They don't have to convince developers, they just have to convince the general population. I've had several discussions about open source with people who don't care about coding and it's hard to untangle the misinformation they receive from the media. They get talking points from authorities that they don't understand so they will always double down on it. For example, rhetoric relating open source to communism is humiliating to discuss. For proprietary evangelists, the cruelty is the point.
"For example, rhetoric relating open source to communism is humiliating to discuss"
All Open Source isn't communism. The GPL license is a form of digital communism. It forces you to open source any additions made to open source code as a way to make things 'equal'.
I'm glad it and Stallman are mostly in the dust heap of history and better licenses, like the MIT, BSD, and Apache have gotten popular.
The irony is that the only open source projects surviving long term are funded by very large corporations.
If you don't care about creating code, none of this should really matter.
> The irony is that the only open source projects surviving long term are funded by very large corporations.
The real irony is that what is probably the most important open source project in history has a GPL license.
Dust heap of history my ass.
Reciprocal sharing is not "digital communism". If it was, then the mere existence of the public domain and the fact that copyrights expire is "delayed communism".
The GPL was absolutely necessary in getting corporate America to play ball with FOSS projects instead of merely extracting value from them. It's also the only reason why embedded vendors even release anything at all. The licenses on Linux and busybox require it. The fact that permissive licenses are more common for certain kinds of FOSS projects does not mean the GPL is dead - far from it.
Stallman is more or less irrelevant, but that's because Stallman let GNU become irrelevant. Without GNU, he's a washed-up has-been from the MIT AI Lab with a startlingly low Epstein number[0], a chain of disturbing accusations, and a foundation that acts like his personal sockpuppet. The reason why companies still play ball with Linux and it's GPL license is because Linux continues to deliver a Free and free kernel worth using at the low low price of "please send back your source code changes". Which, again, is not "digital communism", it's just a good bargain.
[0] Erdos number but for pedophiles