&gt;I don&#x27;t understand this - every product &amp; service sold in the open market - from baby formula to clothing, from a meal at a restaurant to a flight - relies on competitive advantage that&#x27;s proprietary to the seller.<p>I disagree, what products and services typically rely on is price which in turn is typically based on just how well a company can exploit workers and negotiate cheap prices for material, and of course advertising to make people buy their particular version out in a sea of thousands of practically identical products.<p>&gt;A mindset to open this advantage up is somehow being selectively applied to software.<p>Because the FSF is concerned about software, due to it&#x27;s founder being a developer. I&#x27;m sure there are efforts to have better dislosure of contents, preparation and materials used for the type of physical products you brought up.<p>&gt;In a truly open and free market, malicious elements that include spyware, rootkits .. etc will get rooted out.<p>I find that incredibly naive, pretty much every company wants to exploit their customers for maximum return, Microsoft recently turned their OS into the equivalent of spyware in order to harvest user data for ad targeting, meanwhile the governments are actively making use of malicious elements to compromise as many end users they can in order to surveil them.<p>&gt;which by the way is how evolution and biology has programmed all of us.<p>What? Are you saying we are actually programmed to hide our discoveries in order to be able to take advantage of our fellow man rather than share our knowledge in order to advance ourselves as a species ?<p>&gt;BSD&#x2F;Apache&#x2F;MIT kind of permissive licenses offer true freedom.<p>For the developer, Free Software offers &#x27;true freedom&#x27; for the end user. Ah, the old &#x27;true freedom&#x27; nonsense.<p>&gt;an approach that allows companies to focus on their value-add rather than re-inventing the wheel.<p>Meanwhile everyone needs to re-invent the value-add functionality, so you are still re-inventing the wheel.<p>It ends up saving proprietary companies money because they can lower the amount of developers they need, since they don&#x27;t need to write as much code, only the &#x27;value-add&#x27;, this leads to less developer employment.<p>If anything you should be disliking permissive code rather than copyleft, since it is the former which really threathens developer jobs in the proprietary software sector which you seemingly fear for.<p>&gt;Stallman is a vocal detractor [1] of ANY permissive open-source license.<p>Well obviously since they do not protect any of the end user rights which Free Software was created to protect. Again Free Software is about giving rights to the end user, not the developer.