Through it all, the GNU Project
has managed to meet its milestones, albeit with a few
notorious delays, and stay relevant in a software
marketplace several orders of magnitude more complex
than the one it entered 18 years ago. So too has the
free software ideology, an ideology meticulously
groomed by Stallman himself.
To understand the reasons behind this currency, it
helps to examine Richard Stallman both in his own words
and in the words of the people who have collaborated
and battled with him along the way. The Richard
Stallman character sketch is not a complicated one. If
any person exemplifies the old adage "what you see is
what you get," it's Stallman.
"I think if you want to understand Richard Stallman the
human being, you really need to see all of the parts as
a consistent whole," advises Eben Moglen, legal counsel
to the Free Software Foundation and professor of law at
Columbia University Law School. "All those personal
eccentricities that lots of people see as obstacles to
getting to know Stallman really are Stallman: Richard's
strong sense of personal frustration, his enormous
sense of principled ethical commitment, his inability
to compromise, especially on issues he considers
fundamental.
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