I used to be a Copyleft zealot. But eventually I realized that an absolutist insistence on “Free as in Freedom” has become outdated: when the GNU project was started, it was not easy to distribute copies of large programs. That is no longer the case (you can now serve complete photo editors, IDEs, etc. over the web). The FSF thinks it’s OK to “sell” your program, but if it’s under a “true” FOSS license, how do you get compensated for the value your program provides to those who get their copies from the person/company who initially paid you? And what’s to prevent a group of people/companies from pooling their money and pretending there’s only one customer willing to pay for your product?

Zealotry makes it impossible to have a middle ground between “Four Freedoms” and “all rights reserved”, and insisting there’s only one true way to do FOSS will lead to 100% proprietary software dominating end-users (which is who the Four Freedoms were about in the first place).

I think an approach that preserves some of the Four Freedoms, while restricting distribution of the core program, would still be in agreement with the spirit of FOSS. For example, what’s wrong with a license that lets anyone study the program, modify it, etc. but empowers the Copyright owner to collect money from those who run it in production? If selling your program is OK, but modern technology makes it impossible to be compensated fairly by users of your software (and even worse, competitors with deep pockets can out-scale you and put you out of business), this seems like a reasonable middle ground.