In a capitalist system the expenditure of every dollar inflects and alters the value and trajectory of all other dollars. One could also point out that dollars given to Apple in some (not small) part go directly to lobbying governments and fighting absurd legal trench warfare to convince countries to "not allow products to ape one another". I find it astonishing after so many years of reading Slashdot that so many readers fail to grasp the way in which computers and IT are utterly in the grip of the capitalist mode of production, and resort to abstractions about "letting the people do what they want" instead of facing the unpleasant truth of an ever-more-pervasive curtailment of technological freedom. Stallman may be impolitic, is certainly eccentric, but he has firm principles, and sticks to them, while Gates, Jobs, et al. have only capital (including the human capital of their apologists, the cynical and the easily duped.) To put it another way, free software is for the ages, while the accomplishments of capitalist IT will last only until your MacBook breaks, your Windows is no longer supported, your Google is tool of the government, and the next crisis erupts.