But you do remember the talk and you are still willing to promote it, so from his point of view that's mission accomplished.
That's like expecting Sylvester Stallone to do higher mathematics or Mother Theresa to do an arms deal for you.
Some people are what they are and their environment/audience will have to accept them as they are.
The problem lies squarely with the person that hired him, the abstract of the speeches listed should have adequately explained what they were going to get. That's exactly what that rider exists for in the first place, to avoid misunderstandings like that.
I highly doubt if RMS could even tailor his speech to the occasion, he must know it by heart by now except for the Q&A part.
What I found interesting on reading the 'rider' is that he still refers to the GNU operating system as though it is in daily use. I've yet to see a HURD based system do anything useful in production but half the world wide web seems to run on Linux these days. Of course linux is 'merely a kernel'.
But if you write free software the you also give away the right to name that software, after all, a fork is under no obligation to be named after the parent. So RMS holding on to insisting to call Linux GNU/Linux looks to be against the self-imposed freedoms.
Considering that glib, libc, gcc, emacs, the vast majority of the Unix utilities, bash, grub, autoconf, make, readline, gzip, tar, screen, wget, and Gnome are all GNU projects[0], I would say that GNU is most definitely in daily use. The Linux kernel isn't much use without the software on top of it, and it's nothing at all without the compiler that turns it into machine code.
[0] See https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html#allgnupkgs for the full list.
Or without the its own license, the GNU GPL.
Linux is still useful without KDE, but the functionality provided by GNU is critical and would require a large effort to replace.
This isn't really true. You could just grab your userspace from a BSD, or Plan9Port. Clang and LLVM do well enough to replace GCC on most important architectures.
25 years later. Very few works are relevant for that long.
However since GNU software is the foundation on which most of the system is built you can argue that it has a much greater importance.
"Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs"
Now compare that to how many people have none of the GNU software on their systems.
It's really difficult to determine the relative importance of one software project at this level over another they reliant on each other. The Linux kernel needs GNU as much as GNU needs the kernel (at the moment anyway). You can run the OS without KDE (hence not calling it KDE/Linux).
I can see Stallman's point as he set out to create an operating system called GNU, created almost all of the parts required which were then used by someone else to create a Kernel which was then packaged up with a different name.
Personally I think you can call GNU/Linux whatever you want as the licence its released under has nothing in there saying you need to give mention to GNU in the name. If you package it up you can call it Fred for all I care and I will refer to it as Fred.
You could also form stacks, like KDE/GNU/Linux, or go all the way and just draw a directed graph of the major software dependencies. This isn't a serious proposal, but I would be kind of pleased if someone actually did this.
You didn't know the real Mother Theresa, did you.
That, and he does tend to be brusk.