"The GPL and the American Way" (2006) is stallman's rhetorical response to critics who characterize the GPL as un-American or socialist. The essay connects the values embedded in the gpl-v2 and the free-software-definition to themes in American political culture: individual liberty, community self-reliance, and resistance to concentrated power.
The essay's occasion was a recurring strain of criticism from the proprietary software industry and some open source advocates, who characterized the GPL's copyleft mechanism as "viral," "communist," or contrary to free enterprise. stallman counters this framing by arguing that it is proprietary software — software that restricts what users can do with their own computers — that represents a concentration of power inconsistent with American traditions of liberty.
The argument draws on the Jeffersonian tradition in American political thought: that democracy requires citizens who are economically and intellectually self-sufficient, not dependent on and subject to the will of large corporations. Proprietary software creates precisely the dependency relationship that stallman considers anti-democratic. The four-freedoms — to use, study, modify, and redistribute — are presented as extensions of classical liberal freedoms into the digital domain.
The essay is less philosophically rigorous than why-software-should-be-free and is primarily a rhetorical reframing for an American audience. Its significance is that it demonstrates stallman's awareness of the need to address his critics' framing rather than simply asserting the ethical case, and his willingness to argue on cultural terrain rather than purely philosophical terrain.
The essay also implicitly engages with the free-vs-open-source-schism-1998-2007 debate: by connecting free software to American liberty traditions, stallman positions the free-software-foundation's approach as more consistent with American values than the more business-friendly open source framing that eric-raymond and tim-oreilly had promoted. The essay is collected in free-software-free-society and is representative of stallman's many shorter pieces addressing specific political and rhetorical challenges to the free software position.