What is interesting is that as free software proliferated, the largest consumer software companies shifted from being ones that sold tools that enabled the user

What is interesting is that as free software proliferated, the largest consumer software companies shifted from being ones that sold tools that enabled the users to exploit the computer to making services that exploited the users through advertisement. Previously the large consumer companies sold operating systems, word processors, databases, spreadsheets, utilities, compilers, etc to consumers. Thanks to free software which has in large part both devalued these types of software by providing them for free, while at the same time enabling massive datacenters because these infrastructure software are free, the consumer software companies make their money selling their user's attention span to advertisers.