Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)

Heavens, thank you. It’s like people assume genius when RMS wiggles his little toe and wonder what grand intellectual insight might have moved Him to do so.

Stallman has been right so many times, usually decades ahead of time. On each hype cycle when most of us were bewildering at the latest shiny thing, Stallman was spelling out exactly how companies would use it to exploit us. And I'm not talking about obvious garbage with zero upside like crypto and IoT, I'm talking about more subtle hype that actually did have a degree of upside, like the cloud or javascript for example. I think he deserves a little bit more respect than that. I'm not saying "lets suspend our critical thinking and just follow whatever RMS says", I'm saying "this guy has been decades ahead of time in the most fundamental matters like morality and justice, lets give his quirkness a little leeway".

Industrial IoT is far from useless. Consumer IoT is pretty dumb, but let's not get too sad about the IoT as a whole.

Disagree with you about crypto, it allows me to purchase high quality drugs online. Also disagree with you about "IoT", I use zigbee devices that I can control remotely.

What seems like "obvious garbage" to you, might be a treasure to another person.

He’s also fairly arrogant and unreasonable in various interactions¹, forcing people to bend over backwards to accommodate his requests. He puts off a lot of people and severely harms his own movement by making people who are not part of it think he’s gross, both physically (the infamous picking something of his feet and eating it) and intellectually (I have examples in mind but don’t wish to start a flame war).

What good is it being a visionary if people ignore or actively reject the message because they are put off by the messenger? It’s not useful being a harbinger of doom if nothing changes anyway.

Stallman should be commended and recognised for starting the free software movement, but he should’ve stepped aside long long ago and let someone more charismatic be its figurehead.

¹ I’m sure someone reading this has had a different experience, but please do a cursory web search and recognise people’s negative interactions with Stallman are not rare.

Wireless light switches are pretty cool. Digitally,wirelessly controlled light bulbs are neat. That's about it.

> please do a cursory web search

Each person reading this might come up with some different in their search. Do you have a specific example to point to?

No, they don't. I'm sure you're capable of finding one that suits the context here and reading it yourself.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

Wearables are amazing as well.

The point is precisely that there are plenty of stories, there’s no need to single out any of them. Look for his treatment of women or while being a house guest. Heck, you can even read about disappointing (if minor) interactions in this very submission. I won’t link to them specifically because I remember more than one woman mentioning how they were harassed by Stallman fans after telling their stories. I have no desire to contribute further to that, I’m sure you’re capable of coming up with the searches yourself, it’s not remotely hard.

And the BT-accessible aqueducts.