Comment Re:Stallman is an idiot.... (Score 3, Interesting) 640
One with principles. Just look at the mobile landscape to see where not sticking to principles brings us, everything is "Open Source" yet everything is locked down and you can't even boot your own OS. Or Firefox where they claim to be about privacy, yet load the browser full of cloud stuff you can't even easily get rid of.
That said, I don't consider Stallman a good leader in this day and age. His principles are fundamentally correct, but he is stuck in the 90s. The software world has changed dramatically since then. More often than not, you no longer even own the hardware the software is running on, not just due to evil cooperation, but simply due to the way networked services work. The principles of Free Software fall apart in that case, as even having access to source code helps you little to none in that case when you don't own the server that the software is running and that is storing the data. The FSF has largely failed to address those issue, both in terms of plain philosophy as well as in terms of additional licenses. The question of how you gain back user freedom in a heavily interconnected world is largely unanswered.
And that's disappointing, as it feels like there is a lot that could be done. The GDPR for example gives a lot of freedoms back to the user that didn't exit before (e.g. data export, right of deletion), but it's a European law. If I wanted to provide similar rights to users outside of Europe there is no Free Software license I can use, even AGPL only addresses the source code, not the actual user data that is being processed. I think it would be a good time to start developing licenses for the flow of data, instead of just worrying about the software, but as far as I can tell, that's not happening at the FSF or in the few cases were it is, I don't feel it's quite going in the right direction (e.g. too much focus on federation as a solution, which is still ripe for abuse without any kind of rules to regulate the dataflow).