* Run the software for whatever purpose they want.
* Inspect the software so they can see what it's doing.
* Change the software however they want.
* Share the software with anyone.
Call me an idealist, but aren't these things important?
* Proprietary software makes me dependent on the whims of a business. If the business shuts down, stops updating its products, or changes their products in ways I dislike, I have to discard the investment I've made (time, money, learning, etc).
* Proprietary software makes it complicated to share my work tools with friends and even family.
* Proprietary ecosystems prevent me from learning. On the other hand, I am profoundly grateful for the learning opportunities given to me by the free software community ever since I was a teenager.
* Proprietary tools are hard to integrate with. For example, whenever a new version of Apple's mail program is released, the makers of the GPG plugin have to reverse engineer the changes before they (hopefully) can update their software.
* Proprietary tools often use proprietary formats, which prevents collaboration and contributes to the problem of digital rot.
And so on...
What could this mean? Well they could do something malicious (which they quite often do), they could allow something malicious to happen out of ignorance of the original programers and we'd have no way to fix these issues (think all the window's 0-days), they could even just revoke licenses of software that is in use for critical systems (think medical records).
A worse side effect then all of these is the one that is most egregious: It prevents younger generations who are starting to learn about computers from understanding how the lower part of the stack works. That's why, in my opinion, many older people have no problem delving into lower level systems code and many younger people today have a very hard time doing such. They've been robbed of the experiance of hacking their OS/Machine to shreds and loving every minute of it. Hardware, software, and even documentation is under lockdown and it's an assult on not only our principles but also our youth and self interests.
Stallman's default assumption that proprietary software is malware rings true to me, too... if not now, it will be in the next update.
Rhetorically, I think Stallman's ethical strength contributes to the integrity of the Free Software movement, but also tends to alienate people who do not already agree.
As I see it, this is a common dilemma for good causes. For example, I think animal rights rhetoric tends to alienate people who don't already strongly agree that animals have rights.
I'm influenced in my thinking by reading things like Alisdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue", especially the second chapter, which begins:
"The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on -- although they do -- but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture."
Another source informing my approach is Richard Rorty's "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity". I see free software as way to actualize solidarity, and yet I'm skeptical about the possibility of convincing people that proprietary software is "wrong" or "evil".
That's not a fact, that's rhetoric.
The fact is that there is no system - absolutely none - which doesn't define how users interact with it, and set limits on what users can and cannot do with it.
FOSS doesn't solve this problem. At best it allows a tiny subset of technologically expert users some limited opportunities to make incremental changes and adaptations.
But it also creates some unfortunate side effects, including a perpetual ferment of hobby-quality unprofessional tinkerer code that doesn't have to deal with end user feedback because "Issue closed because I don't understand your problem and don't care about it anyway."
There's certainly an argument to be made for making software more open, but FOSS more or less nets out to a break even on the whole. It's certainly good to have around, but the suggestion that it's The Only Way Forward is more dogmatic than fact-based - not least because there's nothing in FOSS that selects for quality of user experience over quantity of development effort.
1. Open Source makes me dependent on the whims of a particular community. If the group has infighting or lack of activity, enjoy your abandonware. Yes, you could resurrect the project yourself, but that is a ridiculous burden for most situations.
2. It's often complicated sharing Open Source apps. They often require loads of tinkering, are poorly documented, and require specialized knowledge. Unless all of your friends and family are free software enthusiasts too, this isn't always simple.
4. Open source tools can also be hard to integrate with. You exchange licensing being a barrier for integration with lack of resources for designing good integration schemes. The larger projects can have significant resources to get around this.
However, even though it's flawed it's not totally incorrect. You sometimes can change something -- maybe look at the internals and write some trivial patch to solve an immediate problem; maybe change some scripting bit -- and sometimes if there is infighting in the official community, a fork can happen. Not saying forks are not messy or even always possible, but the possibility is there and it happens.
There is a huge difference between "it takes too much time/knowledge to change this piece of software" and "it's illegal to change it".
It's also kind of like open knowledge, like science and math. Sure, it's hard to learn algebra or biology, but with hard work you can master it and contribute.
Even if I cannot always fix things myself, looking at (and breaking!) free source code taught me a lot about programming.
Quite often I've used a fork of software that continued providing a feature the core distro discarded or added an experimental feature the main line hasn't been able to perfect enough to put into production.
And it's common for someone else has to take up the banner to continue producing a library or software the original developer no longer has time or interest in producing.
With commercial software however for the most part you're stuck providing a patch file with some hopefully not too complex instructions on how to hack it in.
2. Most free software is also available on proprietary platforms. Seldom an issue. Some people will say they "cannot" read your .odf document, but if they can't even install LibreOffice, they likely have more urgent problems, such as the crapload of malware that is most likely infesting their computer right now.
4. Don't have any counter-argument. You may be right.
That said, growing up I've come to realize that one's time is valuable, life is too short and at the end of the day you have to pick your fights.
Even as hackers, there are times when we find ourselves with the "end user" hat on. Creative work for example (photo/music editing in my case) is already challenging and time-consuming enough not impose additional burdens upon yourself, like dealing with inferior / immature desktop Free software when there's an alternative that gets you there faster.
macOS in my view has always struck that rare balance between polished end-user tools and large amounts of familiar Unix / open source / standards based components under the hood to satisfy the hacker in us.
As most people I'm slightly worried about Apple's hardware vision lately, but the state of desktop Linux simply isn't good enough to warrant a switch back for demanding users yet.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
There are things that are open source, but not free, like the Unreal Engine.
https://www.unrealengine.com/eula
the Unreal Engine is not Open Source. Not least because you can't share the source code without restriction.
As I understand it, the difference between free and Open Source is a difference in philosophy rather than a difference in licensing. For Free Software people the importance lies in freedom, but for Open Source people the importance is that it's a better way to develop software.
For example, a Free Software person would always use free software even if was inferior to a proprietary alternative, because they wouldn't want to give up their freedoms. An Open Source person would use whichever is superior, regardless of licensing. I'm in both camps but I tend to use the term Open Source because Free is confusing because it means both 'no charge' and 'liberty'.
The FSF and the OSI both have a list of licences they endorse. I think some licences are endorsed by the OSI, but not by the FSF. Those are candidate for "Open Source, yet not Free".
Besides this small detail, I agree.
Would you consider to use term "libre software", because "open source" is confusing because it means both "one can read the code" and "one can do certain things with the code"?
I'm still dependent on Intel providing the drivers for their wifi chips. I'm still dependent on AMD/Nvidia providing drivers for their video cards. I'm still dependent on a lot of non-libre software that I need in order to do my job.
All of your points are important from a theoretical standpoint, but that's based on the idea that the end user actually knows how to do any of that. And those skills are very, very uncommon.
But if you think open-source gets rid of that issue, I'd like you to look up "Ubuntu Amazon search ads", maybe "systemd vs init", also "pulse audio" just to name a few. Yep, it's possible to get rid of all of these things, but again, only if the user knows how. Which again, isn't a common skill.
After all, looking back I can't easily point at actual harms created by (for example) photoshop's proprietary nature. But it's almost universally accepted that there's a danger in the walled gardens of Facebook or Google.
I'm hoping that the idealists will be able to defend/create open protocols and networks. There have been some successes, mostly when it was in the interest of industry heavyweights as well (i. e. Apple killing flash, html5 takings its place). Currently endangered is E-Mail and essentially dead is personal publishing.