He's devoted his life to letting people know, and so few listen.
It's something which I have struggled with. Not that I think my ideas are all prophetic, or ignored/misunderstood, but that in the past some of my ideas have been prophetic but ignored, until some point in time where they were validated to be true. With that being a possibility, I struggle to know whether or not an idea that I feel strongly about, but is misunderstood or discounted, whether or not it should be discounted or discarded. It's hard to know what the right thing to do is when you are pretty confident that you're right, but you know you could just simply be wrong.
It's mostly about trying to figure myself out that I'm bewildered, not issues that apply to society at large. But even in that limited domain, I'm still gripped by analysis paralysis for that reason.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy
[2] Genius in the seminal sense.
The problem is, of course, that he's socially Quite Something, and that makes people have a natural level of disbelief that is the polar opposite of, say, the effect that a good cult leader, con man, grifter, or salesman has in terms of convincing people. He has like a -10 to Charisma, except he's actually really engaging and interesting, like a street preacher with 150 IQ.
The change he has affected in the world is phenomenal. It will continue to be a thing long after he's gone. Would be that people would walk around with his bearded visage on their shirts instead of Che and Marx.
It is both a testament to him and a terror that programmers are now coming of age who have effectively been born post- open source. A BSD licence is far better than nothing but the GPL has almost been hurt by its own success these days.
We currently program in an environment where people just open source stuff for the sake of it (and good on them/us for doing it), but with the advent of the mobile phone as a general purpose computer (You can't just download C code and run it on your iPad any more) and the cloud (same shit from a difference arsehole when it comes to user freedom) the pendulum will swing back the other way.
In less than a decade, I was convinced RMS had been right. This is why I look very warily at anything based in a third-party cloud, because later RMS warned about its downsides, too, way earlier than the general crowd started to realize them.
Before 23 years have passed, I'd like to remind about another gloom-and-doom warning, by Cory Doctorow in 2012: https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html