>Who cares where the information came from if the information is accurate?

It isn't. The article opens up by claiming that Stallman has a political agenda regarding the normalization of child sexual abuse which is a blatant lie. He never had an agenda regarding this, just a blog where he posted his terrible and tone-deaf opinions.

He deliberately framed his quotes in such a way to lead readers into a conclusion that fits his own political agenda.

This distinction is also made by the law in the USA, so this quote merely reflects USA law.

You can disagree with this quote and even find it gross, but to claim this quote aims to normalize CSAM is a blatant lie.

Stallman's credit for the creation of the GNU operating system was stolen by Linus Torvalds, and most of the community even claims that GNU isn't an operating system, essentially deleting his biggest achievement and denying him any and all recognition.

He created and championed Free Software, but that movement was replaced by the Open Source ideology, which is diametrically opposed to what he believed in. The FSF struggles to get new members and funding, while the Linux Foundation and open source projects flourish with billions of dollars from volunteers and corporations alike.

GCC and Emacs are largely irrelevant today. Stallman himself gets no respect; he's mocked and harassed by open source advocates and corporations alike.

He has expressed the isolation he is in during an interview: "I am the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don’t really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways, I feel like I ought to be dead."

What Drew DeVault did with this hit piece is despicable. He wanted to shame and bully the FSF board into removing Stallman and resigning so his people can take over and push for his deranged idea of 'free software.'

The message is clear: HN has a "bias" (according to them) and their readers must take action in order to discuss it.

It could be that readers here disagree with them, it could be that readers don't buy their attempt at character assassination, instead they play victims as if there was a grand conspiracy to keep a homeless old man with cancer at the head of a nonprofit.

This is telling. They don't want discourse, they want to silence and bully everyone who disagrees with them so only they are allowed to speak.

All they have is anonymous accusations with zero proof, an off-context quote regarding an MIT professor, off-color jokes made 50 years ago and a couple of (retracted) opinions that are no worse than the things being said by prominent philosophers like Michel Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir.

His operating system, GNU, is the de-facto UNIX implementation and runs many critical systems around the world.

Anyone who claims that the guy is unlikeable has never truly bothered to hear him speak and isntrad relies on what they've been told by malicious actors. Stallman doesn't attack other people or ideologies.

If anything his biggest mistake was using Linux as a kernel for people decided to call the GNU operating system "Linux" and it eventually took most of the funding and development away from the OS and its ideology.

"Linux" has a minuscule market share and the people that use it are already more likely to use Firefox than Chrome since FF is open source.

>Windows comes with Edge pre-installed.

Edge is now Chromium-based as not even Microsoft wants to deal with Google breaking websites for non-Chromium browsers "by mistake" and rushing to fix it.

>MacOS comes with Safari pre-installed.

>OSX comes with Safari Mobile pre-installed.

Which are minuscule portions of the market.

>Android devices appear to have a decent choice of browsers, and the default is chosen by the manufacturer. For a lot of them that's Chrome, but not all.

Irrelevant. All of Android's browsers use a wrapper around WebView which is Chromium. Only Firefox comes to mind as a non-Chromium browser and it's not preinstalled on anything.

>I don't think there's actually any large group of devices that has Chrome pre-installed.

Android phones, Microsoft Windows and every user that installed Flash or Avast! in the past 12 years.

>Also, pure Android users are free to install any browser and set it as the default.

Again, most browsers are a wrapper around Chromium. Again, most users don't change defaults.

>Chrome is so popular because it has been the best browser for years.

And anti-competitive practices like being bundled with popular software and having free advertisement from the most popular website in the world (which also happens to be the most popular email provider and video sharing platform.)

>I see where TFA is coming from: if we could agree that browsers don't need to be this complex, then there would be more of them. But that would mean less flexible web pages, and we'd end up with something Flash-like being an attractive alternative.

Websites are not flexible. They're flexible for ad companies and web designers who like pointless animations, but now they're harder to parse, modify, save and their compatibility with text-to-speech has gone down the drain the past years.

The problem with Flash is that it gave us a bunch of unresponsive, needlessly flashy websites that were harder to use. Web designers are doing the exact same thing with HTML5 and their 50 MB of JS libraries.

Today only Blink and Gecko remain. And for some reason web developers want Gecko to dissapear.

This is what it all comes to. Unparsable, terrible-to-use websites that are also not compatible with text-to-speech is the future because ad companies demand it. Users are complete non-entities in this decision.

Right now Gmail's HTML version is both faster and lighter than the regular version. The only advantage being not having to reload the entire page to load mails (which is still faster on the HTML version.)

On a side note, the irony of GNU/NT must be killing Stallman.