I've found many startups are merely "investments" by some entrepreneur that were intended from inception, whether explicitly or not, to be grown to a sufficiently negotiable state and sold to the biggest buyer. That's not to say that big tech companies don't buy-out their competition, but many startups also dream of being bought-out.

I agree. I think for most the answer may be a mix of complacency, convenience, and conforming to the norm.

Free software and the FSF. When the Snowden leaks came out, they weren't news to me – just confirmation.

This has been around for a very long time. I'm always surprised that more people haven't heard of it.

Google does this time and again, and a workaround always gets released eventually. Then again YouTube has been steadily going downhill these past several years, so maybe it's for the best.

OSMAnd is very good, with a lot of features, but lately I have been using Organic Maps. It has fewer features but is SO MUCH FASTER when rendering maps.

Mysterium looks pretty interesting, being completely decentralized. All the mainstream VPNs are pretty shady to me, being run in a centralized manner and some heavily marketed by "influencers".

You do realize that RHEL is open source, right? The "pirating" has already been done by RockyLinux (formerly CentOS).