If we’re doing Wikipedia as the sole citation then:

In 1806, Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. By 1807, he began work on a more extensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language, which took twenty-six years to complete. To evaluate the etymology of words, Webster learned twenty-eight languages, including Old English, Gothic, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, Welsh, Russian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. His goal was to standardize American English, which varied widely across the country. They also spelled, pronounced, and used English words differently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster#Blue-backed_speller

As time went on, Webster changed the spellings in the book to more phonetic ones. Most of them already existed as alternative spellings.[34] He chose spellings such as defense, color, and traveler, and changed the re to er in words such as center. He also changed tongue to the older spelling tung, but this did not catch on.

Furthermore your quote doesn’t actually have a relevant citation:

He was very influential in popularizing certain spellings in the United States, but he did not originate them. Rather […] he chose already existing options such as center, color and check for the simplicity, analogy or etymology”

Though in context of the previous paragraph seems to imply that this was an opinion that the wikipedia article came to simply because there was a previous work that argued specifically for ‘or’ in place of ‘our’ but again, it appears to simply be their opinion based on an assumption.

Nah, Webster really did drop the ‘u’ and changed a lot of spelling. He also learned a lot of languages since back then there were many, many different languages/dialects in America at the time and he wanted to make it easier as he changed spellings, such as swapping ‘re’ to ‘er’ for phonetics. There was also a lot of anti-British sentiment at the time of course which certainly would have motivated acceptance.

Webster is definitely also credited for this in histories and not newspapers outside of anecdotes.

Noah Webster dropped the ‘u’ on words as well as otherwise changed the spelling of many words in ‘American’ English.

It does represent freedom.

Kent can fork the kernel if he wants with all the fixes he wants in it and distribute it as he sees fit. This particular instance of the kernel (which happens to be original – the upstream), Linus has to balance allowing some fixes other developers want to include versus a ‘minor’ release of the kernel during this cycle (because it is a minor version release, not a major one). Kent could then also stop other developers from contributing to his fork but then those people could just fork his kernel fork and do what they want.

You as a user are free to use any of them. You’re even free to take Kent’s PRs right now with everything done in the kernel at this point, compile it and run it yourself if you want. You could even market it as something and sell it all if you want for a profit if you can get the customers. You’re free to do all of that. You can do it right now if you want.

It doesn’t change what Disney tried to do to get out of it.