Also, I'm pretty sure the original commenter was implying that RMS is a bad spokesman because he is so polarizing/unattractive (idealogically).
For instance, the FSF is fairly successful, but in an alternate universe, with, say, David Hasselhof (or, KITT, for that matter), as their spokesperson, maybe they would have been vastly more successful.
With regards to the availability of free software, who knows how much is due to them, how much is due to BSD type sharing, and how much is simply due to the economics of free software making a lot of sense for some kinds of programs.
"Free software" existed well before Stallman.
I learnt to program from magazines that had "free software" written out in BASIC. It was free (cost and freedom). After that we used to download free software from BBS's. Fractint etc.
Free software existed before, it'll always exist. It's existence has nothing to do with Stallman.
About as irritating as hearing 'Crockford invented JSON'.
See Gratis versus Libre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
For the most part, Apple has given away development tools for free, or at very low cost, primarily to cover the overhead of offering them.
Since Mac OS X has been out, development tools have been free, and in the box. (Though now you download them rather than get them in the box, of course.)
This is plainly false and easily checked by simply looking at archive.org's record for developer.apple.com.
And have you considered that one reason for OS X development tools being available free of charge these days might be because Free software changed the development tools landscape dramatically in the last two decades?
There was no freely available compiler for the mac between System 1 and OSX. My fifteen-year-old self had to make an at-the-time pretty significant investment to buy Metrowerks Codewarrior.
That was the anti-golden-age of programming.
My first C/C++ compiler cost nearly as much as the machine it ran on. This will never happen again and we can thank the GNU ecoSystem for jump starting the new ground rules.
I dumbfounded by all the awesome software I can use to build larger systems with everyday, literally millions of dollars worth of assets. Anyone anywhere could do this, with only food, water, hardware, electricity and internet.
Microsoft did its damnedest to kill Borland and its inexpensive tools.
Proprietary dev tools still exist, true, but the landscape is so vastly different. Even my favorite IDE IntelliJ has the source released under a BSD license, I actually reupped my license when they did this.
It came with MS-DOS 6.22 and had QBasic. But it was useless. You see, I wanted to create games. And not shitty games using ASCII-art, but the kind of games I played daily.
I then got a pirated Turbo Pascal and I learned the ins and outs of it. But it was also useless -- I had to develop my own graphics primitives, but the environment was extremely limited. What I really needed was a C++ compiler that could compile executables for 32-bits protected mode and a library that already had graphics primitives optimized for something better than 320x240 Mode X in 80286 assembly.
Then I got to DJGPP, a GCC port for MS-DOS and Allegro. It was heaven-like from initial testing, but reading on DJGPP I began reading about Linux and for the first time I got the feeling that I was using an obviously crippled environment, because it was. And for Windows 95, since it was getting deployed everywhere, Visual C++ and Borland Delphi were expensive, too freaking expensive.
You may feel nostalgic about Apple II and that lovely Basic you loved so much. But it was also useless. And the "free development tools" from OS X? The compiler itself is GCC and the command-line environment is composed of lots of tools proudly wearing the GNU mark. Only in recent years has Apple started to consider other options, like LLVM, but that's because GCC has some technical issues, but otherwise it is the most mature and widely deployed compiler on this planet and has served Apple well.
You see, OS X wouldn't be OS X without the GNU tools and I really don't get how OS X can be used as an argument.
It's also worth noting that Mac OS X's "free" development tools include the GNU suite.
Now, they don't fit the FSF's definition of "free software", but I have little use for the redefinition of words to attempt to push a political viewpoint, so, y'know.
I only see one person here trying to redefine words to push their political viewpoint.
Stallman's, on the other hand, rather sadly attempts to pervert the discussion with such headscratchers as (say) "Visual Studio Express is nonfree." Well, no, it's quite free, I just downloaded it and they said the corporatey equivalent of "use in good health" (though this was, as is their sort of thing, buried in a EULA that was many many pages long). If they said "VS Express is not freely licensed," well, yeah, sure. Instead the FSF and similar unfortunates attempt to reverse the overload (underload?) of the word 'free' to mean only the meaning of 'free' that is politically appealing to them.
So, you're right, there's only one party committing etymological warfare in anger--though I'll cop to doing it in jest to get my point across. :)
When you hear RMS using the word "free", it will mean "libre". So if RMS says something is "unfree", then it's glaringly obvious what he means, and in no way "etymological warfare".
You could just as well complain about the English language being ambiguous. It's quite unfortunate that free (as in Freedom) and free (as in beer) mean completely different things depending on the context, yet use the same word, but there's little we can do about that.
Visual Studio Express is the same basic deal. Microsoft doesn't give it away for free. They grant license to use it to anyone with a Windows license.
"Visual Studio Express is nonfree."
Well, no, it's quite free
Here, let me define freedom for you:
the state of being free or at liberty rather
than in confinement or under physical restraint
exemption from external control, interference,
regulation
ALSO, VS Express is not free as in cost either, as long as it only works on Windows, you do have to buy Windows Licenses. It's basically a complementary product. With GCC on the other hand you don't give a crap what platform you're using or what platform you're targeting. Well, actually you do give a crap because that's an extra benefit. Depends on your perspective.
And the culture of sharing exists outside of Stallman's highly restrictive copyleft bubble. Ordinary open-source software falls short of Stallman's demands, but it actually grants the user more freedom than GPL software does.
That said, I'm a little fuzzy on how much FSF may be inspired the BSDs to exist.
edit: I was overstating what I actually meant when I said that they don't use GNU software. I don't know about the current crop of BSDs, but I was referring to the original BSD system not being built on top of the GNU base.
It is only recently in the last few years that the BSD projects have started removing GPL'ed software from their base trees and replacing them with BSD equivalents. clang is slowly being accepted by FreeBSD (a BSD compiler developed by Apple), tools like grep and diff are being redone under the BSD license, and OpenBSD is looking at pcc to replace the gcc compiler for their base system.
The main reason is simply because they want to create a fully BSD distribution of components, where none of it is under the GPL license, secondary only recently has there been a new compiler available that is as good as gcc and could be a viable replacement.
BSDs are open source, and free as in beer, but there have been years-long flame wars between RMS (and FSF advocates) and Theo de Raadt (and BSD advocates).
Stallman may say that free software has not been successful when people use the term Linux instead of GNU/Linux. (and yes, I am aware that there exist Linux Kernels without GNU userlands.)