I think that drastically overstates the support programmers as a class have ever had for the Stallman/FSF view that tools to combat the use of non-Free software are a moral imperative, though I do think that that extremist position of actively combating non-Free software did seem, if not a moral imperative, at least to be important instrumentally to the promotion of Free/open source software before the pragmatic case for open source was broadly accepted by much of the industry.
I'm still trying to explain to him that Obamacare was originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation as an alternative to "Hillarycare." Sigh.
The software world has changed a lot in the last 30 years. There are almost as many users directly using a Linux kernel-based operating system every day (Android) as there are Windows users worldwide, and Android will almost certainly take the lead from Windows by the end of 2015. I think this would've been unfathomable to the handful of people who knew what Free Software (in the rms sense) back in the 1980s and 1990s.
Err, back in the mid-to-end nineties far from being unfathomable, a widespread belief was that each year (or 'soon') would be the year of "Linux on the Desktop" and Linux overthrowing Windows.
At any rate, where this is coming from would make a lot more sense if you'd come up in the 80's and 90's, and remembered what it was like before open-source gained a serious foothold.