But to give you the benefit of the doubt, MIT is a school. There’s nothing very exciting about it, I’m sorry. The students are smart, but so are students at a lot of universities. It’s not really any better than the others, except for some name recognition. They teach the same things, they provide the same opportunities.
Stallman didn’t even go there. He went to Harvard for his bachelor’s degree and was a “visiting researcher” at MIT. MIT has some cool research projects, but many many technical universities in the USA have those. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Stevens Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon, hell just any school that has graduate students and a computer science department.
Now don’t get me wrong, Boston is a great city (I live here, I love it) and MIT is a good school. But that’s it, it’s just good. Many many many smart people have come from other schools. Linus Torvalds has had an even greater impact on some of the topics you seem to care about than Stallman, and he went to the University of Helsinki in Finland. Schools are just schools.