When I was a teenager, back in the 1990s, I idolised RMS. The GNU project and FSF were what I idolised him for, back then I'd never heard his views on these issues. As I grew older, I started to think that the hardline position of the FSF was impractical, at least for my own life. I wouldn't say I idolise him any more.

I think his former views were completely wrong, but I try to understand where he was coming from: RMS comes out of a progressive 1970s cultural milieu in which a lot of people were willing to question all aspects of traditional moral values, including age of consent laws. I can think of a number of now-mainstream European politicians, who in the 1970s were willing to associate with (or at least tolerate) "pro-pedophile" advocacy groups, and that way they behaved in the 1970s has come back to bite them – Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Harriet Harman, Jack Dromey, Patricia Hewitt. Someone like Allen Ginsberg, who was an open member of NAMBLA – and, by at least some accounts, actively abused underage boys – was nonetheless an acceptable figure in polite society – something that would be quite unbelievable in the year 2020. In the 1970s, a lot of what is now the mainstream gay rights movement was willing to associate with organisations like NAMBLA; by the 1980s, the mainstream gay rights movement had fully severed those ties, which was a prerequisite for the cultural and political successes of the LGBT movement of today. In the 70s, the victims of child sexual abuse were largely invisible, they were not being heard in the conversation in the way they are now, and society (including much of the radical left) had not yet begun to take their experiences seriously.

What makes RMS a bit different, is that figures like Cohn-Bendit, Harman, Dromey and Hewitt, realised their mistake (or at least cared enough about social acceptability to move with the times.) RMS clung to this view long after it had become seriously socially unacceptable in a way it had not been in his twenties. Why?

Well, it is obvious to me that RMS has a lot of autistic traits (as do I myself). I'm not the only person to notice this – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20969320 – to arrive at and defend socially unpopular positions through application of abstract reasoning, completely divorced from real world human experience, and then to cling to them pigheadedly, is something a lot of people with autistic traits end up doing at some point. So I think his autistic traits are another big part of the picture here that other people may not be seeing.

RMS' former views were always wrong: I'm the father of two young kids myself, to me their wrongness is completely obvious. But I can understand how something which is completely obvious to me, even to most people, might not have been obvious to him, and why it might have taken some real world interaction with abuse victims for him to understand it. And, to the best of my knowledge, these wrong views of his were purely theoretical, I've never heard any claims he's actually acted on them, or even had any personal interest in acting on them – unlike someone like Allen Ginsberg.

I'm not saying this because I think he should be the leader of the free software movement. I think he has done an enormous amount for that movement, but it probably now would be better served by someone younger and more attuned to contemporary culture. But he's a human being, and I feel the urge to understand him sympathetically, rather than join in a mob out to get him.