Remote attestation is the true enemy of your freedom. The power of the authoritarian corporatocracy to force you to use only the (entire) systems they control. It's worth reading https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html again just to see how prescient Stallman was.
I think it’s also worth asking why he didn’t have more impact despite pretty clearly seeing this problem. Part of the answer has to be resource disparities but I don’t think it’s just that - Linux didn’t really capitalize at all on Microsoft’s lost decade, and much of the innovation in security has happened on other platforms. I think there’s also some kind of blind spot in the open source community where a lot of people see this as something other people need, not them personally.
I've been saying this ad nauseum forever and I'm not the only one.
A related problem is that the OSS world is mostly tech enthusiasts. It's like having car people design cars. They'd be full of special switches and options and stuff that car people want. Car people don't understand that most people hate cars. What they like is mobility. Same goes for computers. Most people hate computers. They just like what computers let them do: communication, making content, getting their work done, etc.
That's true, barely, only if you equate "software" with "things that draw stuff presented on a display to a user". Regular non-tech-geeks are using open source software (in the real sense, meaning instructions given to a computer to make it do something) pervasively, everywhere, every day, on all their devices (yes, even the Apple ones, but especially all the devices they use that aren't in their pockets).
Open source certainly isn't a failure, it literally won the war.