Not only that: take a look at Emacs: essentially no one Emacs is equal to another. It's so flexible that any users bend it (easily) to their needs and desire. Sharing their configs is a mean for any users to evolve, acquire knowledge easily; you have a problem or need something? Ok go look for others chances that they already see and solved that problem are really high. With "black boxes" you can only customize what black box dev's have leaved to their users, real changes are hard, you have to checkout code, study it, modify it, rebuilt, ... in the end you're became as "standard" as possible without freedom and personal experimentation even if you have the open code.

That's easy for companies since they deal with "standard" "Ford model like" people, but that's a killer for evolution especially evolution driven by people/users, not upstream/companies.

If you can tailor software to fit your needs as you like you get a friendly personal environment and you have "a bit of power" on society, you still need upstream work but you are also a bit independent, and the same is for upstream to have help from the community they need to comply with an heterogeneous community with users, not consumers. We are in the end interdependent so forced to cooperate in a relative peace. On the over side we totally depend on upstream being effectively powerless. Oh yeah, you can choose different software, at least for now, but that need to exists, that's no more a community.

A simple example a proprietary software, Master pdf editor, gain a bit of success in GNU/Linux world and decide to insert watermark on modify pdfs by free version. If it's distributed by single distro, single distros can keep old version for long time. Leaving all needed time to their user to switch. If you relay direct on upstream you discover the new "feature" a day perhaps without warning because it's auto-updated for instance, and you may have no time, no choice. This also happen recently with the "tweaked" Android settings by Google and I think many many other cases.

Freedom it's not only "being free of doing something" it's also can do something easily, have a system that let you be as free as you like.

I'm confused. What about containers makes them inherently less free than other tech? Ultimately, they're "just" a layered filesystem with some OS-level isolation magic sprinkled on top, they're not really revolutionary in any meaningful way other than that they unified two pre-existing technologies. LXC/OCI are great specifically because they give you a reasonable scaffolding upon which to build your containers, but you get to define every last thing that goes into them.

Example: I used to work at a place that, for a variety of reasons, needed to use custom builds of upstream Debian packages. So, we created our own Debian container base and rebuilt all the major Docker container "base" images (e.g. `openjdk`, `python`, `node`, `nginx`) with our own image as base. We had custom control all the way down to the OS level, and our orchestration solution (Kubernetes in our case, but a pile of shell scripts calling LXC directly works too).

I totally get being skeptical of {Docker|Kubernetes|Mesos|GKE|EKS|AKS}, but there's nothing inherently "un-free" about containers. They're a nice packaging primitive that happen to have some (useful, but not mission-critical) security features bundled in. So, your whole point kinda confuses me. That containers are standardized by OCI/LXC just makes them easier on your poor sysadmins to administer than 100 engineers' pet servers each running a different version of Emacs.

Not unfree by itself but as a model: free software are born to be as integrated, flexible, easy to evolve as possible, isolation means or that you can't properly integrate your software or you can't trust it.

Think about the level of integration of Emacs and it's flexibility vs Eclipse/VSc/... the former is completely integrated and you can essentially modify any aspect at runtime with a simple sexp/config change. While the letter require to write and maintain plugins. The burden between programming and using in Emacs is substantially nonexistent, while you feel it on any modern software.

I do not know if it's clear seeing my bad English but I hope so. Think another example, Xerox model Alto&other Smalltalk machines, freedom it's not only the code but the way you use and customize your system, it's simplicity and flexibility. In FOSS we are all a bit devs, a bit admin, a bit users, a bit ..., while in proprietary world anything is rigid compartmentalized and "switch" between compartments it's not easy. The very same concept apply to containerization of software.