Fortunes lost and won is incidental. The big story is small-i infowar.
Richard M. Stallman was a a prophet that wandered in from the desert and ranted against proprietary software. Some listened (Apache, Linux, Blender), but most didn't (Google, Facebook, Smartmatic/Dominion).
Quote:
Richard Matthew Stallman (/ˈstɑːlmən/; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms,[1] is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in a manner such that its users receive the freedoms to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License.
Stallman launched the GNU Project in September 1983 to create a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software.[2] With this, he also launched the free software movement....[5] In October 1985[6] he founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify, and distribute free software, and is the main author of free software licenses which describe those terms, most notably the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most widely used free software license.[7]
In 1989, he co-founded the League for Programming Freedom....
In September 2019, Stallman resigned as president of the FSF and left his "visiting scientist" role at MIT after [he was cancelled by the Left]
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GNU is self-referentially GNU's Not Unix.
At minimum the software that controls elections should be auditable.