I really appreciate what RMS has done as far as start a movement that I think has contributed greatly to the human existence but when he says things like "The basic point of the free software movement is that nonfree software is unjust and should not exist." I can't but seriously question his judgment. It's one thing to personally want to use free software, it's another to claim that nonfree software "should not exist". If one person writes nonfree software and another person voluntarily uses it, I don't think anything "wrong" has transpired. People should be free to offer software under whatever terms they desire likewise people should be able to consume software under whatever terms they are willing to agree to.
In the RMS world you are not good if you support some free software. You have to support them exclusively
From the link:
The basic point of the free software movement is that
nonfree software is unjust and should not exist.
Which organizations is he talking about?
It's articles like this that make it very hard to continue to take RMS seriously, and that is a huge shame. He's brilliant and has contributed so much. Things he created are the reason I get a paycheck.
That said, this tribal religious you're-either-100%-with-us-or-you're-against-us and I'm going to "condemn you" ("nor have anything to do with it, nor even talk about it except with condemnation.") attitude makes it almost impossible to be sympathetic to his cause and puts him on the level of other rigid religious fundamentalist radicals.
If he IS talking about Red Hat here, as others have theorized, then he is worse than a fanatic, he's a self destructive jerk.
Red Hat just recently came out and said despite other companies abandoning GCC for Clang (See Google, Apple, FreeBSD, Android, even the Linux Foundation) they were still investing in GCC. Without GCC there is no more "GNU slash Linux" it's just Linux at that point. There are other C libraries, other userlands, but Linux still needs GCC and Red Hat is backing GCC. Keep condemning allies like Red Hat and soon they'll wonder why they even try to be your friend.
As soon as llvm.linuxfoundation.org gets Linux written in C instead of GCC, there will be no more GNU slash Linux or GNU plus Linux or whatever RMS wants it called. FreeBSD, Android, and then Linux will be fully capable of ditching GNU, FSF, and RMS and GPL'd software (save for the kernel which is GPLv2 and only nominally so, they never actually sue for violations like binary blobs) altogether. And who would be sad? Linux didn't "win" because of the philosophical views of RMS. Linux won because it worked. What happens when Linux, and companies like Red Hat, don't need this kind of garbage anymore?
Metacomment: a few years ago anything by RMS would have been jumped on within minutes of posting with lots of comments against him and his principles. Is he now being looked at in a different light by the wider software development community?
I converted this year to using Linux on all of my computers, and with some compatibility of FSF and Apache 2 licenses, this is 'easy' to do (e.g., the community version of IntelliJ is Apache 2, so a decent IDE slips into my mostly GNU based working and writing environment). I like to wear FSF tee shirts, and I feel like I am being true to the cause, even if I do have an iPad and Apple TV to watch Netflix. I am a member of the FSF and I personally feel like it is OK to have these non-free devices around as long as my working and writing environment is libre software.
Or to paraphrase it: All other goals have to bow before the goal of everything being free software as defined by Richard Stallman.
I also think that open source is nice, but by far it's not the most important thing there is to software.
> There are organizations that proclaim support for free software or the GNU Project, and teach classes in use of nonfree software. It's possible that they do some other things that really support free software, but those classes certainly don't. On the contrary, they work directly against the free software movement by promoting the use of the nonfree software. That increases the magnitude of the practical problem it is our mission to correct.
Just to throw out an extreme example for discussion: the Mozilla Foundation would seem to be one of the free-software organizations that RMS critiques.
One initiative they've supported is Software Carpentry: http://software-carpentry.org/scf/partners/
One of Software Carpentry's packaged lessons is for MATLAB: http://software-carpentry.org/lessons/
To be fair, the current MATLAB lesson plan includes asides for how GNU Octave can be used...but the fact that the curriculum is titled "Programming with MATLAB" certainly counts as promotion of non-free software.
Edit: by "extreme", I mean that Mozilla is in most people's minds a passionate advocate for free software, and the number of their affiliations with proprietary software lessons is extremely small as far as I can tell.
Edit 2: FWIW, RMS's definition of non-free software may be much more expansive than most people's:
https://stallman.org/airbnb.html
> Airbnb requires you to run nonfree software (an app, or Javascript). It puts you in a data base easily available to Big Brother (just like a hotel).
JavaScript is many things, but nonfree isn't one of them.