The FSF ideology was born at a time where the level of bidirectional mistrust between closed source software vendors and open source advocates was a lot higher than it is currently. The world has evolved since then and the business world now embraces open source, possibly for reasons that have nothing to do with ideology (shared r&amp;d costs, commoditising lower layers of the stack and the realization that you can just as easily get lock in with open source software as you can with closed source). In a world where even Microsoft is releasing more and more of its crown jewels as open source every given week, the FSF position can appear out of place but this I think is a testament of how far we have come on the original goals of the project.