[tgma]

I don’t know where you got the suggestion of sainthood. I personally am not a communist-adjacent like he is and believe me I cringed when I typed the term “oppressed.”

The point is that most people, even most new hackers, misunderstand who Stallman is and what his principles are. At best they see him and some random crazy pedant that’s probably never wrote a line of code like most politicians or lawyers in his space. They don’t understand the dude wrote the world’s most popular compiler for three decades or more (I won’t be surprised to hear they think BillG is more technical than him if you survey). Nor do they have a grasp of his movement to the degree they attribute Open Source, a deliberate and successful attempt to derail his PoV, to himself!

None of that implies sainthood or value judgement on him. It stops at hearing what the guy really says carefully.

[Turing_Machine]

I personally think FOSS software is a fine thing, while not being overly fond of the GPL.

If you allegedly "give" me something for "free", but still assert the right to tell me what I can do with it afterward, it's not "free" in either sense of the word. It's not "free as in beer", nor is "free as in freedom".

Stallman's monomania on this subject became tedious and counterproductive decades ago.

Yes, he wrote some great software. So did dozens of others.

[tgma]

I don't share the same feelings about GPL idea and see it as extremely valuable, especially now that rug pull and Amazonification is pervasive.

I do share the feeling towards the free terminology. Over the years he has been fond of libre more and more.

That said I think the reason behind the confusion over the term free is less sincere and somewhat of a Freudian slip in retrospect. I think his original view was indeed against commercialization and he pivoted to the current iteration of Free Software advocacy. By the way, Linus is on the record making the same mistake and initially licensing Linux under a non-commercial license.