[steauengeglase]

I put Chomsky on the same shelf that I put Richard Stallman on. They've both spent years building huge and sometimes impenetrable rhetorical castles. Yet there is a cost of staking out all of your moral high ground and putting out impaling spikes of a specially compiled lexicography of precise, barbed, and hand crafted definitions. Eventually you are left alone in that high castle and abandoned by future generations.

Sadly for Stallman it happened mostly in his own life and Chomsky will have at least a good decade after he passes.

[the_af]

That's pretty dismissive of both men.

Neither of them have been "left alone in their high castles". Both have a large following, are well respected (and controversial), and people have built upon their philosophies or used them to better understand the world.

[steauengeglase]

People have built upon, but (at least in Stallman's case) also built around.

You can go back as far as the late 2000's and the GPL still had a huge following. With the mobile boom F/OSS was still embraced, but the GPL has steadily fallen to the wayside. You can only be so uncompromising when people need a means to eat.

Now we have an entire generation of CS grads who'll use MIT as their de facto license.