> The problem is that "better" is being defined by the companies spreading the marketing propaganda about their products Partially, but I don't think this is n

> The problem is that "better" is being defined by the companies spreading the marketing propaganda about their products Partially, but I don't think this is nearly as big of a factor as lots of FOSS people on the internet these days seem to think. Remember that RMS wrote a lot of the original GNU tools by himself and wrote the beginnings of GCC. Stallman could have just chosen to reject C and not write GCC altogether the way a lot of modern FOSS advocates seem to act about rejecting closed software. Unix and C could have been cast as proprietary enemies to reject, but he understood at the time that to gain traction, FOSS needed software that was usable for similar purposes as proprietary software. We can cry conspiracy all day but the hard work of building good products is what ultimately wins the day. (Network effects on modern social/messaging platforms are a much more complicated story however.)