Management was involved but did not decide. Don Melton decided to use KHTML:

But I chose the engine we used -- with my teamâ(TM)s and my management chainâ(TM)s support, of course -- ...

That's also why Stallman's solution is ridiculous. When companies are too big to fail, their single-customer suppliers are too vital to fail, regardless of which division they supply. Splitting up a big company doesn't do anything to the risk, but it makes hippies happier.

The suppliers will only fail if the single-customer fails. The single-customer will not have significant problems if one of their suppliers fail. Stallman's suggestion is excellent!: Large companies will pay a percentage of their income as tax. The percentage increases with the global gross income of the company. This will force these companies to have good long term business strategies.

And you have not even mention one.

OpenDocument Format is also a zip container with XML inside.

Gimp is getting some good competition from Krita now. The image editing application that is part of Calligra Suite with a focus on painting is very active with many releases. It has CMYK support, tons of filters and brushes and an active community of artists. And there is a tablet version called Krita Sketch.

MuseScore Player
Partly closed but based on MuseScore from the same people.

EbookDroid Nice PDF reader.

A gaymer is a camper in the closet.

No, I'm not being paid. I work on a similar project: WebODF. I wrote the post so someone (thank you) would ask me what is in it for me and I could plug this project.

Seriously: my experience is that PDF.js works acceptably for most PDFs I threw at it. That included large PDFs with designer layout and scientific papers. Granted, poppler (okular, evince) is still way faster in rendering, but I enjoy PDF.js because it is good enough and I know the work it took to make it and can see the improvements they are making still. Trying to write a desktop type application in the browser makes one appreciate a good one like PDF.js.

The PDF viewer in Firefox, PDF.js is an amazing piece of software. It is written entirely in JavaScript and runs in the same sandbox in which a webpage runs. So it is very safe. The layout accuracy and speed of PDF.js are simply amazing. Text selection happens just like it does in the browser. Some PDF viewers only allow you to draw a rectangle on which to do OCR. PDF.js simply lets you select the glyphs.

This viewer has been available as an add-on for a while already.

The difference is that you are in a child-like hypothetical that lacks any of the real issues involved in free software.
On the contrary, I was asking about what type of software provides most freedom: software that I can control completely, but which does not exactly do what I want it to do (yet) or software that I cannot control completely but which I can reasonably assume performs the task that I want it to perform quickly and cheaply.

You also make a bunch of assumptions that show you don't know anything about free software, why it even exists, much less, what makes it free.
I program Free Software for a living and I use mostly Free Software and have done so for more than ten years.

For example, you suppose that people who use Free Software don't have any software to choose from, and that they will have to write it yourself.
I do not assume this. I do assume that often it is necessary to adapt the Free Software to make it work according to my wishes. If there really is this glut of software and no need to write any more then all computer programmers would be out of a job. Yet, there is still demand for more and better software, both free and un-free.

In a market for closed software, a developer can anticipate a demand, write software for it and distribute the development costs across many customers. In FOSS, this is very hard. One customer can not achieve some useful improvement to an application for the price that is normally paid for an un-free application. One can group funds and then order software from a developer, but this will yield a very different quality of software and it will create it only after a delay. In the un-free market, an entrepreneur has anticipated my demand, loaned money to implement it and tries to make a profit by selling the software after creating it.

In a comment on this topic I asked a similar question.

An argument that RMS will likely use, is that if you use proprietary software, you are helping to keep the majority of software proprietary, while if you use and advocate Free Software, you will help in improving it, which leads to a better medium-term situation.

The same argument can be used for situations where a vendor benefits from the network effect to keep people locked into their service. These arguments can be made for using the metric system in the USA or for resisting the Mafia in Sicily; in many cases it is hard to get everyone to behave in a way that leads to optimal situation.

I use a proxy that I wrote myself to surf the web. Its purpose is similar to the Firefox add-on RequestPolicy: to selectively block requests to website B that originate from a visit to website A. An example is the loading of content from google-analytics or scorecardresearch.com.

This proxy is written in Javascript and runs on Node.JS. I have not put it online and not plan to share it soon. Nevertheless, a similar script could be used to cache your web site visits and index their content.

Here is a slightly philosophical question.

When using Free Software, a lot of time is spent in trying to find the right software or in writing it. The software store model, where controlled devices offer cheap software, allows the market place for software to work efficiently. Programmers have an incentive to write good software because there is a lot of competition. With a market like that, when you choose to use closed software, you often get functionality faster.

A simple definition of freedom might be: being able to do what you want to do. If I need to write software to do what I want to do, that could be considered to be less free than when I have the ability to use a closed product that does what I want instantly.

Talking about freedom in this way, is quite different from the way the Free Software movement looks at it. In Free Software, freedom is linked to more control. In closed software the emphasis is on more convenience and more spare time. Do see the balance between control and convenience as black and white?

He explains it right there. We live in an abundance of webpages. I think this workflow might actually work fine once you have a good archive of reference materials local and properly indexed.

The web is not just a source of information, it's also a source of distraction. By building in a latency, one can be more productive. Stallman is not the only one that does this.

In addition, by limiting himself to fewer types of communication channel instead of a complex mix of twitter, facebook, irc, mail, telephone, web, voip, text and more, he needs less brain cycles to deal with the different formats.

Or if you want to combine Java, JavaScript, and a few other scripting languages in a Node-like server, use Vert.x.