I think you’ve got part of the answer in the post, as to why people apparently don’t care about Freedom 0.
I think people do care, but only for the amount of exercise of that freedom that actually affects them. And, by and large, most proprietary software provides that (though maybe not if one chooses to abide by the letter of the EULA).
For instance, most Windows software that I’ve bought can be installed on any Windows machine that I own, regardless of what the license says about number of computers. And Microsoft has put a significant amount of effort into making sure that old software runs on new operating systems – sure, not perfect, but by and large it’s true. My favorite image editor is one I bought nine years ago; it still works quite well, just like it did. And that’s a pretty extreme case; most people would have chucked it for something newer by now.
(And, as an aside, it’s not like something being free software prevents it from getting abandoned, either. I use Zinf to play my music. GPL-licensed. Last update was several years ago, and I suspect it’s dead.)
It will be interesting to see how this shakes out as DRM software gets better – whether companies will actually use it to restrict Freedom 0 for their users in ways that impact what those users actually want to do (such as sharing from computer to computer), and what that will do to sales. I suspect the result is going to be about like what happened with dongles – sure, it’s technically a great solution and completely stops nickel-and-dime piracy, but consumers hate it and the net result is a hit to the bottom line rather than a benefit.
It’s also interesting, looking at the occasional story of businesses that get burned by the BSA – which is sort of the ultimate DRM, when it comes into play. I don’t know if there are enough “never again; I’m going completely with free software” anecdotes to make up data or not, but there might be. I suspect the personal-computing situation and the business-compution situation are rather different.
(The business story I’ve heard most is, “We care, but this is what our business partners use, so we have to use it too, even though we’d rather not.” Or, simply, that the benefits outweigh the costs.)
Meanwhile, I’d be interested in seeing statistics for supported lifetime of free-software programs versus proprietary ones – that is, for what length of time can one get a new version of the program that’s backwards-compatible with the old data files and is essentially a new, improved version of the old thing? The theory of “there’s always a path forward” is nice, but does it actually map into benefits? Going back to Zinf, I can’t make it a modern shiny application on my own; if the community isn’t there, it’s as dead as my copy of Macromedia Picture Publisher – and, if in practice the free software is more likely to get abandoned, I’d be better off going with the software that is likely to have a practical future.
But a lot of the comparison isn’t among the average programs; it’s Word versus Open Office, Photoshop, and so forth. Even if those get abandoned, the user base is large enough that there will still be compatible paths forward. It’s not really about programs anyway; it’s about data, and work habits.
