Well, Ubuntu's unwavering pragmatism in getting GNU/Linux on the desk- and laptops of reasonably regular people has had a big impact.
But being right (even very right) in the 80s and 90s doesn't make you automatically right forever after; I found his assertion that you should starve rather than write or run a single line of unfree code[1] to be wrong and very counterproductive to spreading free and open source software.