He has told people almost that exact thing. I recall an interview from about a decade ago where some asked RMS a question similar to the one the GP mentions, but their phrasing was more like, "I need to make money from software to feed my family." RMS' answer was that the interviewer's ability to feed their family was less important than free software.

RMS' heart is mostly in the right place, but he's a fanatic who is 100% out of touch with the real world.

He just reply according to where the cursor is placed regarding ethics.

The same way anyone who think selling metamphetamines to vulnerable people and kids is unethical and wrong, then you should not do it and find another income to feed your family.

Nobody is put a gun to the temple and forced to write proprietary software to make a living. There are myriads of other jobs.

> All while he lives comfortably off the income of his own celebrity.

For most part of his life he was living in his office at the university, technically homeless. After that period he lived in a home designated by MIT, possible because they got tired of the building code violation of having a professor living in his office.

I would classify being able to live at his office without being tossed out into the streets, and being given a home after that got to be too much for the school, as living off his celebrity. The "technically" in "technically homeless" is a major difference between what Stallman has to deal with vs what non famous computer scientists/software engineers have to deal with.

I understand he's forgone the amount of wealth he could have accumulated by just working in the software industry in the name of his cause, and that is laudable. However he thinks everyone should do this despite the greater burden they'd have to shoulder. All the people he tells shouldn't be making non free software so they can support themselves and their families are not going to be given free lodging by MIT.

Being a celebrity does provide much more benefits than a person actually being homeless.

However your comment above said he lived comfortably off the income of his own celebrity. We would have to twist the word income here for a bit to cover this kind of situation. The comfortably part is also a bit questionable, but I guess living at the office can be comfortable to some people. The description just didn't fit the situation that well, which is why I wrote the above comment.

Alright, if you want to be that pedantic then find+replace “income” with benefits. The point still stands. He has the basics of his life taken care of and tells others they should go without in the name of his ethics system

The hyperbole doesn't help. Stallman would not tell you that you need to starve in the streets. He is well away that most programmers get paid at least median income, and often much more, and they are normally people who can make choices in their lives, few of which will involve starving in the streets. You don't have to agree that the choices are attractive to acknowledge that they do not need to include starving in the streets.

I don't think its hyperbole based on the public comments Stallman makes

> He is well away that most programmers get paid at least median income, and often much more

Yes, by working on unfree software, an occupation which he uncompromisingly condemns. Programmers working exclusively on free software would be earning much, much less on average.

There are a lot of options to work for a company that builds free software now, and not necessarily fangs / gafam. Many of those companies are struggling to find people. And now, you can often even join remotely. It might be paid less but still very comfortable.

You mentioned exclusively, that's true that you might have to write custom, closed code for customers at many of those companies. But that's still better than exclusively working on non free software.

You can make a lot of money writing free software at whatever FAANG is called now. I mean sure the source is never distributed because the binaries aren’t either, but it does meet the definition.

When Stallman says "free as in free speech, not free beer", he means freedom to use software in any way you want including changing it. Not zero price.

Except this model is practically "zero price". Yes, you can sell GPL software, but on the customer side, buying such software cannot be justified economically, if all you got to do is to find somebody/some place that will provide this software to you free of charge and legally so. The only customers that would pay are ones that do it for moral purposes, at which point your business selling GPL software isn't a business anymore, but something that receives charitable donations.

All of the open source companies/people that come to mind are not selling libre software, they are all selling some kind of service - support contracts, managed hosting, etc - or they embraced some kind of freemium/"open core" model (so they are really selling non-free software), or they are funded by charitable donations and sometimes public grants, often by having some large non-free companies being sponsors (Linus Torvalds is paid this way for example, through sponsorship money from the who-is-who of the non-free corporate world distributed through the Linux Foundation).

Game engine is not what is paying the developpers rent, and Stallman has always explained that he didn't believed artforms should be made open source.

It doesn't sound complicated to me to understand that you can sell games whose code is open source but the 3d models, graphics, levels building and artwork aren't. Customer would still retain all free software liberties, be able to port the game to other platforms and the dev studios would still get paid.

Ardour has 10's of thousands of users, many of which get the software from their Linux distributions. Nevertheless, more than 6000 of these individuals choose to help fund the project to the tune of between $150k and $210k a year.

So yes, although your observations are not wrong, they do not apply universally.

> The only customers that would pay are ones that do it for moral purposes, at which point your business selling GPL software isn't a business anymore, but something that receives charitable donations.

> Nevertheless, more than 6000 of these individuals choose to help fund the project to the tune of between $150k and $210k a year.

How is this not covered by the posters comment about it not being a business but a charity if you rely on people paying more than they need to?

> How is this not covered by the posters comment about it not being a business but a charity if you rely on people paying more than they need to?

If that's your definition, then sure.

That's not my definition.

No I mean literally working on GPLed code which means writing Free Software. But, since those companies never distribute binaries, they never have to share the code under the terms of the GPL.