The same goes for Ubuntu which runs Amazon Ads and sends usage statistics by default.
> As long as GNU keeps preaching this kind of absolutist position where the downsides of corporate-owned software ecosystems exist in a vacuum, they'll come off as doomsayers to many observers.
The FSF was absolutely spot on of raising privacy issues and that has forced a privacy overhaul throughout the entire tech industry. However it is still a shame at how they still cannot convince users to stop using non-free OSes or applications since they don't understand that most end users aren't willing to put the effort into migrating to another platform or to sacrifice convenience over freedom.
The only audience that seems to get the message are software engineers but not the average Joe or Jenny.
I say this as a former full-time user of a pretty huge chunk of their software offering, from emacs, to GCC, to screen -- over the years, I realised that many of their APIs or feature sets aren't modern, and better alternatives exist.
I love FSF's products, contribute to them frequently, and use them every day for my job. But it is laughable to even dream that the alternative they present would be better for the average user, for almost any definition of "better" other than the most restricted FSF definition regarding no-compromise of any sort of "better freedom".
Would I love it if there were more free, "better" alternatives to Apple, Microsoft and Google? You betcha. But there isn't one, and there is no viable path to one, and hasn't been since Stallman first rode out of the desert.
But that's what allows them to exist this long. A clear consistent message that is both unusual and takes no prisoners.
And yet almost everyone I know in tech knows about it, even my non-tech friends that use mastodon and pleroma have heard jokes about it. So given the exposure it's got them, it was pretty good for marketing.
I could be wrong on that, but my personal anecdata is that noone who doesn't already care about free software is really aware of their message about free software.
Some anecdata: My ex, whose parent is interested in computers but she herself does not have much of an interest and only barely knows what Linux is, joined mastodon before me, and the majority of her three hundred-odd follows do not know what Linux is.
Most cishet groups don't have a clue about mastodon or won't budge from facebook because they don't have a reason. The blatantly fascist-supporting twitter moderators, and the hostility of facebook's real name policy has given that incentive to queer people.
Mac OSX is built upon FreeBSD with a custom kernel.
Yes, it does, but you can make the exact same kind of argument here that it is a necessary evil in the real world. Content creators really do have the right to enforce their copyrights, and it's clear that the honor system is not good enough to accomplish this. Just look at the reaction on HN whenever an article is posted that is behind a paywall. Many people simply feel somehow entitled to consume content without paying for it.
Yeah, Apple and their ecosystem aren't saints, and their position on right-to-repair policies is reprehensible, but neither is Android, which runs on a Linux kernel, and from a privacy perspective, reasonable people could argue that Apple's doing a better job than Google is with Android.
GNU unfortunately doesn't see the other dimension here -- usability. There's basically nothing that's come out of GNU in recent memory that's been competitive in terms of usability and mass-market appeal (discounting coreutils, which are the de-facto usability standard for loads of command-line UIs, but their mass market are developers, sysadmins, and power users).
As long as GNU keeps preaching this kind of absolutist position where the downsides of corporate-owned software ecosystems exist in a vacuum, they'll come off as doomsayers to many observers.
Having said all that, DRM does suck and I believe their position there is fully justified.