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Stallman's Plaint, paraphrased.
The world is evolving away from Richard Stallman. He is a stallwart of the free as in ...
Well, beer was never free. And speech is no longer free in the "public square" sense with all the censoring and shaming. And I find all that a metaphor for his frustrations. He is sad and angry that the Liberal[1] notions of "Freedom" have been eroded. One COULD say "destroyed" but that's a little too far.
He continues to dream of a world where everything is unencumbered by artificial/legal limitations on the use, distribution, or modification of software[2]. Where the processes and platforms are all just as open and "Free" as the GPL software and Gnu practices he has championed for years. And this puts him squarely in the honorable school of Liberal Idealists.
Richard is neither wrong nor right. The reality is that "the money"hasn't stepped up to fund moving in that direction. Debian tried but with flaws that trouble Stallman and his friends in these matters. One suspects that Enterprise adoption of Gnu/Linux was (is) largely based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux's promises of support (and their willingness to take money to prove their commitment)[3]. And that brought funding from the beneficiaries. Funding both to Red Hat in the form of sponsored contributors but to Gnu in (continuing) sponsorships.
IBM is in early stages of their IT identity transformation based on Red Hat. Canonical and its Ubuntu are more aggressively working to eat into the Windows/MacOS market. Package management is too complex. It costs too much to both developers and end-users. I/we have no dog in that hunt but we pay a heavy price.
The /. article touched a nerve
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[1] "Liberal" as in political philosophy. Not as in political name-calling.
[2] RMS's definition of freedom is to force a licensing behavior that denies developers the right to put their work out there without restrictions on private modifications in derivative works. It is an important point in the philosophic discussion of "Freedom". In practice, it forces premature disclosure of immature work at some cost to the developer (and their sponsor). It also disincents private innovation that, in the longer run, leads to mimics in the Open Source community. The lead time to white-box copy-cats is shrinking.
[3] We find that Firms, Agencies, and Institutions, being essentially greedy, don't trust free. A price tag that is not too high but high enough that some internal ritual is required for approval is very reassuring apparently.