[1]: https://www.gimp.org/about/
All praise to GIMP, Inkscape and Krita, but they only exist because some proprietary software already existed and created the demand for an free alternative.
There are countless free software projects that were created as alternatives to proprietary software and have exceeded the original by orders of magnitude. If you want to look at a measure of success other than "amount of work you can do with free software" then that's what you should be looking at. Improvement and innovation often doesn't come from some massive new technology, it's always gradual improvements that really make the difference.
What I am arguing is simply that if proprietary software was forbidden, a lot of innovation would be restricted.
Imagine today if we were living in RMS world and everyone that writes software needed to have their software openly published and freely distributed. How many would simply not even start? Would there be a Microsoft, Google or Apple or Facebook? No. Who would be the big player that would have any interest in seeing the development of any technology that could threaten their business?
Most "innovation" would happen in academic settings, and it would never make the jump to any industry.
But more importantly, a discussion of "what could've been" is not really helpful to a discussion of what we should do today. I could equally argue that if users were more empowered than they are now, that you would see much higher levels of technical literacy and much more innovation. Do I have evidence to back that up? No, but neither do you.
I can give you more examples of free software that didn't have a proprietary counterpart, but I don't think that you really want such examples. You want to discuss an alternate universe where proprietary software doesn't exist.
> Would there be a Microsoft, Google or Apple or Facebook? No.
How on Earth could you possibly know that? You're possibly right that they wouldn't be identical to their current counterparts (they probably wouldn't be able to mistreat their users to the same extent), but those companies and those products might still exist.
Social networks existed before Facebook. Hand-held computers existed before Apple. Search engines existed before Google. Operating systems existed before Microsoft.
And I would claim that you have no evidence for such a statement. Given how much technical innovation happened in the hobbyist computer revolution that predated the "software revolution" (where proprietary software was unheard of) I would argue the opposite. But neither of us can possibly know what would've been in an alternate timeline.
But using that as an excuse to keep believing that "we could have gotten where we are only with Free Software" is a cop-out. We don't need to have an alternate timeline. We can think of our existing one as the (non-linear) superposition of two competing philosophies and their development: the hobbyist/academic/free one & the commercial/private/proprietary/profit-motive-based one on the other. We can surely come up with some kind of model to see how the "free economy" would fare if there was no "proprietary" agent.
You have said it yourself: there was a revolution going on, but it was only affecting the hobbyists, the enthusiasts. It took the "proprietary" side to exist to make it computing something as universal as it has become.
Without proprietary software, there would be no BSD 4.4, Linus would not have anything to clone for the PC, there would be no Free/Open/NetBSD, and so on.
Remove these from the "software economy" of today, and what would we have? Minix? HURD? "Innovative", alright. But certainly never able to compete with the proprietary (or proprietary-clones) alternatives at any point in time.
It's very short sighted to think everything else would be the same except for software licenses.
Is that also a problem with capitalism, or a problem with "not capitalism"?
I'm not sure food trade is evil. Forbidding it doesn't make much sense to me. Regulating it however makes a whole lot of sense. But we already do.
Isn't the cold war finished by now? Surely there could be viable alternatives to the current corporate capitalism veering cyberpunk?
The idea was that capitalism gives you a choice between proprietary, shitty, or non-existent software. Not much of a choice. Photoshop is often showed as an example where free alternatives aren't up to snuff (I personally don't have an opinion on this one).
Hence the short "requires".
I don't view software on a spectrum from proprietary through shitty to non-existent. I view it more as a two-by-two matrix of high quality/shitty on one axis and FOSS/proprietary on the other. All four quadrants are populated.
The economic incentives that capitalism and proprietary software provide allow for the massive investments that Adobe is able to make in Photoshop/CSuite, by providing a clear path to financial returns on those investments.
In the 22 years since GIMP started, it hasn't caught Photoshop. (There are many other examples where free or open source software has caught and surpassed the proprietary alternatives/previous market leaders.)
I think it's important to look in that quadrant, though. Why does that quadrant exist? In my judgement, it's beacuse such software requires a large amount of research and time to be devoted to it, and while certain free software projects are able to catch up to it, they are few and far between.
The next question to ask is why such development-intensive software is proprietary. In my judgement, the answer to that is because the development must be funded somehow, primarily in the case of programming that funding is wages. Open source/free software business models, while existing, do not have the same return, especially for these sorts of programs (though they do for Red Hat for instance.)
So presumably, such software could exist being free software if its developers were already accounted for in terms of wages, so they can spend more time making it.
This is where alternatives to capitalism enter - Socialist systems do not have wages, and people have much more free time to pursue their interests, while being sustained by communal production, to which they also participate in part. As such, such development may be possible under Socialism, but not capitalism. There is much less incentive to have proprietary software under Socialism.
If we are getting closer to living in a post-scarcity world, it is thanks to these "horrible" things Capitalism brings us like private property, freedom to enterprise, rule of law that enables trade, etc, etc.
"In Socialism people have more free time to pursue their interests"? People in North Korea are more busy trying not to starve to death. Venezuela is facing shortages of toilet paper, and their government is pushing for forced labor. How can one even think that there will ever be a society rich enough to afford people universally free to do whatever they want?
I do see many problems with capitalism itself, though, so I didn't word my initial comment as well as I should have. I should have said "it would indicate a problem with capitalism".
In RMS world all software woud be GPL licensed, including photoshop. In his view there are other ways software companies can make money than selling licenses, and it is up to their customers to demand them to do that.
It's impractical to be sure, but crazier things have happened given enough time.