> "tying people down, strapping them into their chairs so that they can't do anything that hurts themselves -- makes things worse, not better."

Stallman could have been talking about censorship and deplatforming here and it still would have made sense. His (and my) generation seem to care a lot more about idealistic freedoms than we do now as a society.

There’s nothing wrong with idealistic freedoms or rights in a vacuum. Of course we don’t live in a vacuum, and most non-trivial and realistic situations are about finding the balance between different freedoms or rights, not about their boolean existence.

Yeah, I can't cosign this at all. "Censorship" is no worse now than it has been at least my entire life (I'm in my 40s) -- what's happening is that when the left was silenced by the right, they called it "market forces" or "culture" and now that it's somewhat reversed they're getting all butthurt and believing that everything is going against them.

But in neither case do I believe that "the government is colluding to eliminate first amendment rights" which I believe is a reasonably specific definition of censorship. This is just culture culturing.

Censorship and deplatforming are ways of making the competition shut up. If someone has a different opinion than you do, they should have free speech to say it. Within reason of course, nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene.

This is why Musk is trying to buy out Twitter, and he is trolling them with his wealth.

Don't forget removal from the APP Store or blocked by proxies.

Information still wants to be free, not stifled by tyrants just for being different opinions than the shareholders have.

Remember there is a reason why people want to root their phone, they want the freedom to install any app they wish to install. The more it gets locked down, the more people are going to find ways to unlock it.

Instead of deplatforming and censorship, ratings should be used instead for people to decide what they are going to read.

> nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene.

I want both sets of people to expose their views to the public. Disgusting though these views may be, it is safer for society if individuals are able to check and decide that someone else's views are reprehensible. If the people are merely told such by authorities, with the "offending" content immediately removed, then the authorities have enormous power to expand the definition of "offending" when it pleases them to do so.

This doesn’t produce a good outcome because violent, indefensible bad actors shout down others and each one drives away 100 reasonable people. Yours is naive idea, though I recognize you are advocating for the good of all.

There’s an argument around growing / shrinking a market here. Have you ever experienced morbid fascination? Some people get addicted to the experience of horror (I don’t mean the genre). This arguably creates a new demand for something that even those demanding it would not otherwise have had any interest in.

I think you’re right about the dangers of giving authority over what does and doesn’t get censored, but there are also very real dangers on the other side of this. You don’t make consuming heroin normative, because you don’t want to make it easy to fall into an addiction by accident for those who are more prone to do so. The more harm the addiction causes to society as a whole, the more prerogative you have to protect people from accidentally becoming addicted.

We "protected" people from heroin addiction by getting a State-sponsored opiod addiction.

People aren’t ironclad in their current views of right and wrong for all topics, its possible to convince people of really anything with enough exposure

>its possible to convince people of really anything with enough exposure

Not really. You can spend days, weeks, and months; millions of dollars; thousands of paid shill accounts; all geared towards selling a single lie. And that lie can be exposed to millions of people in 10 seconds for free. But only if there is free speech.

Agreed, the neo-nazis were fringe and people laughed at their marches. Now that they are taken entirely too seriously, the attention and victimization has empowered them to recruit and grow. The deplatforming has had the opposite of the intended effect, instead putting them in a spotlight.

Except that's not quite the sequence that occurred to my recollection. With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, what was previously "unsayable" was being said by the highest voices, directly legitimising fringe voices and empowering many that previously self-regulated to an extend for fear of judgement. That fear proved unfounded as it turned out and media (both MSM and social) amplified all sorts of previously fringe content. It's only once the push-back began that companies, fearing for their bottom line in some form or other (customers moving, regulation, legal fights) began turfing people off their platforms. At least, that's how it seems to me.

Elon Musk is buying Twitter to increase his wealth, mindshare, and influence. He does not actually care about free speech, and its naïve to think that he is buying the platform for "altruistic" reasons.

He is also the lead of a company that has seemingly fired an employee for posting about their publicly available features, and is also facing one of the biggest labor lawsuits ever in the state of California.

He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.

He built huge amounts of wealth by building rocket ships and electric cars because he's worried about the earth becoming uninhabitable and thinks we need to be an interplanetary civilization. This is a dude who's dedicated his entire life to (in his mind) save all of humanity from certain doom.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that it's all just exploitation.

Those goals are cool and all, but that doesnt change his poor worker treatment or his massive wealth hoarding, while still trying to change rules so he can have more.

Great goals, but in my opinion, a terrible ambassador for tech/engineering, and a completely ingenuine person. I do not believe he is buying Twitter to "restore free speech" at all, and I dont even think that itself is a particularly good goal without having laid out plans of what it means.

Him being in charge of companies that produce cool products does not make him a good person at all.

>worker mistreatment

I haven’t worked for Musk, but I’ve heard he only hires fanatics who want to save the world. I expect that he expects things different from most employers.

>wealth hoarding

Most of his wealth isn’t in money or stocks, it’s in his companies. The money that is in stocks, well most of that’s in stock for companies that have actual assets and do actual things in the real world.

People always have power motives for doing things. But that doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them people who have objectives that require power, or perhaps power seekers who need to meet objectives (or claim they do). I trust the former far more than the latter.

I don't believe this.

I believe he built huge amounts of wealth because he's something like "genetically predisposed to"; he's not different from other billionaires, who I think have something like a mental defect that encourages them to rack up their score as high as possible.

It's just that he has more interesting hobbies (Space, EV, whatever) than the rest of them; but for any move he makes, first ask -- does this look like part of a play to just gain more money? And 9 times out of 10 the answer is yes.

He bought both of those companies. It's a bit disingenuous to say he built them.

I buy a broken down camaro. The windshield is gone. The sheetmetal is rusted. The frame is bent. The motor needs rebuilt. I patch/replace the sheetmetal, and paint it. I straighten the frame. I rebuild the motor, and put a supercharger on it to boot. It’s a pretty nice little hot rod, and it was busted before. But you tell me, did I buy it or build it?

You buy an already functioning camaro factory that restores camaros, you do basically nothing in terms of hiring or management, you shitpost on twitter all day and hire an army of twitter bots to promote the amazing work you're doing on building that camaro.

But you tell me, did you buy that camaro, or did you build it?

Eh, I'm equally suspicious of everyone who speculates about "what Musk is doing". I think your post is spot-on about what he's NOT doing, but as to what he IS doing… how can you possibly know, what his true intentions are? I, for one, strongly suspect he's not even buying Twitter at all: he's just playing with the share prices to dump his 9% with a nice profit (as he always does). But I also guess he has a solid plan whichever way it goes. What actually IS his plan, if he's going to make Twitter private? I have like 10 versions of what it might be, and I don't expect that even one is close. But then, again, I don't really expect he is going to buy it anyway, so…

Elon's work practices are _probably_ legal, or at least signed off by a legal department that thinks they are.

The solution is to make such labor practices NOT legal and force everyone into a good field of play and rules for the game(s).

He could make his own platform, but the users matter. With users, there is influence. In old times, you used to buy the news paper company to get influence.

> He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.

I wonder if we find a billionaire from the top 20 wealthiest who hasn’t at some level

> I wonder if we find a billionaire from the top 20 wealthiest who hasn’t at some level

No absolutely not. Id even say that you wont find more than a handful of billionaires who havent built their wealth on exploitation.

Its such a massive amount of wealth to have, it is virtually always precluded by harming others. The only exceptions I can think of are company founders who got exceedingly lucky, and even then you could definitely stretch the definition of exploitation to include them too.

>Within reason of course, nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene.

Who decides what's reasonable? Who decides what constitutes a "Nazi" or a "Pedophile"? If someone tries to suggest that convicting a 14 year old girl as a sex offender for having nude photos of herself on her phone is preposterous that person can be effectively silenced by labeling them as a pedophile.

"But that's ridiculous. Nobody would do that." -Somebody who has never been on the internet.

Every idiotic position you can think of exists on the internet, and can be amplified to make it seem like it's a more popular opinion than it really is.

The only logical course of action is to allow all speech and let the reader discern for themselves.

> The only logical course of action is to allow all speech and let the reader discern for themselves.

The assumption being that most readers are discerning. Kind of reminds of the adage about markets working based on rational actors. In both situations, reality would like a word.

No, there's no such assumption. In fact, by virtue of ignoring the main point of his, your post is an example "of the adage about markets working based on rational actors", which doesn't go well with reality.

And the point is: "Who decides what's reasonable?" You? Well, yeah, I hope you do for yourself. But I don't want you to dare to even try to decide that for me. Nothing personal, of course: there's no single person on the planet I would trust to do that for me.

In other words, it's not about assuming anything about the most readers (it is rather about NOT assuming anything about them). And, in fact, I don't even expect any good outcome "for the most of readers". I am pretty positive most people will find a way to fuck themselves no matter what you do. The only assertion here is that it will be worse for everyone if you TRY to do something about it. I mean, it should be pretty obvious thing to say, as much as people like to tell stories about "how terrible it was when Stalin was in charge" — it is best for everyone if there's no individual or group of people who can enforce their ideas of what is right on the others.

(BTW, I don't believe that this is really avoidable too. It happes one way or the other. The only thing that makes me say anything about this, is that this is just scary that half of the society today doesn't even understand that they SHOULD TRY to prevent anyone from being able to control what they say or think. They WANT to be controlled. They WANT to fuck themselves and everyone around them.)

Perhaps I wasn’t being clear. Following the principle that your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, the thing about free speech and an undiscerning audience is that there are often consequences that cross that line even when the speech itself doesn’t. Anyway, I’m pretty confident that I’m not going to cut the Gordian knot here.

For myself I’m happy for you to have all the freedom of speech you like. What I’d like enshrined is the right to freedom from speech. In my country we are in the midst of an election campaign and it is impossible for me (both legally and technically) to stop political parties from spamming my phone. I would rather they didn’t spam my phone. I don’t have an opinion about your phone.

Okay, honest question, other than this impossible-to-quantify symbolic value, did FSF make any meaningful contribution/impact over the past two decades? They kept preaching their maximalist philosophy which seems increasingly convincing almost no one; their old flagships kept chugging along, some (or the majority) of them gradually losing relevance, thanks in part to GPLv3; no new hotness is joining the GNU umbrella AFAIK; Savannah is completely irrelevant outside some GNU projects and is less usable than phpBB. Ironically, I guess the hostility of GPLv3 spurred the development and adoption of many permissive replacements, which is arguably an unintended contribution. And on the opposite end of people and companies wanting to be less permissive, they find even the least permissive GNU license inadequate, since they usually give zero shit about “freedom”, it’s financial contributions that they seek; so they’re moving to source available instead of copyleft.

Not really a counter to anything you've said, but just wanted to note that after two decades of fighting open source licensing for their widely popular VST audio plugin API, Steinberg finally did release under the GPLv3.

And what did Stallman or FSF have to do with that? The FSF won't even defend GPL violations in court. Others have had to organize efforts to do so.

The gpl v3 would not exist unless they were there.

I like to think that a goal does not necessarily need to be achievable in order to be valuable.

Correct, this is why I relatedly believe the Linux Desktop is actually a ridiculously huge success. I don't compare it by percentage of market share, I compare it do "how garbage would desktops be if Linux wasn't around to provide useful pressure?"

> I compare it do "how garbage would desktops be if Linux wasn't around to provide useful pressure?"

In what world does Linux on the desktop provide "useful pressure" to anyone? The only Linux "desktop" that has provided any pressure on the desktop to Microsoft and Apple is ChromeOS. ChromeOS is decidedly not a "Linux desktop". If Google flipped ChromeOS to Fuchsia tomorrow it would provide the same pressure with zero Linux.

That there is a desktop OS where everything is open reminds people that are alternatives to walled gardens.

That is a far cry from "useful pressure".

There are more pre-installed Linux desktop/laptop/handheld devices being sold today than ever.

For end users, WSL and Crossover do allow for more freedom than if these things didn't exist.

I mean, there's an argument to be made that Android / ChromeOS / Fuchsia wouldn't exist without Linux either (i.e. not exist as they are or in some similar open source variation). They don't stand quite as independently as you suggest here.

The comment I replied to was specifically about Linux on the desktop, not Linux in general. I didn't claim Android etc wouldn't exist without Linux. Linux on the desktop is just irrelevant to commercial desktop OSes. Microsoft, Apple, and Google don't care one iota about the latest updates to GNOME or KDE.

Third parties don't care about the Linux desktop either. If Linux is even considered it's a distant third place. If Electron dropped Linux support tomorrow a good number of applications would drop Linux support the next day.

Even the likes of Valve supporting Linux is more of a hedge against Microsoft than anything compelling about desktop environments on Linux.

Go count how many Windows desktop features were widely used on Linux first.

It's actually important to have difficult or impossible goals. They are guidelines or north stars used for navigation. It helps make short term decisions that trend in the right long term direction.

I don't really see how this is valuable, and I see a lot of ways in which this is harmful to the cause. It's not explaining the message very well, it's actively turning people off, and it's preventing some free software from being as useful as it could be.

You can keep long-term goals in mind while also working towards smaller short-term goals. Almost every political party and lobby organisation in the world is doing exactly that.

Here Stallman again rails against Ubuntu. Okay, maybe Ubuntu isn't perfect, but s/Microsoft windows/Ubuntu/ would be quite an improvement, and especially since the 100% free/libre stuff he recommends are caveated to hell it's the only pragmatic/realistic option there is right now – not necessarily Ubuntu itself, but some distro which includes the same firmware, nVidia drivers, and such. And if a lot of people are actually running Ubuntu/Linux you end up having a lot more leverage.

By focusing only on the endpoint you're actually doing more short-term thinking rather than playing the long game.

But if Stallman is actually pursuing the OP's idea of extending the Overton window, then he's specifically not trying to accomplish short-term goals. Other people can and should be working on those short-term goals. Stallman, meanwhile, is trying to stretch the playing field out far enough that the smaller goals seem very reasonable by comparison to the extreme that he creates.

I'm not sure that Stallman is intentionally positioning himself this way (he seems to sincerely believe his all-or-nothing stance), but I could see it actually working. The big problem with Stallman is that he has to be at least moderately credible in order to extend the Overton window, but he seems to perpetually be right on the edge of being completely dismissed. If that happens then the window snaps back shut.

"[Stallman] seems to sincerely believe his all-or-nothing stance"

Richard Stallman has largely been not averse to pragmatism, he is the sort that is willing to clearly articulate his stance as to what he thinks is right, but has also been willing to endorse all sorts of incrementalism. For example:

http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/icecast-dev/2001-February/00...

"In response to the change of license, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation says, "I agree. It is wise to make some of the Ogg Vorbis code available for use in proprietary software, so that commercial companies doing proprietary software will use it, and help Vorbis succeed in competition with other formats that would be restricted against our use.""

(I am desperately trying to avoid inserting a Bernie Sanders analogy here..)

> I see a lot of ways in which this is harmful to the cause.

I'm trying to understand your meaning. You went on to say:

> You can keep long-term goals in mind while also working towards smaller short-term goals. Almost every political party and lobby organisation in the world is doing exactly that.

But every example of such political parties/organizations I can think of (in my experience) has 'puritanical' wings that serve to establish the key direction.

> It's not explaining the message very well, it's actively turning people off, and it's preventing some free software from being as useful as it could be.

I was unable to follow your logic. Perhaps actual example of this happening would be useful.

> By focusing only on the endpoint you're actually doing more short-term thinking rather than playing the long game.

Forgive me, but it appears like you're focusing on practically achievable goals rather than having a long term plan. If Ubuntu continued along its current path of just partnering with vendors, only "they" being able to build the signed boot images that machines boot, then it is not unreasonable to suspect that at some point users will lose all ability to build their own kernel for their machine.

The cause would likely not exist or at least be much weaker if not for Stallman and the FSF and GNU. Ubuntu isn't going to stop what they are doing because of Stallman's ideas.

Love your username btw.

> The cause would likely not exist or at least be much weaker if not for Stallman and the FSF and GNU.

Sure, but that was back in the 80s and this is now.

That someone had a lot of good ideas and did good work 35 years ago doesn't mean they're not hampering it today. I once worked for a business where the owner worked very hard to build things up (or so I heard), but when I worked there all he really used his business for was to show his boyfriends around to impress them or something; I rarely saw him. That's all fine, except that the business was directionless and basic stuff wasn't getting done (like, say, my employment contract). Eventually there was a bit of an intervention and he was ousted (his dad also owned part of the company), which was badly needed because he was really running things in to the ground, in spite of having built it up in the first place.

> Ubuntu isn't going to stop what they are doing because of Stallman's ideas.

No, but the FSF could be promoting Ubuntu instead of railing against it. If I'm interested in Free Software and find the FSF website then all I get are unpractical solutions.

But what the FSF really should be doing is lobby this kind of thing with governments, schools, corporations and such.

I do not always like FSF and Stallman and their policies. Still I am in complete agreement that they do provide enormous value to the software world in and to the betterment of our lives in general.

I reluctantly agree. While its great to have a reference point, there is a whole platoon of people who take this as a gospel. Speaking of gospel idiom, that's exactly what happened in the medieval churches – those who did not follow were ostrasized.

So, let's keep pragmatism, reality and wisdom above idealism.

> they provide a useful extreme endpoint such that there can exist a reasonable "Overton Window" of Free/Open Source/ Whatever Software

Or, ya know, they could just stake out reasonable, nuanced positions that organizations could adopt or at least be a starting point for further developments

I think this may have already been attempted, and you're perhaps underestimating the incentive and relative cheapness of large well funded companies (right now, literally the largest and most well funded) to insert their own agendas into visible movements like this (for better or worse, this is not much different from how "Open Source" came out of "Free Software.")

In other words, the fact that you don't see these positions I think is a result of a mild "embrace, extend extinguish" and not "no one thought of this before."

It's pretty hilarious seeing people suggesting that someone fundamentally unable to engage in empathy, perspective-taking, or second-order strategizing...is actually making some big-brain play to hold down the extremist end so that more moderate voices and exist.

Stallman is infamous for his inability to recognize viewpoints other than his own as having worth or validity. He is literally incapable of such a big-brain plan because there's no way he could see a moderate position as valid.

I don't think OP is suggesting that Stallman is doing it on purpose, just that Stallman's dogmatism may actually be beneficial in spite of itself.

No. I also don't think Buddhist monks are strategizing a big-brain play to convert people to Buddhism. It's more hilarious to see people not getting the idea that this is just his thing and I admire it, even if I ain't doing it.

That's a very diplomatic way to say he's crazy and people who put him on a pedestal are crazy for doing it; despite occasionally have a valid point.

Also I agree 100%.

I have done politics long enough to understand that centrism never pays, in the long run. People are thirsty of ideals and coherence, and the FSF has plenty of those. They are in for the long run. And I would even say: despite having 0 budget, they were immensely successful over time. Modern computing wouldn't be the same without Stallman & co.

>And I would even say: despite having 0 budget, they were immensely successful over time.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree because from where I sit, Free Software had a bright spark at the beginning and slowly faded away into a miserable failure.

Apple sells a lot of laptops because they're really easy to use. The wifi "just works" and the battery life is excellent.

To a first approximation, zero people run fully-free stacks on their daily-driver laptops because they're not easy to use unless you're the kind of person who uses their 2005-vintage Thinkpad on Ethernet and AC power only.

I honestly can't conceive of what this "Serious FSF" that you imagine would look like? Meaning, I can't think of any similar "movement" that succeeds by having a camera-friendly diplomatic leader -- unless you're thinking about going "full politics?"

There's no "vegan leader person" or "financial literacy leader person" or "animal cruelty leader person," etc. Not even "environment person," though you do get your occasional Greta Thunberg or Al Gore, but that's different from what you're saying here.

>I honestly can't conceive of what this "Serious FSF" that you imagine would look like?

Well mostly it would look like an FSF that doesn't eat toejam on camera, and instead of giving the same tired lecture about the 4 freedoms, they actually go out and do productive things like put on workshops for college students to install trisquel or whatever.

Instead of wasting countless hours sponsoring dumb stuff like the GNU Name System they could be writing open wifi/bluetooth stacks that support more than 802.11g, since connectivity is usually the #1 reason people won't run fully-free stacks on their laptops (or at least it's a big reason I won't), or if not that then how about getting governments to run Linux and helping them do so? They could operate a consultancy to bring in some operating income.

>Meaning, I can't think of any similar "movement" that succeeds by having a camera-friendly diplomatic leader -- unless you're thinking about going "full politics?"

Are you unaware that the Free Software Movement is a political movement first and foremost? People think it's a technical thing but technical excellence has always been secondary to political/ethical purity for GNU/FSF as evidenced by things like HURD and gnutls.

>There's no "vegan leader person" or "financial literacy leader person" or "animal cruelty leader person," etc. Not even "environment person,"

Look, if you're not going to argue in good faith then don't bother replying further. Those movements all have have multiple organizations working towards somewhat-common goals. Those individual orgs do indeed have leaders and by and large they're not toejam eaters.

>Are you unaware that the Free Software Movement is a political movement first and foremost?

Bingo. It is a political movement. One rooted in idiotic ideologies that no thinking person takes seriously. Communism was defeated by taking the few valid points of Marx and addressing them. The 98% stupidity was easy to refute and discard when the 2% valid points were accepted and addressed.

Well... I think it also took a cold war between two economic systems, multiple hot wars in Asia, and the maturation of social democracy to do so but yeah your point stands.

(Love your username btw)

Free Software will never be palatable to the mainstream, because the mainstream rejects socialist ideas. I think the popularity of Linux has somehow obscured the ideological origins of the movement, which seemed much more overt in the late 90s/early 00's when I first got into it.

I think you're letting your personal beliefs/circles affect your view on the FOSS ideology. Free software has nothing to say for or against commercial software. Commercial software doesn't need to be proprietary. I was there in the late 90s and early 2000s too and it was a minority (of proponents, many opponents would slander FOSS as a form of socialism) that somehow equated open software with socialism.

We're talking free as in libre here, not free as in beer.

>Free Software will never be palatable to the mainstream, because the mainstream rejects socialist ideas.

Then don't frame it as a socialist idea. There's absolutely nothing about Free Software that has a hard requirement on socialist ideology.

Frame it as pragmatism: Governments/schools/etc should run free software because it's more cost-effective and thus a more fiscally-responsible use of taxpayer monies.

Frame it as democratic: Why should a bunch of unelected CEOs have the right to dictate what you, a citizen of $this_great_nation, do with your devices?

Frame it as nationalism: How can American kids grow up to be world-leading innovators if they can't hack their devices? We're losing to Russia and China in the hacking gap!

Frame it as free speech or something: Why does the government get to decide what I do with my devices? My ipad my choice.

Matter of fact: Chinese smartphone users can be sued for hacking their devices. Particularly developers who develop location mocking apps.

And I think far too many people are missing why Stallman should be, to use a popular term, cancelled.

Toxic people shouldn't have a voice because then all sorts of people will decide to not get involved in a community where such people can be leaders.

Trust me in this, I should know :(

I do not trust you, and I also should know.

"Cancelled" and "toxic" are vague terms that we really need to stop using, please use the more precise words you mean. Has he broken the law or been unforgivably abusive, etc? If so, say that. If not, stop throwing accusations.

Open source would still exist without Stallman and the FSF. There is a practical benefit to open source software and calling people / companies evil / unethical for not open sourcing everything is not as helpful as the FSF may think.

Open Source in the OSI sense of the term was created as a reaction to the Free Software movement so I'm guessing probably not.

It's more likely that we'd have the situation we had with UNIX; incompatible forks tied to incrutable hardware drivers that no one can fix with a zillion different combinations so that when you sat down at a terminal you had no idea what to do -thanks to people being able to take the BSD/MIT software and create their own contrarian forks.

GNU wasn't innovative because it was free, or even because it's source was free. It was innovative because it forced people to play nice.

The UNIX Wars demonstrated how well people play with others when left to their own desires (not at all).

Considering Stallman's Free Software predates "Open Source" I'm not sure it actually would, or if it did, it would likely be less free.

And again, helpful to whom? Yes. Stallman's no diplomat or ambassador, but that's not the job he's trying to do.

Free software also predates "free software." People circulated programs within the science and hobbyists communities, as early as those communities existed. And before there was software, the ham radio community thrived on shared and published designs.

With that said, I appreciate what Stallman has done, if nothing else, to shine light on what freedoms we're giving up, and on the contrasts between the different free and non-free models that are in use today.

Free software is not no cost, it is free as in freedom. Didn't the FSF sell SunOS and Solaris free software when they first started out? It could be sold for the cost of maintenance or supporting the free software, which the user doesn't always get.

With Microsoft and Apple the software is commercial and not free, but they do a good job of handholding the customer and working through bugs and technical issues over the phone.

It's not like permissive licenses are a crazy hard concept to figure out. It's not like Fermat's last theorem where there is a large challenge in discovering a proof. Sure it may not be labelled as "Open Source", but there would be something similar. Also I believe there is a good chance that software would be more free due to copyleft licenses potentially not gaining momentum.

They're not hard, and I think Stallman et al figured them out way long ago, and they are why they created free software. Roughly, "permissive" ends up meaning "bad faith actors are permitted to take advantage of others' spirit of sharing."