As an undergraduate, Stallman came to visit and I got to spend about 3.5 hours around him in a crowd of no more than 20 people. He acted like this the whole time. Come to find out, this is basically how he acts all of the time, to everyone. Every person I have ever spoken to who has interacted with him personally has had a similar experience.

Ash put it well, to describe Stallman as stifling GNU's success. At this point, GitHub, NodeJS, and PyPI have done more for open source software than any GNU axe-grinding. As Clang grows, the FSF and GNU software shrink away. NeoVIM is on Apache. GCC still doesn't have LSP bindings, and it's due at least in part to this petty email exchange in 2015.

And that isn't even getting into these dumpster fires:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619440

- https://www.reddit.com/r/justneckbeardthings/comments/2vkeze... (which he was handing out as late as 2019!)

- https://thenewstack.io/why-almost-everyone-wants-richard-sta...