Papering over a binary blob

Have you, um, read the GNU manifesto? Their goal in writing that software was always to produce a complete free replacement for Unix, and producing a spattering of nice-to-have packages was a nice side-effect along the way. AFAIK RMS has always argued that using non-free software is ethically acceptable if and only if you are using it to produce a free replacement.

That's their ideal, though; I wouldn't call it their stance. If they actually had a "no non-free software allowed anywhere" stance, then surely they'd be trying to squash tools like mingw, and the GPL wouldn't continue to have a special exception for linking against anything "normally distributed with the operating system"?