Your claim that free software enabled "...the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in" just doesn't seem valid. Back when free softwar

Your claim that free software enabled "...the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in" just doesn't seem valid. Back when free software was still a new thing on college campuses, there were proprietary software vendors who owned and monetized a heck of a lot. Whether Microsoft's Server CALs for IIS (yes, that was a thing) or Oracle or Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Bell or ATT, there were a lot of vendors monetizing on both the server and the desktop. Yes, software running on my machine might have been my data but there were numerous cases of that very same proprietary software where the data files were inaccessible. In short, you owned the machine and that was fine but you didn't have a license to the data format and that meant you were...well, locked in and monetized by that particular vendor. I'm not really going to speak to the moral judgement you made about free software since free software or proprietary software can both be used for whatever immoral ends.