ESR has put up a brilliant (IMHO) blog post about the importance of essentially "picking your battles". He says: A common failure mode in human reasoning is to become too attached to
theory, to the point where we begin ignoring the reality it was intended to describe. The way this manifests in ethical and moral reasoning is that we tend to forget why we make rules – to avoid harmful consequences. Instead, we tend to become fixated on the rules and the language of the rules, and end up fulfilling Santayana’s definition of a fanatic: one who redoubles his efforts after he has forgotten his aim.
I think this is often quite true of open source -- that we really don't * need* open source everything. He defines a vague scale in various dimensions for cataloguing the harms of closed source software, and concludes that while some software types (desktop and smartphone operating systems, communications and productivity tools) really *must* be open source to protect our freedoms as computer users, it isn't quite so necessary for others (microwave firmware, games), and therefore, it is not so hypocritical for a free software supporter to play proprietary games.