> His decision making process always prioritizes supporting Free Software over proprietary efforts, pragmatism be damned. No, this is giving him too much credi

> His decision making process always prioritizes supporting Free Software over proprietary efforts, pragmatism be damned. No, this is giving him too much credit. His stance on gcc wasn't just purity over pragmatism, it was antithetical to Free Software. The entire point of Free Software is to let users modify the software to make it more useful to them, there is no point to Free Software if that freedom doesn't exist - I might as well use proprietary software then, it makes no difference. Stallman fought tooth and nail to make gcc harder for the end user to modify, he directly opposed letting users make their tools better for them. He claims it was for the greater good, but in practice he was undermining the whole reason for free software to exit. And for what? It was all for nothing anyway, proprietary software hasn't relied on the compiler as the lynchpin of its strategy for decades.