The original articulator of open-source values, Eric Raymond, whose essays helped crystallize open source as a "movement", gets free software on a fundamental level. He and Stallman were once close friends, and from his blog posts and comments it seems he and Stallman are in broad agreement on the points of software freedom being good and proprietary lock-in being evil.
The reason why open source is a "thing" is to convey these benefits -- these virtues -- to an audience that doesn't think like Richard Stallman. I.e., most of the world. It was an exercise in much-needed marketing for the movement. At the time, no one could out-market Microsoft. Microsoft were licensing Stones songs and lighting up the Empire State building to promote Win32 duct-taped to DOS. Unless free-software hackers had a counterstrategy that didn't sound like a tin-pot revolution organized by bearded, Kaczynski-esque radicals, they would lose and lose big.
Criticize Raymond's efforts all you want. 20 years ago Microsoft was making strategic acquisitions to quash the viability of free software; today they're making strategic acquisitions to be at the center of it.
> 20 years ago Microsoft was making strategic acquisitions to quash the viability of free software; today they're making strategic acquisitions to be at the center of it.
I think you've run afoul of the very confusion RMS is talking about in TFA. They're not buying into free software, they're buying into open source. Most of what MS is doing in the space is using Apache-style licenses. I'm not going to say Microsoft is bought into Free Software until I see VSCode being distributed under the GPL. (It's currently MIT.)
Nope. Even Stallman distinguishes between free software, which includes MIT- and Apache-licensed software, and copylefted software, which is the subset of free software that requires changes to be distributed under like terms to the original software itself.
Of course RMS and the FSF would much rather you use copylefted software and copyleft licenses such as the GPL. But not doing so is not the inherent submission to evil that using proprietary software is, in their view.
The reason why open source is a "thing" is to convey these benefits -- these virtues -- to an audience that doesn't think like Richard Stallman. I.e., most of the world. It was an exercise in much-needed marketing for the movement. At the time, no one could out-market Microsoft. Microsoft were licensing Stones songs and lighting up the Empire State building to promote Win32 duct-taped to DOS. Unless free-software hackers had a counterstrategy that didn't sound like a tin-pot revolution organized by bearded, Kaczynski-esque radicals, they would lose and lose big.
Criticize Raymond's efforts all you want. 20 years ago Microsoft was making strategic acquisitions to quash the viability of free software; today they're making strategic acquisitions to be at the center of it.