dasein wrote:By that logic, impoverished AIDS patients in Africa should decline life-saving treatment because W.H. Gates III is paying for it.
I think your analogy fails here, primarily because there are alternatives in the OS situation, whereas there are really no alternatives in the AIDS medication situation. And even so, the analogy would work only in the case that the impoverished AIDS patient had a strong moral commitment against Bill Gates or modern medicine or whatever. And in that case it would be quite easy to claim that if someone really really does not believe in modern medication, then they should decline it eve if it means death.
And so it could be claimed (to play the devil's advocate) that people that hate corporate influence should avoid Linux entirely. And it definitely could be said that if you truly believe in something, then you should be willing to suffer in order to achieve it. Actually, it is commonly thought that how much you are willing to suffer is a direct indication of how strong your "faith" in the matter is.
But it is not uncommon that people want to "eat the cake and have it too". That is renounce Google, MS, Facebook etc. but still be able to use Linux and not some other community-made free-of-corporate-influence alternative OS/kernel (GNU mach/Libre Linux/GuixSD/HelenOS) with possibly poor hardware support and not as good performance metrics.
In a way there is really nothing wrong with wanting to eat the cake and have it too. There is also nothing wrong in complaining or preaching something that you do not practice, because life is often not that black and white. But I think it is good at least realize this and also realize that in stead of just being reactive about the problem you can try to be "proactive" so to speak (that word really is a crime against language) and explore other alternatives.
But at the end of the day, the question I wanted to ask was whether any people here on this board feel that Linux has already gone too far into the mainstream corporate business world or not.