That's bullshit. He's not fighting any good fight, and even if he were, he's doing it in a way (very much like PETA) that makes sure he's seen as an unpalatable nutjob by any sane individual. His own extremism will prevent him from accomplishing anything.
Being an articulate advocate for an extreme position is an accomplishment all by itself. It opens people's minds. It makes people smarter.
I think RMS's positions are extreme. I don't share most of his views, including his latest concern about javascript. But I admire the man for knowing his own mind and speaking for his beliefs directly and honestly. You don't get mealy-mouthed bullshit from RMS. No evasions, no fog-of-words, no equivocations. I love him for that.
Also, he is more right than I once thought. When I first read "Right To Read" I thought it was ridiculous, extremist, absurd. Well, after seeing what "they" have tried to do with DRM, I was wrong. I think we are still a long way from that dystopia, and the momentum (right now at least) is in the right direction. But he saw something I didn't, and I try not to forget it when reading other things of his I don't agree with.
He's already accomplished a very great deal, exactly by doing things in the way you say will prevent him from accomplishing anything. Of course, you may believe that this is incidental.
What has he really accomplished? All he has done is shift the focus from desktop development to SAAS models. Why do you think all software companies are doing SAAS now? We can use gpl on the server and not have to release our code. Just like google. You get the best of both worlds. FOSS becomes the infrastructure.
FOSS can't compete in this space because they can't afford the servers - you have to have revenue to make it in SAAS.
I think that SAAS was inevitable anyway. You just can't control what people do with their own machines, unless they're not really their machines in fact, and that makes SAAS one of the few ways to make money from software in the long run. The main effect that Stallman had was to push openness farther and faster than it otherwise would have gone at this point, and to make FOSS a legitimate alternative to completely closed systems. The SAAS world is still better than the world in which the IP regime managed to turn the freedom to read into the war on drugs 2.0.
In many ways, the SAAS world is worse for free software. First, have you lost freedom 0. How many times have you heard about someone being kicked out of Facebook or Twitter, for example? You have lost an unstated freedom - the freedom to control your data as you see fit. (It's a lot easier to reverse engineer software that has your data than pull it off of a company's servers who have a vested interest in locking you in.)
You absolutely have the freedom to control your data. What you can't control is their data about you. You shouldn't be able to control someone else's data, no matter what it's about.
There sure are a lot of Free Software extremists then! Even if you're in the open source camp, you're still part of the Free Software camp to some extent. It seems like a lot of people actually like fighting this fight?
