[cwyers]

Stallman's work has enabled a vision almost exactly the opposite of what he wanted - the gratis nature of free software has been a far greater impact than the libre. It's enabled cloud computing by making OS and software licenses scale out affordably, letting everyone leverage low-cost commodity hardware in the place of big iron. In terms of libre, though, the closed-source PCs that ran Windows that Stallman still wars so vigorously against are far more free-as-in-freedom than the cloud computers running mostly "free software." Same with all the Android phones that run a GPL'd kernel but are far more locked down than Windows. The Affero license and the anti-Tivoization clauses have been shutting the barn door after the horses have left. The free-software movement has been pivotal in providing lots of free software in the gratis sense, and that free software has enabled a far less libre computing paradigm than what came before. So you'll excuse me if I am unsure what his remarkable history of being right has been.

[xrjn]

That's a very interesting point that you're making. Especially when you look at recent events with critical infrastructure software, and the numerous people who were surprised to see how underfunded those developers were. After the paltry sums donated to some of these small projects from companies that make billions thanks in part to their software, one has to wonder how much they value open source software's intrinsic libre value, or just the pure monetary value.

[lotsofmangos]

Predicting trends and successfully influencing trends are two different things. However, the free software movement has been one of the most successful experiments in mass communism in history.