"Indeed, the entire Free Software movement seems like a typical failure of appreciating these kind of trade-offs when it comes to freedom."
I find this extremely pretentious and very poorly argumented. I wish I could mod down this article. This looks like the beginning of an FSF smear campaign.
This is what the "Paradox of Tolerance" idea looks like, when taken to its logical conclusion. By simply tolerating this person's post, its ability to be tolerant is ultimately destroyed by the intolerant.
The second reason is indeed that I do plan to write some other things to point out some of the FSFs failings as I see them, both in their philosophy and some more pragmatical things, and the appreciation of the complexity of "freedom" is one of them.
I agree that as it stands it's not well argumented, but this will be an article on its own (soon™, although a kind of proto-draft is available as some comments I made at [1]). I have this kind of complex dependency tree in my head on what to write in what order.
I hate how you phrase this as a "smear campaign" though. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but I do expect people to recognise I'm arguing in good faith, and "smear campaign" implies that I don't.
> I think you if target a specific organization or movement, you should put more effort into portraying their position fairly
I think that's not an unfair point. I have commented out this sentence until such a time I have written a more extensive article on it that can be linked. I also don't really want to focus on the details of specific examples with this, but rather on the bigger picture (I was very hesitant to include it as an example at all, as it's not a debate well known outside of the programming community; I may change my mind and remove it altogether).
Then try reading instead of typing, especially https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.en.html
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html
> we should perform a cost-benefit analysis on behalf of society as a whole, taking account of individual freedom as well as production of material goods.
You cannot say in good faith that the essays fail to recognise or address the existence of trade-offs. Please take note.
>When people say “GPL increases freedom” then they’re right. When others say “GPL limits freedom compared to MIT” then they’re right too. It’s just a matter about which freedoms exactly we’re talking about, and for who.
I think it's pretty clear that the freedom the FSF is advocating for is freedom for the user primarily, and only secondarily for the developer. They're a political organization and this is one of their principles, and those who counter with effectively "but what about my freedom to restrict the user?" are missing the point.
You may disagree with the FSF's position on ideological grounds, but if you do so it's unhelpful to argue that something is "more" or "less" free without first establishing common definitions. You probably have different working definitions of "freedom" in that context at that point, and arguing without reconciling those is likely to result in the two parties arguing right past each other.