"The freedom to run the program [...] without being required to communicate about it with the developer or any other specific entity. " - You mean that, for all those years I've been using Windows programs, I've been required to communicate with some "entities"? That's funny.
Unsolicited requests. Also, for some programs (e.g. popular game engines) if you were to make a commercial product that made a lot of money using the software you would need to deal with the devs of the software (which from the phrasing I'm guessing is more what this is about rather than telemetry).
"The freedom to run the program as you wish means that you are not forbidden or stopped from making it run" - this is easy to violate in the so-called "free software". What prevents me from making a program that can only be run on Wednesdays? Nothing.
Since that program would be in violation of freedom 0 it would be rendered non-free, regardless of what license you publish it by. Also that's clearly a stupid toy example. What this is meant to stop is things like freemium trial versions.
Okay, here is where we start to run into serious problems. First of all, access to the source code is absolutely not a precondition for this. People have been disassembling all kinds of software forever - for example Pokemon games, which have spawned many hacks that improve (or claim to) on these games. No source code required!
Yeah, now good luck disassembling a game protected by DRM software like Denuvo. Or any proprietary program with anti-reverse engineering measures (of which there are tons of because, believe it or not, corporations dislike piracy). The importance of source-availability is that, while not a precondition, it is a guarantee which you don't get with proprietary software.
Windows programs are being redistributed all the time, and probably more people are helped that way than by freetardism.
If I distribute GIMP on my website I am a software distributor. If I distribute Photoshop on my website, I am a criminal because piracy is (in most jurisdictions) illegal. This is about the legality, not the possibility.
So here is where we come to the crux of the issue, it seems. It is the distribution of modifications, that gives real freedom, according to the freetards. But does it actually? Again, you, first of all, need the programming skill to make these modifications - skill that 99% of users don't have. Then there is the issue of your version becoming obsolete by the time you finish your changes - see Freedom 1. And of course, disassembling is still a possibility - you say it's too hard? So is programming for the vast majority of people - again, no advantage for free software to be found.
Again, legality. We've seen AAA game studios forcing mods onto their own platforms, claiming legal ownership of mods etc. People are distributing them anyways but they could get DMCA'd at any time. The "most people don't have the programming skill" thing is ridiculous. This part exists to protect those who do, what's the problem in that?
Of course, releasing the source is not enough for the freetards. You also need to attach a "license" to your program which will allegedly allow others to do everything the "four freedoms" permit. The problem is - nothing prevents anyone from breaking the license. Licenses are just words on the screen - most of us have violated countless video game EULAs for example. More importantly, we also now have proof that the GPL can be revoked -
https://slashdot.org/submission/9087542 ... ecinds-gpl (archive). The author of the program in question sent a DMCA request to GitHub (alleging copyright infringement), and they complied in taking it down.
Yes, the developer of a program can change its license but this does not apply backwards (earlier versions are still free) or to forks.
I'll grant you the license-breaking part, corporations are using free code in their products and nobody has enough legal power to do shit. But this doesn't matter from the perspective of a user who wants to decide between using a free or proprietary program.
Freetardism goes deep, and to refute it all I would have to write a book. But I will try to tackle some other common ones:
"You don't need to be a programmer, just pay someone else!" - This does not bypass the issues mentioned in the section refuting Freedom 1. Besides, I can also pay for a disassembly.
Once again, the issue is legality. Sure, I can pay someone to reverse engineer a program but I will likely be unable to distribute any modifications I paid for.
"If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users. With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the developer or “owner” of the program, that controls the program—and through it, exercises power over its users. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power." - Applies to "free software" just as much, or even more - that depends on the program in question. It is easily possible to make a closed source program that gives enough control to the user that they never even think about modifying the source. On the other hand, the "free software" world is full of crap where you'd have to change half of the code to regain control...might as well just use a good proprietary program then.
"Proprietary software is often malware" - they even have an article with that title (archive), where they mention a bunch of issues with proprietary software. Of course, you can find many examples of so-called "free software" also suffering from those - but freetards gives those a pass, because it's "free". Mozilla Firefox alone fits most of the listed criteria.
Something like Firefox with default settings sucks but this argument is dishonest. Sure, there are some malicious free programs and non-malicious proprietary ones but the average free program will have much less (or none at all) such garbage compared to an average proprietary program. Compare popular proprietary and free software by category (Photoshop vs GIMP, VLC vs itunes, Windows vs Linux) and you'll instantly see the difference.
The freetards' definition of free software simply does not correspond to actual freedom. It is an example of Orwellian newspeak - a software is "free" if it abides by our arbitrarily chosen freedoms, and anything else is dirty and "nonfree" - even though "free software" does not necessarily provide more actual freedom, as shown earlier in the article - and might actually provide less.
Freedom to use the program however you want, to modify and redistribute are hardly "arbitrarily chosen", rather they are very basic and obvious things. You haven't really shown how they don't provide more freedom. Your arguments are focused on the minority of shitty free software, while ignoring the mountains of shitty proprietary software.
It is important to differentiate between open source and freetardism - freetards are doing everything to conflate these two, but we can have the former and throw the harmful ideology away. Maybe then we can recognize (and try to fix) the movement's flaws. Of course releasing the source is great, but that does not necessarily mean the software becomes more secure, more quality, or that the users have more freedom. In fact open source introduces its own set of problems, and freetardism has blinded people from this fact, so it has to go.
If anything, I saw the GNU people denounce the term "open source" as detracting from other aspects of free software. I personally wouldn't mind if software was simply source-available but bound by a EULA (one such program I use is Aseprite). However, it is because of "Stallmanist zealots" that the possibility of making such concessions even exists for me. If "freetards" who pay too much attention to software licensing never existed, we would either be in DRM hell or at the very least, there would be much less software providing user freedom.
First of all - do not bother with big corpo abominations such as Mozilla Firefox or systemd. They support your freedom only in name - actually, they might be even worse than any old closed source software, since they pretend to be otherwise and get you to do the dirty work of fixing bugs while keeping all real control to themselves.
Those suck but are hardly worse than closed source software. If Firefox was proprietary and had an EULA prohibiting modification mitigated browsers like Librewolf or Icecat would not exist.