Stallman has said in numerous talks that he doesn't own a cell phone because not only due to lack of respect for his software freedom but also because they are (more properly identified as) trackers. He rightly objects to handing over data to track his location, as is part of a cell phone's normal operation. As with so many of these issues, his precience in looking out for his own privacy predates the headlines—Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept report that the NSA has been using SIM cards (commonly used with cell phones) tracking data to target drone attacks: "What's more, he adds, the NSA often locates drone targets by analyzing the activity of a SIM card, rather than the actual content of the calls. Based on his experience, he has come to believe that the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata.".

As for "openness of source", you'd do well to read the summary /. provided on this story and the links contained therein. One of those links pointed you to a long-published article about how Stallman is not a spokesperson for "open source" and he has pointed out significant differences between his older movement—the free software movement—and the younger open source movement which focuses on development methodology (and is therefore willing to install and recommend nonfree software). That newer essay updates an older essay which has been published in print as well as online.

Stallman has also long pointed out that code in unchangeable hardware (code in ROM, for example) is equivalent to hardware in that the user and the developer are facing the same hurdles to modify that code. So I'd imagine that a toaster with code in ROM would be a candidate toaster for him to own. But so many devices these days have updateable code. If the code can be changed the user and developer might not be on an equal footing with regards to who is allowed to change that code (free software grants you the freedoms nonfree software does not grant). Thus this more common occurrence raises all the issues he's been talking about, writing/publishing software for, and organizing against for decades.

No, the GNU GPL focuses on the rights of the user. Developers and distributors (now "conveyors" in GPLv3) are restricted from exercising powers governments grant them in favor of letting users exercise their rights granted under the GPL (including section 3 aptly named "Protecting Users' Legal Rights From Anti-Circumvention Law", exercising patent powers as described in section 11, and various freedoms and responsibilites for conveying copies in sections 4 through 6).

Perhaps you are confusing the free software movement with the younger open source movement which does frame the issues it addresses in terms of a developmental methodology. The two movements aren't the same and the two movements don't always agree—sometimes reaching radically different results like when faced with powerful, reliable proprietary software.

Stallman has long stated that it is unethical to hold power over the user, and that proprietary (nonfree) software (no matter its purpose) subjugates the user to the developer's control. The free software definition itself says " The nonfree program controls the users, and the developer controls the program; this makes the program an instrument of unjust power.". As we learn of ever increasing uses of this power (many stories carried on /., the ongoing NSA scandal) we learn that software freedom is more important than ever before. Looking at these issues simply as a developmental methodology (throwing out ethical consideration as the open source movement is designed to do) simply won't fix the problem. There are other related issues involved as well, and Stallman has addressed them for years in talks. I recommend any of his talks about "A Free Digital Society". He is, as usual, way ahead of the corporate press and their repeaters on /. regarding these issues.

The FSF's comments on the Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement (HESSLA) are informative here. HESSLA:

tries to put restrictions of ethical conduct on use and modification of the software. Because it restricts what jobs people can use the software for, and restricts in substantive ways what jobs modified versions of the program can do, it is not a free software license. The ironic result is that the community of people most likely to feel sympathy for the goals of the HESSLA cannot contribute to HESSLA-covered software without violating its principles.

This issue apparently comes up often enough and is important enough where the FSF has published an essay on why programs must not limit the freedom to run them which is also linked to the aforementioned HESSLA commentary.

Considering the FSF's document pointed to above dates back multiple years, I'd say RMS has long answered your question.

The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) is a strongly copylefted Free Software license which uses the word "prohibit" for multiple things. I'd hardly think an organization would put such language in their license if they objected to the use of the words as you think they do.

For example, Section 2 of the GNU GPL version 3 does what it can to clearly prohibits proprietarization: (emphasis mine)

You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force. You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.

This prohibition is a good thing because proprietary software subjugates the user to the developer's control; that's why proprietary software is developed and distributed. Proprietary software is often malware and thus a mechanism for spying on the user, removing programs the user wants to keep installed, and more anti-freedom activities that deny users complete control over their computer. This all happens to any user regardless of how skilled they are with computing, or how willing they are to take advantage of their software freedom.

Section 3 of the GNU GPL version 3 prevents conveyers from exercising legal power to forbid circumvention of technical measures:

When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.

Section 7c of the GNU GPL version 3 "prohibits" misrepresenting material from upstream conveyed copies ("Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version").

Section 11 of the GNU GPL version 3 includes a prohibition to make sure certain patents don't lock users out of exercising the freedoms the license grants.

The details matter: To understand what's going on you have to understand what is being forbidden and prohibited, why these allowances and restrictions are necessary, which users are affected, and how and then evaluate if those causes and remedies are right and proper.

Any complex software has bugs and perfection is never available. The important question remains: how are the users treated? If the software respects a user's freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify the software, users are treated well. If these freedoms are not respected, the user is subjugated. This is an ethical issue with technical ramifications.

Non-free programs (such as Microsoft Windows and Apple's OSes) are designed and licensed to prohibit anyone but the proprietor from understanding how the software works. Nobody but the proprietor can fix bugs or improve the program (I use the word "improve" purposefully subjectively here). And the proprietor could have included a variety of other problems (from the user's perspective) because proprietary software is often malware. A free software system (such as a GNU/Linux system on which nothing but free software is installed) can be fully inspected, shared, and modified by the users. Free software lets users treat each other ethically, non-free software leaves even the most expert users who are willing to do technical inspection/bugfixing work in the dark and prevents them from sharing with others, thus preventing them from helping others.

Software freedom is a far better arrangement for the user. Where non-free software users have to wait for a proprietary binary to patch a problem (possibly introducing new problems and leaving other known problems unfixed such as Apple did for over 3 years with an exploitable iTunes bug during which time governments used the hole to invade people's computers), a free software user has additional options. One can choose to learn to program and fix bugs themselves, one can get someone else to fix software for them (even commercially, by hiring someone trustworthy and appropriate just as one would do to fix other things). No one person can understand all the software they need, there's way too much software to do that. But together we can (and do!) maintain free software systems very well.

The point you fail to understand is that with software that respects a user's freedom, one doesn't need to wait for someone else to fix the bug for them and then hope that bug actually gets fixed when the ostensible fix is released. Users running nothing but free software have options to fix any bug and verify that fix which proprietary software disallows.

The rest of your statement is a form of false dichotomy—arguing from perfection. I never said anything was perfect.

The software Apple distributes to users is proprietary, even if part of that software is built from free software. Proprietary software is never safe for users. Its safety is for the proprietor—what the program allows the proprietor to do to the users.

Apparently memories around here are so short people can't remember when researchers showed Apple can read iMessages anytime Apple wants and the users have no idea which messages are being read. Whether anyone at Apple reads someone's iMessages is a detail so long as Apple can read any iMessage they choose. The same applies to any proprietor for any software which doesn't respect your software freedom. You avoid these problems by avoiding proprietary software.

Nothing in the GPL prohibits commercial redistribution. The GPL aims to prohibit proprietarization. Commercial redistribution and proprietarization are not the same thing. Ensuring software freedom for users of derivatives is a good thing.

Any device's software can do things you don't want. If that device requires software which runs on your computer, then that software can do anything your OS lets it do.

This means a program running with your credentials (running as you) on a networked home computer can upload copies of files you can read, launch a program to spy on you as you work, or possibly install some software that does nasty things to any user of that computer. The possibilities are too numerous to list. And this program can be something that computer users might view as necessary or innocent like a device driver program, or some other program needed to let users control the added device.

So what users who value their privacy and software freedom want has little to do with 3D printing per se because these users make the same demand regardless of the purpose of the new device. One such user avoids devices that run non-free software, or require non-free software to be installed elsewhere to work. That way one can run a 100% free software system (right now that means a free BIOS, free software OS, and nothing but free software programs installed atop that) and use the new device fully.

Actually, as Snowden's revelations point out to all of us, embedding computers with non-free software in them is a huge social problem as it takes away our privacy. Many computers which are updateable only by proprietors is a social problem as well, because those computers can be set up to do things their owners don't want them to do. There's no opportunity for the owner to know what they're really doing, so even hiring someone to do that work on their behalf is out of the question. Many people buy and operate these devices but that is no excuse for treating the customers that way. Citing how many other people build such systems is also no excuse for treating other people that way.

If "Apple respected the wishes of these copyright holders" they would not have distributed any software without complying with each program's license in the first place. That onus of responsibility lies with each distributor.

When a free software program's copyright holder stands up for their license and demands compliance, they're up against another party who is doing the wrong thing. Hence it's perfectly right and proper to say Apple got caught.

Similarly, it's up to Apple to investigate the information they're given before distributing the work further in order to make sure Apple is not participating in copyright infringement. Giving Apple a pass for being handed works by "criminals in China who took the works of authors" is no excuse for commercial copyright infringement. On the contrary, if the upstream were known criminals it should not have been that tough for an multinational organization to learn who they were dealing with and become suspicious thus triggering an investigation.

It's telling that you didn't come up with some attempt to diminish NeXT's wrongdoing in their initial GCC distribution. I'll take Kuhn's word for it over yours because he's only one hop away from the people at the FSF who were there at the time and know what happened in dealing with NeXT.

Recommending any proprietary software to do any task is recommending a security hole. It's trivially easy for any proprietor to include code that spies on you, as computer programmers have long known and Edward Snowden has shown us again. No amount of experience running proprietary software will tell you what you need to know to fix its problems, share your fixes with others, hire others you have good reason to trust to fix problems on your behalf, or even allow someone you have good reason to trust to inspect the program to see if anything needs to be fixed (they're forbidden to do this work for the same reason you are). Picking one proprietary anti-virus program over another, picking one proprietary browser over another, or picking any proprietary program over another proprietary variant of the same kind of program is merely choosing your master. You cannot arrive at a trustworthy solution in this way.

Instead you should choose free (libre) software for your OS, your firmware (via Coreboot), and for all the software you run atop that system. Eschew services that require you to adopt non-free software and gain more control over your computer. The Free Software Foundation's Respects Your Freedom recently added a computer that meets these criteria. We should help them and help free software hackers write more free software to do the jobs we need to be done.

"Good art" strikes me both a non-sequitur here and remarkably subjective. I certainly would never disqualify folk art from being "good" because folk art is highly derivative of others work.

Copying things exactly in this context is a side-effect of using a medium (computer graphics) in which visual items can be duplicated precisely. If one is uncomfortable with that fact, one should consider choosing another medium. This also doesn't help identify the meaning of what I asked about earlier. I also fail to see what would be objectionable about OpenTTD's precise replication and capability extension.

Artists should support free speech even when its their speech that is being commented upon.

I don't know what Sawyer makes of OpenTTD and I see no pointer to a source for the parent's recollection. As I understand it, OpenTTD is currently licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2. I'll also take OpenTTD's developers word for it that their work is a newly-written program (the fruit of a 2003 reverse engineering effort by Ludvig Strigeus, according to Wikipedia), not an illicit derivative of code from Sawyer.

Given those assumptions, OpenTTD is not a version of the program Sawyer wrote. OpenTTD is a separate program that does the same job with no shared code between them. Sawyer's TTD can be said to inspire OpenTTD but I don't see how inspiration qualifies as a derivative work. Creating a work-alike in no way alters the other program(s) that do the same thing. So it's not clear to me what an "artistic view" of the original program really means. I hope this language is not an attempt at giving or claiming unwarranted control over workalike programs.

I certainly hope the parent's recollection is inaccurate and more artists welcome comments on their work, as well as respecting the user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the program.

Thanks for pointing me to your sources so I can read them for myself.

Fighting for copyleft is standing up for user's software freedoms for derivative works. Copyleft itself is not the goal, but copyleft is part of a means to securing software freedom for the future.

I see RMS saying he's fighting for user's software freedom via copyleft, but I don't see how that is equivalent to saying "RMS does not want GCC to play any part in a toolchain/process which might have non-GPL parts". Other copyleft licenses exist. RMS and points out when those licenses don't do as good a job defending user's software freedoms as the GPL does and then he explains his rationale. Also, it is possible to make a copylefted free software license that allows conversion to the GPL (such as the Netscape Javascript license or via an explicit conversion clause). I can also envision a strongly copylefted free software license that does a better job of defending user's software freedoms than any of the GPL variants. But I don't know of such a license. If one such license should exist, I'd expect RMS to respond as he did to the existence of a compiler that was technically superior to GCC which also defended user's software freedom, "For GCC to be replaced by another technically superior compiler that defended freedom equally well would cause me some personal regret, but I would rejoice for the community's advance.".

It makes sense to me that if the GPLv3 or a variant (such as the AGPLv3) is currently the best license for defending user's software freedoms and one of one's goals is ensuring software freedom, one would steer users toward the latest version of the GPL licenses. This isn't steering people to the GPL for no reason at all, or some kind of brand loyalty; the reasoning is carefully explained.