[basilgohar]

Say what you will about the man personally, but his prescience with regards to the trends of industry and its attacks on personal freedom with regards to software and hardware have been very accurate, oftentimes decades ahead of when the effects are widely understood. His disconnection from average people can sometimes be explained because of how differently he thinks about things – usually in an absolutist sense, which is very alienating.

But his contributions to the software community, even if not directly through software commits, but through advocacy and ensuring the fundamental freedoms are preserved, are still being reaped to this day.

The same thing goes for the FSF, which, having been founded by him, has a similar worldview. It may not be pragmatic towards startups that want to profit from artificial digital scarcity, but those same startups and other businesses have profited immeasurable through FSF's defense of software freedoms.

Would the world really be better off if the Microsofts, Oracles, and others of their ilk still had the same grasp on the user experience of software? Neither Android, AWS, nor countless other staples of billions of peoples' lives and livelihoods would be a thing if not for the early and ongoing defense of software freedom that the FSF has provided.