> For one he managed to keep the whole GNU project true to its values by being someone people listen on the subject. How many other people do you know you can guarantee not to "monetize" and sell out such a huge project to a highest bidder in the meantime?
Quite a lot of them actually. In a sense, that is the big advantage that free software (but really the copyleft, since let's be honest that's Stallmans most meaningful contribution to the current ecosystem that everyone who does use FOSS uses) offers.
If someone ends up being a malicious, self-serving actor who sells out their project to the highest bidder, the copyleft is there to ensure that even if the copyright is signed away using an CAA (which if you want to argue about that, I would recommend you don't do it in a thread involving the GNU/FSF since they have notoriously bad and outdated CAA systems from what I heard), you can still keep that project going.
From projects such as Emby getting forked to Jellyfin, from Owncloud to Nextcloud, from the long history of adblockers getting sold to big corporations and then other maintainers stepping in to fork them back; THAT is the big strength of FOSS and copyleft. The idea that a sufficiently big and developed project can never truly "die", even when it changes hands. Sure the road is rocky sometimes (ffmpeg vs avconv was a case of maintainer drama that led to forks and eventually withered away), but that is what makes it worth it in the end.
None of that really falls back on Stallman's seemingly singular attempt to claim ownership on the entirety of FOSS. It does on the countless developers, project maintainers and the like who don't sell out and in the event that one does, that their damage is limited.
> You do realise that his role is not so much being a coder nor even a manager, but being what in business is sometimes called "a visionary". Thankfully there are enough coders and managers involved to have GNU and Foss going. The value of Stallman in the 80s and earlier was not just in the code he wrote but the ideas he managed to implement in our collective consciousness by doing that. Now more than ever we need someone we can count on to offer advice and leadership that has no agenda other than the original values.
Except he's also pretty much *the* public speaker for the FSF and their main PR person. And at that role he is just an objective failure. There is a constant stream of PR disasters. I am by no means a PR person, but you don't have to be an expert at something to note when someone is doing something really wrong.
We don't need Stallman anymore. There's plenty of great voices and developers in Free Software. Stallman is what, 68? He's past retirement age in my country. He won't be around forever. If anything, we should be looking to successors for him. Both on the PR and the visionary end. Stallman should have been put on a backseat by the FSF years ago. Instead, the organization has turned itself into a bloated singularity around the opinions of one man, backed up by a not insignificant amount of Free Software projects to give it weight.
> What is it that he actually said that was so "horrible"? Are you sure you are actually talking about what he said or have your opinions been formed by lies? Read this and tell me what is so horrible in his actual stance on the subject: https://www.wetheweb.org/post/cancel-we-the-Web
Redefining sexual assault in a way that would exclude many victims of sexual assault, reiterating his own stance that he thinks the age of consent is meaningless. Just about the only thing the media got wrong was because Vice (which yeah, is a shitty outlet) went for a cheap headline that most news sites copied. I have linked below for you the original email exchanges if you want to check them.[1]
> Please do enlighten me on what Stallman's stance on pedophilia is? But please use actual text written by him (not ripped out of context) rather than he said she said.
He's since walked these back as stated before, but here's the two biggest ones: [2][3]
[1]: http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-0913201914205...
[2]: https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun...
[3]: https://www.stallman.org/archives/2012-nov-feb.html#04_Janua...