The 'fosstards' aren't generally writing the Free Software I use -- they're hanging out in debian-legal and harassing people over petty imagined issues and doing more than anyone else to promote strong intellectual property rights (especially Software Patents: you don't weaken something by anal-retentively respecting it).<p>The vast majority of people writing GPL software do not align with the FSF's ideology, the GPL2 is just the most practical for their needs. Note how noone outside their core commune has switched to the GPL3, and how noone actually deeds the copyright for their random projects to the FSF like they recommend in the license text?<p>The only hard-GNU software I (and most others here) really use are GCC, coreutils, bash, and readline. Incidentally I'm hoping to be able to ditch all the first three in the near future for quality reasons mostly borne of FSF-pigheadedness (though I would like to swap out readline when that's the only GPL lib in a program). If I switch back to a Mac I'll be able to use better alternatives for all of them quite soon.