I think Stallman has very much lost sight of who his true 'adversaries' are. I consider myself a strong proponent of open source software but there are reasons - imagined or real - for not making everything open source or for using a permissive licence.
Not using a permissive licence for a software effectively bars most companies from using that software. In my opinion licences such as Affero GPL aren't free at all because they limit what you can do on your own machines. I've experienced this first hand with very useful libraries such as iText.
Sure, iText und many other AGPL-licensed libraries are available under an additional proprietary licence. However, this isn't very much about free software either but simply another sales argument: "You've got to publish the valuable source code of your application unless you pay us a lot of money. In that case: Screw free software!" Sounds a bit like blackmail to me.
I understand that the FSF is an ideological movement that's based on strong principles. Stubbornly insisting on these principles without considering pragmatic concerns does a disservice to free software adoption, though.
Not using a permissive licence for a software effectively bars most companies from using that software. In my opinion licences such as Affero GPL aren't free at all because they limit what you can do on your own machines. I've experienced this first hand with very useful libraries such as iText.
Sure, iText und many other AGPL-licensed libraries are available under an additional proprietary licence. However, this isn't very much about free software either but simply another sales argument: "You've got to publish the valuable source code of your application unless you pay us a lot of money. In that case: Screw free software!" Sounds a bit like blackmail to me.
I understand that the FSF is an ideological movement that's based on strong principles. Stubbornly insisting on these principles without considering pragmatic concerns does a disservice to free software adoption, though.