Hah! Glad I'm not the only one who has this theory https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104114

You make it sound like it's required to have nice, free things.

it absolutely is. appeasement never worked. i put my foot to the floor and that's it. without me, there would be no libreboot at all.

Richard Stallman was a noted centrist for decades after all

"I dunno about this GNU project, man. They seem like a bunch of radicals. Why do they have to impugn all proprietary software like that?"