[ekianjo]

I think you fail to see the usefulness of fundamentalists. They help keep some kind of balance in the overall system, by pulling some of the practices towards one end. If no FOSS fundamentalists existed, we may be living in a very different software world right now. A number of extremely useful POSIX tools were the products of such ideologies.

I think one of the "better" approaches if you cannot survive with a "support/customization" model (which is certainly not for everyone) is to open-source elements of your software offering that are not business critical but still somewhat useful for other parties to live in the open. This way you do not take away your livelihood, but you still contribute back in some amount to the tech world. That's like being a good citizen.

[dpower]

Interesting point, but I think it's a fallacy. Taking this line of argument and applying it to the social sphere - you would be arguing that there is a place for nazi's in this world (I'm just making a point - not saying you support nazis!)

Totally agree with your "good citizen" argument though. Something we should consider.

[type0]

Your nazi argument works against you here, by only providing proprietary software to your users you are being totalitarian (completely in control of the software) and users won't know if you treat them fairly either.

[ppseafield]

I think you're equivocating a bit here: FOSS fundamentalism (as you put it) isn't even close to the same kind of thing as Nazis. I think a better name would be FOSS purists.

IIUC you mean this in the context of desktop environments (and not including things like Android, server OSes, or ChromeOS). The problem with your argument is that those of us who use Linux as our main desktop environment don't want just another platform: the entire point of its existence is its openness. The point is and has always been that you can download it, install it, and run it without having to jump through arbitrary hoops, agree to restrictive licensing, pay anyone, etc.

Watering that down for proprietary software vendors goes against the whole point.

Maybe we would get more, possibly better software. Steam has certainly shown that for games. However, the entire reason that Steam for Linux even exists is that folks at Valve didn't like what Microsoft was doing with Windows 8, specifically the Windows Store and its games for sale, competing directly with Valve. They created Steam Machines and Steam for Linux as a contingency in case Microsoft tried to use their position to prevent another, competing marketplace from existing.

They can do that because of the license, and specifically because of the license no one can later revoke Valve's ability to use the OS, even if Linus or GNU decide to go into the games marketplace business. That's why us purists insist on it.

[AsyncAwait]

Garbage point, because Nazi ideology is not based on anything other than supremacy. There's no other 'ideas' to it, if you will. No other substance. Take for example socialism and while far from perfect, there are ideas that could and should be adopted from it.