> Listening to him speak in 2009 was surreal, especially during the Q&A session. I can't recall any specific quotes but he was ready to burn ten bridges for an

> Listening to him speak in 2009 was surreal, especially during the Q&A session. I can't recall any specific quotes but he was ready to burn ten bridges for an ounce of symbolic freedom. Was that when RPI ACM brought him in to speak? I recall he spent a while complaining about Linus letting binary blobs into the kernel. Then in the Q&A, he got trolled by someone claiming a music sample business was being undercut by CC-licensed competitors. RMS didn't handle that well. In my opinion, RMS is actually very pragmatic, meaning he's willing to do almost anything to further the goal. He only appears radical because he has uncommon ideas about what the goal is and what furthers it. His radicality varies according to pragmatic considerations. He'll give his blessing to BSD-style licenses in a case like this, and he'll hold out against GCC plugins for years when he thinks that furthers freedom. From a purely principled point of view, Free Software advocates might want to weaken copyright for software. RMS hasn't put much effort into that, because it would weaken the GPL. It would also be harder for Free software to compete if all software could be distributed free and legally. So he rarely attacks copyright in general, for pragmatic reasons.