A few comments as postscript:
Opposition to recognising Free Software (as a meaningful communal exercise that draws participation in all sorts of ways) misses a lot. Setting aside, the resort to the same old moralising about moralising and looking at the substantial issues: I think despite the smoke and confusion, there is some general agreement that certain OSS types, especially Eric Raymond, are not representative of what used to be called Free Software and has now become (in name and in the explicit choice of some of its participants) Open Source. Further, no one individual, his views or participation, is critical to understanding what Free Software is and might represent.
Nobody AFAIK (and certainly not I) in this conversation has claimed that Free Software is either what everyone has to use (I have until recently recommended Windows over GNU/Linux, and even now, offer end users a recommendation of either Mac OS X if they can afford it in the short-term -- it pays off in the long-term -- Ubuntu, or Windows XP) or that it will solve the ailments of society. Shag searched the archives for a quote from me to demonstrate that I had made claims about the superiority of Free Software (less buggy, faster release cycles, etc). It seems she couldn't find any, or perhaps in an act of charity she produced a post of mine that reinforces what I have been writing all along. It is possible that I have suggested here or elsewhere that the Free Software model is *technically* better apart from certain very special cases -- this is indeed, arguably, the case, IMO. However, that is not the value of Free Software to the Left.
Finally, as I have mentioned before, there is the same foundational narrow self-interest reductionist/individualist framework that gives flower to justifications of capitalism, that is repeated in criticism of Free Software (shag of course turns this around and claims that arguments for Free Software are moralising individualistic identity politics -- identity as what, I am not sure -- but I think the arguments are all out there, by now).
Free Software is not prescriptive, it *is*. ;-)
--ravi