Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment

Say, consider the same piece of software, available from two separate vendors, at the same price.

Nice strawman.

Let's consider another hypothetical situation. I need to pay taxes and the only way to do it is via proprietary government-supplied package. Debian's choice: give me the package in "non-free" and help me to stay in my house. FSF's choice: "liberate me" by sending me to jail.

Who's screwing me? Debian? Or FSF?

P.S. Note that choice is not at all hypothetical: this improvement over reality. Currently aforementioned package only exist in Windows version and thus it's not in Debian. But what if government will achieve partial enlightenment and produce Linux package?

Don't you agree that the lack of freedoms in the latter, that presumably leads you to choose the former, would be detrimental (and thus harmful) to you, no matter how much you need the features offered by the software?

Don't try moving the goal posts. Your contrived scenario has nothing to do with what I posted earlier. Of course if the two packages differ only in that one is free and the other is non-free, it makes more sense to pick the free one. However, I already explained that I personally use non-free software only if it does something I need and there is no free software available which does the same thing. Hence your premise doesn't apply to the situation I was talking about.

You may argue that in this case it is better to write a free piece of software that implements the missing functionality. This is true in an ideal world where programming takes no effort. In the real world I don't always have the time and wherewithal on top of my regular project load to, say, reverse-engineer and reimplement a complex undocumented proprietary communication protocol to do something that is only an ancillary part of my actual work. In other cases I have written free software that does what I require. This is not a black-and-white world.

Don't you agree that the lack of freedoms in the latter, that presumably leads you to choose the former, would be detrimental (and thus harmful) to you, no matter how much you need the features offered by the software?

Is the free version actively harmed because (having the nonfree binary) nobody cares enough to make it work? True. Again, is it harmful to users? Nope, it is just less useful than it would be otherwise.

Other proprietary software can be actively harmful because it is full of security holes (like Acrobat), it places impractical restrictions on how we use software (like DVD players), or locks people down to proprietary formats (like Office), but being proprietary per se is not so relevant -- many of the same effects can be achieved with free software.