At the risk of being reductive: Make more of our software copyleft? Even weak copyleft?

As a thought experiment, imagine how the modern web might've played out if KHTML was released under the MIT license instead of the LGPL?

Bearing in mind: Google has other ways of controlling the market (search, android, youtube, gmail, "switch to chrome" everywhere... don't call it anti-competitive...), but they've had to work much harder to exert control than they would've -- IMO -- if blink/webkit/khtml had a more "corporate friendly" license.

Maybe I'm off base with my reasoning, but I see it as being about friction. We can't stop the inhuman profit-seeking machine from doing what it does, but we do have some (underutilized) tools to slow it down.

Same thing as always, make better free and non-commercial software.

Form a "software engineering association" with fees paying for full time lawyers and lobbyists and try to pass laws that would prevent the scenario above. But expect a very organised and well funded opposition: the anti-privacy trends have big sponsors at the top.

Don't develop for Windows, or MacOS for that matter.

If your OS is uncontrolled, so is the software.

Don't be a developer as a profession, and that'll pretty quickly resolve the need to be paid for software you create.

I guess you'd also not be allowed to value your time or effort, either.

Many (/most?) developers want to get paid lots and lots of money for their software.