The GNU project explicitly has a moral grounding in the philosophy of free software and tried to produce a UNIX replacement for end-users. Not only for employment as a capital good for firms but also as a consumer good. And they also aimed to "finish" or "complete" the GNU system (with waterfall development being the most common way to produce software at the time). The reason why the GNU project never finished is not because it was too complicated, too unfocussed, but it's because only the work on software productive infrastructure, such as the GNU toolchain, could reproduce itself with interest and support from capitalist firms. Employing free software as an end user simply did not have the same resource allocation or interest.
Capitalism doesn’t require that a profit be made on the production of capital goods because profits are made through the control of the circulation of consumer goods. Anything that decreases the cost of capital consequently increases the potential profit that can be captured through the sale of the goods. Capitalist firms will support the creation of copyleft software in order to employ it in production. However, in most cases, they will not support the creation of copyleft art. Why would they, as art is a consumer good, and the industry is not in the business of giving away consumer goods for free. They are in the business, however, of earning profits by controlling the distribution of consumer goods. Failure to understand the difference between capital demand and consumer demand propagates the myth that the success of free software can be a template for free culture. Under capitalism, only capital can be free. That’s why software can be free, but culture cannot be free without more fundamental shifts in society.
– Free culture requires a free society: copyfarleft: The Telekommunist Manifesto
Reading through the early Free Software Foundation and GNU bulletins this is pretty clear to see, especially in the donation acknowledgements. A significant proportion of the resources being allocated to the FSF were from the vendors of commercial software. And later there is explicit thanks to a multitude of corporations that Stallman has been in direct conflict with ideologically: Intel, Motorola, Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard, NeXT, Sony, IBM, and many more. These early days of free software are a lot similar to the foundations providing governance over FLOSS projects today than most people realise if they removed their imagined nostalgia.
The investment into the GNU project as software productive infrastructure commons becomes even more apparent by the incorporation of Cygnus Solutions from 1989. Cygnus Solutions was a hugely successful and influencial startup that was founded with the explicit purpose of developing and providing support for free software and they were acquired by Red Hat in 1999 in a transaction valued at $674m, or $1.3b in 2026. They supplied many maintainers for the GNU project and by 1991 were doing "over 50% of all GNU toolchain development". Stallman himself recognises the significant impact Cygnus was making to the project when the GNU project appeared to "Stall" in 1993, and Cygnus frequently appeared in the FSF's own bulletins with donation matching campaigns, and advertised their own services as a way to fund and deliver development of the GNU toolchain. Communiques from both the FSF and Cygnus explicitly identify developments on the GNU toolchain that were a product of collaboration between the FSF and Cygnus. John Gilmore, a Cygnus Co-founder, is presently a director of the FSF and in his bio for the FSF states "He co-founded Cygnus Support, the successful commercial free software company that polished and supported GCC, Binutils, and GDB; and invested tens of millions of revenue dollars into engineers improving GNU tools".
The GNU toolchain was not simply produced by the FSF or volunteer contribution. By the end of the 1980's the GNU toolchain was being produced directly by and with the material support of captialist firms. And the GNU project at large was being reproduced by its employment as a capital good in the production of other software. This did not happen in conflict with the principles of free software, it was totally complementary and embraced while the software that was free was employed as software productive infrastructure.