Many of the people discussing it do think it is directly relevant, myself included. Consider downvoting and moving along if you find it off-topic?
And by the way, communism isn't exactly a word you have to be afraid of, and accusing someone of opposing capitalism doesn't shut down the conversation nor mean they are incorrect.
It was not my intention to use “communist/anarchist” as something people ought to be afraid of; it is merely completely irrelevant to this issue.
I doubt that Stallman himself would consider them relevant since he, in my experience, takes every opportunity to disassociate himself from communism and anarchism; he is instead concerned with copyright, software patents, and other impediments to scientific progress. Therefore, to try to drag those former kinds of ideas into a thread specifically about the latter is to deliberately cause inflammatory and irrelevant discussion, and also to cause opponents of these former ideologies to connect the two in their minds, creating FUD about the latter.
> I doubt that Stallman himself would consider them relevant since he, in my experience, takes every opportunity to disassociate himself from communism and anarchism; he is instead concerned with copyright, software patents, and other impediments to scientific progress.
His solution to that is a limited form of anarcho-communism—abolishing private intellectual property (while the FSF leveraged existing private intellectual property regimed to effect that goal) in favor of free public use.
Whether he approves of the label is pretty much irrelevant to whether what he advocates is in line with it.
Why must the bounds of our discourse be drawn by the interests of the author of a piece? I don't see any reason to do that and it certainly isn't the determinant of what is 'relevant'
