I think the loss of freedoms Richard Stallman described were very much what was already happening around in with the Lisp environment. He was correct in saying this would be repeated as software ate the world.
So roughly the things he was right about were very hard to prevent. Which is partly why he was right.
Stallman came up in the time of mainframes and dumb terminals; so he had mainframe concerns and mainframe critiques.
His relevance now is because we too have shifted to mainframes, but we don't call it mainframe and dumb terminals anymore, we say 'cloud' and 'mobile'. We are rebuilding the future in effigy of our past because it's what we know. Stallman's critiques being relevant again are a testament to the cyclical nature of humanity, like bellbottoms, hightop fades, and vinyl records.
Now if you don't mind, I must iron these JNCO's, times-a-wasting!
I'm not very familiar with the Lisp environment but what Stallman always argued was the logical conclusion of the current (at the time state) of software freedom and redistribution. Nothing being codified was ripe for abuse and misuse, but because the general community consisted of altruistic "doo-gooders" that reality always seemed very far away.
the problem is he also have so f**g wrong opinions about so much s*t, but yes when it come to software he was right all the way, that make follow him a mental gymnastics marathon.
Struggled to parse this, but why would it be a problem that he was wrong about things outside his speciality? A professor of astrophysics being "wrong" about his opinions on whether eating meat is ethical says very little about how right he is on exoplanet mass distributions.
(I happen to agree with Stallman on his non-software views that I know about, so am a bit curious on what you disagree with)
The whole rider is pretty nutty. Even on fairly mundane requirements he manages to sound a bit crazy. "I absolutely refuse to have a break in the middle of my speech. Once I start, I will go straight through." Presumably at some point he said he didn't want to take a break but someone stuck a break in the agenda anyway and he decided to declare his intention to throw a fit if that ever happens again. It reads a little like "100 ways in which RMS cannot handle the unexpected."
It's perfect by legitimate to prefer copyleft, but I struggle to take seriously the idea that a license can be abused by following its terms, particularly when the reason people put stuff under permissive licenses is to let anyone do whatever they want with it without giving back.
