It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign.

— RMS on cloud computing, 2008.

I've always found it difficult to get fully behind Richard Stallman. Despite having built my career on his software and being a paid-up member of the Free Software Foundation, I could never relate to his paranoid, unyielding distrust of all closed systems (or the toe jam thing).

But suddenly he doesn't seem crazy anymore. After the Snowden revelations, and all the other major and minor privacy breaches of the past few years, his paranoia now seems justified — even rational:

Stallman may be more radical than most of us, but we need him: firstly, to be the extremist, to dig in and fight on issues of freedom that the rest of us might let slide. Secondly, to show us how far down that path it is possible to go, to set an example that we might follow if the current erosion of privacy and personal freedom continues.