Name me 10 hackers who have had a bigger impact on society than Stallman and the GNU Public License. We live in a world with so much free and open source software all around us, it's easy to forget the role Stallman's unwavering advocacy has played in creating this reality.
It seems hard to quantify. If everybody were using the BSD or Apache license instead of the GPL, would society be substantially different? My guess leans toward "A little different, but maybe not that much." Would BSD and Apache have caught on if Stallman hadn't been there? I don't know, but BSD at least predates GNU. Any answer would have to delve into the realm of historical fiction.
Well, Ubuntu's unwavering pragmatism in getting GNU/Linux on the desk- and laptops of reasonably regular people has had a big impact.
But being right (even very right) in the 80s and 90s doesn't make you automatically right forever after; I found his assertion that you should starve rather than write or run a single line of unfree code[1] to be wrong and very counterproductive to spreading free and open source software.
