Richard Stallman has portrayed himself as the defender of computing

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Richard Stallman has portrayed himself as the defender of computing freedom. Even though he does not have the three years of legal education real lawyers have, he portrays himself as somewhat of a legal expert. He uses his clout to stigmatize certain software projects as not being "free." (Most people can use them for free, but that doesn't count.) In the end, though, he has derailed the most important free software project of all: Linux.

He has derailed the Linux movement by creating his own forks of various projects. For example, he started Gnome, which diverted volunteers from KDE. He also created his own version of RPM (deb). I hypothesize that he is doing this for personal glory more than anything else. He tries to steal the spotlight by creating differences where there aren't any. He criticizes software makers for not allowing commercial enterprises to use their software for free. They still allow regular users to use them. So the only freedom he is defending in that case is the freedom of corporations! He also claims that he deserves equal credit for Linux, as if GNU contributed 50% of the work to Linux. Of course neither Linus nor Stallman deserves 50% of the credit. It's pointless trolling.

Anytime there is a Linux distribution that might challenge Windows, Stallman seems to go after it. Freespire, openSUSE, and Xandros have all been tarnished by a stigma from paranoid wannabe lawyers like Stallman. They are the easiest to use distributions today and have the newest software packages. However, Linux users are gravitating toward Ubuntu, which needs a lot of work.

I am not sure if Linux will ever challenge Microsoft or Apple. There are too many projects and Stallman seems intent on creating more. He will soon introduce his own kernel (Hurd) which will introduce more bugs that will need to be fixed. The only winners in this battle have been evil corporations like Apple and Microsoft.