Stallman’s Law
Here&#x27;s the thing about Richard Stallman -- he&#x27;s absolutely correct in all of his principles and all of his underlying thinking. He&#x27;s as intellectually farsighted as anyone I can think of in tech. However, all of the movement around him and the resulting &quot;outreach&quot; efforts have been rather shortsighted in comparison.<p>Let&#x27;s use environmentalism as an analogy. There is a place for an absolutist intellectual position, when it comes to the underlying science. However, much of the tremendous progress that has been made with respect to the global environment has been a tenacious &quot;foot in the door, while they&#x27;re slamming it&quot; struggle, where allies and politics are vital. This is why I found the FSF animosity towards &quot;Open Source&quot; perplexing. If a group is advocating for freedom, I find it perplexing when they seem to be coercing me to be free in exactly the way they deem correct. While leadership is vital in any movement (I think that leaderless movements generally fall off the rails and tend to spawn extremist groups) one of the primary reasons leadership is vital is to set the tone and morality of the movement. A firm philosophical and intellectual grounding is also vital, but it can&#x27;t stand alone if the tone and morality of the movement allows it to succumb to any human group&#x27;s natural tendency towards jingoism. RMS always got the intellectual far-seeing right. In terms of tone and politics: fairly close to dead wrong. Basically, he could impress college aged me, then alienate working aged me.