What is freedom of speech and why do we need it?
First Point: Nobody on this planet is more intelligent than the entire human collective (except Gary Kasparov, who beat "The World" in chess back in 1999). Jokes aside, for society to evolve, our ideas of social vs antisocial behaviour need to be constantly questioned -- even when those questions are directed at the very people/groups/movements who questioned the system to bring about positive change in the first place. "People love what science gives us, but not the questions it asks." -- heard it in a film, dunno who said it first, but the bottom line is that we have to ask these questions and prioritise objective reality over everything else (while still being compassionate and sensitive enough to have basic human respect for people's subjective reallities, example: religion, identity things, and the stuff I can't speak about on this internet).
Second Point: Again, nobody is smarter than the entire compute cluster that is the 7.9billion people on this planet. We need new ideas. A lot of these new ideas are bad ones. I think we can all agree that the idea to remake The Lion King in 3D CGI was a bad idea, lol (I'd love to point out actual controversial things, but I'm not on Home Field, so I gotta go by forum rules). Still, the important the is not quality, it's quantity. Why? Well, duh, there's a relationship between academics, idealists, and creatives (though membership to these groups is not mutually-exclusive). Creative types and idealists often come up with ideas while academics criticise them, refining what's usable and discarding what's mental. That said, sometimes, bad ideas are incorporated into society, which brings us full circle to First Point.
Third Point: We are human. We have real sentience. We need to able to express what we feel, who/what we feel it about, and if we know, why we feel it. This is pretty simple, but I should have the right to preach about my Church of Coffee, where we worship The One Bean that rules us all and not be oppressed, silenced, shamed by the decentralised Big Brother of social media, etc. because the majority bellief is that The Church of Earl Grey Tea is the best. Everyone's expression is guaranteed to disagree with someone else, trying to shut everything down is counterproductive because nobody can express how and why the feel the way they do, on both sides, and reach common ground if we shove everyone in walled gardens based on intersectional labeling. And that brings us back to Point One and Point Two, since we need to be both critical of this (very flawed) system, but we need new ideas to find a better one (because we live in a different era and reying on past values of logic > emotion or science/stats > personal experience is fine, it cannot be implemented in the same way because society's architecture has been changed by this infinite expanse of Internet.
What is Liberty and why do we need it?
Liberty, simply put is being free. No king, lord, governor, government, etc. can keep you as a slave, oppress you, opress your freedom of belief and expression, and so forth. Boiled down, we can call it "sellf-determination". This ties in with Freedom of Speech, because this is where we get to the point -- well we start, I've planned this as a build-up. As it stands, we do not have true liberty in tech (actually other areas, but this forum is not the place, nudge, nudge, wink, wink). For starters, we accpepr the idea of OEM's preinstalling software that we cannot remover on devices we pay for as normal. Think about this: Woulld you buy a house if it came pre-furnished with ugly floral-print furniture & curtains and you were not able to simply dump them. Of course not. Worse still, imagine if instead of tasteless furnishings, you had cameras watching you. No sane person would pay for this... unless it's a piece of modern tech. This happens because these things creep in. They start with market dominance, then corporate interests will move away from minority markets to support the dominant entity. Once that entity has most of or all the power, they will start dictating to others in the general ecosystem. Microsoft is one of the prime examples. Microsoft makes software, amongst that, an OS. Yet Microsoft tells hardware manufacturers what they can/cannot do. If they do not comply, Windows will not work correctly on their hardware. Now, last I checked, software, especially the OS, was supposed to meet the hardware specification, not the other way around. Ask yourself without thinking first, "When did this happen?" and you won't get to an answer because it was a gradual process and much of it seemed like a Chicken-Egg Principle... Only it wasn't. It was a masterfully thought out, subversively-executed plan that used cunning marketing and even loose enforcement of IP. Gates admitted that he would be okay with people copying (illegally) Windows, because it would help it achieve a de facto status. And it did. Sofware companies, most especially gaming, stopped supporting other platforms because of the Windows market share... as did hardware manufacturers -- to their own eventual perill (y'all made yer beds, lie in em). Apple is another. It started with "incompatibility" was Apple hardware and other systems, but gradually reached the point of Apple trying to ban self-repair.
And don't think Open Source is immune. Most of Android is open source because the Linux kernel in GPLv2'd... Thing is that neither the firmware nor hardware has to be. In other words, we have a more modern form of vendor lock-in. Worse still is that we don't even have autonomy over our Android OS. Try to uninstall Youtube or any other Google app (OOTB)... Thought not. We don't have the right to remove software from what we paid for, what is our property. Worse is that we still have those rights on paper, but there are intentionally malicious designs preventing us exercising our legal rights: the warranty, and the risk of hardware bicking (which I bellieve is intentional since I saw a Russian hacker flash a chip on a printer that was counting number of printed pages and then bricking the printer in a much more modern form of planned obsolescence).
Now, let's get to gaming. Today, you buy the right to play the game, not a copy of it (mostly). The same gradual progression happened here: Well, each generation saw games getting bigger, but more on this. Just keep in mind that this is happening in the background. So, initiallly, we started with online "authnetication" as a "copy protection" (which was provn ineffective, but continued to be used and a disproportionate expense to companies). then we "trended" to DLC to "extend/expand/add to" games, then almost every game stated needing "patches" -- which were downlloadable. Hmmm... But what about QC??? Lol wut? Okay, so at this point, games were large, patches were large, the world was connected. Aw, heck, let's just have the user download all or most of the game and related content. But wait, why not require they have an account with a service/provider, too... Ta-dah. "The System wins"... "Flawless Victory"
I won't bother with non-interactive content, based on the above you can extrapolate since there are many paralllels. Sufficed to say that you need X streaming service or X membership to view/read/consume Y content -- which you're licensed to consume; you don't own a copy.
I'll end on the note that these entities profile you with your personal information, track your habits (even IRL), and either sell it, auction add space, or just use it internally to market their own products to you
Now I'm going to posit something here: Imagine if somebody wanted to silence you? Sure, if you were some llone wolf crazy, you could fight back, but most of us have families and kids, friends and lovers, and even just neighbours llike Surfer Dave. These people in our lives are affected by our choices (well, not Dave) so far as standing up to these giants. You have all the standard rights on paper, but you cannot enforce them because these entities have certain rights, too. They can cut you off from everything in the blink of an eye. You depend on the tech they track you with. And, to reference things like Psycho Pass, Minority Report, etc., they can profile you and determine your behaviour -- and they are trying to do it way beyond the scope of what porn you like. ML is a lot better than you know. We're conbining the database/dataset approach with some interesting behaviour simulation gleaned from the public's interactions online, with and without our products (not my products, "our" as a general term). This isn't to make a better Alexa. This is to make it better a auto-profiling you. That's not to say that a coming generation of virtual "intelligent" pets aren't on their way; they are. But beware because these puppies (pun intended) are gonna be you paying for yourself to be used as a lab rat for the next phase. The line of "real" virtual pets (a far cry from Tamagotchi and Pokemon or those stupid free phone apps) are going to be hackable to allow somewhat questionable activities (though officially these hacks will be a violation of the T&Cs that are slapped onto things to protect the company. They want you to torture your V-Pet, actually, and I'm pretty sure you guessed why.
So, we're at a point where not only can you simply be erased because almost al news is consumed onlline and social interactions are becoming more so, but soon they'll be able to tell how much of a threat you pose and cut you off before you can be. Better yet, shape you through the correct exposure to have a certain political or social bias.
Back to reality, though. All of it boils down to your products don't merely not beong to you, the actually own you.
So, where's the business potential?
Ah... Firstly, people -- young people -- are, for the first time in ages, becoming more privacy-aware. There's a growing interest in alternative culture in general and the 2010s are proof (albeit in a totally different area of life, cough, hint). Now, what is more edgy than non-"normative" hardware/sofware. Nothing says "I'm an individual" more than joining the thousands of others rebellling against "the norm." So there's a selling point.
Another is convenience. People are tired of missing drivers on Windows as they are of hardware issues on FOSS (although Linux is fairlly supported these days). And more people, even dim-witted cool kiddies, are at least toying with the notion of going Linux (while some LLinux users are now going BSD). By that, I mean full Linux. I don't mean to put down the community, but MS is responsible for a lot of converts because of decision after decision that alienated users. So many people I've spoken to wish they could afford a Mac. Some of them will listen to me and give a balanced distro like Mint a try (I generally show them videos of OTT eyecandy and awesomeness furst, then tell the Mint is a starting point).
Finally there's corporate.
Developers: Imagine a developer's glee at full, real, bear-metal access to do thing like write custom dyamically-loaded/unloaded drivers at game start/end instead of bear metal access through someone else's drivers? Imagine the general ease of optimization. Imagine the lack of legal BS. I think corporations would take interest
OEMs: Dealing with open hardware makes configuration easier and building custom OSes etc. without all the NDA drama. Yeah, sorry intel, we're going with the open CPUs for our workstations.
Purposed-hardware: Whether you're building your own personal framework for a massive industry like and airline company or just a crypto mining op, I think it was appeals.
...But you know what most of all? Never mind the above. Most people, even a-holes, support ethical companies. Marketing yourself as protecting privacy has worked for MS and Apple before (despite it being a llie). People buy non-related products from "ethical" companies in a different area. Example: ABCD Inc. donates 5million per year to saving the oceans, recycling, and rhoming kittens/puppies/unicorns. XYZ Inc. does not. They are mainly in the Teas industry, but dabble in coffee as well. XYZ Inc. coffee is $4.50 per cup and ABCD Inc. is $5 per cup at the local coffee shop. The coffee tastes identical and both come with a free donut, and both companies' profiles are well-known. Which coffee do you suppose sells the most?