I met Stallman for the first time in ~1993-1995, in Paris. He was talking about the threat of copyright on user interfaces (the infamous "thrash bin" lawsuit) a

I met Stallman for the first time in ~1993-1995, in Paris. He was talking about the threat of copyright on user interfaces (the infamous "thrash bin" lawsuit) and (but less so) on software patents, speaking in the name of the League for Programming Freedom[1] (LPF) that he was leading at the time. So this was a talk explicitly about programming freedom (and against the risk posed by excessive IP regulations), NOT about free software. Everybody in the room mostly agreed with Stallman, but there was one guy, a shareware author, who had some objections to what he was saying, namely that he wanted some protection for his software and thought that his business couldn't survive without them. Stallman was not pleased at the objection, and began shouting at him like a madman, saying that he deserved to die (figuratively). This happened again a few years later, still in my presence, this time against a representative of MuPAD, an organisation who had ported their software to Linux. Since I was the person who had invited MuPAD in the first place, I got my fair share of Stallman's burst of anger. Needless to say, I found the first event bizarre, to say the least, and Stallman lost all of my respect, as a person, after the second event. Besides his anger management issues, I think that he made a major mistake in focussing on free software as a goal in itself, and not on programming freedom, which could have rallied many more supporters. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_for_Programming_Freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_for_Programming_Freedom