I see antitrust as a critical purpose of freedom-respecting software - suppose you pay the author for the rights to use the semis proprietary software. You go o

I see antitrust as a critical purpose of freedom-respecting software - suppose you pay the author for the rights to use the semis proprietary software. You go on a decade or two, and become critically reliant on it. But then they jack up the price a hundredfold. You can't do anything (short of rewriting), even if you could flat-out hire a replacement dev team for the entire project for cheaper than what they're charging you. OpenOffice and MariaDB are classic examples of Free Software solving this - the IP holder sandbagged, so the community forked and fucked off. Even despite that though, LibreOffice still suffers from losing its OpenOffice name, and plenty of users lose out because they're unknowingly using a barely-updated version due to abovementioned sandbagging. Proprietary software hands a default victory to the IP holder. Free Software hands a default victory to the user. It's either one or the other.