Isn&#x27;t the argument above that he was wrong? He may have been <i>morally</i> right that free software is an inherent good over proprietary software, but that&#x27;s sort of a given for this discussion.<p>He was <i>tactically</i> wrong in taking an expansive view of both what free software licenses should enforce and what fell within their realm of enforcement. He was hoping that GCC would be so much better than the competition that people would use it despite it being GPL, and for a long while (e.g., NeXT&#x27;s Objective-C patches) it was. But the GPL, especially the GPLv3, was perceived as way more onerous than Stallman expected it would be, and eventually it became worth people investing heavily in a competitor just to avoid the GPL. If he had aimed a little less high with the GPL and admitted a plugin architecture &#x2F; documented IR for GCC earlier, then LLVM may never have taken off.<p>Alternatively, he was tactically wrong in thinking that strong copyleft was required to achieve the goal of software freedom. Note that the clang in the NDK &quot;is now a nearly pure upstream clang,&quot; not because they&#x27;re required to, but because the pace of modern software development makes it genuinely easier to <i>voluntarily</i> submit changes upstream.