> But how? Who is going to build, maintain, and provide equitable and effective governance, support, and regulatory compliance for that system? And why are others going to use it?

Who does it for Debian or Blender or DNS or SMTP?

> Most small orgs don't have IT expertise. They buy off the shelf hardware and software. The computers they buy come with an OS on them, and they use that one. What would compel them to install a different one?

The computer they bought came with Windows 7, but Windows 7 isn't supported anymore. Windows 11 says it doesn't support that hardware. Meanwhile it's a quad core with enough RAM and an SSD and even if it's a few years old it's still fine. All they need it for is to use Google Docs and Chrome/Firefox. Why spend hundreds of dollars on a new machine when you can just have your niece install Debian?

> There's really no reason for other large companies like PepsiCo to be making their own Linux distros for their office staff, any more than it makes sense for Google to start bottling their own beverages for their cafeteria.

There is though.

Bottling beverages is a low margin commodity market. Software isn't. If you can bottle your beverages just as well as Pepsi, you might save a fraction of a percent on something that costs you a fraction of a percent of your revenue. If you can cut Microsoft out of a large enterprise, you can eliminate tens of millions of dollars in licensing costs. That pays for a non-zero number of software developers.

Meanwhile free software exists, so you're not starting from scratch with an empty plot of land and have to figure out how to mold plastic into beverage containers. You start with a Linux distribution that other large enterprises are already using and make some minor modifications to tailor it to your needs.

> Yes, many are large enough that they could -- but they'll never do as good as a software company does, because they aren't one.

In many cases they are. If you're a bank, you're "not a software company", but how are your customers interacting with you in the main? How about a health insurance company? A telecommunications company? An online retailer, like Amazon (which knows this quite well)?

You don't have to be "a software company" for software to be a major part of your business.

> Are you really better off training and supporting your office staff to send out invoices using SumatraPDF on Ubuntu, just to save money on Adobe/Windows licensing? For companies that have nothing to do with software, this is a recipe to lose more money in operational problems than they save in licensing.

It's not just about licensing. Okay, so you save a couple hundred bucks per seat on licensing. That's several million dollars, you could justify that, but maybe it's not much better than breakeven.

But then you're not trapped in a Skinner box, where every day you have to keep clicking "no" to a box that, if you ever click yes, you end up violating a privacy law and putting your company in regulatory peril. Or locking yourself into a vendor who can then raise prices on you by more than your original estimate of what they would cost, but by then it's too late and the cost of extricating yourself is now more than the cost of paying the danegeld.

There is value in opting yourself out of the enshittification of major platforms.