Free as in freedom has been political since, like, the 1970s. I think the more important question is, when did people come to believe that free as in beer is apolitical?

The position that others should have the freedom to read, use, and adapt source code is inherently a political one. It was never not political.

It shouldn’t be surprising that people within the FOSS movement have political disagreements about precisely what that freedom should entail.

want censorship of not allowing any proprietary software to be mentioned

I personally haven’t run into this, though I have seen people immediately hop into a conversation to say, “You shouldn’t use X! It’s proprietary!” Worst-case scenario, I’ve seen social shaming for using proprietary software. Which I think is to some degree OK? Encouraging and advertising proprietary software is unethical, and I think it’s fine to annoy people into not advertising things like Discord. That’s not censorship, it’s just how relationships work, it’s how people associate.

don’t allow any critiques of the software they use because it’s libre software so there are no faults or bad designs.

Again, I haven’t run into this. I have seen people defend even garbage libre software on the basis that half-broken free code is better (ethically) than wonderful non-free code — which is true!

My attitude is if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.

It only hurts the people that use the proprietary software that was made; now they don’t have control over their PC, and are at the mercy of the developer. Really, all they can do is cross their fingers and hope the dev is friendly and not up to anything unscrupulous. Speaking of which…

I also believe libre software can be used for the surveillance of other people, libre software does not be default mean privacy

Not inherently, obviously! No one actually thinks that free software is a magical silver bullet that vanquishes any possibility of malware, spyware, or anything of the sort. The argument is that these sorts of things are, compared to proprietary software, significantly easier to identify and remedy.

For instance, let’s say you find through some network analysis that a program phones home with suspiciously large payloads. You can’t actually see the contents of the packets as they’re encrypted in some weird format you can’t make heads or tails of. With a proprietary program, you’ve hit a brick wall that’s very hard to climb — you can’t find out what the program is sending, not easily. Your only hope is some back-breaking reverse-engineering work, which probably isn’t feasible unless you’re a professional security researcher. With a libre program, though, you could snoop through the code for anything net-related, and discover much more easily that it’s sending your private keys to the project’s server. Heck, with the libre program you could even remove the malware code and use the program again!

One is leaps and bounds more amicable to privacy and security.

if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.

In my opinion, the point of many open source licensing models is not to protect the author, it’s to ensure that useful modifications to the code are able to be incorporated back into the original software. The licenses accomplish this by requiring those who fork/modify the original code to make their code/modifications public.

This improves the source code and makes it better for everyone.

You can’t take an open source project protected by a GPL license, make improvements, pretend that you did all the work yourself (i.e. not acknowledge the source project on which yours is based), and then attempt to monetize the original code + your improvement.

For example, take Truth Social. Not understand (and/or caring) about the license attached to the Mastodon project, they forked the code, made changes, and then did not acknowledge that they did so. Mastodon had to threaten to sue before they acknowledged that they’d built their platform on open source software.

It’s not about protection of a single developer or even a group. It’s about cooperation to build on the work of others in a fair way.

Open source licensing is responsible for a lot of really useful things that are integral to the daily lives of billions of people. The Linux kernel alone is a massive example. Without that license, there would be no Android, or SteamDeck. Without the BSD license, they would be no OSX/macOS. Without GPL, there would be no AdBlock, no uBlock Origin, no Git, no MySQL, no Ansible, no ProtonMail, and millions of other projects. Most internet servers would probably still be running Windows.

Most of these licenses explicitly say that you can even sell products based on the code - all you have to do is acknowledge the source project, and make your own source code public and available under the same license.

Here’s what Linus Torvalds said about people making money from Linux back in 1993:

The fact that others make money by selling Linux is something that I find mostly amusing, and something which does my ego no end of good. Frankly, I wouldnt want to bother personally, so if somebody else does it, it doesnt hurt me. Its also quite legal by the copyright, and so far I havent seen any major developer stand up and say he doesnt like his code being sold, so I dont see the problem.

I will gladly admit that I don’t use BSD nearly as much as Linux and know far less about it but I think Apple forking and close-sourcing a version of BSD is a pretty good example of what you said doesn’t happen in BSD.

With all that being said, that’s what the BSD license allows for and so there’s no issue with anyone doing so.

Interestingly, Apple as well as the 2 others I mentioned that ship BSD based operating systems sell hardware meant to cooperate nicely with the software that they “give away”. Red Hat and other commercial Linucies? Linuxes? Linnii? often have a support or software license agreement that makes them money.