Richard Stallman was right since the very beginning. Every warning, every prophecy realised. And, worst of all, he had the solution since the start. The problem is not Richard Stallman or the Free Software Foundation. The problem is us. The problem is that we didn’t listen.
Forgive me if I trivialize, but we should not mourn too much: the obvious solution is to pirate it all. Do not waste time and energy for reinventing the wheel in the form of writing open source software. These resources can be used better for Revolution. Instead of diving into exhausting dispute and overintellectual arguments of Stallman, just do what said Marx: seize the means of production. That is, fucking pirate it. It is simple as that.
There’s more to it than just having free software. The source code is important too because it lets people learn from it, improve it, and use it to write or improve their own projects. Free software is only half the equation.
Unless you mean pirate the source too, in which case yeah absolutely but easier said than done.
One time, I spent whole day arguing with some anarchkiddies about that, and no one gave me a short, convincing argument like that. Their posts were emotional rather than seeking for truth. That’s the difference between debate and dialectics.
I’m mostly just paraphrasing Stallman’s own arguments. They’re worth checking out. He’s not without his faults, but his reasoning in this area is very sound.
All right, that’s an argument. Also, having fun from coding is also a valid argument. Though, from my experience, it is easier to start learning programming from some simple, isolated cases, as in thextbooks, than from real life programs, which can be very nasty and domain-dependent.
To start learning yes, but as I’ve gotten more experienced I find myself getting a lot more value out of real life examples. Cracking open a git repo and seeing how they did something can save me hours of reading documentation or at least give me a better context to grasp it. People learn differently from each other, and also themselves at various stages of their understanding.
Pirating a program doesn’t let you study what it does or change it. So you still don’t control it. It solves nothing.