I went to a talk Stallman gave when he was in Vancouver a few years ago. I found him not only uncharismatic, but almost actively so. Rather than promoting the FSF's agenda, I left with an even worse impression of it than I had originally had.

I give Stallman credit for his commitment to his cause, but at the same time I have to criticize him for maintaining his methods.

You want people to stop using Google Docs, because it's proprietary and hordes your data under Google's control? How about encouraging, spearheading, and promoting the creation of an open-source alternative? The suggestion of 'Just don't use Google Docs' isn't practical; people use it for a reason, and he doesn't seem to understand it, presumably because he doesn't 'collaborate' on documents the way that teams often have to. But if you put a free alternative in front of people, I'd wager you'd get a lot more converts.

Hell, how about just some modifications to OpenOffice to allow multi-user document edits using your native app, facilitated by a central server or peer-to-peer networking (e.g. zeroconf/avahi). Boom, now your full-featured word processor, which is better than Google Docs, has all the features you want, plus a local copy of the file.

Stallman's arguments seem to be 'This thing you like is bad, so just don't have it'. It's like someone without any children saying "Why do you need a playpen? And so many toys? And baby gates? Just don't let your kid go near the stairs, problem solved.' If you don't understand the challenges involved, which he obviously does not, you can't really provide input on the process.

He's also generally opposed to Clang/LLVM, for the sole reason that it provides an even more freely-licensed replacement for GCC. Now don't get me wrong, GCC is ridiculously important, and might be the most important thing the FSF has ever produced, but it also devolved into a complex, unmaintainable mess. Very few people in the world were capable of adding substantial features, and even fewer were willing to do so.

Now we have a competitor, an open-source compiler toolchain which provides better results faster than GCC, while also including tons of new features that makes a lot of work easier for everyone (e.g. integrating source code parsing into your IDE so you can find programming errors as easily as your spell checker can correct words). Clang/LLVM have forced the GCC team to sit up and start implementing all the things they had no time or interest to implement before. Now everyone gets a better compiler, no matter what OS you're on or what you choose to use. GCC is a significantly better compiler, and Apple is largely to blame. But because Apple is involved, LLVM is bad, because it can be used in non-free build systems, like Apple's or Adobe's.

And yet, despite Apple's use of it in non-free software, it's still far better than GCC in a lot of ways. So his fundamental objection is that proprietary software exists and can be used, and not that it's being forced on users. Apple and other corporations have advanced the state of computing and compiler technology, and he's upset about it because of the very reasons these corporations were able and willing to put the money in to give us all something better.

I can't take him seriously anymore. He's been tenured for too long, and disconnected from users for so long. He has a lot to say about how the users of 1995 should use their computers, but nothing new since then.