One of the arguments of the movement is that by participating in it, by giving away your labor to all mankind, others can benefit and this works vis-a-versa, others give away their labor so you can benefit as well.
The problem of course is that this also says that labor is worthless and nobody gets to eat and find shelter unless they have some significant patronage. So sure I can build my Sprocket-Cog Software more easily because many of the software components that go into it are available to me for free (beer) so long as I free the entire thing at the end (freedom).
The follow-on argument is that you can always try to build a services model around Sprocket-Cog Software and live from that. But there's a subtle implication there that building turnkey software is not an option if you want to live, but making broken, user-hostile, hard-to-use software is the only morally "good" option.
(there's another argument that can be dismissed that you aren't prohibited from selling your software commercially under the right license, but that's a stupid argument, nobody will buy software from you if you just make it available for free (beer) anyways, so your only valid option (and the only one that has so far sorta "worked" in the marketplace is to provide services)
RMS of course dismisses all of this with a bunch of handwaivyness, like he does issues with hardware, food, etc. because he simply doesn't have to worry about them (because he has money) or because he can't find a path he can personally follow. It's hard to take claims about morality seriously when they only apply to software and not anything else that's far more embedded in life.
RMS doesn't say that work is worthless, or that you have to give your labor away to all mankind. It's purely an issue of what people can do with the fruits of said labor.
I've been programming professionally for 15 years, and I've gotten well paid for it. But I never worked for a company that sold its software without handing out the code right with it. Many times it has not met RMS' standards, because some of the code used proprietary libraries, but using said libraries was always the customer choice.
Most of the time, the customer that uses the code keeps it to themselves, just like they keep the actual executables they compile to themselves. A few times, however, my code was just released with an open license. Either way, I'd have still gotten paid, every single time, if copyrights or patents did not cover software at all.
Remember that the original complaints that made this movement happen had little to do with software being for pay, but with the chains that come along with not allowing modification: Printer driver has a bug? Tough. Game doesn't work in a newer computer? Buy a remake. Bought a new computer because the old one broke? Call MS and see if they will let you transfer the OS from machine to machine. It's issues like that free software wanted to change. Making it hard to, say, sell videogames in that kind of model, is not the real objective, but collateral damage.
It is not because he has money that he can find a personal path to follow, he really doesn't. His speaking fee is modest, his position at MIT is unpaid. He lives like a student, if you've ever read that long document he asks others to read if they book him for a speaking gig, can't find a link to it at the moment, it's mostly about avoiding unnecessary expense and distraction.
You do realize that he is actually in possession of a reasonably large amount of money and can live independently (if frugally) without payment for the rest of his life.
The problem of course is that this also says that labor is worthless and nobody gets to eat and find shelter unless they have some significant patronage. So sure I can build my Sprocket-Cog Software more easily because many of the software components that go into it are available to me for free (beer) so long as I free the entire thing at the end (freedom).
The follow-on argument is that you can always try to build a services model around Sprocket-Cog Software and live from that. But there's a subtle implication there that building turnkey software is not an option if you want to live, but making broken, user-hostile, hard-to-use software is the only morally "good" option.
(there's another argument that can be dismissed that you aren't prohibited from selling your software commercially under the right license, but that's a stupid argument, nobody will buy software from you if you just make it available for free (beer) anyways, so your only valid option (and the only one that has so far sorta "worked" in the marketplace is to provide services)
RMS of course dismisses all of this with a bunch of handwaivyness, like he does issues with hardware, food, etc. because he simply doesn't have to worry about them (because he has money) or because he can't find a path he can personally follow. It's hard to take claims about morality seriously when they only apply to software and not anything else that's far more embedded in life.