[cabalamat]

> There are some advantages to this strategy. It taps into old, powerful emotional responses in human beings – the same responses that give messianic religions their power. As a way of recruiting a small hard core of dedicated followers it’s tough to beat, and sometimes – if you’re, say, the Gautama Buddha or Jesus or Mahavira – you can make it scale up. But I described it as a trap for a reason – most such attempts do not scale, remaining tiny marginal cults.

Is fanatism working for RMS? Well, the German Pirate Party regularly top 10% in the polls, which is rather better than you'd expect from a "tiny marginal cult", so one has to conclude that it is working.

[icebraining]

You shouldn't mix up RMS with the Pirates. While there are obvious similitudes (particularly in terms of privacy, DRM, etc), RMS was initially opposed to their platform of reducing or killing copyright, since that would limit the effectiveness of the GPL without really fixing what he fights against - after all, lack of copyright doesn't mean you'll have access to the source, which is a precondition of freedoms 1 and 3 [1].

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

[cabalamat]

> You shouldn't mix up RMS with the Pirates

Shouldn't I? RMS mixes with Pirates, seems to be broadly in favour of what they stand for, and comments a lot on internal Pirate Party mailing lists.