The fact that the two coexist does not constitute a valid argument for how things should be, in a better world. There are many less-than-ideal things that coex

The fact that the two coexist does not constitute a valid argument for how things should be, in a better world. There are many less-than-ideal things that coexist together with superior alternatives. For example there are countries where women are required to cover their entire face in public, but the fact that they coexist with secularly governed nations does not validate theocracy as not being oppressive. Similarly we have two ways of doing things coexisting with free and proprietary, and the world would be a better place if one of the alternatives was simply not present. The line about financial incentive is very disputable as it is all about personal preferences. I personally prefer emacs over eclipse (emacs just rules), gimp over photoshop (photoshop is bloated, doesn't run in Linux as far as I know, and I know how to use Gimp better), Inkscape is awesome, Flash sucks big time, and Windows is needless to say, horrible. Free OS took 20 years? No I think freedom at the level of the OS was the original way of doing things, from the very beginning. It's the proprietary software that got in the way making it difficult for modern free OSes to catch up by constantly setting hurdles by requiring free software to reverse engineer things that needed to be compatible.