Maybe it's a legitimate argument but it is also a imho naive one. Lobbying works when you have big money backing you up, when you represent big interests. Or when you represent a looooot of people, when you have voting power backing you up. Fsf and the free software movement have neither. Look at Mozilla's action... Don't seem to be really effective. What was effective in Mozilla's action was getting people to use free software by backing it up with money i.e make free sexy/polished. But it seems like a secondary path for Mozilla today. They dumped thunderbird when they could have financed usability of PGP encryption way sooner. They dropped Firefox OS and now someone else is making money off of it. Firefox sync is not seeing much development so people are not in a hurry to give up non privacy respecting alternatives.
The main difference between simply open source software and free software is a stance about whether an alliance is possible/beneficial with the software industry (money flows in) or not (no money).
I don't have a strong opinion on the matter. I am glad open source is so ubiquitous and to see the pool of "commons" aggrandizing but I still don't trust big tech to really have user freedom at heart so I support the FSF.
What free software lacks is money really, not ineffective political lobbying.
I agree that the argument is naive. It entirely relies on the idea that government regulation (or more importantly legislators) are held responsible for issues, so therefore they need to be lobbied/pressured/made to perform.
Free software (in the FSF sense) has been able to be created entirely because a large number of programmers have positions/salaries/roles that allow them to do work outside those roles that has benefit or relevance to other people.
Linus was a student when he started Linux. RMS was a grad/postdoc/researcher etc. comp.lang.c had a lot of readers (and writers) that were in the academic establishment that had the freedom (both time and money) to develop and share useful software.
The main difference between simply open source software and free software is a stance about whether an alliance is possible/beneficial with the software industry (money flows in) or not (no money). I don't have a strong opinion on the matter. I am glad open source is so ubiquitous and to see the pool of "commons" aggrandizing but I still don't trust big tech to really have user freedom at heart so I support the FSF.
What free software lacks is money really, not ineffective political lobbying.