[Guthur]

You clearly misunderstood the problem.

The entities he is so adamant against are not benign or passive, they actively try to capture your freedom for rent seeking behaviour.

Microsoft, Apple, Amazon etc, have not got to where they are without this behaviour and they are so powerful that they have in many cases captured even public money from large governments for decades and are exceptionally sticky once allowed in.

LLM provide an exceptional opportunity for us to free ourselves from these captor interests, but we need to looking to develop them.

RMS has been proven correct on so many things from standard Microsoft behaviour, and planned obsolete to the licensing rug pulls of so called open source projects.

The question is not about stopping non free, that's a ridiculous objective, but if you don't have any principles you are going to have nothing solid to stand on in response to their nefarious and extractive behaviour.

[spauldo]

The objective is very much to stop non-free software. It always has been. It's not secret - it's explicitly why the FSF exists.

And that's a good thing, for the most part. Someone needs to hold the hard-line stance. It'll never happen, but it pulls things in that direction. We're all free to do what we like and use whatever software we choose, and part of the reason we have that choice is because the hardliners refuse to budge.

It does mean they make unrealistic demands and occasionally hold back useful functionality, but it's better than not having them around.

[paddy_m]

I haven't misunderstood the problems that RMS talks about, I agree with his prescient analysis. I firmly disagree that RMS the person is the best person to lead a software producing organization that aims to deliver a free future.

A simple reductive example. Imagine a great software leader that leads an org that writes great code and generally achieves the org's goals, but once a week, they say something offensive that discourages 1/10th of new users. A better leader would be someone who does all of the same things, except for the offensive comments.

I am saying that RMS makes offensive distracting comments, and regularly makes project manager choices that slow the adoption of free software. If you criticize him, people come back to "but he's right philosophically" which he is, and that misses the point. He has wrapped the FSF into an ego play for himself where he is in control or at least an important roadblock to software progress. If RMS cared as much about software freedom (as opposed to his ego) as he says, he would work to allow better leaders to develop and have power in the FSF org.