However, his world view is very much permeated by the importance of individual freedom and he is somewhat zealous in getting his message out there.

I like to think I have a more pragmatic approach to individual freedom than that - I'm happy to sacrifice freedoms in some areas if they grant me freedoms/abilities in other areas.

Being able to freely develop software on all the CPUs I own isn't an essential freedom.

But what I meant to imply was that for some, freedoms are important enough that they're a part of their lives, and RMS is one of those sorts. It DOES permeate almost everything that he does, and I respect him for being, if nothing else, more of a sentinel than the average person about what impacts our freedoms and what doesn't.

I'll be the first to concede that I am not nearly as vigilant and RMS is, and often participate in things that I don't morally agree with, but here's the real question, I guess... why shouldn't you be able to freely develop software on all the CPUs you own? For what reasons do you allow those constraints?

1) So what ?

2) He did few things. He launched Free Software Movement, started Free Software Foundation, and GNU project. He is main author of GPL :)

3) So what ?

4) So what ?

"How can someone hear him when he says something like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3083349 "

Because he's not hypocrite.

Yes, imho the GPL (and the idea of viral copyleft that it inspired) deserves to be treated as one of the greatest legal inventions of our time. Given the ongoing reduction of just about everything to information, the ascendancy of code and data among the human race, and the extent to which it will shape our future history, a viable, effective, encompassing legal framework to ensure its freedom is one of the most valuable contributions to computing that anyone has made.

The vote counting process has to be transparent, and closed source voting machines are not transparent.

Are you calling me nuts as well?

Haha. AWESOME.

He browses Internet from emacs.

He shouldn't use a mobile phone, there are reasons why he would get tracked.

>> 4) He doesn't use a browser; rather, he uses wget and reads the fetched pages from his e-mail mailbox;

He needs privacy more than anyone else.

You see as a political activist/famous person he should be more careful with these things.

For important elections, so do I and many others. Its much easier to steal an election based on an opaque computer systems.

Religions have questionable basis and use: it is both impossible to prove they are objectively true (at least through the scientific method, the only way we currently have to discover what is true) and to claim that they offer something valuable, which could not exist otherwise, to a human society.

Software freedom (or lack thereof) on the other hand has objective, practical consequences. They might not be direct, or apparent, or significant for every user in every possible use-case, but it is rather easy for a semi computer-literate person to understand that they exist and that they can be pretty negative and serious in too many cases.