What an absolute clown. He’s a parody of people like him. A masterful troll.
This is outdated information. He just uses a browser over Tor now.
5 Likes
Show some empathy! Your personal website would be outdated too if you could only update it via tiny rolls of handwritten DNS packets, carried by ravens.
16 Likes
Different issue.
RMS is One Weird Dude. However, he’s also One Weird Dude whose record on predicting (mostly bad) technological developments is somewhere between ‘superb’ and ‘actively prescient’.
Personality sniping related to the fact that he is a weird dude is easy, hard to argue with; but tasteless and rather pointless.
Going through his predictions of ‘how this proprietary software stuff will all end badly’ and trying to rebut them, though? Well, there’s a reason why people usually skip this and just snipe at him for being a weird dude; specifically because it’s really hard.
If anything, his most significant predictive failures were in not being pessimistic enough. The GPL, pre v3, isn’t resistant to Tivoization, and the speed and efficiency of the rise of locked bootloaders were arguably substantially greater than predicted.
18 Likes
He has opinions about planes.
https://stallman.org/airlines.html
Hi… I know this sounds crazy, but how could I do this? I really want to be able to do this since I don’t want to get a VPN.
“First they ignore you.
Then they ridicule you.
And then they attack you and want to burn you.
And then they build monuments to you.”
We seem to have gotten stuck on step two with RMS, perhaps because there’s so much to work with there.
But he’s been a titanic force for good in the world.
7 Likes
…he now connects to websites from his own computer – via Tor and using a free software browser. Previously, he used a complicated workaround to more or less email webpages to himself. The announcement brought a surprised gasp and a round of applause from the 300-plus attendees.
“At one point, I used to believe that the Firefox trademark license was incompatible with free software, I found out I was mistaken – it does allow the redistribution of unmodified copies,” he said.
From blaeceorcanstan’s link.
3 Likes
Ridiculous. Just because people ridicule you doesn’t mean you are right. Most of the time it is because you are foolish.
This is like the people who take some super minority stand on some scientific subject (and often don’t have a science background) and claim since Galileo was persecuted, their own persecution proves that their scientific theory is right. After all, if Galileo was proven to be right after being lambasted, the same must be true for themselves.
I’ve read enough by RMS to realize that if I followed his ways I would get nothing done. Please read the rules he provides for people who are nice enough to provide a place for him to crash when he travels.
It never does get old: https://xkcd.com/225/
4 Likes
Well, There’s an image that I will now spend the next week trying to erase.
1 Like
I know right? I mean, who could take a guy seriously who founded a movement from which sprung the OS and a great deal of the software that people use for scientific computation?
7 Likes
Also, I’d like to put it out there that, among those things he lists, a way of paying for things anonymously on the internet would be pretty sweet.
1 Like
Independent of anyone’s opinion of him. The guy really does walk the walk.
7 Likes
I disagree. His personality is weird, rigid, and he refuses to see that it is odd in ANY sort of way, and if questioned about it he gets angry and defensive. It is EXACTLY what makes him someone not to listen to.
This is exactly where I have problems with him. I don’t believe in the GPL at all. Give me BSD any day of the week. I don’t want to tell anyone what to do with the software after they’ve taken it. Give me credit and leave me alone
And this is why I don’t care for him. He refuses to understand why anyone would ever think differently. That others can be ethical unless they follow his exact beliefs. I’ve seen up close when he has ‘corrected’ others about their opinions. I personally understand why people like the GPL, and I understand why some people need GPL3+. I don’t. I feel that if you create something, you have the right to tell others how to use your work – or not use it.
And yet, I don’t hold my opinion to be anything but my own. RMS? There is no option other than his.
Same with things like privacy. For the MOST part, I could give a shit about my privacy. There are specific areas that I do care about, but for the most part…I’m not going to get my panties in a bunch. Again, with RMS? Even explaining this is how someone else might feel this way, you are going to be lucky if you only get a lecture.
Again, the personality parts are exactly why. He can’t understand anyone else’s point of view, he doesn’t have a perspective that matches most, and he takes the most extreme belief and anyone else is an idiot. And that goes directly to the personality aspects.
6 Likes
Worst free software ever!
4 Likes
Half of me is repulsed, but at the same time I eat bits of skin from my fingernails, and people do lots of gross things in private.
Admittedly that’s not in front of cameras and some sort of conference…
1 Like
This seems somewhat odd, given that if you run the Python interpreter in interactive mode, this is more or less exactly what it does: Read user input, evaluate it, print result if applicable. (or change machine state, which is inevitable as it is procedural programming instead of functional).
1 Like
I was really confused when I first read it, but he’s using those in the Lisp purist sense (of course he’s a purist about everything). Python’s implementation does handle doing those, but the approach isn’t the same as Lisp’s (Python’s got a inherent distinction between data and code/expression and statement that doesn’t match the Lisp paradigm of read/eval/print), so by his criteria it’s inferior.
2 Likes
