Maybe not the best example there, known or not - Plato's influence on us today is pretty heavy.

There are even strong theories connecting early Christianity directly to Plato.

Sure, and arguably RMS has had a pretty significant indirect impact on the lives of people who don't care about technology but still use free software in their day to day lives (it is everywhere). But those people don't really think about his message anymore than the average person contemplates the impact of neoplatonists on their present cultural context.

[Before anyone gets offended, this is just a metaphor. Obviously plato had a much more significant impact on the world than RMS did]

Being so bad at dating that "never getting laid" is named after him?

"Does it matter? His message isn't for non-programmers."

I see. Well then, carry on.

But maybe then do not wonder when the rest of the world does not care about software freedom and also don't donate or support it in any way.

Oh and Plato is well known as a philosopher, but yes, most people do not know that he proposed a very totalitarian state and is rather known for platonic love.

[delayed]

> But maybe then do not wonder when the rest of the world does not care about software freedom and also don't donate or support it in any way.

I mean, i would more wonder why people would think the rest of the world care about the gnu project's four freedoms or even understand them.

Half the time we can't even get citizens to care about basic things like freedom of speech.

Everyone wants to fully control the devices they own. But more importantly they want their devices to work. So a half working open source lineageOS mobile is less valuable to them (and me), than a closed source, but working blob.

But if you can get them to understand, that open source eventually means consumer friendly, that the device will be fully under their control(no ads, no restrictions) and working if OSS gets more support, they will listen. But since they largely do not know all this, I think it is exactly because most free software preaching evolves only around devs.

> Does it matter? His message isn't for non-programmers.

His message is pretty much user-centered.

(and programmers deserve good message delivery too)

True, yet most users don't care about the details in any meaningful way. They just want to be able to use a convenient service like Spotify...who cares that they don't OWN the music anymore? Who cares that they don't pay artists as much as they could?

The only time it's a problem is when an artist doesn't release their music on a certain platform and it's now work to try and go download a second app, make an account, possibly pay a subscription, and THEN listen to the new album. These are the kind of things users actually care about, not whether the app/backend is FOSS or not.

HN is a power user community so it's easy to improperly extrapolate our experiences and what we tolerate to what "normal users" will tolerate.

> most users don't care

> who cares that they don't OWN the music anymore?

That's the thing, he is trying to raise awareness on this stuff. I do too.

If people cared, he'd be mostly done with his raising awareness work.

Open source is pretty much a developer issue. Free software, though, is a user issue.

(Of course we often use the terms interchangeably)

>If people cared, he'd be mostly done with his raising awareness work.

This is a good point, and shows why we need people like Stallman to press us on important but unglamorous issues.