He's an ideologue, not a hero. Heroism implies courage and noble qualities.
It doesn't detract from his authority on the subject, not in the least, but is he a hero? I don't think so.
He would likely scoff at being called a hero too.
In any event, the vast majority of people will know no privacy other than from each-other's affairs. Frankly I think the advent of cheap home delivery will push the privacy issue higher into the general consciousness, and people will be alarmed that all of their purchases are now tracked and indexed.
The gap between online and offline purchasing will disappear over the next 18-36 months, and those on the forefront of this will be in a significant position of power. The synthesis of Big Data(TM) between related firms will reach new heights, and that will actually scare people.
I have always considered his work on Lisp machines back in the early eighties heroic. When Symbolics stopped sharing their developments, he endeavoured to match them feature for feature, single-handedly, and give away the reimplementation for free. To quote Steven Levy, "RMS had single-handedly attempted to match the work of over a dozen world-class hackers [1], and managed to keep doing it during most of 1982 and almost all of 1983". He saw what Symbolics created, and then reimplemented it and gave it away.
Greenblatt noted that he was out-hacking the whole bunch of them. Gosper called it incredible.
When Stallman finally couldn't keep up, he set a new goal that he hoped would solve the problem permanently. GNU.
There is, of course, the other side of the story, although I find the dismissal of the complexity of the features RMS was matching a little disingenuous - how complex they were seems irrelevant compared to the fact that he was doing it alone and Symbolics was doing it with a bunch of world-class hackers: https://web.archive.org/web/20080112153822/http://dlweinreb....
[1] Some people on HN define "hacker" as "person who can code". The definition in use here is older.
The "dismissal", as you call it, is hardly unfair (note, I was an eyewitness to all this, the players were largely in my social circle and I worked for Lisp Machines Inc during that period, heck, we both gave up on Lisp Machines in general at the same time). As DLW relates, RMS didn't do the designs of the new features, he copied some of them. In part I believe this is because he's much more an improver than an innovator when it comes to code and systems. This can have massive qualitative results, like after he took over ITS EMACS, but it deprives him of the cachet of "inventor", for what that's worth.
It's hard not to think of Stallman's crusade against the major powers as not requiring courage, and his endless fight for other people's freedoms as not a noble quality. He's basically a civil rights warrior.
Out of curiosity, whom do you consider to actually be a hero in the modern day?
It doesn't detract from his authority on the subject, not in the least, but is he a hero? I don't think so.
He would likely scoff at being called a hero too.
In any event, the vast majority of people will know no privacy other than from each-other's affairs. Frankly I think the advent of cheap home delivery will push the privacy issue higher into the general consciousness, and people will be alarmed that all of their purchases are now tracked and indexed.
The gap between online and offline purchasing will disappear over the next 18-36 months, and those on the forefront of this will be in a significant position of power. The synthesis of Big Data(TM) between related firms will reach new heights, and that will actually scare people.