To deal with that, consider using GNU/Linux phone Librem 5 recommended by the FSF: https://www.fsf.org/givingguide.
> and Linux being used for cloud lock-in
What do you want to discuss here? There is always a possibility to use tools for the evil. Non-free software is used for that, too (much more).
The fundamental reason is the shift towards the web as a platform, not the abundance of Free Software. As for the oligopolies you mention, the process is as democratic as possible with extremely low barrier to entry: many of the current big players weren't millionaires who had to invest piles of money into factories and wait for decades for their dreams to materialize.
> What about Linux (Android) being used as the prime spyware vector, and Linux being used for cloud lock-in (k8s et al)?
I don't believe RMS would object to that, he is not a Linux fanboy and concentrates on Free Software instead.
And surely using cloud service, no matter built on open or closed or free or not software, will tell very little of the modifications that were done to the service and the packages. Basically I know nothing about the cloud-based mysqls, elastic searches, etc that are provisioned for me by s.o.
It's not like closed-source software would have prevented any of this.
SaaS is the only way left to force most people to actually pay for the FOSS stuff they leach.
Take a look at Ardour for an example. Red Hat too.
I should also note that nowadays Red-Hat belongs to IBM, so there are other forms of funding beyond support contracts for Red-Hat enterprise.
Yeah there is CentOS Stream now, but that isn't what freeloaders want.
Alternatives popped up literally days after the annoumcement of centos stream. We got back to original point. If you know the history of rhel and its clones, you surely know they used to be tenth of projects similar to centos, some much more active/reactive. The redhat funding of centos as a perfect rhel clone is more a parenthesis in history than anything.
So in the end freeloaders still get exactly what they want.
> Yeah there is CentOS Stream now, but that isn't what freeloaders want.
I would say that isn't what some freeloaders think they want. All the feedback I get from people deciding to stick to centos stream and trying it out before a potential switch to something else has bern mostly the same: a lot of fuss for nothing, their life hasn't changed and centos is still meeting their needs.
Recurring income is a stronger business model, nobody's denying that, but that doesn't mean it's an improvement for the user or that those producing software with a goal of financial gain would have just released standalone open source software if only free software licenses had been more sympathetic to their needs. Rather, I think if SaaS did not exist, if their first goal is revenue, many of these groups would have just released straight up proprietary software.
The "free" in "Free and Open Source Software" is free as in speech, not free as in beer. We'd like to think that decision to charge or not charge for the product is orthogonal to the decision to make the source code available. In practice there is some interrelation.
But FOSS was never "you can't charge for it."
Also missing a discussion about the role of open standards as opposed to open implementations, such as POSIX/LSB, picture and A/V formats for personal storage and streaming, standards for messaging, and the absence of a GNU/Browser despite the presence of so-called web standards.