His message wasn’t “Use GNU GUILE, it’ll make your life great”, it was “Don’t use Tcl”

Technical discussion is all well & good, but at the point that Stallman sent his message, GUILE didn’t even exist – it was purely an attack on Tcl, with zero useful suggestions. Frankly, the “don’t use this but I won’t suggest a better alternative” strategy is one I expect from people like Roy

Urging developers not to use a language not due to issues with Freedom, but personal issues with design, is a horrible move to make for someone of his standing

I think you’ve got it exactly the wrong way around. Urging developers to not use a language because that language is badly designed is a good thing. We should do more of that. Urging developers to use (or not use) a language because your personal opinion is that it is (or is not) sufficiently “Free” is a stupid thing: not only are you imposing your values on people, you are also helping to ensure that the language developers never see enough open-source adoption to make it worth their while to support open-source-centric development.

Frankly, we could use more people discussing things on technical merit, and fewer people spending potentially-productive-time arguing back and forth about license clauses and who’s got which stamp of approval.

Now, if his technical arguments were flimsy, that would be a reason to suspect that there was something going on. That’s not the case here.

“.Net is a fun platform to code for, and I like to have fun in my personal time ”

This is barely an excuse for your constant shilling and misrepresentation
of other people’s thoughts and actions. This whole situation is not ‘fun’
nor ‘amusing’. Get your facts straight and either admit when you are proven
wrong (everywhere in this thread) or come up with something more intelligent
than the usual Mono/.NET drivel.

1. RMS lays out his reasoning, and whether you agree with it or not, there is nothing irrational or crazy-eyed about his thinking. Quite the contrary, almost every rebuttal acknowledges he at least makes some points, while discussing where opinions differ on other points.

In fact, the entire debate is largely centered around very nerdy syntactical and technical issues – a very common happening in programming circles and therefore a very poor attempt to discredit RMS.

2. A super common Team Mono / Microsoft apologist defense is that “Microsoft might have done some bad things, but that was a long time ago!” Or, perhaps they might even get on me about repeating a quote from a dusty old interview in the Register.

But, of course, it is fine and dandy to point to a 15 year old debate on the technical and syntactical merits of TCL as some sort of evidence that RMS was a nutter back then, and so must be a nutter now?

3. Of course, we all know today – 15 years later – how dominant TCL became, where now almost everyone uses it for common scripting tasks. Oh wait, that’s not what happened at all, is it?

This is very – very – weak sauce indeed.

In all these cases, he pointed out issues that either didn’t exist (Javascript) or turned out to be overhyped (LZW) or didn’t come true (Java). So much for his foresight.

RMS has been incorrect about legalities before; a lot of people (myself included) don’t see why the GPLv3 is an improvement on GPLv2

Your inability to see or agree that the GPLv3 is an improvement is hardly evidence that RMS is incorrect.

So this is not an example of RMS being incorrect.

I don’t recall anyone being sued for GIF infringement

No one would have been sued for “GIF Infringement”, since it was the LZW Compression algorithm that was patented by Unisys.

Which Unisys sued Corel over. (http://ww2.itweb.co.za/office/unisys/9809071211.htm)

Unisys had a very long and confusing history of trying to impose license fees on anyone who wanted to use / modify / save for profit / non-profit, and often threatened legal action. (http://www.cloanto.com/users/mcb/19950127giflzw.html)

So this is not an example of RMS being incorrect.

and he was wrong about Java

How so? The problem was resolved by Sun re-releasing Java under the GPL, as it noted in bolded text at the top of the very link you provide.

It seems strange to call RMS wrong when the situation he was critical of changed to meet his standards, at which point he noted the change and stopped criticizing.

So this is not an example of RMS being incorrect.

weird concerns about Javascript

What is “weird” about his concerns? The fact of the matter is when you run obfusucated, complex JavaScript programs through a web browser, you run into many of the same issues that you do when running regular old closed-source programs.

Since RMS has concerns with the latter, it is perfectly rational to have concerns with the former. I don’t see anything “weird” about that at all.

So this is not an example of being incorrect.

but I can’t say that he’s been right most of the time.

Perhaps, but solely based on the evidence you have chosen to present, you can not say he has ever been incorrect.