The idea of Open Source was, first and foremost, to allow the users of software to inspect and modify the source code. "free" in this regard has something of a

The idea of Open Source was, first and foremost, to allow the users of software to inspect and modify the source code. "free" in this regard has something of a political as well as an economic component. To summarise the political very broadly, I'd say that software (and the data it manages) are power, and giving broad access to both distributes that power among the users of software. The economic aspects are not just cheap access to software, but also the benefits of increased competition result from access to the code, which allows the creation of data-compatible competitors. These missions have failed for anyone but software developers, because so much of today's software runs on servers where the GPL does not enforce sharing of code, and because the community has become dominated by commercial players and permissive licenses like MIT. As a metaphor: the bakers are all happy because the flour and yeast are free. But bread is as expensive as ever, and most people eat in restaurants, anyway.