Wonderful comment. This is one reason I always laughed at the argument "yea, but... we have all the source code!". Great, so the solution is we pay to maintain it? How is this free again?
The unsaid thing about freedoms is you cannot exercise them unless you have the means to do so. If you don't have that, the only value freedoms afford you is aspirational.
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.
Nobody is suggesting that. In any case it's a false comparison, since anybody has the ability to fully exercise their freedom of speech. To exercise your open-source freedoms fully require skills, time, and/or money (to pay others to do it for you).
If the overall noise level is too high and you don't own a microphone, your freedom of speech can't be used effectively, you talk any nobody hears you. It is not a reason to drop freedom of speech, right? It's just the same with free software, the mere fact that you are allowed to read, change and distribute source code IS the key. Doing so is hard but not a reason to dismiss this freedom as irrelevant.
