Hacker News Reader

Lmao he is just a figurehead. Fsf doesn't depends on or needs him

>Stallman is the FSF and they're irrelevant without him.

So will the FSF just cease operations when he dies?

BSD wouldn't exist without Stallman? Could you explain that?

I thought I had read that Stallman badgered the original dev of FreeBSD into adopting an open source license, but I can't find any references now. I probably misremembered, sorry!

You may be thinking of http://techrights.org/2020/09/15/rmsf/ :

"So I asked Bostic himself. Originally, his reply was: 'It’s true. John Gillmore & Richard Stallman convinced me that opening up the sources was worthwhile, we wouldn’t have done that without their urging.'"

BSD per se would exist without Stallman--it already existed before the GNU project. But it was non-free because it contained AT&T proprietary Unix code. Stallman was influential in getting the proprietary parts replaced and the BSD license fixed to be usable for free software. Without that effort on his part and the GNU project's (e.g. the AT&T C compiler was replaced by GCC), BSD today would be quite irrelevant if not outright dead.