Stallman reminds me of a king who has everything done by servants and knows only what his courtiers tell him. Being free of menial tasks like installing software leaves him more time to tackle serious issues. But it also insulates him from the problems that real people face.
It's not really something you can observe well from the outside, but in working with Richard on many things, I was surprised early on how much respect he gives to those he trusts, and how appreciative he is of help.
So "servants" is far from how he views volunteers. And after working closely with him for a few years within GNU, I don't feel at all like a servant---there is mutual respect, and we're not afraid to state our opinions or disagree with one-another. Much of the time he makes me feel like I work beside him, not below him. It's quite constructive.
This seems incompatible with what I read recently in an emacs discussion on HN, wherein they were unable to merge a popular package into emacs without Stallman's rubber stamp despite him being essentially uninvolved since 2008.
Are you referring to Magit? All code that is part of Emacs requires copyright assignment to the FSF; it's that simple. If Jonas Bernoulli can make that happen, then the issue is resolved.
He's intimately aware of the problems real people face and spends lots of his time discussing them. If he's a king with servants, he's one who knows the value he receives and thinks constantly about how to achieve a world in which everyone can easily get the results he has (e.g. not worry about installing their OS but still having fully-free/libre software)
My criticism of him is a separate, but similar, issue. I believe that he misses some of the social aspects of modern life, and that's why he views certain innocuous proprietary behaviors as totally damning. Based on his occasional emails to other members of the MIT community, he also seems to have a lack of empathy for people (not just organizations) who don't share his disdain for non-free things.
Not to mention that I find it difficult to see eye to eye with any man who would use a public urinal without shoes on.
