Fame is Not the Goal
"Fame" kills. Many celebrities don't live long. Musicians? A high proportion of musicians die young. Their meteoric rise and subsequent fall can fit into the timespan of a week, a month, sometimes a year. If they're lucky maybe decades. Maybe. Some gain infamy. This infamy can lead to a new kind of career or a comeback.
In sports, the "shelf life" of some athlete or footballer is 5-15 years (a bit longer for goalkeepers because experience is more important than stamina/endurance). In "showbiz", many have sharp ups and downs, which they compensate for (with reservations) by taking drugs.
In short, fame can kill. It can be destructive. Just look at what happens in South Korea; the suicide rates among celebrities there have long sounded serious, then came or eventually rang the alarm bells. They still don't know how to tackle this issue, a national crisis.
In recent years my output in this site increased to about 8,000 articles per year; many of those articles are seen by many people and we attract more whistleblowers than ever before (whistleblowers are the way to have exclusive stories with considerable impact, which in turn begets more whistleblowers). But the growing exposure - and measurable increase in reach - resulted in horrific attacks not just on me but almost everybody in my family. I cannot tolerate this because even as a thick-skinned person it would be selfish to simply ignore the impact on loved ones.
My aim is to promote Software Freedom, but this apparently strikes some nerves and as a result of this people whom I love and care for deeply (and love me back, sometimes unconditionally) are subjected to abuse and are made to suffer. In recent years I spoke to about 30 cops (probably more), they came to visit us more time than I can even remember or count (they pick evidence that we show them), and I had to spend a lot of time speaking to webhosts who are also coming under attacks (somehow they always seem to target women in the webhosts! Funny that!). We'll cover that latter thing soon (new series, years in the making).
Software Freedom advocacy is not "safe"; there are interests and greedy people working for these interest groups who would do anything to silence advocates. I very much admire and can nowadays relate to what Richard Stallman (RMS) went through, knowing that Richard is a very nice person (I met him in isolation twice, once in Lincoln, then again in Oxford, in order to record videos).
Despite the halo parody (an atheist pretending to be sainthood), Richard does not wish and never sought fame. He was just very angry at what Xerox had done when he worked at MIT and he correctly foresaw that many more "Xeroxes" - not just Microsoft - would make the world a bad place. They would become a living hell not just to programmers like him but to everyone who uses a computer (not so many people back in the early 1980s).
Richard is surviving cancer and his movement is surviving "Cancel Mobs" (primarily online cowards and inherently hypocritical mobs that champion "cancel culture").
There are many Richards out there who don't try to be famous, but their projects - once they become popular and even ubiquitous (high levels of adoption, huge userbase like VLC's) - receive a ton of abuse.
This was last summer: Online Mobs and Crabs: Doing to Fabrice Bellard What They Did to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds
Stand up for Richard even if you don't like his politics or generally don't like him as a person. Richard is not really a bad person, but if we give up on him (under the false premise that "brought it on himself" - a smear we saw in social control media leveraged against us despite the judge disagreeing strongly on that) - then we know the above-mentioned "cancel mob" will get appetite and start looking for the "next Richard" to taunt, to mock, to selectively (misleadingly) quote and so on.
Free software advocacy goes against the "moneyed interests" and there will always be many "useful idiots" out there willing to join the "online gangs" (seeking affirmation in thoughtless groupthink) that dehumanise the vulnerable and then "high-five" one another in "like" or "favourite" form. "The Practice of Ritual Defamation" was articulated 36 years ago as follows: "In a ritual defamation the victim must have violated a particular taboo in some way, usually by expressing or identifying with a forbidden attitude, opinion or belief. It is not necessary that he “do” anything about it or undertake any particular course of action, only that he engage in some form of communication or expression. [...] a ritual defamation must bring pressure and humiliation on the victim from every quarter, including family and friends. If the victim has school children, they may be taunted and ridiculed as a consequence of adverse publicity. If they are employed, they may be fired from their job. If the victim belongs to clubs or associations, other members may be urged to expel them."
This is precisely what they were doing to Richard. █