And this is why the industry needs to professionalize, with a code of ethics and regulations so that we can tell our bosses no when they tell us to do this stuff.
We need regulation, laws and enforcement, enough with ethics.
Stallman basically preached a Communist manifesto where the tech workers should own the means of production/compute. Communism became popular in the early 20th century because people were scared of a feudal-capitalist future that didn't come to pass --yes, partly because of Communism. However, Big Tech has managed to build exactly that kind of feudal/rentier capitalism without regulation, without oversight and with full market control.
In the end, I don't think Stallman was right wrt the tools needed to stop that future; the GPL was embraced (and then undermined) by Big Tech and became irrelevant. By actually commoditizing the base platform layers, OSS probably enabled the massive cloud/application behemoths on top. More importantly, OSS was useful as a pseudo-competitor to the monopolists --remember when in them midst of the Microsoft-DOJ fracas, MS kept bringing up Linux as its nemesis? how did that turn out? what percentage of Azure are Linux machines? what Big Tech behemoth does NOT run on OSS these days?
But, to his credit, the future that Stallman warned us about did come to pass; his diagnosis was correct, but not the cure he prescribed. The internet is now run by feudal lords that extract rents from anyone trying to work or live on it.
https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-fro...