Charles Cossé wrote:
Statements like "Free Software supports education, proprietary software forbids" [1] https://www.gnu.org/education/ strike me as outrageous and counter-productive.
A proprietary program's license is designed to offer no permission for its users to learn how that program works. Thus proprietary software forbids that education. What should strike you as outrageous is that when schools deploy proprietary software they are telling a student that their education ought not include understanding how their computer (including the software on it) works.
I understand that what is meant there is merely computer science education and not education in general, but even that goes too far.
I don't know how you came to understand that this is somehow restricted to "merely computer science education" nor do I see any such understanding conveyed in https://www.gnu.org/education/. Perhaps you were confused by the mention of reading and writing code.
Historically it was expected that anyone who wanted to scale up their effectiveness in using a program learned a little about how to make a computer repeatedly redo a desired action, hence many users (including non-technical users) would learn a little programming. This did not mean that they had anything to do with computer science education. RMS gave talks about the development of GNU Emacs in which he mentioned that a variant of Emacs written in Multics MacLisp by Bernie Greenberg "proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program." (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html)
If I want to put a new version of my FSF-registed https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/TuxMathScrabble education software online without GPL-ing it, that certainly isn't "forbidding" any education that it was ever intended for, i.e. kids to *use* the software to learn math.
Perhaps not (I can't say for sure without looking into the licenses of the program dependencies), but your intentions shouldn't limit what people can do with the software on their own computers. Also, the GNU GPL is not the only free software license. This license, when defended legally including court action if needed, does an excellent job of preserving a user's software freedom. But there are many other free software licenses from which to choose.
However if this new version were distributed as non-free software, users would not be able to trust that the program isn't doing something they don't want the program to do. Depending on the implementation details, the program might not even run when desired. The best way to ensure that programs do only what one wants them to do is to deal strictly in free software. Then any suspicious activity can be fully looked into and corrected.
It's the same as saying that we should stop eating organically grown food because there's a Window's system involved in the food chain.
No, it's not the same. It's worth remembering that the first programs Stallman wrote for GNU were written on and intended to be run on non-free OSes because non-free OSes were the only available systems at the time. He couldn't wait for a fully-free OS (such as what's listed in the FSF-approved free distros at https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html) to exist so he recognized that a free Unix-like OS is built from free programs and he set out replacing non-free programs with free replacement programs. We have a better situation today than Stallman did when he started GNU because we have fully-free operating systems on which to do our work.
What if life on earth was in danger and couldn't be saved because of FSF-induced gridlock, i.e. because in order to save life on earth we would have to do something "unethical / immoral", namely use non-free software ... at what point does it become acceptable? Why bother with the ethical arguments at all? Just advocate for the transparency and more people will join the cause.
Apparently the ethical arguments are quite compelling and foresee problems excellently, offering potent time-honored responses to modern-day problems. Listen to any of Eben Moglen's speeches and you're sure to hear him say "Stallman was there first" or words to that effect. Perhaps Stallman's most well-known instance of this prescience is his dystopic short story "The Right to Read". We see this coming to pass with DRM-riddled eBooks and TiVOized hardware.
How we treat other people is always a critical concern. As modern society depends more on the computer, how we treat other people via computers becomes increasingly important. These days, it's a life-or-death issue whether people can retain their privacy (the US government uses tracker, aka cell phone, location data to know where to send drone-launched bomb attacks, for example), the Snowden revelations put a fine point on how urgent it is that we help people conduct their lives with more privacy. We all ought to have the freedom to control our own computers and collaborate to improve our society. Quite a lot of what the FSF mentions in https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-schools.html doesn't just apply to schools.
The first part of your quote above is ridiculous but it contains a small germ of a sensible question within it, so I'll try to address that: is it ever ethical to run non-free software? RMS's talks address this directly -- yes, to reverse-engineer it. There's great value in providing interoperable free software replacements for non-free software. Reverse-engineering file formats, communication protocols, and reimplementing programs so they can provide the same functionality (even if they're not drop-in replacements) are all very valuable in the free world so that users can cooperate with other systems without losing their software freedom.