I’m aware that Richard Stallman had some questionable or inadequate behaviours. I’m not defending those nor the man himself. I’m not defending blindly following that particular human (nor any particular human). I’m defending a philosophy, not the philosopher. I claim that his historical vision and his original ideas are still adequate today. Maybe more than ever.

This is really an important note. I've always maintained that while not every little one of Stallman's ideas are gold, his ideas on things he's got expertise on (especially open-source software) are pretty much on point—even if his ideas are a bit too idealistic and are seen as aspirational ideals rather than calls for action and the fact that a lot of them are painful for ordinary people to follow.

RMS has never stolen my personal data and sold it to criminals, or deprecated my hardware by deliberately throttling its speed. The worst things you can say about him that he's a wierdo and a bit of a fanatic. But, he's a fanatic about personal and societal freedom, which is something everybody should be a fanatic about.

Free software is foundational to our society today. We should be much more aggressively protecting and encouraging it

Very timely article and a good reminder for us to 1) release our software under strong copyleft licenses and 2) do not invest our time in software that does not do .1

I wrote this eulogy to St Stallman already quite a few years ago, with the point that he may be wrong, but he is wrong in the right way, and that is a good thing. Still relevant:

St Stallman: A Hero of the Highest Order

Not this man pls, he is too radical. No, im not talking about free software, im talking about Richard Stallman the person. He ate dirt from his foot in public lecture, shout at the crowd, throw water bottle. I mean, he is not the one and only person who has an ideal, the way he acts is rude to say the least.

Let's get back to the free software, GPL and FSF, i think it will work wonders when we have difficult time securing basic human rights, and save us from losing more to large corps and power. However, the legal system has to function according to the GPL to properly constraints large corps. With that being said, GPL is a powerful communism license or mechanism to fight the large corps and power. It is 100% free for all, but it is not 100% free in any sense. If you develop a software base on GPL licensed software, closed source, you can be charged and legally ask you for the source code. It is also radical af if you think about it, except that it is nowhere near as relevant as what we have to fight for right now, which is free software.

Really good piece but I think revolving the subject around a person does it a disservice. Surely he can't be the only one who thought of forbidding for profit use of foss. Honestly I'd be much more interested in reading this if the author wrote it around his own experience.

Forgive me if I trivialize, but we should not mourn too much: the obvious solution is to pirate it all. Do not waste time and energy for reinventing the wheel in the form of writing open source software. These resources can be used better for Revolution. Instead of diving into exhausting dispute and overintellectual arguments of Stallman, just do what said Marx: seize the means of production. That is, fucking pirate it. It is simple as that.