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Okay so I think we can all agree that proprietary software shouldn't be promoted by the FOSS community. It also seems to be acceptable to promote the use of free software applications on proprietary OSes. So why is there a problem with promoting the use of proprietary applications on free OSes?
The free software community understands that free software gives the user more freedom than proprietary software. Proprietary software confines its users, prohibits them from making changes that would allow everyone to benefit, etc. Free software advocates (myself included) have a habit of claiming that using free (libre) software means the same thing as having freedom.
There has been this argument in the community for a while that using some non-free software to further the Free Software advocacy might be a useful thing. As an example say you have a graphics card that there is no Free Software driver for. Then using a proprietary driver and therefore being able to use a mostly free software OS becomes justifiable.
"...Free software does not have the ability to cause catastrophic damage to the software industry. Proprietary software that spies on and restricts the freedoms of users will be eliminated, but such a change is for the better. More jobs will be created for programmers by companies who want specific changes made to their software.
You might know I'm an hybrid kind of guy: I run Free Software as much as I can, but if I have to run proprietary software to have something that works, and that pays the bills, I will. Lately, I'm getting more and more irked by the “Free Software Fundamentalists” that preach that no proprietary software has the right to exist any longer.
RMS: Thus, the Pirate Party's proposal would give proprietary software developers the use of GPL-covered source code after 5 years, but it would not give free software developers the use of proprietary source code, not after 5 years or even 50 years. The Free World would get the bad, but not the good.
Many of these problems are with volunteer software in general, not Free Software in particular. Hobbyist proprietary programs are often hard to use for many of the same reasons. But the easiest way of getting volunteers to contribute to a program is to make it open source. And while thousands of people are now employed in developing Free Software, most of its developers are volunteers.
Free software is software you can study, modify and share without restriction. But unlike proprietary software, there is no big budget marketing campaign behind it. Rather, people discover it and come to value the freedom it provides. What are these people's motivations for working on free software? Why is community and sharing so important? Why should everyone be using free software?
