> So I don't see why you would think that my rubrik for what is best for society is off topic here.

It is off-topic because it assumes that other people share your rubric. It is off-topic because it ignores the real question, which is whether that rubric is even the correct rubric to have. It is off-topic because it has nothing to do with whether Stallman should have said the things that he did. Let's say that someone else showed up, and said "we should be trying to optimize for money in Apple's bank account; instead of GPL, which seems extreme, we can strike a better balance that provides more money into Apple's bank account". Do any of us here care about the amount of money in Apple's bank account?

My contention is that caring about how much software in the world is open source, or how much software in the world exists, or what powers mankind has given access to that software, is an interesting and potentially valid rubric; and, it seems to be at least a major component of your rubric. Sadly, this means you are thereby doomed to spend forever arguing over how to best make tradeoffs to help you optimize for that rubric when dealing with people like Stallman. You will bring up that rubric, and they will seem incompetent to you, because they just don't get it: "they are throwing away so much value".

And they, in turn, will look at you as naive, because you are attempting to optimize for something they don't care about and would be perfectly happy to throw away entirely. Trying to argue whether, in the long term, BSD or GPL (for example; feel free to insert any decision that must be made instead) is good or bad for that specific rubric is entirely irrelevant to them, because even if BSD was amazing for that rubric, and even if GPL was miserable for it, at the end of the discussion the GPL advocate will say "well, that was an interesting waste of time: now where were we on trying to get everyone to use GPL?". You won't succeed in convincing them of anything: you are just wasting time.

Now, maybe, on the other side, I'd make some inroads with you by trying to argue that, in the long term, making things "too free for developers" actually comes around to "bite you in the ass" and that you end up in situations where, for example, all major mobile browsers are now effectively closed source in a world where everything is increasingly moving to mobile-only platforms, and that by having invested so strongly in WebCore (LGPL) instead of Gecko (GPL) we caused that reality by allowing WebKit (BSD) to exist... but this is going to be a really long and really painful argument that has nothing to do with Stallman hating on gcc, and it is not one I feel like I should have to spend my time today arguing. I honestly don't even think these arguments really get anywhere, and tend to just make everyone angry.

> "I have a right to own slaves" is a bad analogy, it doesn't mirror the kinds of trade offs we're discussing here. Slavery is not a case of balancing rights between two people, it is a case of one person's supposed right negating all rights in the other person. It's not very dissimilar from "I have the right to kill."

sigh As you seem to only be quoting the things I am saying in these immediate comment threads, without taking into account the expanded context I've now linked you to twice, I am going to have to consider this conversation a waste of time :/. The extent to which that exact analogy matters in the full argument I asked you to read is clearly "not much" (it was there, and is here, just an example of freedoms being relative; in the full argument I went into extreme detail on exactly how the freedoms here are subject), and yet you seem to only be responding to the teaser summary I laid out in this comment. I should not have to repeat that entire thread here: all I asked you to do was to read that discussion and come back, and I do not understand why that is so hard for you to do :(.