Love him. His one hot take, which was completely misconstrued by the Twitter mafia, doesn’t take away from the fact that he’s been right for 50 years straight.

We’d still be in the IT stone ages without him. If you don’t believe me just look at the software they used to charge money for in the 1990’s.

Microsoft would have likely taken over the Web Server market just as they had the Desktop market, without him. The internet would be a fraction of the size it is now.

I wish his license had allowed for more equitable distribution of profits. It’s a crying shame companies can build billion dollar enterprises off of open source software and not pay devs a penny. It’s a problem that continues to hobble libre open source software all the way into today. But he’s stated he’s not a socialist so I can’t hold that against him too much.

It’s GNU Richard Stallman, not Richard Stallman.

He’s neat :)

I’m a woman, and have talked to him via email 2-3 times in the last 20 years. While I’ve met Torvalds, Jobs, and others in the industry when I was living in the Bay Area and working as a tech journalist, I never got to meet RMS – only via email. I think he has social issues, maybe he’s on the autistic side or something similar. I don’t think he understands clearly some of the things he’s saying when it comes to social stuff. He doesn’t get a pass, but at the same time, he’s a bit different as an individual, so that needs to be taken into account. When it comes to software, his heart is in the right place, and in fact, if it was me, I’d be even more strict (or more “Free” – depends how you see it), with GPL.

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https://stallman.org/

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First, don’t listen to his opinions on anything that isn’t about comouters and software. He doesn’t have a good track record there.

Do pay attention to his takes on technology and freedom, there’s a lot of food for though there.

I was at one of his talks recently, and he’s definitely and eccentric fellow. When it comes to free software he’s a die hard extremist, and I have a feeling he knows and to a certain extent he does that on purpose. Case in point, he mentioned how he refused hearing aids and would similarly refuse a pacemaker as there are none running on free software.

As such, that’s how I take his ideas about free software: a good philosophy taken to the extreme to showcase what’d be possible if we went all in on that, and the dangers of not doing it. Definitely not something that can work for everyone, or a realistic pathway to a world of free software.

I do think, however, that someone like him is fundamental to advance the cause of free software, even if no one takes him literally and emulates his way of life.

I’m not gonna refuse a life saving treatment or device because it runs on propriety software, but I am willing to sacrifice some convenience to use a free software alternative when available.

I think he may have been right.

He is one of the people ever in the open-source movement.

Unironically one of the greatest people in the technology space of the last 40 years, in the sense of accomplishments and impact on the world. I’m talking specifically about the free software movement, copyleft, and the GNU GPL. The world would be a much worse place without those accomplishments. The fact that a lot of his life’s work is erroneously attributed to the kernel guy doesn’t change that.

As a thinker, absolutely brilliant and unfortunately misunderstood. He espouses radical ideas about the relation of users to the technology they use that are still relevant to issues of today (e.g. enshittification, planned obsolescence, surveillance capitalism, and so on). It goes far beyond “you can look at source code to see if there’s bugs or spyware in it.” There’s a reason “Stallman was right” is a meme.

As a leader and a figurehead I’m not convinced he’s as effective. Regardless of the coordinated smear campaign from a few years ago (in which it was erroneously said “he defended Jeffrey Epstein” or “he blamed Epstein’s victim” or some such), he has demonstrated behaviors that alienate people and people who have worked for/with him (e.g. FSF employees and GNU maintainers) have said he is not a good boss. His comment about “voluntary pedophilia” is inexcusable, even though he has said he no longer stands by it. The Epstein association was fabricated from a quote taken out of context, but I don’t think it was wise to even join that discussion. The glibc manual abort() joke incident from 2018 is probably what convinced me of this - not so much that the joke is bad (humor is subjective) but that multiple developers objected to it and said it made them uncomfortable, yet he “pulled rank” and insisted it be left in (although as of now it seems to be absent). I believe his intentions were good (the “joke” isn’t actually about abortion as such, but rather the US government “global gag rule” suppressing discussions of such) but forcing it in against the protests of the community was inappropriate in my opinion.

Overall despite the above I feel he’s done more good than harm to the world, however, I’m not sure how much more good he can do in his position. I feel like the term “Stallmanism” would be an apt term for his thought but because of the above I feel leery associating myself with the guy.

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he was right about the computer stuff

Pointless hasn’t been the same since he left. Xander looks so lonely