As a software developer, I’ve long known the power of collectivism. Free and Open Source Software that’s community developed by non-profit organizations forms the backbone of the internet. Pretty much every major corporation runs their backbone on it because it’s demonstrably better. With rare exception, pretty much every major website runs on servers that run Linux, an operating system developed primarily by volunteers working on it because they want to, not because there’s any profit to be made. The idea that we need the profit motive to be innovative or productive has always been a lie and the proof is sitting in front of all of us every single time we go online. Companies are all too happy to exploit the fruits of collective labor, but rarely turn around and offer the same back. Microsoft will run Azure on a backbone of Linux all day long but they will never open source Windows even though free and open source development would rapidly improve Windows, because it isn’t about making the best product, it’s all about control. It’s market fascism. Windows isn’t the dominant operating system on computers because it’s better, it’s because they spend billions of dollars making sure it comes pre-loaded on every computer you can buy so you don’t have any choice. They have a history of choking their competition out of the market too. Just look at what they did to Novell. They were hit with an anti-trust lawsuit over it and lost, but the punishment was basically a slap on the wrist. Also Apple isn’t real competition. They bailed out Apple years ago under the agreement that they wouldn’t actually compete, and they’d let you install Windows on your Mac. That’s why every Mac comes pre-loaded with BootCamp, which lets you install Windows but they’ve made it increasingly hard to install Linux.
Apple is the DNC of the software industry. It’s controlled opposition to give you the illusion of choice while refusing to actually compete with Microsoft directly. The proof is sitting there in every install of MacOS from the first boot. BootCamp comes pre-loaded to let you install Windows, but it doesn’t let you install Linux, and they’ve made it increasingly harder to sneak around and install it anyway, while they actively go out of their way to keep people from using MacOS on non-Apple hardware, which is artificially inflated in price over the competition. The illusion of choice is sold to you at a premium so only the affluent can get access to it.
If you think that Linux is behind Windows just because of market share, how do you explain Android? Companies rushed to support a Linux-based brand new platform with literally no market share when it came from a giant corporation with a history of questionable policies. It isn’t about market share, it’s about prejudice. Linux is the greatest proof in the pudding example that grassroots community organized labor is greater than corporate labor. They’ll run Linux all day long on servers that the public doesn’t get to see directly, because it’s demonstrably better than the corporate made closed-source choices, but they generally won’t run it on production machines in the office that the average worker or customer gets to see, even when it would actually save them massive amounts of money in licensing fees and maintenance overhead, because they don’t want employees to start getting ideas.