Free Software Foundation Priority Projects

To be perfectly clear: I share your motivations, and I cede that the FSF is a lobbying organization for promoting libre software. I want to note that I'm not specifically taking target at FSF here just generally the OSS/FOSS community in aggregate as I have interacted with them.

Now, to the argument! :)

My basic argument is as follows:

1. Its more important to have a libre/free OS than it is to have all Applications ever be libre/free. This is a matter of pragmatism. Your wifes phone for example, would be much better off if the phone OS itself was libre. This in my opinion is the best approach to take. It gives you the bulk of the freedom that one does seek, without completely alienating developers who, in some cases given the realities of today, rightly (or wrongly), don't want to or can't open source their software. I'd rather have their software on an FOSS platform than have to leave a FOSS platform to run their software. Thats just the economics of the world at work.

2. If one accepts #1 to be a justifiable position, which I think it is, the singular focus as far as the software part is concerned is to push that operating system forward with that set of ideals. Too often I find in the OSS/FOSS communities that they don't evangelize the platform, they evangelize the ideas, which again, i completely get, and I think for users, esp. of a technical bent, get it, and use it, and benefit from it. However, I don't think the average user, or even the majority of technical users, can get away with the switch. In part, its because the same logic that makes a FOSS/OSS operating system amazing doesn't particularly scale to Applications. Again, I will reference the missing software of Adobe, Microsoft, even task app like 2Do, Wunderlist, or the lovely Pixelmator, or even Zoho business apps are not available as native Applications on FOSS/OSS platforms, even Electron-type apps aren't scaling to Linux quickly. I think this is because the platforms aren't being evangelized. Everyone is concerned about the licensing, whether they can review an apps code, etc. or they get caught up in other mundane details, instead of unifying around a platform model that allows Apps of all types to exist (which i realize they do now, but I'm talking about community voices).

3. I would say to your point, an open source phone that runs 'nonfree' software is better than a nonfree phone OS running nonfree software. Why? Well, see above, but specifically because things like OS updates and OS changes would be viewable at a source code level, thereby if any apps are making modifications to it, you will see that.

4. The one thing, and this is my biggest thing, is that the lack of evangelizing as a platform for users is until recently, there is a huge lack of direction in the FOSS/OSS community. Elementary OS is the first time I've seen where a Linux distro is actually putting users first and adopting modern design and aesthetics. Another recent version of that is KDE's Neon built on ubuntu. Great desktop experiences. I feel the user experience suffers from a lack of focus on evangelizing and focus on a platform, instead of just ideals, that presents itself as a coherent whole that is accessible to develop for with some consistent standards. FOSS/OSS doesn't have to equal completely decentralized missions split between 2000 organizations. Where there has been unification lately, the better those products are becoming and actually entice users on a platform. High Idealism is well and good, but without focus on the platform, its hard to argue to switch. If you build a good platform, and get developers to make apps for it that people want to use, you are, in my opinion, gaining more than you're losing with this approach.

I have never seen this approach until very recently in the FOSS/OSS community. I'm glad its happening. It looks like huge steps in the right direction. Now if we could get some of the larger organizations behind a consistent evangelized message for desktop and mobile you could have some real change.

Having said that, I don't think the FSF needs to get involved with that as the role of prioritising software freedom in an ever changing world is probably more important and also more difficult than ever.

One thing I would caution is assuming that encouraging non-free applications on a free operating system is always going to be win-win. I worked at Corel when they were doing their Linux distro. They misunderstood free software badly. They saw it as an opportunity to lock people into their proprietary applications by changing the underlying OS (without having to pay for developing it). This led to some pretty strange business decisions and ultimately wasted a huge amount of money.

There were a couple of spinoffs from ex-Corel employees who tried to maintain this way of thinking and it was always an uphill struggle. Probably the only one to make any kind of profit was TransGaming and I'll maintain that was substantially because Gav State is both a talented and genuinely nice guy.

I think in order to to make this kind of thing work, you need to understand free software (and the goals of free software) at a very deep level. From my experience, it's just no compatible in a natural way.