Comment by Hendrikto

> You think Stallman and Torvalds did what they did because they were neutral?

Is that a joke? Both have made it abundantly clear that yes, this is their stance. Let me quote literally the FIRST freedom RMS put into writing:

> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.

This is explicitly free and neutral. "for any purpose", no restrictions. Linus endorsed this stance by licensing the kernel under GPLv2, and has repeatedly upheld this view ever since, making the argument again and again that he does not want to restrict what people do with the project.

Even in his famous announcement message, before adopting GPL, Linus said:

> I'm doing a (free) operating system

Then he licensed Linux with his own free license, before adopting GPL.

> Full source must be available (and free)

Freedom is and has always been important to both RMS and Linus.

> If I dont like the direction an open source project is taking and I fork it. Does make it less free?

No. In fact it is one of the freedoms guaranteed by free software.

> By your line of thought project should all have MIT licenses because you should not add restrictions

There are people making that argument, but there are also people arguing that guaranteeing freedom requires more conditions. There is no real consensus on this question.