I just came across Richard Stallman's comments on Miguel de Icaza. Assuming those comments are true, I qualify this as the death of any moral authority that RMS could have to represent the free software community.
He is obssessed with getting credit for something that, yes he helped starting and yes he was part of, but, GNOME, KDE, BSD, X11, Mozilla and many other projects and communities with different, respectable and useful views on what freedom means deserve as much if not more credit than the GNU project for providing the free tools than an average computer user would expect from a modern operating system.
He is obsessed with taking Microsoft out of business, and he hates Miguel because he is one of the very few trying to taking them to play into our terms and from where I stand I think he has achieved.
I don't think Microsoft is a business model to follow by no means, but I think many people and institutions are attacking them irrationally without looking into where the real problem is.
In 1997 when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he stated that the assumption that for Apple to succeed Microsoft had to loose was wrong.
A very sound statement, and very surprising coming from the person that have all the possible reasons to hate Bill Gates and Microsoft more irrationally than anyone. But Steve Jobs was not stupid and looking at where Apple is now I'm pretty sure none can deny he was right.
Recently I read The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier in which the author analyzes some of the reasons poor countries remain poor. One of the statements on the book summarizes quite well the different vision on how to spread freedom that Miguel and Richard represent.
He states that politicized people tend to think in terms on winning and losing, since in politics, he says, you either have power or not. However, in economics and business, it is very common that two different parties can benefit mutually from a given relationship.
It seems to me that RMS is been so long in a strong political position that he has forgotten how the world really works, and he feels that the only way to justify his position is pointing his finger at the people who doesn't do things his way, which funnily enough, are often the people doing something.
