The actual entities that control people through software are very rarely developers, but institutions and corporations. And one of the things that software free

The actual entities that control people through software are very rarely developers, but institutions and corporations. And one of the things that software freedom really does allow is for those developers to jump ship without abandoning the software when those entities become abusive or change the deal. And this does happen! The response to Oracle's anti-F/OSS, user-hostile moves when they bought Sun is a powerful example. Free software also means that you can pay developers to take the software in a different direction if you can't do so yourself. There are lots of user-serving forks in the world. Cinnamon and MATE really did serve Gnome 2 users who were pissed off and disappointed about what they saw in GNOME 3. LEDE really did resurrect OpenWrt by giving people a way to push the project forward when development had stagnated. yt-dlp saved a bunch of youtube-dl users who would have been left in the lurch. Of course creating and maintaining a fork requires non-trivial resources. But forks do happen and their possibility absolutely makes a difference to end users, lots of the time.