OpenSSH? Apache? X11? Those are all licensed under BSD-style licenses and not GPL, and they are still widely used today, moreso than any proprietary version.

X11 was the typical example of BSD failure. X11 had an MIT license, got taken in by proprietary vendors who had their own X's all with cool features, most of which are still not in the X11 on Linux. There was no free usable X for Unixes for years. Essentially the XFree86 people had to start from scratch and this took years. Eventually XFree86 became the standard X, but only after the entire X model was outdated. The result of the BSD license was a disaster for free software one of the worst free software disasters ever.

OK let me give you some more examples other than Linux;

MySQL and derived products
KDE
R language exploding
Blender
Sugar CRM
Darktable
Inkscape

And I could literally list hundreds that are comfortably being used.

I'd disagree. We know that lots of companies do run their own app stores, so it most certainly is practical for them to distribute their own software to literally millions of their users. It is practical. I actually think it would be practical for the FSF for example to run their own solution.

As for installing your own software... for someone capable of building iOS software the developer route is quite practical. It isn't practical for 3rd party distribution but that's a very difficult claim. If the FSF said something like, "there is no practical way for developers to sell software to non-corporate users outside the Apple store" that would be fair. But that's a far weaker claim than what they are saying.

And that's my point. At a certain point refuting an exaggeration isn't just nitpicking but rather the claim is simple false.

Their issue with JavaScript is effectively non-free JavaScript not so much the language itself. They are right now educated about JavaScript, how best to use it, so need for a replacement.

I think for the iPad Stallman would want Apple to open it more. From what I can figure essentially what he wants is some of the features in the enterprise SDK, which Apple distributes at below their cost. I attribute FSF's position on iOS to ignorance and principle and it is hard to distinguish. The FSF simply says too much that is just false when it comes to Apple for me to figure out what they want. Plus I've told them this and they've kept it up, so at this point they are lying not mistaken.

OK adjust to 2048 vs 128. The point was that you are saying as long as x86 is a far better fit for servers it will be used for servers. Well of course. The question is what happens as the ARM economy gets larger than the x86 economy and the advantages of ARM design techniques come to dominate. Obviously I can't see what's likely many years in the future so I don't know what that will look like. For laptop it is obvious that SOC / power drive the change. Lighter and thinner. Beyond that is gets opaque.

However the economics are daunting. With ARM selling 10-20x or more as many chips per year...

Absolutely. That's the idea. Different interfaces depending on the form factor but same binary. That way you plug your phone into a large tablet you get the large tablet version. Give it a mouse, large screen and keyboard you get the desktop version. Your example is correct.

But non touch laptops are completely different things from tablets, phones and touch laptops. It never made sense having the same interface for both.

That's correct. Which is why the whole Windows 8 idea was that the entire ecosystem of Windows laptops would move towards touch: capacitive resistive screens with hinges allowing for screen flexibility. Microsoft should have been killing off non-touch with Windows 8, probably by leaving them on Windows 7. And BTW for desktop something like a digitizing pad should have been mandatory.

it goes into the desktop and then opens it. Why?

Mostly because Windows 8 was a transitional operating system designed to help hardware and developers move from the old desktop to the newer interface. The end user stuff was less important. Not everything was done yet and there was a lot of inconsistency between desktop and Metro. That could have been corrected with time and would have been quickly. Getting something out the door to start the hardware revolution was the top priority and they were right to ship early.

It isn't propaganda.

BSD claims to create free software. It has a long proven track record of failure where systems that were once free become in practice proprietary and unfree even though there is some free almost worthless version hanging out under the BSD license. If you don't consider free software desirable then you can't argue there is anything wrong with the GPL's restrictions.

a) The ability to share and modify code is desirable (otherwise why BSD or GPL)
b) These abilities are called software freedom (a definition)
c) GPL does a better job protecting all the freedoms needed to share and modify code accept those freedoms needed to limit other's freedoms

You are just assuming what you are trying to prove with your rhetoric. The only freedom being restricted in GPL are those needed to directly or indirectly restrict other's freedom for software. Your first comment about freedom and capacity is meaningless. The only thing we are talking about when we talk about which copyright license to use is software freedom. So yes when you fail to give someone source code under this definition you have made them less free.

I've noticed that many of your claims regarding Apple and DRM in the various posts are simply false and I suspect this applies to other vendors. For example

https://www.fsf.org/news/ibad_...

blocking installation of software that comes from anywhere except the official Application Store -- false there are multiple ways to install software used routinely: developer's installation capabilities, enterprise and academic servers, 3rd party app stores included with cloud MDM agreements...

regulating every use of movies downloaded from iTunes -- I'm not sure if they mean the iTunes application or the iTunes cloud services. If they mean the application that's not true, there is nothing to prevent you from uploading your own movie to the application and downloading to a device. If they mean the cloud service they are distributor and have some responsibility but you can grant Apple permission for unlimited free distribution.

Do you think you should be fact checking your claims so that these don't get repeated and then refuted? How is it helpful for the FSF to word things in ways that lack nuance to the extent that they are just provably false?

They do that.

For Flash they produce Gnasha free player
Their anti-Facebook article lists recommend alternatives: GNU social, status.net, Crabgrass, Appleseed and Diaspora.
I don't know what iBad is. As for TiVo they have two problems

a) Software licensing disagreement which they fixed with GPLv3
b) DRM which they can't do much about legally. That's arguably a whole new movement.

What criticisms do you see as being any different than the ones from over two decades ago? Given that Linux (a GPL product, with lots of GPL components) has become so standard that it arguably is becoming the very definition of UNIX and is far and away the most used operating on the planet how has copyleft been losing ground?

Nor can permissively licensed programs be made proprietary, you can make a proprietary derived work but that does not change the original.

So what? The version that anyone cares about is often not the original but the one in use. The GPL came into existence because of one of the cases the X-Windows code where the version used by the various UNIX companies was proprietary even though there was a free version no one could use. It was many years till the XFree86 project started to create a both usable and free version and then more years until they achieved it. Assume the original Linux kernel from the early 1990s was free but the ones in use today were proprietary.

Come on that's the typical BSD argument which essentially amounts to "how can I be free if I don't have the freedom to restrict other's freedom". This has been answered for decades. There can be individual restrictions on freedom which collectively create greater freedoms, not just greater goods.

Your loss of freedom to restrict others freedom whether by direct or indirect action increases not decreases freedom.

It can cause taint to the closed source software especially if the projects are similar.

Don't work on parts of the free system where ideas from the GPLed version are likely to seep into your commercial version. Or do things differently enough.

The FSF has taken a very harsh line on Apple considering their setup to offer essentially no freedom. I'll ask about specific claims in a separate question. Apple offers the ability to setup an enterprise server for $300 / yr (not per device) which iOS devices could register against and those devices would then have whatever policies the administrator wants. So for example there could be an open upload area that people could download directly from. Or the provisioning keys could be public and software could be side loaded. Why doesn't the FSF just run an open server and allow iOS devices from across the world to point to this and not the Apple servers?