> I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contr

> I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contributions but at the end of the day just figured he was wearing a tin foil hat. Yeah. Pretty much the only people who took him seriously were the folks who wanted to lock down computers, or were being paid to do so. I remember going to a west coast science fiction convention in the early '90s (most likely a Westercon or LosCon, possibly a BayCon) that had a panel on "computers and copyright" or something similar. I don't recall the panel itself much, except that it was a fairly small room, but one bit stuck in my mind from the Q&A: An audience member said something to the effect that the necessary restrictions on copying would just be implemented in hardware rather than software. I think a panelist dismissed his statement, but the audience member insisted that it was possible, and that he had X years industry experience to prove it. At which point the conversation started getting very loud with a substantial fraction of the room speaking over him (and each other) saying he was wrong. And that was it. I'm pretty sure most of the folks in that room came away with the impression that "information wants to be free" and there was little that could be done to oppose that. It was about a decade before that whole exchange came to mind again, when "Trusted Computing" started gaining traction and criticism. I've occasionally wondered just who that audience member was, what their "industry experience" was at that point, and what they've worked on since.