Thanks for making that point. I want to make perfectly clear that I have a tremendous amount of respect for RMS and everything that he's done. By no means would I recommend that he compromise his ideology or 'go corporate.'
All I'm saying is: almost everybody at his talk (already a self-selecting group) was put off by the tone and extremist nature of his delivery. His message got lost, and that sucks - it's an important message.
But his eccentricity and radicalism are what made the fsf and gnu possible in the first place. Anyone with his skills in the 70s turned into a millionaire by the end of the 80's. Instead he decided to lock himself up and write emacs, gcc, glibc etc and give them away for free living on donations and minimum wage freelancing.
The thing is that you can't call him on his eccentricity and radicalism when this is exactly what got him there in the first place. Sure, he's not business friendly but we already have very powerful entities such as google advocating foss in a business friendly way. I still find his speeches entertaining and things like swindle and digital restrictions don't offend me, they're actually refreshing compared to the usual politically correct speeches.
I dunno. Couldn't you use that same sort of logic to argue against criticizing any great/commendable person? We shouldn't criticize them because those character traits are part of the reason they accomplished these other things over here.
Then again, maybe the criticism they've received all along has helped to drive them to those successes, so we actually should be criticizing them...
I used to agree with you until I realized the following:
RMS is part of a very different property rights movement... one that has a history in Western society but was generally abandoned in favor of the sort of understanding of property rights that most of us take for granted.
It is a coincidence that RMS is radical about other issues, such as 9/11, etc. It's likely that someone with his intellect who is so open to new ideas may tend to believe a wide variety of things that mainstream thinkers (like most of us) would find absurd.
The key points are that RMS's views are profoundly Western in their ideological roots (it's not like he smoked some herb and started reading about the property rights views of some remote island society)... and that he puts that philosophical difference ahead of the many possible compromises and middle ground positions he could have adopted. His views are not utopian either, they represent a mostly lost thread of Western thought.
Realizing this about RMS made me appreciate him more. In a world where we all take certain beliefs for granted, RMS reminds us that property is a social construct.
The tone and extremism are part of the message.
Parts of his message. The ideas that seem important to you, you can pick them from it and propagate them yourself.
Alexey, I thought you made that point very clearly in your post. It's in important message, and a huge loss when he intentionally chooses language or brings in other topics that cause it to be unnecessarily marginalized.
Well at least they'll remember him and what he said up to that point. Then days/months later they'll disregard some other things he says. Later still they'll realise he was right all along about various things. That's been my experience, and it's taken me ten years to get there. I'd hope that he keeps doing what he does best.
All I'm saying is: almost everybody at his talk (already a self-selecting group) was put off by the tone and extremist nature of his delivery. His message got lost, and that sucks - it's an important message.