>The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground.
Are you joking? This was before my time, but there once was a time when you would not only have to pay for development tools, but pay for them seperately. Want a compiler? $500, please. Want something like Bison? Fork a few hundred. Want an assembler? Another few hundred. etc.
There have been setbacks, and it does look like the tide is turning towards everything becoming closed again but it's untrue to say that Free Software has "only lost ground" since 1985 -hell, GCC didn't even come out until what, 1987, 1988 or so?
Open Source in the OSI sense of the term was created as a reaction to the Free Software movement so I'm guessing probably not.
It's more likely that we'd have the situation we had with UNIX; incompatible forks tied to incrutable hardware drivers that no one can fix with a zillion different combinations so that when you sat down at a terminal you had no idea what to do -thanks to people being able to take the BSD/MIT software and create their own contrarian forks.
GNU wasn't innovative because it was free, or even because it's source was free. It was innovative because it forced people to play nice.
The UNIX Wars demonstrated how well people play with others when left to their own desires (not at all).