Ideological purity is the point. A whole range of other options are available but ideological purity is what Stallman offers, with no expectation that everyone will appreciate its benefits.

The very existence of the FSF's offerings is necessary to understand what other positions compromise to obtain other benefits.

Okay, but Stallman's non-purity related bad qualities are a problem for his own mission.

Eg, Stallman is reported as creeping women out in the link above. That has nothing to do with his uncompromising ideals regarding software.

So maybe Stallman could quietly retire to some sort of metaphorical ivory tower, and keep producing uncompromising ideology, which could be then evangelized by somebody less creepy. There's no need for compromise even. The same ideology just has to be delivered by somebody with better people skills.

I think that'd be a win/win.

That would be ideal, yes. But there also needs to be a bit of a culture change away from Stallmanism ("we want absolute Software Freedom now and anything short of that is unethical!) to a more pragmatic attitude and outlook.

This starts with simple things like not picking fights with the BSD projects only because they allow non-free software in ports and alienating many lead developers of the most successful project that uses your license (Linux).

Lol, this has been said over and over basically since GNU existed. "You need to compromise!!!11!!one!".

FSF and GNU are not about compromises. If they were, they'd have stuck to the original Unix distributions and all their licensing grey areas. Instead they didn't, and the world is better for it. Why should they change now...?

> Instead they didn't, and the world is better for it. Why should they change now...?

So this is where we fundamentally disagree: I do not think the world is better off with an uncompromising FSF. I think the world and state of Free Software would have been significantly more advanced if they had adopted a more pragmatic attitude. I don't think that's "compromising" per se, but rather accepting that things don't change in a day.

Also consider an alternative universe where the FSF and/or GNU had invested in to a good code hosting platform and a system to setup payments for people developing software instead of the ecosystem rolling from one proprietary platform to another over the last 25 years.

I mean, no hard FSF/GNU, no GPL, no Linux - with only the BSD/MIT license around, any good kernel feature would have been simply coopted and repackaged like the TCP stack was, keeping commercial software always ahead. From that perspective, the world is undoubtedly better off like this. Even the projects that compromised just a little bit with LGPL often got swallowed: see KHTML, for example.

> consider an alternative universe where the FSF and/or GNU had invested in to a good code hosting platform

FSF/GNU were created by nerdy hippies, expecting them to ever be great at running such a service is unrealistic. Besides, they did provide platforms, they just were never as good as commercial alternatives.

It would be good if you would not repeat unsubstantiated rumors.

No credible allegation have brought forward against Stallman's behavior regarding women. It's all hearsay and we should avoid hearsay and rumors.

I don't mean to imply he committed a crime. I'm saying that he's odd and offputting to many people, which is hardly news. And while I've not seen him recently in person, everything I've read firmly indicate that he's very stuck in the past and his manners are not up to modern standards.

Sure, no harm done. Stallman is odd, no argument about that.

> Ideological purity is the point.

Can a person be ideologically pure and not be an asshole? Or do the two go together (as is alleged with Stallman)?

The assholes are probably firmly inside the union in the Venn diagram of "ideologically pure" and "vocal advocates".

I agree with throw0101bm but then there are people like Henry Cavill.

What's the Cavill reference?

Henry Cavill is vocal (but kind and respecting) and an "ideologically pure" geek, in the sense that he seems to try and change scripts of series and movies he plays in, where they overlap with his nerdiness, ie [0], but there are more references. Of course, this is true in so far as geekiness can be seen as an ideology, if so, Cavill is pretty pure and vocal, but also just a great guy it seems. Now he’s going for a Warhammer 40k series and people are looking forward to it, because he knows his s*.

[0] https://redanianintelligence.com/2021/12/09/henry-cavill-add...

Come on! Cavill took a nice big pay check from Netflix and filmed 3 seasons of that show, fulfilling his contract like a pragmatic professional. I have no doubt that Cavill is a nice guy that cares about the things he claims to care about, but had he truly been 'pure' in the senes we are talking about he would have walked away a soon as he didn't get his way and not cared about his contract or future career.

Considering the hate against him by the entrenched non-fans that are seeking profit off the franchise, it is pretty obvious what his 'compromising' 'kind' ways got him. That he was well paid, and can use that as insulation is very much an outlier to the way things usually go, i.e. tar and feathering of Stallman.

I thought that the rumours were that other people in the production of The Witcher show were not fans of Cavill trying to change the scripts?

Basically Cavill wanted the show to closely follow the books (books he was a huge fan of), and the show runners wanted to make changes to the stories and go in a different direction. This lead to a lot of arguments, and eventually Cavill being replaced.

The Dalai Lama. Perhaps Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn?

"Don't let perfect be the enemy of good" Might be a saying to reflect on for a bit.

Also aside from that he was an enormous asshole to people, which damaged his own goals, and is just wrong.