I think you're absolutely right about the enablement aspect. Stallman seems to have been protected from normal social feedback at least since starting at MIT a

I think you're absolutely right about the enablement aspect. Stallman seems to have been protected from normal social feedback at least since starting at MIT as a graduate student in the 1970s. Most reasonably functioning autistic people seem able to improve their social skills, at least to some degree, as they mature, if only as a conscious act ("masking"). The bubble Stallman lived in seems to either have prevented him from doing that, or worse, possibly allowed him to willfully ignore such personal development. You see this unproductive coddling in the Perens article, which simply assumes Stallman's "handicap" is a fact of life over which he couldn't possibly have any conscious control. In my experience, that's rarely the case, unless you're dealing with much more severely handicapped individuals, who may not even be verbal.