While you are technically not incorrect in your points, you also miss the entire point: if you can take it from me tomorrow I am not free. Paraphrasing Whedon "

While you are technically not incorrect in your points, you also miss the entire point: if you can take it from me tomorrow I am not free. Paraphrasing Whedon "You can backdoor Google & surveil the net but you can't take my GNU PGP from me." Your 'Network Effects and free distribution' are benefits of the efficiencies of freedom. But paltry when it comes to legal freedoms in the face of tyranny, the topic of this post-Snowden thread. A Good Monarch or Wise & Benificent Dictator is a great form of government and historically golden ages & enlightenments record this. It is not the 'do no evil' CEOs, or good kings but those that might follow that Free Software offers legal protection against. GPL is public domain 2.0, not a poor tragic commons starved by ever extending legal protectionisms or over grazing and undersharing. Technically you are right, a company could stand up for our rights, but they didn't recently and they had to keep it secret. Discretionary, temporary freedom is illusory - it vanished when needed most. Like the constitution of a democracy the GPL seeks to enshrine natural rights in law. Like Democracy it must be actively defended and abuses policed. The GPL ensures freedom cannot be taken back easily, it is a legal hack that protects itself and the 4 freedoms with copyright. Historically it revitalised the public domain in the software sphere and practically protected it against decades of well funded attacks and FUD - creating billions of dollars in value that didn't mainly go to rent-seeking intellectual landowners but developers and users. Yes, your proprietary shared source model has given some freedoms & verifiability; Snowden shows how illusionly this was. The four freedoms: to Run, Compile, Modify & Share are all needed to ensure (not merely offer or promise) continued freedom. FOSS & Shared source are one thing; Free GPL Software is quite another. Is CVE french for FUD ? Because this is nonesense, security is an arms race. Under a panopticon even TOR is weak. Since Snowden millions have been spent & volunteered auditing, patching & shoring up our commerce & the individual against state level actors & fifth column code. Pre-Snowden no-one imagined the elliptic curves were a lie or our own governments funded & coerced weaknesses into ssh - freedom is playing catchup. Our own governments paid to make us all vulnerable to intrusion. Everyone technical was dumbfounded at the scale of the hidden betrayal of trust. Security by obscurity & secrecy is weak. Published source alone is not free nor verifiably safe, the distributed binary's hash and compiled binaries hash may coincide but malicious code hash collisions are trivial for states to produce. Your scenario offers hypothetical freedom but Snowden's slides show backdoor concealement is actively pursued by states coercing companies, e.g. Lavabit CEO (and noone knows how many who merely complied and distributed the backdoored binaries rather than face jail.) Furthermore if the toolchain isn't free the Ken Thompson backdooring compiler hack applies. GPL is owned by all. Coders retain their personal copyrights - that is its genius not a quibble. Again if you can't make a change you alone believe is necessary or receive it from & share it with with your community yous aren't free. GPL forks ensure every party has the same rights. Owners & Licensee's legal asymmetry can & has prevented this. Forking requires all 4 freedoms. Yes GPL can license crap & democracies have elected theocracies & dictatorships. Magna Carta states If the Executive is not subject to the rule of law, it is nothing less than tyranny. In final answer I quote Vonnegut & Churchill who both witnessed true horror: "So it goes. All is Foma.", & “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”