His fight for free software is a part of his character. he was doing it for all these years with high motivation because it wasn't just idealistic, it was perso

His fight for free software is a part of his character. he was doing it for all these years with high motivation because it wasn't just idealistic, it was personal. A specific brand of proprietary software made his happy hippie coding youth end, took away his friends, etc. - you probably heard the story a million times. Most people would just give up and go on, but he decided to choose Don Quixote's way. Nobody believed he would succeed, it was a lost fight by a lunatic. But it was this weird obsession that kept him motivated over the years. The appearance of Linux was both a success (the world finally got a complete operating system) and a failure (it forgot about GNU and focused on Linux). Then it turned out that proprietary software is not the only danger coming from greedy corporations: DRM, vendor lock-in, etc. RMS predicted many of these and was actively fighting against them. Whereas on a personal level he was the same Don Quixote as in the after-Symbolics period. Many people hated him for all possible reasons, and are celebrating now. What a sad time.