Who sets these principles? I ask because FSF has bashed Apple and MS at various points in time. If the FSF is writing the religious-book here, then you're not supposed to work with the cloud, you're not supposed to use to chromeOS notebooks and boy you should really go dump those smartphones since they're either proprietary or open-but-not-quite.
In that same vein, code inside a car's sensors isn't open sourced and Toyota had a rather messy couple of months because of it. So boycott cars too ? Build your own car ?
I really don't get the excuses people come up with to complain about people getting shit done. A "principles based" fight is being fought in politics all the time; fat load of good that's doing.
Being a part of the hacker culture means sharing the hacker ethics, including the principle of information-sharing, which is the base of the FSF philosophy. These principles are not set by someone, there are what is meant by the word "hacker". If you do not consider these principles to define what the hacker culture is, then we are talking about different "hacker cultures". I use the common programmer subculture meaning of "hacker":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(programmer_subculture)
Sharing the same ethics means having similar views of good and evil. Seeing something as evil does not mean you must boycott it, yet it is logical though not always practically possible to avoid what you consider to be evil.
In that same vein, code inside a car's sensors isn't open sourced and Toyota had a rather messy couple of months because of it. So boycott cars too ? Build your own car ?
I really don't get the excuses people come up with to complain about people getting shit done. A "principles based" fight is being fought in politics all the time; fat load of good that's doing.