I agree with you. I just yesterday wrote this over at SoylentNews.org (the community spin-off of Slashdot that split when Slashdot imposed its new interface on us): http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=4458&cid=108238 Unfortunately, Stallman is going to have the supremely unsatisfactory pleasure of going to the grave after a lifetime of scorn and abuse at the hands of nerds - only to be proven right. It's pathetic that the nerd community never misses an opportunity on sites like this one to pick fun at his grooming habits, his relentlessly consistent stand on issues, and his fixation on purity of position even at the expense of convenience or ease of coding (or even talking). But the trends show the things he worried about are slowly becoming reality and despite having foreseen it, he will die having failed to prevent it. But the rest of us, we will go to the grave knowing we persecuted a guy who was actually right. Hopefully a lot of us will feel ashamed. More likely we will be "enjoying" life in our little walled gardens, trying to finish reading our books before they expire and are revoked, and sharing tips on software piracy sites that allow us to use our computers for limited purposes without the tracking authorities finding out.
Hope he has a good laugh from the afterlife. Hopefully he'll be drinking a pint of stout with Dennis Ritchie and Alan Turing and watching us struggle.
He's a very clever guy; wish the majority of us would recognize it.
He's a very clever guy; wish the majority of us would recognize it.