In one of his talks (it was some TED talk) he even drew pictures of companies with leashes around the necks of their users. In his words, if the source code is not available, the software owns the user, the user doesn't own the software.

I think this is something that the majority of programmers don't care about. I mean, most programmers only concern themselves with engineering. They rarely care about the societal affects of what they build, let alone how it's built. One area I agree with RMS on is that open source is essential to transparency from companies as to what they are doing with our inputs.