This sort of doctrinaire newspeak is what gives GPL advocates the appearance of a cult. Developers who incorporate some open source code in their app and don't release it aren't taking away anyone's freedoms.
The upside to GPL is that any link N has the same rights to use and modify N-1 as 2 had on 1, with the downside being that N has limited rights on itself. BSD grants maximum control to each link, with the downside being that any given link may choose not to allow any links to be added below it.
Let's not throw around names... it's not out of comprehension to think of knowing what your computer is running as a fundamental right.
Developers who incorporate some open source code in their app and don't release it aren't taking away anyone's freedoms.
That's precisely it. I'm not asking you to agree with the FSF view, but to understand it. In the view of the GPL, distributing proprietary software is absolutely taking away people's rights of knowing what's running on their machine, modifying what they're running, etc.
Fundamental rights aren't always obvious, and whether or not this view will catch on is not something I pretend to know. I think this will be an open question for dozens, if not hundreds of years to come.