Comment by bcaa7f3a8bbc

Or I would rather say... Yes, "free software" has an ideological intention, that is, to make the software free for all its users, to protect it from exploitation using a strong license, and eventually leads to some forms of social change in the software world, as in "when we have enough free software, we'll kick out those dirty licenses, ever more, hackers, ever more".

But "free software" itself is only the means to an end, it's a technical and legal tool to accomplish these ideological intentions, and as a tool, it's a collection of code published under a license scheme. When the developers served their duties by providing the source to the users, the work is done. The developers have no responsibilities to implement anything for its users.

On the other hand, if someone writes free software because they wants some forms of social change, in this sense, the intention is not solely developing free software, but to pursuit an ideology though the development of free software. And this is done by a group of people in a community, like Debian, then they must be doing whatever is needed for this goal, i.e. be guided by the needs of the users.

In conclusion, "free software" is not about you, a free software community can be, and often is about you. But it is also legitimate if it's not, in the end, it depends on the community. Some people only care about themselves, some projects just want mainly the software, but may also care about users freedom, some projects want social changes, while others focused on improving the current status of a specific technology. There are overlaps, but there are priorities as well.