Free software is a great system of ethics allowing users to run, modify, and distribute software as they please.

However, free software isn't a complete ethnic in and of itself. Canonical, IBM, and others, have distributed things under free software licenses with the purpose of taking over the entire Linux ecosystem. systemd does much more than an init system and repeatedly drags more things into itself. Through cronyism with the GNOME project and others, it has needlessly become a dependency to run commonly used software.

Canonical has fashioned snap in such a way that the only present snap repository is their own. Linux Mint has even had to go so far as disabling this altogether. Some find it useful, and I don't begrudge them of that. However, not everyone likes that (1) it is tied to Canonical, (2) it is slow, (3) doesn't obey system themes, and (4) that developers often see this as a catch-all and don't want to distribute the software elsewhere. This limits people's choice in the end, and clearly demonstrates that someone could follow all of the rules of free software, and still have something ethically questionable.

Thankfully, distributions like Slackware do avoid these pitfalls for the time being. It remains to be seen how long things like this can be avoided.

The kernel Linux has grown to over twenty million lines of code, serving as a large attack vector, for those looking to crack systems. This also serves go make maintenance of the kernel impossible outside of the massive Linux kernel project.