> Open source keeps your options open. Does not mean it will be necessarily free or effortless, but you'll have options. You still have to be able to exercise

> Open source keeps your options open. Does not mean it will be necessarily free or effortless, but you'll have options. You still have to be able to exercise those options. If you can't, you might as well not have them at all for all the good it will do you, and in the mean time you still have to deal with the fact that your stuff doesn't work now. Also for what it's worth, you said you frame the argument in the form of: OSS Advocate: "Do you want your software to change grind puppies into baby food?" User: "They wouldn't do that" <Spoiler: They do> User: <shocked pikachu> OSS Advocate: "Have you heard the good news about our Lord and Savior RMS?" But, just because you have options to mitigate the end result doesn't mean that OSS software also won't change to the "grind puppies into baby food" model. That's what the user cares about and OSS does nothing to address that because OSS on its own isn't concerned at all with the the features of the software, just how the software is distributed. Edit: And having finally read the linked article in full, I feel like the author is talking about a similar thing. The option to recompile from source to implement the features you want is useless to the user if the user doesn't have the ability or time. And it makes the software less valuable to the user relative to a proprietary version that does have options that they can exercise. Open source is and always has been a developer facing feature in reality and it just so happens that some times (and especially early on) developers were also users. But most users aren't developers anymore and even developers aren't necessarily developers with the skill sets necessary to modify your application anymore. If the goal is to give the USER the freedom to modify the software, then open source on its own might not be enough, or even sufficiently better than the offerings from closed source vendors.