Example Gnome3, which is free software, even a officially sanctioned GNU project. Overnight, a few key people decide to abandon the traditional desktop metaphor, against the will of a majority of their users and to the detriment of the whole linux desktop. The users hated it and are still hating it, but nobody has the ressources to modify it. Nobody has even the ressources to keep Gnome2 alive, let alone fork Gnome3.
Yes, in theory users could make only those changes they want, but only in theory. In practice, if a significantly influential player says that Gnome2 is gone, Gnome2 is gone. Even if iOS was free software, if Apple decided to make a change, they would be still big enough to force a majority of users to accept their way.
If you're not paying for their time (or willing to put your own time in), you don't get to chose how the people who are putting the effort in spend their programming time.
With free software, you have the option to do whatever you like to it, but no-one has the obligation to work on it on your behalf.
Absolutely and that's the problem. Say my wife (not a programmer) doesn't like it, she isn't going to learn to program, understand the code, make the changes she wants and implement them.
While it's theoretically possible, it's so impractical as to effectively be impossible.
The number of people for whom free as in speech software is actually freer than close software is a very small percentage - for others, such as my wife, Android or Linux is no freer (as in speech) than iOS or Windows.
This doesn't take skill in programming, no more than (in the venerable tradition of car metaphors) it takes mechanical skil to know that the dealer can install the leather seat or roof-rack options for your car if you request that of them.
You drastically understate the percentage of people who have alternatives to choose from at their skill level.
Not entirely true. Windows can run into licensing problems from time to time, which you don't get with the other major OSes. Buy a used macbook? OS is fine. Buy a used Windows PC? Well... the vendor said it was genuine. Turns out if you try to get the security updates, it starts complaining about not being genuine. I had to sort out exactly this problem for a nontechnical ex-colleague of mine who'd bought such a PC for her new small business.
But when she uses a program whose the source code can be examined by a worldwide community of programmers, her chances are greatly improved that if the code plays any dirty tricks someone will already have discovered the offending code, they will have screamed bloody murder, and the offending code will already have been removed. Even if she's unfortunate enough to have encountered the malicious code before it's been discovered, she can be confident that when it is discovered: 1) it will quickly be fixed, and 2) since it's in Microsoft's and Apple's interests to disparage F/OSS software, it will be prominently reported on the 11:00 news.
I'm certainly not claiming that there's any absolute guarantee that any software is safe. If you really want to be paranoid, read Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.167....
But I am claiming that her chances of being harmed by having her data misused are far, far greater when she uses software that can only be examined by a very few programmers inside an organization that has a vested interest in hiding the misuse. She's much safer when she uses software that can be examined by a worldwide community of programmers whose vested interest is in achieving status within the programmer community by producing code they can be proud of.
Given that the potential to do something is worth a whole lot less than the activity itself, it's easy to see why FOSS is in is current state and will remain that way for a long time.
"Overnight, a few key people decide to abandon the traditional desktop metaphor,
against the will of a majority of their users and to the detriment of the whole
linux desktop. The users hated it and are still hating it..."
- "overnight" - Versus an open discussion among everyone interested, with lots of early prototypes available to discuss the changes.
- "against the majority of their users" - Got numbers? Reasonable surveys? Or are we just trusting that the loud crowd that curses about this change is not a vocal minority, but really 'the userbase'?
- "the detriment of the whole linux desktop" - Puh - lease.. That's not even funny. This part is just sad..
- "Users hated it and are still hating it" - Generalization, care to provide numbers, surveys - ah, right. It's just a repetition of the second point, right? To really make it stick?
Really, that was uncalled for and totally useless. You could've made your point about not being able to 'use the source' without adding unqualified attacks.
However, the main point isn't whether we can get as much eye-candy as humanly possible. Free software operating systems may always be lacking some set of features that are present in proprietary systems. But the real issue is how many _anti-features_ there are. We know about Apple's decision on storage policies because it is blatant and they were up-front about it. But there is so much in a proprietary program that we can't easily monitor. It may sound paranoid, but there are likely backdoors, etc. in many of our cell phones, allowing paying governments to listen to converstaions, even when it's sitting in your pocket, or it looks like it's off but still has the battery in. http://www.neatorama.com/2011/05/29/gmail-hackers-used-us-go... Gmail and others are _known_ to have backdoors to user data for governments, for example. How comfortable are you with that?
And it's not limited to backdoors and spying. Apple once installed a hardware chip in one of their computers to remove certain features and sell it at a cheaper price. Removing the chip allowed users to use those features. While we usually don't have much control at the hardware level, I personally don't want to use an operating system that is defective by design http://www.defectivebydesign.org/ , with forced obsolescence just being one example of a dirty tactic that is often used. (Get the latest phone, the previous one isn't cool anymore and the new OS works like crap on your "old" hardware!)
If it weren't for Firefox, there would hardly be any web standards to speak of, and the internet would basically cater to Microsoft Windows' Internet Explorer. Microsoft resisted the development of the internet in its current form because it allows users of virtually any operating system to use the web to its fullest potential. I don't think Apple is very much above that kind of thinking. When there weren't many apps for the iPhone, Apple touted the idea of web-based apps, because it was an easy entry point, and there weren't many binary alternatives in the "ecosystem". Once there were lots of programs in Apple's (censored) store, they began discouraging the use of web-based applications and encouraged everyone to make programs compiled for the iPhone, largely because a user of any device can use a web-based app, but you have to buy an iPhone to use the any of the programs that have been written by programmers for that device. (No cross-compiling allowed by Apple, btw.)
So whether or not we like where development is heading with a given free software project, there is a sanity to the development process in that there are no anti-features that I can really think of. If any get made, then all it takes is _one_ programmer to say, "I don't like that idea, I'll just delete that code and share the change with others, because it suits me, and because I can."
edit: spelling