You cannot blame that in Open source though, nor even Linux specifically. It was companies like Google, Yahoo! and Geocities that really set the expectation for free software with the average user and they were companies built around advertising and walled gardens. Outside of tech circles, almost nobody ran open source. But most people had or knew someone who had free email, et al.

Commercial companies did this to themselves as they raced to the bottom with aggressive pricing and a need to dominate at a global scale.