[tedks]

""" 2. He doesn't let the FSF be larger than him.

Who's their 2nd in command?

Who'll take over after he passes on?

What will the FSF look like in 30 years? """

I don't actually know who the second-in-command (if there is such a position, the FSF seems very flat) is. But the first-in-command is John Sullivan and has been for like, ten years? A long time at least.

I don't think anyone will ever replace rms. You can't necessarily teach vision like he has. Honestly, maybe nobody will replace rms because free software will be illegal in the surveillance dystopia of the future. Everything else in The Right to Read has born out. But, the management of the FSF has been out of his hands for a long time. He's just the theorist; a role that's utterly critical, but not business-critical. When rms dies, it'll be like Marx dying.

I have no idea what computing will look like in 30 years but I think the fundamental premise of the FSF is that software is an extension of thought, so the sanctity of your software is the sanctity of your mind and should be regarded as such. That is an easy thing to continue on.

[Frondo]

The thing is, the world 30 years from now doesn't need RMS.

(I realize that sounds callous, but my long-term partner split from me today and I'm a little drunk, so spare me :p )

What the world in the short-term and 30 years from now needs is someone new to think about and develop philosophies around today's software freedom concerns.

What's that look like? I dunno, I'm not that thinker.

What RMS did was profound and important for that time in history. The last few years, everything he's written seems goofy and childish. What we need is an RMS for the modern era, i.e. a significant thinker who can speak to the next 20 years of people.

Sad to say, like most nonprofits, there's no succession plan.

[loup-vaillant]

Eben Moglen sounds like a formidable advocate. Maybe a bit old too, but right now, he is a synthesis monster. While Stallman may have vision, Moglen has crystal clarity of expression.

I don't pay much attention to Stallman for a while now, because I sense I feel I have got enough from his Free Software, Free Society essays —which I recommend to any who aren't familiar with Free Software.

Moglen however still manages to surprise me with new stuff —the last one being, it is now too late to build the [free] network we want. We can only fight the [centralised, spying] network we don't want, and we have less than 10 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T4bZ5R-MH8

[throwaway212122]

> The last few years, everything he's written seems goofy and childish.

What people don't seem to realize (also in Torvalds discussions) is that people simply wrote like that on the Internet up to around 2005-2008.

These people also produced most of the software that the millenials are now churning around or write middleware for.

What I find disturbing is the trend that millenials spend more time learning how to write glibly, appear mature on the Internet and in general sell themselves instead of writing truly new software.

[None of this is directed at you, I just used your comment for context.]

[adn]

There's really nothing wrong with making a concerted effort to be more polite or accepting on the internet or anywhere else for that matter. Framing wanting to have good self-presentation and wanting to be a great coder as mutually exclusive is clearly disingenuous.

[Fnoord]

> The last few years, everything he's written seems goofy and childish

This is you growing older and wiser, and his old rhetoric being outdated (someone like Eben Moglen, or even Edward Snowden is more up2date). You'll find the same to be true in other idealistic writings or speeches.