[specialist]

Agreeing with you: Absolutists (like RMS) expand the Overton Window. I'm more BSD than GPL, but without RMS, BSD would be seen as radical.

ESR wrote:

Unfortunately, RMS made an early decision to frame his advocacy as a moral crusade rather than a pragmatic argument about engineering practices and outcomes.

Having done a bit of policy work, value statements are what works. "Intellectuals" (progressives, geeks, libertarians) think The Right Answer wins. Nope. Cite George Lakoff, David Domke, Thomas Frank, Noam Chomsky...

Further, open source is a moral issue. Example:

Diebold hid their software. We lost transparency of our elections. Bad things happened. John Bonifaz and voteraction.org proved in court that John Kerry won New Mexico in 2004. The same things happened nationwide. Extrapolate.

Ditto medical devices, our personal data, etc.

So I'm with RMS. I'm sorry that RMS makes ESR feel weird. Tough.