I can understand the tone of the post. I'd also love devices where I can modify all of the source, change everything to how I see fit and have the freedom to not have telemetry beamed up to corporations. At the same time, I want to interact with friends and some of those friends chose closed source. I want to have my cake and eat it too and we can't.

The world has changed since the free software movement started. It's not enough to host your own mail server and keep a landline telephone to keep in touch. It's not even enough to use IRC or services which, relative to today, hardly maintained their walled gardens like MSN or AIM. Some are willing to make that sacrifice, I'm not, but I don't really like either choice. Sometimes I feel like I don't really own my devices but at least I still have friends.

At the same time, you're completely right. Free software didn't lose just because grandma isn't using a Coreboot tablet in a FOSS utopia. Anything written under the GPL requires that any (distributed) modifications have source code shared and that's huge for anything important. Yeah, some people never pay a cent and never have, that's kind of why they even used it in the first place. I switched to Ubuntu when Vista came to a crawling halt because it's free and people said it's good. I set up Linux servers at work because they host apps we need and it's easy to sell free. Some might never pay, some might have a really weird issue which needs fixing now and they'll throw some developers at it to ensure they get it. Free beer is the bait while free speech is the hook and, where it isn't free beer, billions are being spent.