Nathan Myhrvold from Microsoft is now managing Intellectual Ventures, which is arguably a bigger patent troll than Acacia [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. We mentioned this company before because Microsoft could use Intellectual Ventures for lawsuits against competitors like Linux, by proxy [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
Watch the following recent video and jump to 35:20, which contains some GNU/Linux FUD. For future reference, as you can see, this guy is quite hostile towards open source. This includes myths about the technical abilities of Free software programmers, user friendliness, cost, etc. ⬆
Ubuntu "took off" not because it was very good or very easy. Ubuntu "took off" because of ShipIt, i.e. because of a multi-millionaire subsidising its mass distribution (at a personal cost).
In a healthy company, the CEO and CFO would get sacked on the spot for doing so. But IBM is not a healthy company, it's just a sick cow being milked to death.
"Considering Stallman worked in the MIT AI lab in the era of symbolic AI, and has written GCC (an optimizing compiler is a kind of symbolic reasoner imo), I think he has a deeper understanding of the question than most famous people in tech."