And he's been right about things. Almost every time. I post this basic quip every time one of these threads comes up. After the fifteenth "Oh, yeah, I guess he was right" you start to cut the guy a ton of slack.
This is an excellent comment because it explains Stallman's accuracy (vs his opponents) not in terms of the fundamentals of their reasoning but in terms of their heuristics for judging motivations.
By the way, it always seemed to me that by civilized discussion once can learn the opponent's point of view and maybe even reach a compromise, but it seems HN works in a different way, hiding downvoted posts. When I expand them, I'm often surprised to see they're not spam nor offensive content, but just statements many people don't agree with.
The argument for closed source software (and indeed intellectual property in general) is that it incentivizes creation by giving creators a means to profit from their ideas.
Now RMS of course has his own arguments on that point, which is great. But, my point is that predicting that people will sometimes do bad things with closed source software doesn't make you a prophet. It means you have an IQ above 15.
It would be like if I "predicted" that baseball bats would be used for violence and then every time a crime was committed with a baseball bat, everyone was all like, "oh, he was right again about the bats!" Everyone everywhere knows that bats are sometimes abused for violence. That's not foresight, it's common sense.