He's been explicitly not willing to consider issues I'm talking about. In fact, he's quite happy to live in a system which enables and produces conditions which enable the existence of proprietary software. He's never been working to change those issues. In fact, the concept of copyleft, the mechanism it relies on, is firmly rooted in the status quo. You say it yourself, it uses restrictive copyright laws to enforce "openness", but the crucial point is that it's an openness with a severely limited scope. It does absolutely zero to change society in any meaningful, fundamental way. The very act of relying on capitalist state legal system to force people to be "open" serves only to further legitimize that very system which makes possible, even desirable, for things like proprietary software to exist. The GPL isn't even a subversive hack of copyright law--the law was meant to enable authors to put almost any kind of conditions on the use and distribution of their works, as they please. It's the purpose of copyright law all along to enable things like the GPL. The fact that it's highly unusual to release works under such conditions is beside the point. Stallman almost autistically only sees his most immediate grievance, the incidental fact that software can be restrictive to its users, but is completely blind to the actual fundamental social causes of the issue. So no, the GPL is not in any meaningful way successful at actually changing society, the whole concept is fundamentally conformant to existing socio-economic conditions.