121–130 of 210 posts
When I first started to become computer savvy, Stallman had already moved into the activist stage, and further away from programming. I had always heard that he was a great programmer. But, I've never actually seen any code he's written. The earliest software versions I can find on gnu.org's FTP are from 1994--I'm guessing most of the projects had multiple contributors by this time. Anyone happen to know where some p…
apt-get source emacs
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Saying 9/11 was the work of Christian fundamentalists seems nearly as bizarre as claiming it was the work of the government. Neither has any grounding in fact.
What he said is that if the government was behind it it would probably be the christian fundamentalists.
You and many, many others need to start providing citations for these claims of what "he said." If you heard it, there's probably a citation somewhere about it.
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…
> 2) rms is a practical guy. stop acting like he's a mad man who knows nothing. He started GNU, wrote emacs, glibc, gcc and probably others. He created the concept of free software and wrote a license as good as GPL to defend it.
He created the concept of 'Free' (note the capital F) software as his definition of free. People were sharing source code beforehand. The source to Unix was available under licence, there were plenty of tools available (ISTR TECO, EMACS' predecessor being open source for example) with source. I can create a definition of something that distorts other peoples' views of the truth and misappropriate it as my own.
Secondly, he wrote all of those things as part of his GNU OS, which he never finished. As someone who's written hobby OSes before I can understand that GNU was a massive undertaking, but he's not the only guy ever to write an OS and deserves no more kudos for it than the BSD guys or any other OS developers. He is not some magical wizard of software freedom.
> 3) rms doesnt want people only to use free software.
This[1] article by a certain Richard Stallman on gnu.org begs to differ. Maybe it's a different Richard Stallman?
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> He would be just another programmer if he keeps coding. Wouldn't that be better than being just a gadfly? At least that's my impression; RMS will appear on some group or maillist, drop a bomb, tell everyone they're doing it wrong, and then disappear while the flamewar blazes, accomplishing nothing constructive in the process. And, in this community, everyone's status is based primarily on their programming, includi…
His status has been earned. RMS did incredible programming work in the 70s,80s that I think entitles him to make comments (even if they are wrong).
No he didn't! He wrote a text editor, a compiler and a library. It's not like he's the only person ever to do that. He also had a lot of help from others. He isn't the sole author of EMACS, GCC or glibc.
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His status has been earned. RMS did incredible programming work in the 70s,80s that I think entitles him to make comments (even if they are wrong).
> RMS did incredible programming work in the 70s,80s No he didn't! He wrote a text editor, a compiler and a library. It's not like he's the only person ever to do that. He also had a lot of help from others. He isn't the sole author of EMACS, GCC or glibc.
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I'm a happy fellow of the FSFE ( http://fsfe.org/ ), the European pendant to the FSF. Sometimes we also discuss FSF campaigns, and usually agree that those would almost certainly be counter-productive here in Europe, especially things like the "Windows 7 sins". However, we always thought: Well, the USA have a different culture, so maybe this kind of campaign is needed there, and probably our style of campaign would n…
Exaggeration and negative campaigns can work in the U.S., but as soon as "hyperbole" starts sounding like "crazy conspiracy theory" Americans tend to shut down. For the majority of Americans (contrary to the loudest voices in the political sphere), being outside of the "mainstream" is the kiss of death. I say all of that as a libertarian member of the FSF who disagrees with the way that many of the FSF's campaigns ar…
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I'm a happy fellow of the FSFE ( http://fsfe.org/ ), the European pendant to the FSF. Sometimes we also discuss FSF campaigns, and usually agree that those would almost certainly be counter-productive here in Europe, especially things like the "Windows 7 sins". However, we always thought: Well, the USA have a different culture, so maybe this kind of campaign is needed there, and probably our style of campaign would n…
Perhaps this a silly question, but why don't you guys expand your campaigns to the US? Why the geographic limitation?
There's an old saw which seems to apply perfectly here: Think global, act local.
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…
Of course there is, but I think in some ways it hurts RMS, and it hurts the image of the FSF. A good friend of mine (a fellow hacker, actually a much much better hacker than me) and I were talking about Richard Stallman the other day. The guy deserves an enormous amount of credit for his contributions to humanity. Think about what happened as a result of GCC. Think of how many things were enabled because of that. Rig…
Well, I think it is more subtle than that. You are relying on certain externalities - for example, you can't build a chip fab without spending an enormous amount of money, and you need all that power so you can work in Python and not ASM, you can't lay ubiquitous bandwidth without spending an enormous amount of money, etc.
What you are doing is equivalent to your friend creating whatever she can imagine in MicroStation (or whatever CAD architects use these days). It's just that she seems to be more aware of the commercial aspects of actually making it happen than you are.
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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.
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> RMS did incredible programming work in the 70s,80s No he didn't! He wrote a text editor, a compiler and a library. It's not like he's the only person ever to do that. He also had a lot of help from others. He isn't the sole author of EMACS, GCC or glibc.
You're only counting his Unix stuff. He's credited on the chine nual[0], he wrote bit-twiddling hacks, he published an AI paper with Sussman, etc. His WP page mentions a bunch of stuff. [0]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/two_pi_r/264672507/