IMO, the fundamental problems with Stallmanism are not to be found in its tactics and execution, but rather in the very core of the philosophy itself.
1. An ardent defense of capitalism and private property.
2. A critique of open source as a superior software development methodology.
You'll find shades of (1) in various defenses of competing open source licenses (e.g. BSD). But also, (1) is a pretty common attitude in software development circles (a majority of the libertarians I know are software people).
(2) is a lot less common in developer crowds, I think in part because when evaluated as a purely factual and categorical claim, it's trivial to prove false. Many of the most successful software projects in the world are open source.
The economic argument against (2) is far more common -- and is made in this thread by sprafa for example.
Surprisingly, there are also moral arguments against (2) -- see e.g. https://acmsonline.org/home2/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/VanD...
TBF the moral case against (2) probably really is as rare as you claim (which is a good thing IMO).
But the intersection of (1) and (2) isn't impossible to imagine, and I think there are a lot of developers who get close to this confluence of opinions. Or at least a lot closer than they are to "Stallmanist" freedom.
-2¢
Stallman's philosophy is that all software should be Free because the users deserve it, not because the author wishes it to be.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.en.html
[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.en...
Proprietary licences will sometimes prohibit resale or modification, for instance. Licences like the GPL do the exact opposite: they allow modification and resale under the condition that these subsequent derivative works are licensed under the same terms (if distributed).
I would have thought being able to decide the conditions under which others can use your private property is an idea the most ardent capitalist would support.
However, OpenBSD (my second choice of system) does not, and they've been vocal in the past.
https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#43
It's pretty simple - freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. That includes in a proprietary environment. That includes whatever you want it to include. The other three freedoms then tell you "except in some ways we personally don't like."
They also don't like the FSF much. They have done some things that are a little controversial, like require devs to cede ownership of code so that the FSF can relicense when they want to (mostly to new versions of the GPL).
What you mean is probably copyleft licensing which is only a subset of free software licenses. Copyleft means that you cannot redistribute the software and its derivatives unless you give the freedoms down the road to your clients/users as well.
However, there are free software licenses that aren't copyleft too.
Yep, that's what I meant! Sorry, wrote that one late last night...
Everyone I've ever seen that disagrees with the FSF either:
- doesn't understand what 'freedom' means in the context of software, thinking only in terms of software developers and not in terms of users, when users are the only ones that actually matter, or - doesn't understand that free software isn't opposed to making money from software.
It's not opposed to trying to make money, but it does mostly prevent actually making money. If software wasn't copyrightable I suspect most desktop software and video games would never have been created. This argument dates back to the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
Thomas Schelling mentions the notion of "incomplete antagonism": you could have partly opposed interests to someone else's but still have ways in which you can cooperate with each other. Other people thinking about trade have suggested that this is almost always the case, even, maybe surprisingly, when people have directly opposed values in some respects (but not others).
http://www.amirrorclear.net/files/moral-trade.pdf
When you're buying most things from other people, you might have an "incomplete antagonism" because you may each want to get the best deal you can at the expense of the other person -- driving a hard bargain, so to speak. But you might still appreciate the opportunity to trade and not necessarily resent the other party to the trade (I wish that the vegan sandwich I just bought at LAX had cost me $8 instead of $19, but I'm still grateful that I could buy it at all).
Most attempts to defend proprietary software that aren't based in "romantic authorship" (emphasizing a special moral relationship between creators and their creative works that would make their preferences or interests count in a way that other people's don't) would probably focus on the benefits of trade: proprietary software fails to optimize perfectly for the user's interests and includes some intentional disadvantages for the user, yet many users could willingly accept these limitations because they've been bundled with benefits that the users appreciate, or because they help to incentivize activities the users appreciate (like continued development or support of the software).
This is normally the case for situations where trade can occur: each party may be asked to accept things that aren't that party's most preferred outcome, even deliberately where an alternative that that party prefers is logically conceivable. For example, if you rent a physical object then you might not be able to use it for any purpose, or if you hire someone then they might not be willing to perform any task you ask them to, or if you buy something then you might have to pay for it -- even though if others were making your interests their first priority, none of these limitations would exist. Presumably proprietary software advocates think that "selling software" is mostly akin to selling other things, where private ownership and sales work (fairly well|extremely well|better than any available alternative) for allocating resources, incentivizing productive activities, and increasing people's welfare, and that it's only anti-user in the ways that the costs or restrictions accompanying other kinds of trades are anti-customer.
The question is: should ideas belong to the category of legally-protected personal property? I'm very aware of the pragmatic arguments in favor of this. However, I (and others) also believe that there are significant ethical arguments in opposition to it.