a lot of these are inherent on the laptop you wrote this with coupled with using the internet in general.
RMS was right all along. We need free software, or we will have no control over our computers. And our computers are going to be everywhere.
Free as in beer is the enemy of free as in freedom.
On a personal computer, there is free software to accomplish any desktop computing task. How can you say that it wont get built when it already has been?
Meanwhile, the closed systems people do pay for have a monstrous advantage and will continue to be far ahead. Nowhere are they further ahead than design and user experience, which in my experience are harder and more work to get right than core code. When you make something work you are only maybe 25% of the way to making it usable. That last 75% is the no-fun stuff people have to be paid to do, and it's the stuff that separates products people use from geek projects only a tiny number of enthusiasts play with.
That will not automatically happen for a lot of classes of software. You point out that any desktop computing task can be done with free software. So what? That doesn't even matter anymore. It's 2014 and we can't accomplish a significant amount of mobile computing tasks with free software, and those are more intimately connected to us than desktops ever were.
You make an excellent point about mobile computing. However, interest in free mobile software is growing and we'll see more options available to mirror the demand.
What I'm trying to say here is that I hope to see even more business models that work well so we can get free alternatives in more areas of computing sooner rather than later.
I hope that viable business models that support free software emerge. I have a feeling that the general public will be made to suffer by this surveillance system growing around us, and will learn that like convenient Starbucks, freedom is worth paying a few extra bucks for.
The morality of RMS is an abstraction that is disconnected from empirical truth, just like any religion is.
Maybe he would have done some good (other than the software he's written) if he had actually made the argument that we need open source for privacy reasons.
We should all feel deeply offended at not having that control, if we know what's good for us.
Looking at the current state of affairs, I'm starting to think RMS wasn't radical and fanatical enough!
On the other hand, computers are how we communicate with and consume information from others; they are essentially how we view the world. Thus what power the companies-in-control have to limit, persuade, and otherwise manipulate the population who uses computers is far greater than what they can do with cars.
To come back to the car analogy, if the manufacturers had the same type of power those making computers and their software did, they would be able to remotely control your car to make it go not where you want it to, disable it if you tried to drive to "non-approved/licensed" locations or if you attempted to drive faster than they allowed, carried more passengers than licensed for, etc.
Of course, convenience and control are not disjoint either - and more control can also lead to greater convenience, as users customise the software they use to make their use of it more convenient.
No, we should all choose to use products and services that protect our privacy (potentially by being open source), and educate others to do the same. NOT "get deeply offended." Getting offended is what you do when someone goes against your RELIGION. That is why Stallman's message does not work: it is like a religion.