I find the FSF's mission extremely important on an educational, "meta" level — regardless of the particular content of their ideology — especially in the Silicon Valley culture. According to the SV ethos, laws come in two flavors. The first is man-made laws, like the laws of government. Those are often described as "silly", "outdated" or downright "stupid"; it is imperative that SV culture hack those — as in break — and replace them with something else (as in "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission"). The second kind of laws is the laws of the society (or the market, as a special case) — "what people want". Those laws need to be hacked — as in exploited cleverly — and are on the same level as natural laws. Opposing those is seen as "ideology" (with an implied negative connotation, as ideology is the futile fight with the laws of nature), or worse: "political ideology". Never mind that the entire goal of technology is fight the actual laws of nature, that in their eternal indifference, have placed annoying limitations — nay, "challenges" — on us humans. There is a strong naturalistic fallacy built into the SV ethos, that is only in effect when social laws are concerned[1]. The FSF is a movement that tackles celebrated SV ideas (code; freedom) yet reminds us that "emergent" social laws are just as man-made as the laws of governments, and unless proven otherwise, they can — and must — be changed by human action.

This can be maddening to the hacker ideology, which views this direct, real political action as folly. Why fight what is impossible to fight if you can somehow hack a workaround? Wasting effort trying to divert a river seems crazy if you believe that "progress" can be achieved while swimming with the current.

[1]: I have a theory as to why that is: to the somewhat autistic mind of some technology types, the physical laws are governed by unforgiving but inherently simple laws, presenting a well-designed puzzle, meant to be solved. The social laws, on the other hand, appear complex, impenetrable, even threatening. They are then either discounted as stupid (i.e., society can be simple, but isn’t because stupid people complicate it; a utopia would be governed by simple laws, resembling those of the physical world in structure), or surrendered to as something too powerful to understand and contend with head-on. A clever hacker is meant to exploit their quirky, but superficial idiosyncrasies, uncovered by statistics and "data", but must never fight them and never try to untangle their deep structure.