Having the option to exercise your freedoms (or, say, contract someone to do so, or band together with other users to do this) is an important protection for yo

Having the option to exercise your freedoms (or, say, contract someone to do so, or band together with other users to do this) is an important protection for you as a user, even if you will not directly exercise it yourself. It can for example inform the relationship the original vendor has with you, and how they treat you. "But I'm never going to patch it anyway" is a bit like "Privacy? But I have no secrets", which implies you will never have secrets and don't want to have the option to, even if external factors not under your control change. By the same token, just the mere existence of free alternatives does a lot to keep developers of non-free software honest in some cases, even if they don't gain competitive market share. OTOH, ironically the existence of free software has also let the developers of non-free software off the hook in important ways. For example, if you look at any large proprietary software maker, you will often find that their most skilled engineers are the ones with experience developing free software - because they have additional years of high-density experience that companies fail to provide an equivalent environment for (low incentives to mentor, more extreme specialization, etc.). So proprietary development shops have had to be far less sustainable wrt/ training and recruiting because the community has picked up the slack. Which I'm not sure is a good thing - healthy teaching relationships and learning opportunities for experts on the one hand, business models and competitive salary on the other, rather than both in one spot.