"I respect this lunatic whose views are divorced from reality"... isn't this damning him with faint praise, and therefore confirming user _RPM's first sentence?
Science is intertwined with the accomplished legacies of hated figures whose beliefs were shaped by prejudice, yet whose works became recognized and included in established theory.
Computing fields tend to venerate their idols with a religious-like fervor, unfortunately.
What I'm saying is that even if you disagree you can respect only if you recognize the motivations behind someones labor.
To say that GNU is good technology but don't agree with its premise is disrespectful because, by definition the design has failed if you don't agree with the agenda.
So you could say that you respect the effort but think it has failed, or you can say that you like the result but don't really respect its origins.
Uhm, no. People do great things for strange motives all the time. Stallman may have written Emacs for some ideological crusade which I don't care about (and consider counter-productive to the world at large), but I can not pretend that it's a great technological achievement.