There have been some take downs he's done that were either spot on at the time or later showed themselves to have been almost prophetic, so I think credit must be given there.

That said, and although I think he takes a lot of things too far, I also think that (in general) it's useful to have someone articulating one far pole of the debate about user freedoms. I suppose the counter-argument is that extremism causes some people to tune out entirely but I don't really buy that's the case here.

He held a talk at my university recently. During the QA, every time a student asked RMS a question, he would spend 2 minutes correcting the formulation of the question, and then dismissing the actual question with a snarky remark.

For instance, one student asked something about RMS being the "CEO" of FSF, followed by snarky remarks by RMS that "FSF is not a company and that he is actually the president". (I might remember wrong, but it was something along those lines)

I understand and respect him and his beliefs, but his personality just annoys me.

1) He is really serious about his crummy coffee. Like, he was brewing a pot on stage as he was talking at like 9pm. Like, a Walmart brand drip coffee maker, none of this french-press stuff.

2) He has a really bad 'dead fish' handshake. Like, Really bad.

3) He is SUPER dedicated to what he does and that is super admirable. I wish his vision of software and hardware was the default idea, not the corpo-spy state that we have eneded up with. That world would be a lot better. But it's asking far to much of people with only an 8th grade reading level.

4) He actually is really cool to hang out with and talk to. However, he is for more matured and knowledgable people. He kinda talks over the new CS peeps and really doesn't have time for them and their questions. He's not a professor and that shows.

5) Unsupprisingly, he's not good with millenial/gen-z women. Some of it is that he's from a different generation and he hasn't been in the same world as them, some of it is the sterotype that he is a nerdy, doughy, Linux guru. He could be better, but he's not as bad as a Google exec. by any means.

6) All the lecutres I went to where he was speaking were amazing and have really shaped a lot of my brain around software and what it is. Time very well spent.

A reasonable answer is to pirate everything you buy so you always have a DRM free copy.