I wrote about this a few years ago in [1]. I think some of the more recent personal attacks have been unfair and misguided, but criticism of Stallman goes back decades. Why does X use the MIT license and not GPL? Because they found Stallman too difficult to talk to (see quote in the article). Many prominent people involved in Free Software have been at odds with Stallman for a long time. When I first heard of Stallman in an interview sometime in the early 2000s I compared him to Osama Bin Laden in terms of extremism, which was a mean and wrong thing to do and I'm sorry I did that (I was young...), but it's indicative of the kind of responses he's evoked for a long time. Some of his ideas are good, but many are also silly, and some downright misguided.
You can have good ideas and be a bad leader of a movement. These two things are not mutually exclusive. A wiser and less ego-centric Stallman would have stepped back decades ago.
You can have good ideas and be a bad leader of a movement. These two things are not mutually exclusive. A wiser and less ego-centric Stallman would have stepped back decades ago.
[1]: https://www.arp242.net/rms.html