RMS stance is understandable, because he is also responsible for the
current situation. He failed to predict it, and his dream is now
turning into another Animal Farm, where some developers are becoming
more equal than others (it's an open question if there was a better
strategy possible when GPL was created). The biggest problem is that
GPL needs symmetry to work. I give you my code, because I can take
yours in return. But this symmetry breaks at some point, when there's
more code than one person can really handle (or even read), and what
eventually happens when corporations come into play. GPL can't really
deal with it, because it wasn't designed for such possibility. We can
safely assume that for corporations freedom is useless, and that they
care only about money, so how currently they can earn them on GPL'ed
software? By selling support, but this introduces conflict of
interests and unavoidable pathology. Let me use a car analogy to
explain why. Imagine you're giving away the cars and parts for them
for free, hoping that you will earn money on servicing them. Is it in
your interest to make them as trouble free, and as easy to setup and
fix as possible, so that almost everyone could do that? No, because
you won't earn any money then. Instead, by complicating the design to
the maximum level (like the need to remove the whole engine just to
change the lightbulb), and making it a fast moving target, you will
make sure that only your mechanics will be able to fix it, and that it
will need such fixing often. Now all that has left is to convince the
most popular gas stations to have a fuel for your engineD only, and
voila, mission accomplished (as a bonus you can also make some false
promises like a quicker start, and full DIY compatibility, but that's
only for true devilopers ;)). Sounds familiar? It's because developing
and earning money on support only will always lead to such
pathologies. And we are really responsible for this, in our best
interest is to make sure that developers will earn money on writing
free software, not on supporting it, otherwise it will be like
fighting with the Hydra.