Certainly no downvotes from me. I spent more than a decade on the "RMS is a dirty f'ing hippie who will bring down the wonderful open source movement with his intemperate antics." side of the argument too (though to be fair: I never bought into the "Copyleft is an unreasonable infringement on freedom" nonsense that some of my compatriots did).
The guy was right about basically everything. The anti-tivoization provisions that the FSF was talking about more than a decade ago, and that appeared in a usable license almost 6 tears ago, would absolutely have had a place in preventing this nonsense. Yet no one uses it, because RMS is a dirty f'ing hippie.
(And yes, I know the real world is complicated, and that corporate sponsors of copyleft development "refuse" to use the GPLv3 and cannot be convinced. The same thing was said about copyleft itself 15 years ago. The commercial world adapted. They'll figure this out too if we demand it.)
It's probably RMS's single mindedness and inflexibility that allowed the FSF to see this coming down the pipe. I now feel naive that I thought this was Chicken Little stuff and irrelevant to most users.
For the longest time, I used to think that rms was insane. Everybody did. It was just, "Oh, did you hear about Stallman's interview on [insert website/news/channel here]?" "No, what crap did he say now??"
I think now people are realizing how he was right. I don't agree with everything that comes out of his mouth, like the whole GNU/Linux thing, or how he uses an inferior computer because it doesn't have a proprietary BIOS. But, now we see the government in bed with Hollywood, we see them in bed with Big Business, and we see them in bed with the big tech companies.
Our government is a slut. The only way we can get it to do what we want and not what it wants is by expressing our opinions about it. rms may be quite vocal about his opinions, but without any sort of noise, the flame will die out. He knows this, and that's why we think he's crazy.
Too bad ~99% of the general masses and public have been irreversibly deceived by the bipartisan system to even think about a possible alternative (The Green Party, Libertarian movement, etc.).
RMS follows the archetype of the mad philosopher in the marketplace. Unpleasant appearance, unpleasant message, spends much of his time taking pot-shots at the respected players... but in the end people eventually figure out he was probably onto something. It is almost certain he will never be universally respected, but we will remember him.
Of course that is a bit of historic revisionism through selection bias, the people with a similar appearance who aren't onto something are soon forgotten, but I think it is becoming clear that RMS will not be playing that role.
Another important lesson especially for techies is that being right isn't enough. You also have to persuade people and sell your idea, and in some ways that is the hardest part. I have often thought rms should step down and let Eben Moglen do the talking.
This really would be ideal, but I'm not sure Moglen has the time to both run the legal effort and run the org and FSF legal really does an awesome job. I think maybe what the FSF needs more than anything is a NEW champion, someone younger perhaps without the baggage of RMS that would be able to relate to a new generation of devs without compromising the FSF agenda. I don't have any suggestions to this point. It might take a new organization to make this happen. I hate to suggest "forking" the FSF because that's probably the worst outcome short of a total dissolution, but they desperately need new voices.
