plain TeX is a joy to use, but you must really understand boxes and glue etc on a deep level. LaTeX makes that easier, but at the cost of extreme complexity internally (compare the output routines for example.)
Their "dominance" is the choice of the distributions. Gnome is opinionated, and I respect that they follow their vision. To me this is free software working as intended, people are free to fork Gnome if they want something that the devs don't want. And apparently, many distributions think Gnome should be the default. Maybe it shouldn't, but that's up to the distros to decide.
Getting paid in money is one motivation for people, but not the only one. Some people do things because they want to, regardless of payment. And some of them want to give what they made as a gift to anyone. The flip side is that no one can force them to do anything, it's all voluntary.
The author of JSLint wrote:
"So I added one more line to my license, was that, "the Software shall
be used for Good, not Evil." And thought: I've done my job!
/.../
Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a
different lawyer, at a company. I don't want to embarrass the company by
saying their name, so I'll just say their initials, "IBM," saying that
they want to use something that I wrote, 'cause I put this on everything
I write now. They want to use something that I wrote and something that
they wrote and they're pretty sure they weren't gonna use it for evil,
but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So, could I give
them a special license for that?
So, of course!
So I wrote back---this happened literally two weeks ago---I said, "I give permission to IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil." "
A good story about a bad day doesn't have to be about complaining. It can be about learning from mistakes, a strange irony, the absurdity of coinciding factors, etc.
People seem to think that those who choose permissive licences don't know what they're doing. Software can be a gift to the world with no strings attached. A company "taking" your code is never taking it away from you, you still have all the code you wrote. Some people want this. MIT is not an incomplete GPL, it has its own reasons.
For example, OpenBSD has as a project goal: "We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to."
Consider this: when you speak the listeners know what you mean based on the rest of the sentence. When you write you give the reader the intended word through spelling. People who read will see your words and assume you really meant "then" instead of "than", and the sentence will make little sense.
The words "I" and "eye" sound similar, but if you write "eye" I will read a sentence first thinking you are trying to say something about an eye, then when it breaks down, go back and find the issue.
End that my friend is less then eye-deal for comprehension.
To increase their UNIX skills.
I wanted to try inserting and removing kernel modules, so I looked around and thought "well, I don't have a USB stick in right now so I can safely try removing the usb kernel module." So I did that, and after pressing enter I realized my keyboard is connected with USB.
Similarly, the viking rune "alphabet" is called the Futhark, because the first letters are pronounced F, U, Þ, A, R, K.
There's also PonyOS (https://www.ponyos.org/) They wrote their own kernel, so it's not Linux, but it is Unix-like.
The founder of GNOME, Miguel de Icaza, stopped using Linux in favor of macOS in 2014 iirc. That makes me guess that the macOS design was at least acceptable to him. Maybe the visions were similar enough.