We've lost our way

I have very fond memories of being an internet/FOSS/unix geek as an

undergraduate, from 2003 to 2006. It felt like a great time for us. There was

huge community awareness around two particular issues, namely proprietary

formats and the importance of webstandards. Everybody was rallying around

OpenOffice and Firefox as replacements for Microsoft Office and Internet

Explorer, and these tools were actually achieving something approaching

mainstream success. There was this great sense that we had all risen up as a

community, realised that certain aspects of software were either good or bad for

users (note that these issues aren't even about source code availability, but

about avoiding unpleasantries like vendor lock in), and we were winning a sort

of David vs Goliath battle to make the world better. It was great!

Now it's 2017. Microsoft are actually beginning to fade slowly into

obsolescence, which is something we wouldn't dared to have dreamed of in my

student years. And yet, I haven't felt that Firefox-era thrill in years.

Quite the opposite. Frankly, I think the broader internet/FOSS/unix geek

community has totally lost its way and its moral compass. In terms of having

the power to steer the industry, to eliminate competition, to lock in and

control users and given them an increasingly raw deal, companies like Apple,

Facebook, Google and Twitter are today even worse than Microsoft were in the

previous era. And while it's not true that nobody is calling these companies

out, the opposition is nowhere close to being as mainstream as opposition

against Microsoft used to be. Making a concerted effort to avoid these

companies and their products/serivces puts you in the hyper-fringe part of

geekdom. What happened?