Richard Stallman is autistic, weird, and has ethical and political beliefs that range from the bizarre to the flat-out objectionable, about which he cannot stay silent even when it would be prudent for his baby the FSF's sake, making him useless for any public-facing organization aiming for broad mass appeal, assuming the general public will ever give a single shit about software freedom (they won't)

He is also the *only person* in free software or open source leadership that I trust absolutely to look after free software as a philosophy because I am 100% certain that he *cannot be bought*, and I know that's the real reason he's hated, and why every year there's a new attempt to destroy him

When he has to go, whether he's forced out by hypocritical charlatans, or cancer or old age takes him, free software will have lost its only truly dedicated and unimpeachably honest voice

I know rms is strange, and sometimes it's painful to support him because of the dumb shit that he says, especially speaking as someone firmly right-of-center politically

But when it comes to free software, which is so important to me, even more than it was when I was a younger man, when it comes right down to it, I *don't trust anybody else*, and when rms is gone, free software will have lost something that it will never ever get back