RMS has always been prophetic. He's got the biggest Cassandra syndrome of anyone I've known. He's 100% right most of the time (at least evaluated a decade or two later), and most people have always thought that he sounds like a nutcase.
He's devoted his life to letting people know, and so few listen.
I'm super grateful he dedicated his life to spreading such anti-mainstream ideas about intellectual property. He wasn't the first at all to think outside the actual box that is the mind prison living under a copyright regime puts you in, but he had profound impact on so many to break us out of it. Technology would be nowhere near where it is now if not for the millions of us that gave the sweat of our brow to free software. Which also coincidentally created the largest concentration of wealth and power in the history of the species on the backs of that collective labor but I digress.
It's something which I have struggled with. Not that I think my ideas are all prophetic, or ignored/misunderstood, but that in the past some of my ideas have been prophetic but ignored, until some point in time where they were validated to be true. With that being a possibility, I struggle to know whether or not an idea that I feel strongly about, but is misunderstood or discounted, whether or not it should be discounted or discarded. It's hard to know what the right thing to do is when you are pretty confident that you're right, but you know you could just simply be wrong.
It's mostly about trying to figure myself out that I'm bewildered, not issues that apply to society at large. But even in that limited domain, I'm still gripped by analysis paralysis for that reason.
RMS is a stellar example of why we should avoid falling into the genetic fallacy[1]. Yes he is stupid about inter-sexual relations and sexual relations in general. But I don't look to RMS for dating or sex advice and neither should anyone else. Contrarily, just because he's stupid about some things doesn't mean we shouldn't listen to him in the domains where he's literally a genius[2], like software and information freedom.
Yes, it's amazing. He was using systems with Free bootloaders and bios etc. before Librem Purism was a thing at all, and has continually been on the bleeding edge of privacy and freedom.
The problem is, of course, that he's socially Quite Something, and that makes people have a natural level of disbelief that is the polar opposite of, say, the effect that a good cult leader, con man, grifter, or salesman has in terms of convincing people. He has like a -10 to Charisma, except he's actually really engaging and interesting, like a street preacher with 150 IQ.
The change he has affected in the world is phenomenal. It will continue to be a thing long after he's gone. Would be that people would walk around with his bearded visage on their shirts instead of Che and Marx.
He's devoted his life to letting people know, and so few listen.