Free was fine back when people paid their ISP or university to host their pages for them. The stuff put up by hobbyists was a lot more interesting in general anyway.

Free didn't ruin the web, advertising did.

Yeah, except Windows 10 actually does cost money. And the people who pay for it still get to see ads.

It seems like the only sure way to avoid all this tracking crap in Windows 10 is to pony up for the Enterprise version (which is basically impossible if you’re not a business).

I want a fully supported OS that will see upgrades. I'm willing to pay. I guess that means OSX or Linux for the forseeable future.

I used to think PCs that were sold had some vendor bloatware, but now the OS itself is bloatware.

Were Stallman & Torvalds simply precient for their viewpoints 20+ years ago?

I wouldn't put Torvalds in the same category as Stallman here. IIUC, Torvalds initially made Linux free simply because he was doing it for fun. Now he couldn't change the license if he wanted to, and he's getting paid to work on it anyway. In any case, it seems that he's always been much less idealistic about software freedom than Stallman.

What's the difference between OSX and Windows, in your mind? It's even more "free" than Windows is, since you can't buy it separately and all OS updates for the last few versions have been free.

Telemetry: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-w...

Can't disable unless it's Win10 Enterprise or Education editions (does any PC sold come with Win10 enterprise or education editions)?

Not quite the entire Internet has gone that way. However, it's frustrating seeing sites that offer original content with paid access being criticised all the time, as if they're somehow evil or trying to rip visitors off by honestly charging a reasonable price for their work instead of giving it away for free and making a deal with demons to fund it some other way. This is what we get for letting $0.99 ifart apps become the benchmark for a whole generation, I guess.

>it's very hard to compete with someone who is giving something away for "free" (note quotes)

There's at least one very promising competing model: give something away for free (note lack of quotes) and offer people the option to pay.

In the software world we usually do that by using the free version as advertisement for a better paid version, Patreon (and Dwarf Fortress etc) show that the model can even work if paying offers no notable advantages.

I agree with your point but I doubt that something published by such a large company which many consumers have a distaste for ("my stupid computer is always blue-screening; I hate Microsoft") would be able to sustain such a huge development effort on just donations.

Edit: if it were open-source and they paid some people to work on it still, that would be...interesting.

I believe getting enough people to donate on a regular basis requires two things: a certain amount of customers have to be real fans of your product, and they have to be aware that the product ceases to exist if nobody donates.

Both aspects are a challenge for software: most people see software as a mere tool, and most people don't see the need for updates (and in fact see them as annoyance).

That's why a twitch streamers or youtube creator can easily get decent amounts of donations while donation buttons in software go completely ignored in almost all cases.

Open source is the one existing model in software development where donations work with some consitency (though donations are mostly in terms of development time, and some widely-used projects still go completely ignored).

For closed source there's are a few working examples with passionate fanbases (mostly games), but for the most part we haven't figured out how to do this well yet.

Arguably, with where the TVs nowdays are going; that story haven't even started the plot.