Surely "hello world" is useful only if you release it under a copyleft licence since its purpose is to teach you how to get started with the language it demonstrates.
In any case, freeness is a goal for me as a user of software. I choose Gimp over Photoshop, for example, because I care more about still being able to access my photos in 20 years time than I do about having access to certain feature sets.
The purely political stance I rail against is, in effect, "X fits my use case and is objectively better in every way, but Y is free, so I'll use Y."
For what it's worth, I can still open PSD's created way back in the 90's, and the format is well documented.[1] Adobe could disappear in a puff of logic tomorrow and their format wouldn't become unreadable.
> Surely "hello world" is useful only if you release it under a copyleft licence since its purpose is to teach you how to get started with the language it demonstrates.
I would argue that "hello world" is useful only if you release it under a very permissive non-copyleft free software license or, better, as public domain, for exactly that reason. Copyleft is excessively restrictive for this purpose.
In any case, freeness is a goal for me as a user of software. I choose Gimp over Photoshop, for example, because I care more about still being able to access my photos in 20 years time than I do about having access to certain feature sets.