The elephant in the room is SaaS. With SaaS it is possible to use 100% free software and even release all your code as FOSS as well and it's meaningless. The se

The elephant in the room is SaaS. With SaaS it is possible to use 100% free software and even release all your code as FOSS as well and it's meaningless. The service has your data and it's the hub. Even if you can self-host few people do and it's time consuming and hard. SaaS, though often based on FOSS, is far more closed than closed-source commercial software ever was. I can run a closed-source DOS app from 1989 in DosBox today and if I had data in it I could still access it. Same with most commercial PC software for Windows and Mac. Can't do that with SaaS. Even if I can run it the SaaS has my data. If I stop paying it's gone. If the company goes out of business it's gone. If they rev the software in a way that ruins it for me, I'm out of luck and I have to start over. (Sometimes they let you export your data, but never conveniently and never in a good format.) Here's the thing. Software is not actually free. Easy to use mature software is hugely labor-intensive to produce. If you don't design the economic model, the market will design one for you. Usually that model will be worse than what you would have done. The most popular creative way to monetize "free" software is surveillance capitalism followed by adware and cloud-as-DRM SaaS. Oh, and a sure fire get rich quick scheme for quite some time has been to take a promising FOSS software or standard and slap up a SaaS around it. Something tells me none of these companies pay anything to the original creators. TL;DR: FOSS lost the war because it confused free "as in beer" with free "as in freedom" and never figured out an economic model. As a result we got one, SaaS with the cloud as back-door DRM, that is worse in every way than the old closed source shrink wrap model. But the fact that most people in this thread are bringing up DRM for media means that people may care more about free "as in beer" than freedom. Few people are bringing up what FOSS was supposed to be about: control of your own computing environment and ownership of your own stuff. It was never about getting other peoples' stuff for free or even about software not costing any money. It was about software not restricting you and honest freedom-respecting models.