If we try to discuss this here, it’ll take years. “What the people want” is not a simple concept. People today want convenience, and people say they want cheap gas for their cars, and people say they want to pay less taxes. But people don’t want to live without public services and don’t want the ecological collapse that many other things we “want” lead to… How should laws be made? Again years of discussion. I didn’t say anything about whether the laws I suggested should be implemented today or how or by who, I just said they would serve the end of software freedom. The point is to understand that copyleft is a pragmatic hack a workaround of current law. Copyleft is not itself an ideal (regardless of whether you agree with the ideal that copyleft is not).
I can access Kanban by paying for the proprietary hosting. My concern was only about it being proprietary. So, I wouldn’t even have had the complaint if Kanban and all other features were in the MIT-licensed repo but turned off for the hosting service free level (which means self-hosters could have Kanban, but self-hosting is a hassle, the point is for the code to be FLO). I might then happily pay for the hosting convenience, happily knowing that I’m supporting uncompromised Open Source software.
You should read my very first intro post that led to this topic: Introduce Yourself: New Member Monday [September/October] - #2 by wolftune
RMS is not an advocate of capitalism per se. People can be critics of capitalism without being supporters of anarchism. But okay, yes, some ideas may happen to be anarchist-enough or anarchist-compatible. That doesn’t mean everyone who supports such ideas is ideologically anarchist or in agreement with anarchy overall.
The same reason that “sustainable” is a marketing topic — because people should (and many do) care about it as a value. Hence, marketers like to use popular ideas, and the ideas should be popular because they are good ideas, and people caring is one step, and products living up to the marketed values is another step.
By saying this, are you also suggesting “don’t talk about or engage with products you have concerns or criticism of”? It’s easy to infer that. This is somewhat common rhetoric, and while there’s an aspect of it that is sensible (the part about checking that people consider their options and not only complain), the idea of “don’t complain” is not really good (and people who say it are usually hypocrites who are complaining-about-complaining). In this case, Baserow representative responded graciously, my concerns were expressed and heard, and some small actions were even taken. Projects that are in good faith and care about communities want to hear complaints, and complaints can be constructive.
“if you don’t like something, don’t use it” often sounds like “don’t mention complaints, keep them to yourself”. For the most part, I think this rhetoric is usually more harmful than helpful.
I do appreciate and agree with many of the things you’ve said in this exchange. The issue of orphan software is indeed part of the issue, but that doesn’t bring up the concern about VC-funded software companies going in user-hostile directions after initially gaining enough adoption and lock-in — a pattern which ends up with non-orphaned software that is controlled exclusively by a company that has a lot of power over users. In the case of Open Source, the users have more of an easier out, and having that also discourages bad behavior by the company in the first place.