There's a great deal to be said on message-crafting. Leave that up to more moderate folks, like ESR (and yeah, that kind of tells you how extreme rms is, that Eric Scott Raymond is a moderate).
Stallman and the FSF are basically the platinum standard by which all free software rhetoric is judged. It is of utmost importance that they not bridge one iota. They are the reference implementation for what it means to have truly free software, what it means to value philosophy over culture, and to value ideals over pragmatism.
That's cost them, and yeah, that doesn't make them popular. But you know what? Their track record has been pretty correct. The number of infringements and abuses of power they have warned against have only multiplied--and will continue to multiply.
They're going to lose, of course, because the people they're trying to help don't want help. The people whose freedoms they hold dear forsake them and mock them and sell out at the smallest sign of convenience. It's a forgone conclusion--so, they might as well fail as martyrs instead of salesmen.
I want to upvote the first two paragraphs and downvote the second two, so I'll comment instead :-)
Stallman's ideological intransigence is the backbone of the free software world. If he was even a little bit "reasonable", free software would have been nibbled to death by ducks by now. Instead it's still going strong after thirty years.
Freedom isn't reasonable, and there will always be a few people who go to unreasonable lengths to defend it. This is a good thing, and Stallman has managed to do so by not killing anyone, not overthrowing anything, but by building something unequivocally positive and good.
Free software is going to win, of course, because it will never go away. Companies are transient. Ownership is temporary. Freedom is persistent, so long as the rule of law is operative. GPL is still the dominant open-source license: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2012/02/15/decline-of-the-gpl/ (or it was as of 2008-ish)
The thing that gives free software power is precisely the freedom Stallman baked in: the freedom of developers to change the code. A decade from now any given proprietary system will be a pile of undifferentiated hexidecimal sludge, but we'll still be able to compile the Linux kernel from source, on architectures that aren't even invented yet.
For all that he rants about users using non-free software, the core freedom Stallman is defending is developer's freedom. To paraphrase George Orwell, "Freedom is the freedom to modify source. Grant that, and everything else follows."
> If he was even a little bit "reasonable", free software would have been nibbled to death by ducks by now.
If he had been flexible in the 1980s and 1990s, maybe.
Once the practical case for free software was established by facts on the ground, free software has been on a pretty secure footing whether or not the Free Software movement (or the FSF and Stallman) was flexible, or even present.
People have always said that “now” is the time to be flexible, since “now” we are on a secure footing. Constantly. Since the beginning. You will excuse me if I don’t believe it this time, either.
I don't recall anyone staying that in, say, 1990, nor do I remember any facts that would have supported that if they did, like many leading firms releasing free software without compulsion, either where they were the original copyright holder or where the upstream was under a permissive license so that they had no obligation to release anything, with thriving community driven free software projects, with major firms frequently contributing or sponsoring, under permissive free software licenses in many application domains.
The fact that the pragmatic case for free software has been made and well-avcepted is quite evident.
I do. It started when the BSD project made its initial free release, and really got going when BSD became a runnable OS in its own right. Ever since then, people have been saying that the GNU project is unnecessary since BSD exists.
The problem is that ESR and the "open source" people have a fundamentally different understanding of software freedom than do the FSF. I'm not judging one over the other, but I think it's a mistake to conflate the two. It's not simply the narcissism of small differences; they have fundamentally incompatible motives, even if their means can be seem as congruent.
> The problem is that ESR and the "open source" people have a fundamentally different understanding of software freedom than do the FSF.
No, if you read the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition, you'll find that there understanding of software freedom is pretty much identical.
Their ideas of the moral purpose of advocating for software freedom and/or the most effective tactics of advocating for software freedom differ, certainly.
I think you make an interesting and very valid point that "Stallman and the FSF are basically the platinum standard by which all free software rhetoric is judged".
That said, it's unfortunate that the standard for free software rhetoric is shrill, conspiratorial, and purposefully marginal.
Most successful organizations realize the value of aesthetics. There's a good reason that the World Wildlife Organization has a panda as its logo and not, lets say, a water buffalo.
Stallman and the FSF are basically the platinum standard by which all free software rhetoric is judged. It is of utmost importance that they not bridge one iota. They are the reference implementation for what it means to have truly free software, what it means to value philosophy over culture, and to value ideals over pragmatism.
That's cost them, and yeah, that doesn't make them popular. But you know what? Their track record has been pretty correct. The number of infringements and abuses of power they have warned against have only multiplied--and will continue to multiply.
They're going to lose, of course, because the people they're trying to help don't want help. The people whose freedoms they hold dear forsake them and mock them and sell out at the smallest sign of convenience. It's a forgone conclusion--so, they might as well fail as martyrs instead of salesmen.