When they tried to cancel RMS for the first time in 2019, I am ashamed to say that I used it as an opportunity to pile on him on Twitter. I was sore about petty differences such as the architectural crippling of GCC and the viral nature of the GPL.

Since then, I have seen user freedoms continue to erode. Statists continue to push for more controls and backdoors on encryption. Repressive governments have the cooperation of the companies that run the mobile device app stores. Desktop operating systems continue to degrade with the addition of advertisements and increasing amounts of DRM, spying and "trusted computing" features that limit what you can do with your own machine. In short, we are one or two steps away from Stallman's nightmare scenario, where the illegal use of debuggers and compilers is considered a crime.

I used Stallman's first cancellation to advance my own permissive-licensing agenda (albeit by a very small amount, as I'm an unknown). Introspecting upon the way I reacted initially, I now suspect that this is simply another attempt by powerful interests in government and business (notably, a great deal of enmity against RMS comes from Microsoft and Salesforce) to destroy a man that has dedicated his life to keeping computing free.