He's also an interesting study in having principles - a purist approach is rare, honestly confusing to most people and actually rather effective in a Cassandra-style way if watched closely. Quite effective in terms of outcomes too, it's really deceptive how much of an impact he managed to have because the part of the brain that judges success and failure seems to key off charisma and social proof rather than doing a technically outcomes-vs-intent comparison.
A few years ago there were some "personalities" that very much agitated against Stallman. Without generalizing too much it is these people you probably should keep a very, very large distance to. Toxic is likely an understatement.
Oh, please. This sort of anonymous, hopelessly vague character assassination does not belong on HN.
You have of course given no idea of which people you're objecting to. But the people I know who were upset at Stallman a few years ago had clear, specific concerns, and some of them were directly harmed by Stallman.
If you would like to rebut their complaints, feel free to give it a go. Or you could also claim that the harm caused was justified or excusable given the positive things he's done. But you have to actually make the case, rather than just smearing them like this.
I do think this belongs on HN as a topic. This isn't a character assassination since I didn't name anyone. Quite the contrary, the character assassination was directed against Stallman and it was based on toxic slender and rumors and it even lead to consequences. If someone does feel addressed by my comment, I welcome that of course and perhaps it will lead to some self-reflection because I want to underline that it is strong criticism.
The problem comes when his principals turn out to have blind spots.
I feel like the refusal to close the network hole in the GPLv3 is a significant blind spot of his, and is a decision that has aged incredibly poorly in the age of cloud services.
