As soon as the binaries start betraying their user, there needs to be an alternative. Open source goes a long way to prevent the people in defacto control from adding things like requiring unnecessary accounts, naggers, ads, telemetry, backdoors, excessive bloat, etc. But sometimes the maintainers can't be reasoned with beyond a tolerable point and a lot of software and people already rely on it heavily. If the thing is a standard then someone needs to fork (if open source with a proper license) or reimplement. If it's a closed, proprietary foundational piece of software (OS, driver, word processor, compiler, browser) then someone needs to create an alternative from scratch. Those alternatives may very well start betraying the user at some point in which case, goto 10. e.g. We don't need a competing Linux because Linus is currently on our side.