I've always loved it when people take specific quotes and respond to them individually without responding to the passage as a whole. I think it frees them from the responsibility of understanding the thesis before them, and consequently from producing a counterthesis of their own.

In my opinion, singling these replies out is a surefire way to identify someone who's arguing in bad faith, having given up any hope of understanding the arguments they oppose and hoping only to "win" on some obscure internet forum that nobody else will ever read in order to satisfy their egos.

The fundamental point which I made again and again is that most users don't want Stallman's four freedoms. You could put all four freedoms before them and they wouldn't care. You could take them away and they still wouldn't care. If they're using free software, it's just because it happens to be free while possessing some characteristic they like; not because it is free software in and of itself. The exceptions to this rule are the exceptionally paranoid, government agencies or those who insist on getting a Librebooted laptop and reading through every single line of code they run, and the Stallman worshippers who refuse to use proprietary software on moral grounds. Sure, maybe it'd be possible to create free software that people like to use. But the moment something better comes along? Even if it's proprietary, people will move on to that without fail, because they don't give a shit about the 4 freedoms, because in an ideal world they'd never exercise those freedoms anyway.

The argument I'm making is really just that simple. You can bring up as many ancillary points you'd like about free software being terrible, or servers being defined as consumer goods, or trusting in FOSS vs trusting in scale, or so on - but none of these ancillary points address the central issue, which is the simple fact that most people don't care about Stallman's 4 freedoms either way, and that it is rational for them to not care. The average user is not any better off in Stallman's dreamworld than they are in the present world; in either case, their reluctance to read source code for themselves would mean that they are reliant on developer honesty, and frankly, if I had to choose between trusting Google and trusting you to make sure that my software hasn't got any weird shit in it, it wouldn't be irrational at all to prefer to trust Google.

As a final ancillary point - just because I cannot help myself sometimes - the definition of a web server as being consumer software is clearly wrong in every sense of the word. A personal website, or a portfolio for that matter, are goods produced to satisfy other consumers. In other words, the man who creates his personal website, or the artist who creates a porfolio website, is hiring a web server in order to produce a consumer good for others. The consumers who visit that ultimate product don't give a shit whether it's running Microsoft or Google or Apache technology, and I'd challenge you to find any average Joe who boycotts websites on the ground that they're on non-free web servers. For all I know, Stallman might actually do that - somehow I don't think that's too out of character - but good luck convincing the average Joe to discriminate on the basis of web servers.