RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.
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I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and just said "so are you going to buy something?" and motioned toward the booklets. I didn't need a printed copy of the `sed` man page so I shrugged and he seemed quite annoyed, turned to his assistant with a notebook computer and started dictating something to them, as almost to make it clear that our interaction was over.
I'm not sure what the point of posting this is, but that's my RMS story - it was my first "never meet your heroes" moment, I guess.
Free software gives people part of the means of production. In the 1980s/early-1990s model where personal computers were common but most software was run locally, it was an effective challenge to corporate interests, but since the evolution of robust networks and remotely processed software, it has ceased to be nearly as effective.
However, it's important to note that if free software ever truly challenged industrial interests, they would just get the laws changed to prevent it from restricting them in any real way using some bizarre legal maneuver. As it is, it is tolerable and produces useful products corporations can use for free. That's what it means to live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
But yeah, altruism is typically shared by both anarchists and communists. The only remaining question seems to be: who better embodies the ideal?
The fact is that he is just one more type of asshole who spends most of his time arguing about other people needing to work for free or requiring utopian collectivization of the work (process, output, etc.). The details are not essential because the idea is still the same: preferring the nebulous idea of collective freedom against individual freedom (and this includes moral corporations).
There is no centralizing characteristic to capitalism. It is, in fact, exactly the contrary and the main reason that what we call “capitalism” is the de facto system of exchange ever since humans evolved past primitive needs. Capitalism relies on self-interest to function, and there is no central entity. One could argue about the government and the money supply control as a central entity, but it's actually not a requirement, just a convenience. If government money becomes untrustworthy, you just switch to using something else as a medium of exchange (often other moneys or precious metals). On the other hand, communism absolutely requires centralization and violence/coercion to force people to comply. I have no idea how you can jump to the conclusion that capitalism is centralizing when it's absolutely the reverse.
As for the free software and the parallel to possessing the means of production in communism, it is very interesting because it basically disproves the whole theory without much effort.
Software development is a field where the capital requirements to get started are extremely low, yet hardly any people with access to this capital have been able to produce value, both at the individual level and group/business level. Clearly it is not enough to be able to access the capital and all the tools for free.
What's more, all of this is only possible because there are some other people working on things that allow software development to even exist. Those things are entirely dependent on the capitalist system. Thinking you can build a “free utopia” on top of a capitalist system is delusional and extremely dumb.
I can't argue all day, but at this point I really don't understand how some people who are not very young anymore can still believe in the bullshit of communism and its derivatives. I don't really care per se, but the problem is the moral posturing and constant activism of those communists. If their stuff was any good, they wouldn't need to spend all day trying to convince productive people to buy into their utopia.
But the demagogues endlessly promoting communist ideologies definitely benefit from it by appearing morally superior and getting resources for no valuable work in exchange.
The GPL, shows that, actually, they are not really ok with the no reciprocity part.
There are very few truly altruistic individuals, and their defining characteristic is that they just do the good stuff instead of endlessly talking about it for brownie points. Basically the complete reverse of communists (and everyone far left in general).