To save others from wading through this bloated and disingenuous article, the core seems to be: With all that said, the intent of the adherents to the term Fre

To save others from wading through this bloated and disingenuous article, the core seems to be: With all that said, the intent of the adherents to the term Free Software is to seek to promote certain freedoms for the users of software, by depriving the creators of software (at least in the United States) of the rights afforded them by Congress under Article I, Section VIII, Clause VIII. [..] The difficulty is that the freedoms that the Free Software Foundation insists on giving software users are freedoms that most software users do not want, and the freedoms that they wish to restrict for software producers are freedoms that most software producers would rather retain. He tries to trick the reader into thinking of "software producers" as if they were a single entity. He finds room to talk about IBM's software distribution practices in the 1970s, but "forgets" to mention any case where free software prevented, or could have prevented (or simply never included), user-hostile practices (such as the now-pervasive DRM and spyware/telemetry, or anti-competitive moves [1]). To use a car analogy - I don't want Volkswagen preventing me from picking my own mechanic. Yet the article tries to frame it as if this is some kind of burden on the user, and an infringement of Volkswagen's rights. Of course the article is never that direct or honest - it exhausts the reader with irrelevant stories, skirts around the real issues, obfuscates and never states its thesis in plain language: that it is somehow to the user's benefit to be prevented from examining, modifying, or sharing software. More than wrong, this article is dishonest. This is the kind of prose that is used to deceive, not explain. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code