Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

alexeymk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 210 posts

Re: Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

#71

Post by ugh »

andywood wrote: post #61

I dislike the idea that every single leader in the world must only conduct themselves according to Dale Carnegie, as it were. There is an over-abundance of people doing just that, and judging from this post and many of the comments, a lot of people seem to want others to conform to that sort of uniform "persuasive" behavior. I'm not saying it isn't effective, but surely not everybody needs to do that. Isn't there roo…

If you portray yourself as someone who wants to be persuasive, you better be prepared for being criticized when you are not living up to your mission.

There is nothing wrong with not wanting to be persuasive if you do anything other than persuasion but RMS is very much in the persuasion business.

Re: Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

#72

Post by lukifer »

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #40
emilsedgh wrote: post #8

A few points i would like to remind everyone who criticizes rms. 1) rms is a radical guy. You cannot change that. He fights for what he thinks is right. He is not the kind of person you can ask to censor himself. If he thinks u.s goverment is to blame for 9/11, no matter how saying it in a lecture seems childish, he will say it. If you invite rms for a lecture, he is coming with his radicalism. That is to be expected…

"even if you believe that the government had nothing to do with the attacks of September 2001," - could well be blaming foreign policy of previous governments, not theorising about conspiracies. I always wonder why conspiracy theory has become such a loaded phrase, people conspire in secret, other people theorise about it, I don't really see the problem.

Curiously enough, if there were secret cabal(s) running the world, it would clearly be in their interest to marginalize "conspiracy theories". Either way, it's classic a priori.

Re: Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

#73

Post by muyuu »

singular wrote: post #46
patrickaljord wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If he thinks u.s goverment is to blame for 9/11, no matter how saying it in a lecture seems childish, he will say it. By the way he doesn't believe that. Last time I read about his opinion on the subject he said that proofs were lacking on both sides (truther and non-truther) but that it was probably the work of religious fundamentalists (either christians or muslims).

To be honest, if he believes that 'proofs are lacking on both sides' then I've just lost quite a significant amount of respect for the man. If the 'truthers' are correct then many hundreds, if not thousands, of people decided to conspire to murder thousands of innocent civilians and, somehow, managed to prevent any leaking of this whatsoever. On this basis alone, the idea that 9/11 was a conspiracy is insane, before…

That always happens with people who voice their opinions on everything. There is always going to be a deal breaker.

We all have extremely conflicting opinions with others. You have to consider every issue and not the man so much.

He's the way he is. I agree with him in many points. In some very impopular issues I agree with him (not the "inside job" thing though). What I wouldn't do is come out in lectures with that kind of stuff. Political correctness is sadly a need when you stamp your real name on something.

Now, I think the FSF is right about basically every single point it's active on. That's what matters to me. I agree it's approach might be sometimes lacking, and I think RMS himself should step down and go back to writing software. Which is why I donate to the EFF instead, and I think it's pretty awesome.

Re: Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

#74

Post by mark_l_watson »

I don't think that Stallman should tone down his message. Sure, he can be rough, but so what. (I've experienced this in email with him when he asked about re-releasing some of my early Lisp books under the FSF doc license, but that is OK.) The world needs people with strong contrarian opinions and even if I don't always agree I value what they say.

Way off topic, but: I can imagine a future world where there is an underground using free software, private but linked ad-hoc networks, etc. The victories of the super rich over the rest of us in the last decade actually have me looking at fiction like the world in Gibson's 'Johnny Mnemonic' as a real possibility for the future.

Re: Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

#75

Post by yahelc »

cgray4 wrote: post #54
roadnottaken wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the same wikipedia article: 1996: Honorary doctorate from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology [85] 2001: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow [89] 2003: Honorary doctorate, from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel [91] 2004: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad Nacional de Salta. [92] 2007: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad de Los Angeles de Chimbote. 2007: Honorary doctorate, from the Uni…

I don't think an honorary doctorate entitles one to be referred to as Dr. In fact, most people with doctorates that I know would rather not be referred to as Dr. In the case of this article, it seems like the author is trying to be overly-formal in the manner of a Keith Olbermann rant.

Seems like he's referred to frequently as 'Dr. Stallman', including on gnu.org.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22Dr....

Re: Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

#76

Post by AlexeyMK »

st3fan wrote: post #55

When you talk about the risk of software as a service, you can mention that the US gov't is attempting to collect identifying user data from the Wikileaks Twitter account, or the recent domain name seizures of PokerStars and other online gambling websites. These are practical consequences of a lack of Free Software Huh Wut!? How is free or open software going to prevent any company from receiving a court order to dis…

Agreed, the point isn't straight-forward. Stallman's argument was against software-as-a-service and in favor of doing computing locally.

If we were using a decentralized twitter alternative like identi.ca or status.net, then all of the IP/log data wouldn't be in Twitter's hands to give in the first place. This is the 'if you let other people do your computing for you, you lose control/freedom over your data' argument.

The same logic (albeit less convincingly) applies to PokerStars - if we were using some sort of Bitcoin-driven, no-single-point-of-failure architecture for online poker, the US government wouldn't have been able to shut down the operation nearly as easily.

Re: Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

#77

Post by kevbin »

ugh wrote: post #68
rdouble wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you are being facetious, but the main argument for vegetarianism is that "meat is murder."

I have been told that the primary reason is that killing animals is morally wrong, not that it is in any way comparable to murder. I have never met an vegetarian so extreme to tell me that animals (we eat) are people.

Whether killing animals is comparable to murder is a different question than whether animals are people.

Peter Singer argues against the species-ist argument that they're incomparable. Or that killing any human is worse than killing any (or even all) animals, i.e. he argues that for some human,animal pairs killing the human is less-worse than killing the animal.

http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/faq.html :

> Q. I’ve read that you think humans and animals are equal. Do you really believe that a human being is no more valuable than an animal?

> A. I argued in the opening chapter of Animal Liberation that humans and animals are equal in the sense that the fact that a being is human does not mean that we should give the interests of that being preference over the similar interests of other beings. That would be speciesism, and wrong for the same reasons that racism and sexism are wrong. Pain is equally bad, if it is felt by a human being or a mouse. We should treat beings as individuals, rather than as members of a species. But that doesn’t mean that all individuals are equally valuable – see my answer to the next question for more details.

Re: Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

#78

Post by cgray4 »

yahelc wrote: post #75
cgray4 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think an honorary doctorate entitles one to be referred to as Dr. In fact, most people with doctorates that I know would rather not be referred to as Dr. In the case of this article, it seems like the author is trying to be overly-formal in the manner of a Keith Olbermann rant.

Seems like he's referred to frequently as 'Dr. Stallman', including on gnu.org. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22Dr....

Yuck.

Re: Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

#79

Post by planckscnst »

emilsedgh wrote: post #8

A few points i would like to remind everyone who criticizes rms. 1) rms is a radical guy. You cannot change that. He fights for what he thinks is right. He is not the kind of person you can ask to censor himself. If he thinks u.s goverment is to blame for 9/11, no matter how saying it in a lecture seems childish, he will say it. If you invite rms for a lecture, he is coming with his radicalism. That is to be expected…

The author (and his those who agree with him) are not asking Stallman to censor himself. On the contrary, they are asking him to express himself more effectively.

Re: Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

#80

Post by ugh »

kevbin wrote: post #77
ugh wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been told that the primary reason is that killing animals is morally wrong, not that it is in any way comparable to murder. I have never met an vegetarian so extreme to tell me that animals (we eat) are people.

Whether killing animals is comparable to murder is a different question than whether animals are people. Peter Singer argues against the species-ist argument that they're incomparable. Or that killing any human is worse than killing any (or even all) animals, i.e. he argues that for some human,animal pairs killing the human is less-worse than killing the animal. http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/faq.html : > Q. I’ve…

When someone says murder most people think 'subset of killing humans' — that's how people come into play. I don't ink you are really referring to a mainstream vegetarian argument there.

There is even vast common ground between meat eaters and vegetarians. Most people agree that killing primates it morally clearly wrong.

Post reply on HN