Speaking of first hand learning and applying those lessons: That's all very well and fine that you're using your free speech to speculate about the motives of ESR and his relationship to RMS, without having actually looked at any of the evidence yourself, but do you know either of them personally, and if so, for how long have you known them, and how often have you interacted?

Have you ever had to sit through ESR yapping at you relentlessly about TMNN in the 1980's? I have, and so have many of my friends from that era. It was all he would talk about at the time. He was notorious for his obsession with proselytizing about TMNN and trying to personally attack and tear down RMS's life's work. (Not to mention ESR's rank bouquet and Pepé Le Pew approach to women.)

Pepe Le Pew - We shall flee to Capri!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMnbNTv_D3A

ESR's Creepy Sex Tips For Geeks: How To Be Sexy:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/sexy.html

And nobody wanted to work with ESR because he was an insufferable narcissist who didn't want to share his code with anyone, who wanted all the glory and bragging rights himself.

All he did was brag and brag like Trump bloviating about how smart he is, dissing all the competing software that was actually free and other people worked on and shared, without ever sharing his own code, or letting "many eyes" review it, over two full years, until he gave up on his TMNN project and never touched or spoke of it again.

There is literally a 365 line 3,135 word 19,560 character file in the TMNN source code called "doc/BRAGSHEET":

https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/blob/main/doc/BRAGS...

ESR's TMNN code wasn't a cathedral, a bazaar, or a mystery house -- it was a shanty town riddled with bugs and security holes far beyond the reach of "many eyes". I analyzed it with Claude: ~774 unsafe string call sites, 42 mktemp races, 61 shell-shaped holes, gets() normalized in a shared header. Review the code yourself if you don't believe me.

https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/tree/main/src

Imagine him cornering you at a science fiction convention and having to sit through him reciting that BRAGSHEET file to you again and again. It was his entire personality and discussion topic for two years (besides how much he hated RMS).

ESR's obsession is all about RMS personally, not just the EFF in general. His own TMNN license and my own personal first hand experience proves it. Have you ever discussed it with RMS himself, or even anyone else involved in the Free Software Foundation, or seen both of them interact in person? I have. I still communicate with RMS occasionally -- the last time he emailed me was a couple weeks ago.

I'm speaking from first hand knowledge and direct personal experience over decades. I'm not speculating and hallucinating and trying to carry ESR's water like you are, without knowing either of them personally.