[crocko]

> For most employees this seems to be factually untrue unless they have significant stock ownership in the company. And even with that, it's still common for projects to be regularly scrapped, postponed, sold off, redesigned from scratch, transferred to different departments, you get the picture. It's just business.

I know many developers that are quite happy working and improving particular systems for years on end and consider it their project. Richard Stallman over simplified the relationship between employer and employee and the project they work on. I believe that is disingenous.

> have no comment on the rest of your post, I request that you please not make assumptions about what conclusions I've drawn. My only point is that that emotional argument makes no sense, it makes even less sense now in 2020 than it did when the article was written.

When did I state anything about what your motivations maybe? I didn't.

Well that is a shame you don't have any comment on the rest of my post because it is quite important when it comes to discussion about this. You cannot ignore that Richard Stallman in some ways has shown companies that engineers will create stuff for free and they don't have to pay. OpenSSL debacle proved this, they were quite happy to let the engineer who was maintaining the project basically live poorly until HeartBleed vulnerabilities. This is never discussed but this is direct consequence of Richard Stallman and his activism.

As for it being an emotional argument, it really isn't. All I am simply saying is that Richard Stallman ignores nuance when it suits him and invents it when it doesn't exist and by using his language that he invented (he redefined the word free).

IIRC he said on a mailing list that he specifically tied the plugin system to GCC to the main part of the program itself so plugins would be forced to use the GPL license. Forcing other people to be tied to your license is anti-freedom. But it is okay when he is a hypocrite about it, people will make all sorts of excuses for the hypocrisy because of the "GPL Freedoms" but the GPL is less free than many other licenses.