Why I Think Richard Stallman is a Fanatic, and Why That Matters.

Eric S. Raymond | Armed and Dangerous | June 11, 2012

One of my commenters reports that he showed my essay on evaluating the harm from closed-source software to Richard Stallman, who became upset by it. It shouldn’t be news to RMS or anyone else that I think he’s a fanatic and this is a problem, but it seems that every few years I have to explain the problem again. I make the effort not because of personal animus but because fanaticism does not serve us well – we’ve made huge progress since 1998 by not repeating RMS’s mistakes, and I think it’s important that we continue not to replicate them.

When I was say that I judge RMS is a fanatic, I mean something very specific by that. I cite Santayana’s definition: “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim”. By his own account of his road-to-Damascus experience, RMS started out attempting to solve a problem; there was this broken printer driver that he couldn’t fix because he couldn’t get the source. RMS correctly identified source secrecy as a damaging practice leading to bad outcomes.

Unfortunately, RMS made an early decision to frame his advocacy as a moral crusade rather than a pragmatic argument about engineering practices and outcomes. While he made consequentialist arguments against closed source (and still does) his rhetoric and his thinking became dominated by terms like “evil”, to the point where he repeatedly alienated potential allies both with his absolutism and his demand that anyone cooperating with him share it.