What do you mean by
we lose all of the protestors? If I don't want my software encumbered by DRM, I don't want my software encumbered by DRM. Do I belong to you? Does my software belong to you? How is it you "lose" me or my software? If you want it, here are my conditions.
I don't owe "some Go enthusiast" anything. They are not the worse off for anything, I didn't give them something and take it away. In fact, what I did was say, "If you choose to use a platform without DRM, you can get this thing I wrote for free." But hey, if that doesn't float the Go enthusiast's boat, he sticks with DRM. It's his choice, I am not stopping him from doing anything.
Arguing that I have some moral obligation to write software for proprietary distribution is like arguing that I ought to write Windows software because more people can use it. Which leads to arguing that I ought to stop writing programming tools and start writing games.
You and the Go enthusiast are free to choose free software or proprietary software, or nearly free software, do what you like. Better still, you're free to write your own software from scratch and stop whining about what other developers choose to do with the fruit of their labours.
How much more freedom do you want? And where do you think the freedom to write software without kowtowing to a corporation came from? Free software, that's where.
And no, I'm not like an auto worker sitting all the time not working, and neither is anybody else who writes free software. Does this look like not working to you?
http://github.com/raganwald/
I'm working, it's just that I choose what I work on, and under what conditions it may be distributed.
A better comparison would be that someone writing free software is like a hippie who grows his own coffee beans and sells them at the side of the road by his farm. You can't buy them at Tim Horton's or Dunkin Doughnuts because the hippie doesn't like what the big chains do with the coffee.
So you go to the hippie or you don't drink the coffee he grows. The problem is that you bought yourself a shiny espresso machine that only takes pods distributed by the manufacturer. So even if you buy the hippie's beans, you can't make yourself any coffee with them because the machine won't take them unless they've been shipped to the manufacturer and packaged into little special pellets.
How is this the hippie's fault for not liking big coffee chains or espresso machines? You can drink plenty of coffee, and you can buy a plot of land and grow your own coffee to be distributed by the espresso machine maker. You can buy a different kind of espresso maker that takes ground beans directly.
The hippie is free and you are free. The hippie hasn't shut down the big chains, but that isn't his goal. His goal is to sleep at night, comfortable that he has made choices compatible with his personal beliefs and that he has given other people the freedom to make choice compatible with their personal beliefs.
I can think of no greater definition of freedom.