The answer is quite likely to be yes. But then when you consider who is the primary typical user of a spreadsheet and ask yourself "are they likely to learn Lisp?" then the answer is no.
For software I've written while working at companies I didn't have control over the license choice, but for that which I've written voluntarily nearly all of it (and there's quite a laundry list now) is under GPL or AGPL. This is because, as some other comments have mentioned, I want any other users of the software to have the same capabilities to change it as I did. I don't want there to be secret proprietary versions which then get distributed in closed form denying the potential for participation.
The ability of users to have genuine control over their systems has been under sustained attack for a long time. I may be only one developer but at least I can make a small ding in the dark empire of bad software practices.
"If you live here, even if you are the poorest person in the country, you are rich beyond the dreams of half the population of the world"
Really? Have you ever been in The Work Programme? Have you ever visited a food bank? Have you ever had neighbours pleading with you for food for their children because they have no money? You can prefer to live inside of a cosy bubble of ignorance if you wish, but this is the UK in 2016.
The answer to all of your questions is approximately yes (names vary). I've also done a lot of work to address these problems when they come up, and I've read the data on the current state of the economy. How many of these things have you done?
Have you ever had people pleading with you for food/money and, instead of berating people on the internet, got them into the drugs treatment programme that they desperately needed? Have you ever got people to correctly file appeals when the jobcentre made a mistake and didn't give them the money they were entitled to? Have you ever taught people the skills they need to be productive members of society and provide for themselves?
Because I've also done all of those things on multiple occasions, and I think I have a much better sense of the problems that we face than you do. I also think that your refusal to admit these are the real problems and put work into fixing them is one of the major reasons why we still have them. It's very easy to say "I want more, it's not fair", and much harder to figure out why things aren't working when there's plenty for everybody and get something done about that.
The BBC is very much a state run organization. The people who ultimately decide what happens to the BBC - The BBC Trust - are appointed by "queen in council", which in practice means government ministers.
I think GNU Social should be pretty scalable, and that's because it's not a centralized paradigm with all users in one titanic database. Currently I'm running my own instance (one user on the server) and then federating with the rest, so that kind of setup should be scalable to the size of the web.
It's just not a centralized paradigm. Joining an existing server means you'll be subject to whatever moderation policy the admin has. Or you can just run your own server and then federate with the rest, as I do.
There needs to be a much better solution to the use case of having to jettison from an existing federation that might be disappearing soon (or where the admin changes the rules and you no longer want to be there).
Currently, the only fix is to create a brand new account on a different federation and start again.
Again that may just be the wrong paradigm. If you are especially concerned about disappearance of a server then just run your own installation. This is partially why I'm making debian packages for GNU Social, to make that process easy.
There isn't really any "different federation". You just follow whoever you want to follow, regardless of what server they're on.
An agent which does not have a place or time is not recognisable as being autonomous, or capable of recognising others as such.