Most unreasonable people are useless though. There's only a small subset who drive progress.

And RMS much definitely is part of this smaller subset.

My old boss at MIT worked with RMS and he said that everyone hates him. Never helping anyone, always getting into stupid autistic arguments with people. He said that RMS rarely did any real work and that everyone hated him and tried to avoid him as much as possible. My boss said that RMS once started yelling at him because he said “bless you” after RMS sneezed. Of course this is all anecdotal, but RMS strikes me as a profoundly annoying and useless person.

Moreover, I don’t even like the idea of the GPL. Other licenses are better, but still suboptimal in regards to freedom. Real freedom is the public domain. In fact, all of my open source software is released under the public domain.

Sure, but arguably he was one. I don't know whether that has been true for a long time, and I am not personally a believer in Free Software writ large.

That phrase could be used to describe how every genocidal maniac in history viewed themselves. Most of the steady progress that has been made in this world has been due to the efforts of diplomatic individuals who cast a wide, friendly net for their supposed adversaries.

Yes like the French Revolution and the wide, friendly... democracy nets. Come on.

> Yes like the French Revolution and the wide, friendly... democracy nets. Come on.

The French Revolution was most violent event of its time with many fractions fighting against each other and was followed by dictatorships.

Do you know there's a reason they call the tail end of the French Revolution "the Reign of Terror"?

Rather than progress, I'd state that change, both good and bad,is driven by unreasonable men.