The biggest problem (possibly the only problem, but still a severe one) with Stallman's views on software copyright licensing is that he seems either unaware of, or unwilling to accept, broader social, economic and political issues of our civilization. Software and processes around it, like any other product of human social production, doesn't and can't exist in a social vacuum. It's nice to be focused on a specific social issue, but when your work scales to a certain level it becomes impossible to consider it in isolation. Reading the comments on that article made me glad to see an LLVM developer who chimed in (silvas) understands this perfectly and he articulated it quite well:

We don't do everything in public purely because of internal constraints of the companies that we work for and those won't go away without significant societal changes (i.e., the necessary changes vastly transcend the developers' own attitudes on the issue: we're talking changes at the levels of entire business models).

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> What about iPhone platform support?

I assume you mean that the platform is locked down?

Well, that's their platform. They make the rules for who gets to compile for it. Now, you may say "well, they shouldn't restrict who gets to compile for their platform!" and that's fine, but it's a different issue, one which goes to the core of Apple's business model and the society that enables it and the individuals that make up that society. Even if LLVM/Clang were to magically become GPL'd tomorrow, the platform would still be locked down.

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It's myopic to think that the software is somehow the key factor here: the assault on freedom in this situation is the incentive to keep it proprietary, and that is a much larger issue. There is a similar assault on freedom from the fact that their hardware designs are proprietary as well, and the incentives are similar.

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In my experience, Stallman's view is extremely myopic because the real impediments to free software are larger societal issues[1]. Within the hacker community these issues don't really exist (Eric Raymond's essays cover this well), and so the default is that code is free software (four freedoms), but the other 99.99% of society is still stuck with archaic principles, and any time that a hacker's paycheck comes from "the rest of society", they are subject to a world where these issues exist.

[1] The GPLv3 "anti-Tivo-ization" wording is a perfect example that shows that confining your view just to software is myopic. Why shouldn't we want the entire device and all its chips to be free also? Why shouldn't the company's internal discussions be done in public? The answer to these questions is the same as the answer to "why does non-free software exist?".