I'd say an interesting question could be what was the reach of Stallman's leadership. I haven't followed GNU and FSF at all in my years while I am a comp sci gu

I'd say an interesting question could be what was the reach of Stallman's leadership. I haven't followed GNU and FSF at all in my years while I am a comp sci guy and I do wonder on each new project which license to take. Free software is something which affect pretty directly every person on the planet yet few have heard about these movements. Software piracy is an example of a similar movement to free software which has had way more publicity with regular people. I'd say this has a lot to do with the persona of Stallman and the way he interacts with the world. People learn about who made the telephone and who discovered Americas but no high school coursebook mentions who created Linux or Python. Software has in many ways been instrumental in shaping the last 20 years yet people have never been more detached with the technology they use. Everything is a black box nowdays. Even concepts like client server communication is completely unknown to a laic. This is a failure of computer and software movements which have alienated themselves and the rest of us programmers from the public.