That is somewhat debatable I suppose. The freedom (if you want to quote RMS) absolutely includes the so called viral provisions of licenses such as the GPL. RMS is quoted as saying proprietary software should be illegal.

As a software engineer myself, I find that sort of demagoguery a bit tiring, and consider a license with less mandatory stipulations as more "free" (admittedly under a different definition than the FSF) than one that has required stipulations. As a result of this, there are many people like the parent, and myself, who could really care less about Free Software but find open source development as one of the most effective software development methodologies. Is all OSS I release also Free Software? Sure! Can someone relicense something I publish with a MIT/Apache license as proprietary software without releasing the code? Sure! My definition is more free = less restrictions, and more restrictions = less free. By that definition, the GPL is a less free (as in freedom for the users / consumers) than the MIT / Apache / BSD.

There's nothing in the Free Software definition that requires copy-left licensing and RMS, along with the other FSF members have validated most OSI approved licenses as being Free Software, including BSD, MIT, MPL and Apache 2.0.

RMS has said a lot over the years, including that the dual licensing business model (e.g. GPL + proprietary) is a valid business model (i.e. whatever it takes to keep development of the GPL version going). And his opinions don't necessarily reflect the official position of the FSF.

He's also said that proprietary software should be illegal due to it stripping freedoms away from users.

He also said that he downloads websites by sending an order by email [1].

That's still irrelevant to the discussion here, which is about what Free Software is and how it compares with Open Source.

[1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

> absolutely includes the so called viral provisions of licenses such as the GPL.

No, no it does not and rms has very specifically said that free software doesn't need to be copyleft. They even have a diagram which explicitly includes permissive licenses in the free category:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html

Your definition of freedom isn't different than the FSF's. You perhaps just disagree on what is necessary to safeguard that freedom and you disagree that proprietary software is unethical.

Yepp, it's a trade off between the rights of the developer and the rights of the consumer / user, you fundamentally can't have both (simplification). RMS goes all on the latter side, essentially.

I am not sure RMS makes such a distinction. To him all users are potential developers (or programmers more likely).

Frankly he is more concerned with who actually control the computing hardware and software being in use on a daily basis.

Keep in mind that one of the issues that got him on his quest was the loss of the ability to modify a printer driver to message those with a print job in the queue that the printer was out of paper.

It may seem frivolous, but it made life that much nicer at MIT. Because once the printer down the hall was out, any number of people may converge on it to fix it once they got the message. Without it, any number of print jobs may be sitting in wait because nobody had checked if there were still paper ready before adding another job to the queue.

I'd argue that he quite clearly does actually make that distinction, though perhaps with different words. (I'm also under the impression that he elaborates quite a bit on the core concept, though I'm unable to easily find a reference). But, e.g. from the GNU Manifesto, 1985:

> GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution.

The phrasing is a bit different (it's from a point of view of freedom of distribution), but essentially he's pointing out the copyleft idea; that the code can never go back to a model that doesn't provide the same guarantees.

So, there's the freedom of distribution, versus the freedom of someone to restrict the distribution. Both cannot exist at the same time. He's quite clear that the benefits of freedom of distribution outweigh (any potential) benefits of restriction, so he's happy to deny others that "freedom". It gets phrased in many ways, but right or wrong, that's what it is. In that sense, I agree with the poster I responded to; to the person doing the coding themselves, an MIT license leaves more doors open, and hence feels more free.

Like with most of RMSs terminology, I disagree with the dichotomy of developer vs user.

Freedom 1 and 3 apply specifically to users who are or will become developers. I believe what we actually want to talk about is publisher vs user/consumer instead of developer vs user.

The FSF people really like their ambiguous terminology, unfortunately.

I an honestly not sure RMS would make such a distinction.

It seems more like one that has grown in into being in more recent years, particularly with the rise of mobile and web.

It's an important distinction IMO. Roughly 99% of the GPL is irrelevant to the end user if they don't have all of the knowledge, desire, and time to crack open the code and modify it.

Even if they themselves do not, they have the possibility of finding someone that does.

And that's the remaining 1% :)

"RMS is quoted as saying proprietary software should be illegal."

Yep, this is pretty much what I referred to. It is not just about code being given away, it is about making closed code illegal which is something I disagree with.

I also disagree with less strong but still demagoguery claims about closed code being somehow unethical. Or chest thumping with no data to confirm it about how all open source programmers are the most skilled programmers in the world, how open source is by definition all clean and well done and closed source programmers are all totally incapable. (Tho, people usually stop to drum this one the moment they find first job. Which tends to be closed source.) Or chest thumping about how all open source communities are totally awesome meritocratic places with no bullshit politics going on ever and how all companies are surely political hell holes.

I mean sure, old Microsoft claims about how open source is all amateurs doing bad quality work is equal bullshit, but that does not cancel out sheer ego and overstatements so often coming out of free/open ideologues. RMS totally did the work of 11 people alone, back then, right?

Case in point, overwhelming majority of open source, especially big projects, is written by employed people, which is imo, actually cool. That includes linux and that data is easily googleable. But the free software ideologists will still run about hobbyist magically developing large projects in their spare time (while they are also working overtime in companies they are employed in no less, cause they are passionate and because who would ever add two numbers together).

Another case in point, RMS boasted about there surely being more women in open source, cause it is so much better environment, until data came out and turned out women are more likely to work on close source. (The difference does not say anything wrong nor good about either group imo, just that the claim was confident bullshit based on ego thinking alone. There are enough differences that have nothing to do with how good either environment is.)