I think you raise really valid points, even as someone who uses linux as my primary work OS day to day, and free software on the server as well, as well as free

I think you raise really valid points, even as someone who uses linux as my primary work OS day to day, and free software on the server as well, as well as free programming languages/environments/platforms. It's a tradeoff. And I think for a while there in the midst of the history of free software an idea took hold that we could have our cake and eat it too -- that you could provide free software (as in Free software, capital "F") AND earn revenue as a for profit business to profitably sustain a company and extend its ability to contribute free (Free) code. I wonder if recent history has shown that this is unrealistic. Maybe we should go back to seeing free software as almost accidental, as a wonderful anomaly -- when incentives are aligned correctly, you can subsidize its development, through government funding, or university research, or nonprofits, or hail mary last-ditch business efforts, or self interested loss leading spending by corporations (a bank contributing patches to a Java library, for example). (I don't think this contradicts the goals of GNU, by the way. Because successful Free software tends to just keep going and live, and even seeming moribund code can be resurrected at any time because the code is out there, I think we could end up using free software for a higher and higher percentage of our computing lives as time goes on, even if its funding is ad hoc and unreliable on balance.)