Stallman never represented the future of computing. He was the same backward guy in the 1990s that he is now, the major difference being that the only feasible alternative to GCC in those days was whatever shitty proprietary compiler your vendor slapped together, so sites adopted the GNU suite because it was better than the alternatives.

It was never Stallman's goal to "represent the future of computing". It was his goal to preserve the spirit of the past, specifically the 1970s AI lab at MIT where hackers could just log in and hack, and didn't have to worry about vendors locking them out from their data or equipment.

Look, I don't agree with Stallman, on a lot of things including software. But without his sort of lone-voice-crying-in-the-wilderness extremism, where would we be? Lots of people, including Gary Kildall, Chuck Moore, and Steve Wozniak could plausibly claim to have been at the vanguard of a culture of openness and sharing in computing. But it was Stallman who had the courage to come out and say, "these are the freedoms we demand, and you're a shithead if you abrogate them." We need more courageous voices like that. They are in short supply, especially as the loudest voices in open source now come from large companies who have much to gain by compromising the Four Freedoms.