What's there to respect about purity of ideology? Being pure and ignorant of other opinions is the easy way out. Learning and understanding alternate points of view and working with those people is what's worth respect, imho.
Being pure and ignorant of other opinions is the easy way out.
There is nothing in ideological purity that demands ignorance of other opinions. And just because you're cognizant of someone's opinion, doesn't mean you have to agree. RMS can say what he wants, and I'm sure he's not ignorant of other's opinions. If you don't like what he says, don't do what he says. If you don't like his philosophy, maybe you shouldn't use GNU software? He doesn't force you to use any software. (Which is more than can be said for lots of corporations.)
That's exactly opposite of what I think is actually going on. I don't want to get into a GPL vs BSD argument, but he does say people should not use commercial software, thus limiting their options to often less useful free software equivalents. And corporations do give you choice in usage as you can always opt to not buy software from them. A well-regulated commercial market is all about choice.
