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 s

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.