My theory is this is HN-specific - and what you saw on slashdot was slashdot-specific.
Because HN started as part of YC its culture really likes VC-backed startups. And we think VCs want the kind of huge returns that are seen more often by closed source companies - they want to back the next Microsoft or Apple or Google or Facebook or Paypal or Amazon, not the next Red Hat or Canonical or MySQL.
It wouldn't make much sense for people to believe free software is a moral imperative, while aspiring to launch huge closed-source companies.
I see a similar lack of enthusiasm for free software everywhere, not just in HN (maybe confirmation bias), in Lobsters, Reddit, IRC. I really think that Unix in Apple and Android has given us what Steinbeck calls "a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction."
It's good enough for most people, we have some Unix under the hood if we go looking for it, free software has mostly won. Or something. I really don't know. I miss the rebels of yesteryear.
The impression I get is that it's mostly the opposite: people have mostly given up on the notion of having all (or majority of) software being Free, and see that more and more as a pipe dream. Hence they don't want to "waste" their enthusiasm on something that feels like a (literal) utopia now.
There's a lot of reasons combined to get people there:
* seeing corporate behemoths everywhere that want to keep critical software proprietary
* many more people wanting to monetise their own software, and seeing that GPL-ing software offers only a few (and
not-universally-applicable) monetisation strategies
* seeing that the "all bugs are shallow" and "everybody pitching in will make Free software the best there is" turn out not really true in practice
* seeing that in practical terms, having access to read and modify source code means nothing in 99% of cases because of software overload and others' code being so hard to get into that it's often practically impenetrable.
Not to say that I agree with all or any of these completely, but it's easy to see such a multi-pronged attack pushing back hard against the FSF's message. Further reducing FSF's ability to spread the message is the widespread character assassination of RMS as an "insane, overly idealistic, and rude slob" that has been going on for at least a decade.
As someone that read the Halloween documents non-stop overnight, it makes me a bit sad too.
Maybe it's just that the rebels these days are quieter and more establishmentarian, because they have /become/ the establishment. TBF, I quite like this state of affairs and don't miss the rebellion-for-the-sake-of-rebellion attitudes of yesteryear.
Because HN started as part of YC its culture really likes VC-backed startups. And we think VCs want the kind of huge returns that are seen more often by closed source companies - they want to back the next Microsoft or Apple or Google or Facebook or Paypal or Amazon, not the next Red Hat or Canonical or MySQL.
It wouldn't make much sense for people to believe free software is a moral imperative, while aspiring to launch huge closed-source companies.