I'm kinda glad that happens, even though I don't participate and the pragmatist in me sometimes disagrees.
I am glad Stallman exists and maintains his ultra-absolutionist hard line. I respect hom greatly for that, and while I often roll my eyes at his intentional foot-gunning of his own use of technology, I also 100% believe he's done an order of magnitude more to improve society than the more pragmatic open source advocates like esr.
In my head, the opposite end of the bellcurve is companies like Oracle. And they're _way_ better funded and more politically powerful than Stallman or esr or the entire "open source" movement put together. Without "extreme fringe wing nut GPL virality advocating loudmouths", Larry Ellison will drag software philosophy "the middle ground" so far to his end that we will all lose out.
So big shoutouts from me to the free software absolutists, even if I don't join in on your chorus (or internet dogpiles). My personal software philosophy probably is grounded in my mid 90's Perl hacking, and I'm very much behind Larry Wall's GPL/Artistic dual license approach. (I do though have ongoing doubts in my head about whether or not the recent spate of "non-open source" licenses aimed at restricting the cloud hyper scalers from SaaS-ing your stuff without contributing anything at all. I respect what they're trying to do at Mongo and Redis. I'm not sure if it will (or even if it should) work.)