Richard Stallman and the GNU project

While I hope you are correct (and in the long run, I think you will be), in the shorter term this will be additional ammunition for those who seek to undermine support for free software. (It was already a bit of an uphill battle, this just makes it harder...)

Now if you'd said "open source" instead of "free software" I'd agree without reservation, because from that perspective RMS has long been irrelevant except perhaps as a boogeyman.

> Indeed, if the Free Software movement to this day depended on Stallman to that extent, then his career truly would have been a failure.

...Folks who change the world rarely end up with a good personal outcome for their efforts.