I like RMS(even attended one of his talks, was fun) and he has been surprising prescient about many things.
But he still seems to be falling victim to the "Smarter people are more likely to believe in false conspiracy theories" rule.
In his post against Ubuntu's local searches being sent to Amazon, he claimed as-a-matter-of-fact that Windows sends local searches to an internet server and his friend proved so. This may be true in Windows 8.1 but is certainly not true beforehand. I figure that if someone else said something similar about FOSS in the same casual way, RMS himself would characterize(rightly so) it as FUD tactics.
Still, I do think that we need more people like him rather than everyone else who seem to be aligning themselves with some or the other corporate entity and thus lose their moral compass in the process.
It feels sort of weird to see such claims about a guy who was hacking on computer systems that were almost two decades ahead of everything else. (But that probably depends on what one sees as "technology". Shrinking transistor size is definitely technological progress, but I don't think that this alone has ever had a qualitative influence on the impact of computing systems - unlike their ubiquity, which, on the other hand, is not as much a technological advancement as it is a social one.)
He was a brilliant technologist. I'm not sure how much programming he does anymore. But the technology outpacing stuff ... Have you looked into the sorts of devices and technologies he currently uses?
But is he still doing that? (Honest question, I don't know) Just because you were on the bleeding edge twenty years ago, does not mean you haven't been outpaced today.
I don't think technology itself has outpaced RMS at all, but it definitely appears that he doesn't keep up on current events. I remember when he released his screed against JavaScript as if he had just discovered it, but JS had been widely used for years at that point.
It hadn't really been widely used for anything more than image rollovers though. His concerns arose when entire apps began being written in client-side javascript
But he still seems to be falling victim to the "Smarter people are more likely to believe in false conspiracy theories" rule.
In his post against Ubuntu's local searches being sent to Amazon, he claimed as-a-matter-of-fact that Windows sends local searches to an internet server and his friend proved so. This may be true in Windows 8.1 but is certainly not true beforehand. I figure that if someone else said something similar about FOSS in the same casual way, RMS himself would characterize(rightly so) it as FUD tactics.
Still, I do think that we need more people like him rather than everyone else who seem to be aligning themselves with some or the other corporate entity and thus lose their moral compass in the process.