Childish meltdowns on stage, comments about pedophilia and toe jam eating aside, RMS might well have been a luminary 30 years ago. But AFAIK he hasn't done any coding in years, and mostly just travels around giving talks, riding on his past fame to continue to enable his lazy, selfish lifestyle (cf. refusing to own a cell phone but happily using someone else's, same for loyalty programs, accepting volunteers who probably want software dev intern experience and making them update his blog, etc.)
I went to his talk when he was in Vancouver, and it was… interesting. It came across as very tone-deaf, the tech equivalent of the man standing on the side of the street screaming about how our sinful behaviour will invite the lord's wrath.
He's described, in recent history, the method in which he accesses the internet; namely, to queue up a list of URLs, batch-fetch them, and then read them offline at a later date. That the person arguing about how our software is taking our control from us doesn't use it in any manner remotely recognizable to us is odd, but for him to argue against web apps which he has, apparently, never used and presumably does not fully understand (beyond his experiences with mainframes and virtual terminals, which are conceptually similar) seems impractical and somewhat tone-deaf.
The man is opposed to the way technology is going, and good on him for sticking to his principles, but he's basically staying ignorant of the last 15 years of technology development. He refuses to use any technology which isn't free software from the top to the bottom, which means he basically can't use sufficiently modern technology, and yet he wants to lecture us about what it does and how it works.
Yet, his position is still somewhat inconsistent. He'll use other people's cell phones, he doesn't refuse to use servers which are entirely free software, and there's no way that the networking gear between him and other servers (e.g. his mail server) is 100% free software. He seems to draw the line at paying for it, but not at using or benefitting from it indirectly.
He uses other people's phones because it doesn't give any information about him when he does that. If nobody else around him had a phone, he just would get on life without making that phone call, or he would wait until he found a landline to make that call. But if the convenience already exists, he'll use it.
He's actually quite internally self-consistent. The principle he's adhering to is (1) he doesn't want to be tracked himself but (2) if someone else is already tracked, that doesn't necessarily track him. He still thinks you should choose to not be tracked yourself, but if you already made the choice to carry a phone, it's too late.
He will use servers or devices which aren't entirely free software because it's not practical to modify them. This is why he makes a big distinction between free software and hackable hardware. He considers these to be two different things. He believes that once you have the actual device and it's modifiable, you should be allowed to modify it. If the device is soldered and hardwired from the beginning, then it's simply impractical to require that hardware manufacturers allow you to modify it. This is why originally free BIOS wasn't such a big deal, until all BIOS became flashable, so now Coreboot is one of the causes of the FSF.
Saying that he will use any server that runs non-free software is a simplification of his position. He considers that sometimes you are merely being provided a service, and you should consider the conditions under which this service is provided. That's why he eschews the word "cloud", because it conflates a bunch of different things and makes people stop thinking about their relationship to a server. He does think that merely requesting a web page from a server running, say, Microsoft Server is ok, because that's just information the server is sending him, and it doesn't matter how that information got generated. He might consider that Microsoft Server would harm the sysadmins using it, not him.
His positions make sense. He's a huge aspie, so he spends a lot of time making sure everything he says falls into place logically. Part of his aspie condition is that he has tantrums and eats toe cheese. You should view those acts as that: a condition he has to live with. But this condition also makes him think very long and hard about the ethical and technical implications of the decisions we make about our computers.
I don't think he's internally consistent in the manner a rational person would expect. I think he's internally consistent in the same way a patient with multiple-personality disorder and delusions finds ways to justify where their lover Eduardo has gone and why he comes and goes a lot like the Pokaroo.
The FSF is a lot more than Stallman. John Sullivan runs the day-to-day affairs, Chrissie Himes organises a lot of the fund raising, and Jasimin Huang is the one who gives my GSoC students extra travel money from the donations that have come to Octave.
The opinions of rms are not the opinions of the FSF.
All I'm saying is, if you actually like the FSF, then you must like something about it other than rms. He's not the FSF. It's difficult for our primitive monkey brains to do this, but consider an idea independently of the person espousing it.
Oh come on, that's a far more childish attitude than any of RMS's eccentricities. Do you really think he travels around and gives talks because he's lazy, or because he's long recognized that it's the best way he can contribute to his goals of promoting free software?
Because if you'd ask me which I'd rather be doing, travelling around and giving talks, or being at home and coding, I'd pick my home and my neighborhood and my routine, every day of the week.
Childish meltdowns on stage, comments about pedophilia and toe jam eating aside, RMS might well have been a luminary 30 years ago. But AFAIK he hasn't done any coding in years, and mostly just travels around giving talks, riding on his past fame to continue to enable his lazy, selfish lifestyle (cf. refusing to own a cell phone but happily using someone else's, same for loyalty programs, accepting volunteers who probably want software dev intern experience and making them update his blog, etc.)
The guy's just an embarrassment nowadays.