> Software differs from material objects—such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline—in that it can be copied and changed much more easily. These facilities are wh

> Software differs from material objects—such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline—in that it can be copied and changed much more easily. These facilities are why software is useful; we believe a program's users should be free to take advantage of them, not solely its developer. Users take advantage of free software mainly in the few domains where copyright and patent law don't get in the way of free software. Free software is largely irrelevant in the greater number of domains where copyright and patent law prevent the user from doing anything of value with it. E.g., let's go back in time and use free software to build a world encyclopedia. Yay, we made a quintessential use case! And in record time! E.g., let's go back in time and use Lilypond to publish beautiful, diffable text-based TABs, melodies, and lyrics for everyone's favorite songs in the world. Boo, I must have set the time machine too far back and got eaten by a T-rex. Sorry, users. In this way a lot of the most useful Gnu software remains "shadow banned." It gets used for niche projects, and a dev can certainly conceive how, say, some domain would be improved if they just adopted free software so-and-so. But the uses that would attract and benefit massive numbers of users are off the table. And neither Gnu nor FSF has the power or competency to make the changes to copyright/patent law in order to enable those uses.