No, that's fair, that has been a factor in the past, and one I had momentarily forgotten about.
Ironically, that article mentions the anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft, and it was the Open Source Initiative which helped get the ball rolling on that, after the leak of the infamous Halloween Documents (read the book form of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" for more history.)
I don't necessarily trust Microsoft these days, but there is a different legal precedence in place now. Attempting an "embrace, extend, extinguish" would probably go down quite differently today.
Even so, remember, I'm an OSI member - I believe there is a time and place for the GPL. Linux and many of its major pieces are best off with that license - especially factoring in the Unix Wars. The two problems you mentioned aren't "moral superiority" or "the big guy shouldn't borrow my crayons" issues, arguably by sheer scope and nature of operating system components. Applications and libraries are generally very different animals (and there are still places for the GPL there, as I said).
All this said, it still doesn't justify the sweeping 'all proprietary is evil' stance. RMS recognized a legitimate problem, but he responded by going philosophically overboard.
For the application developer that needs to make a living, that's an understandable position. For users however, in practice it comes down trading their freedom zero - which is arguably the important goal of the FSF - for said developer's freedom, usually without having much say in this. Nobody can meaningfully run or modify Facebook, or AWS, or most of the software defining to their own ends, regardless of how free or not their authors were to use whichever libraries they used to develop that software.
The wars of the past aren't all that this is about, they're just a motivator for a given position that still applies today. (Albeit a motivation that undermines attempts to explain it.) Whether that position is "good" or "bad" is not a trivial issue to reason about even on terms of software development philosophy, and can't be neatly reduced to "going overboard" vs. "being naive"; or handled by staking out what "really free" and "not free" is. (Which is a game of idealist semantics, and arguably materially irrelevant. Compare and contrast: the opinions of marxists vs. liberals on individual autonomy.)
The Facebook issue is more of "vendor lock-in" kind, but based on relationships.
Instead of devices and technology interoperability lock-in, Facebook is locking people's interoperability and communication to a single platform. If I wouldn't be on Facebook, I would loose asynchronous chat-based communication to half of the people I'm regularly communicating with. And, everybody who is on Facebook, is there, because of almost everybody is on Facebook.
I wouldn't care if Facebook alternative was closed source, as long as I'm not locked to that alternative and I can switch a provider or application whenever I decide to. For example, it doesn't matter which email hosting I use, I can still contact any other email. This can't be done with a centralized solution like Facebook.
That’s because one could argue that even the AGPL doesn’t go far enough and we need something even more restrictive (that we’re never getting) on developers that addresses user data like the social graph and acting upon it.
As great as the open source movement was for the needs of programmers, it’s hard to argue that the history of software in the past decade or two has been anything but a series of tragic defeats delivered to the users, the sharecroppers on the big data plantation.
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No, that's fair, that has been a factor in the past, and one I had momentarily forgotten about.
Ironically, that article mentions the anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft, and it was the Open Source Initiative which helped get the ball rolling on that, after the leak of the infamous Halloween Documents (read the book form of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" for more history.)
I don't necessarily trust Microsoft these days, but there is a different legal precedence in place now. Attempting an "embrace, extend, extinguish" would probably go down quite differently today.
Even so, remember, I'm an OSI member - I believe there is a time and place for the GPL. Linux and many of its major pieces are best off with that license - especially factoring in the Unix Wars. The two problems you mentioned aren't "moral superiority" or "the big guy shouldn't borrow my crayons" issues, arguably by sheer scope and nature of operating system components. Applications and libraries are generally very different animals (and there are still places for the GPL there, as I said).
All this said, it still doesn't justify the sweeping 'all proprietary is evil' stance. RMS recognized a legitimate problem, but he responded by going philosophically overboard.
For the application developer that needs to make a living, that's an understandable position. For users however, in practice it comes down trading their freedom zero - which is arguably the important goal of the FSF - for said developer's freedom, usually without having much say in this. Nobody can meaningfully run or modify Facebook, or AWS, or most of the software defining to their own ends, regardless of how free or not their authors were to use whichever libraries they used to develop that software.
The wars of the past aren't all that this is about, they're just a motivator for a given position that still applies today. (Albeit a motivation that undermines attempts to explain it.) Whether that position is "good" or "bad" is not a trivial issue to reason about even on terms of software development philosophy, and can't be neatly reduced to "going overboard" vs. "being naive"; or handled by staking out what "really free" and "not free" is. (Which is a game of idealist semantics, and arguably materially irrelevant. Compare and contrast: the opinions of marxists vs. liberals on individual autonomy.)
The Facebook issue is more of "vendor lock-in" kind, but based on relationships.
Instead of devices and technology interoperability lock-in, Facebook is locking people's interoperability and communication to a single platform. If I wouldn't be on Facebook, I would loose asynchronous chat-based communication to half of the people I'm regularly communicating with. And, everybody who is on Facebook, is there, because of almost everybody is on Facebook.
I wouldn't care if Facebook alternative was closed source, as long as I'm not locked to that alternative and I can switch a provider or application whenever I decide to. For example, it doesn't matter which email hosting I use, I can still contact any other email. This can't be done with a centralized solution like Facebook.
That’s because one could argue that even the AGPL doesn’t go far enough and we need something even more restrictive (that we’re never getting) on developers that addresses user data like the social graph and acting upon it.
As great as the open source movement was for the needs of programmers, it’s hard to argue that the history of software in the past decade or two has been anything but a series of tragic defeats delivered to the users, the sharecroppers on the big data plantation.