care to explain what you mean?

richard stallman may disingenously call the copyleft licensing as "idealist pragmatism" but it has nothing of idealism. It is a materialistic approach through and through, they studied the current intellectual property laws and designed the copyleft license to use intellectual property laws for their goals!

open source =/= free software, richard stallman extensively wrote about this. i think you may be confusing open source with free software.

AFAICT Chromium isn't free software, it's BSD-3 and a few other non-copyleft licenses. GPLv3 seems fairly solid to me

The success of the Linux OS (operating system) that give rise to the Android mobile OS and the WordPress are prove that artificially scare goods like software does not need monetary incentive for innovation and production. Artificially scarce goods like software and knowledge have cost to serve the first consumer but not the other subsequent consumers which creates problem in traditional market incentive system that rely on high variable cost and no fixed cost. The incentive system that makes Linux OS succeed, under the rule that any improvement to the OS must be shared with others, incentivize development with the self-consumption by prosumer (people who produce and consume a good) and the ability to gain any benefit that others made to the OS.

The Liberals tried to use government intervention like intellectual copyright law to force the artificially scarce goods to function like private goods, so that they can operate under the principle of the market economy, but the Capitalist government interventions always backfired with legal loopholes that allow a person to take ownership of intellectual work by other people like the other hypocritical government interventions by the Liberals against the free market.

Gnu has thought this through in their definition & clarification of the four essential freedoms. It’s worth a read.

Haaave you met GPL, it's related licenses, and copyleft, yet?

GPL and similar licenses which enshrine these four freedoms are legally actionable. You could argue how actively a bourgeois law apparatus respects them is dubious. But I don't know what you mean by idealistic here. Are you saying that the four freedoms do not guarantee freedom in reality?

This is similar to Marx's critique of freedom under liberalism as merely 'formal'. The problem is the gap between that can exist between a nominal right and practical exercise of that right.

This kind of problem is common with rights-based approaches to justice and can be witnessed with human rights broadly. Its identification isn't unique to Marxism, either; liberals sometimes get at it with the phrase 'equality of opportunity', for example. To say that opportunities can be unequal (and that this is a problem) is to admit that justice requires the guarantee of more than just formal rights. I'd say this a problem that has shaped liberal 'privilege' discourse as well: privilege is just such a kind of gap that allows (or constitutes?) the persistence of injustice in the face of nominal/formal/legal equality.

Like in other cases, I'd say that the four fundamental software freedoms get at something genuinely important, and that it's better to have them, even just formally, than not. But like with other freedoms and rights, it's easy to conceive of them too 'thinly'. They need to be fleshed out with a more general awareness of power relations and of the practicality of their own exercise.

To some extent, that awareness of software freedom as situated within power relations is actually already present in free software discourses, which talk often of things like subordination, domination, subjugation, etc., from the start. Unsurprisingly, that dimension is largely absent from the 'open-source' perspective.