No software is an island

I appreciate all the work RMS has done and continues to do, but sometimes purity has to reach a limit. Just as hippies who returned to the earth still depended on the society they left for basic tools, basic medicine, and even money at times, so too must free source software at some point depend on proprietary tools, such as chip foundries and the microcode inside chips.

More than anything else, even before the article got around to mentioning rewriting the git history, my mind flashed to the old Soviet practice of erasing people from pictures when they fell from grace. I always wondered not only how they got rid of all past copies of books and archival newspapers, but how far back they went in erasing pictures? Did they work up new pictures from boy scout (equivalent) days? School pictures? Army pictures?

RMS has to reach a limit. You can't be pure turtles all the way down.