If you're talking about people making fun of his weight or appearance or other strange behaviors, then I agree.
But RMS didn't descend from Mount Sinai with the Four Freedoms carved into stone by the finger of God or anything. He's just a man with an opinion, and his ideas are not above criticism regardless of what he's done for the community.
No. But he did live in a community of sharing that was destroyed by proprietary software and he has spent 45 years developing free software. So many should pay his ideas more respect than they do because they like to make it about his person life.
This entire thing we have going wouldn't be possible without the GNU project. And GNU would never have happened without RMS. The man is a giant. A giant with huge glaring flaws, but every single one of us that did anything with unix-like OSes in the past 30 years owes the man.
Sadly I fear that much like Peirce, Stallman will be forgotten by history because of the acumen of his primary detractors.
Wouldn’t the BSDs have happened sooner or later without GNU, and without Linus? I’m grateful for the contributions of both men (who by the way have expressed quite different ideological stances), but I still think it’s an interesting question.
Maybe yes. But BSD was encumbered by the AT&T nonsense for approximately a third of the free software community’s history. That’s a long time to sit around and do nothing.
> But he did live in a community of sharing that was destroyed by proprietary software ...
Outside software industry and computer enthusiasts no one has even heard of RMS. As for Gatesian Basic conundrum [0] of the past he could as well been forgotten if not for emergence of Linux, maybe he should be lucky be called the father of open source although I understand that he considers it to be an insult.
The common Windows10 user might be okay in having no control over their computing and merely licencing their OS [1], but I would argue that's because they don't comprehend what they're agreeing on. It's sad that computer literacy is that astonishingly low. Agreeing to some entity to have the ultimate power of your computing environment is like having to agree to someone else to have the power over the fabric of your though processes. We're still in the digital middle ages, feudal society where MS, FB, Google have the final say in the spheres of their domination exactly like the churches or kings would decide over their people.
