To be completely honest, after what he wrote about Steve Jobs' death, I don't feel like paying much attention to RMS anymore.
Much like Steve Jobs, RMS is a visionary. Most visionaries aren't necessarily pleasant people in any conventional sense, they can be peremptory, irritatingly specific and detailed in their demands.
Please don't compare the two.
Steve Jobs created a massive company. Thousands of jobs. He created products we all love and use.
Stallman just goes around ranting mad rants at people.
I wasn't referring to the name GNU/Linux ; I was specifically refuting the comment I quoted. The funny thing is that the comment effectively justifies RMS's insistence on using GNU/Linux . Because so many refer to the entire distribution as Linux , a lot of people fail to realize the hugely-important role that GNU software plays in Linux systems. Linux is still useful without KDE, but the functionality provided by GN…
> the functionality provided by GNU is critical and would require a large effort to replace This isn't really true. You could just grab your userspace from a BSD, or Plan9Port. Clang and LLVM do well enough to replace GCC on most important architectures.
Clang and LLVM do well enough to replace GCC on most important architectures.
25 years later. Very few works are relevant for that long.
Whatever you do, do NOT let him stay in the home of someone you respect or like. I've done it twice, and both parties ended up literally burning the sheets, and wouldn't discuss further what had happened.
Bit late, I've already done that. :) Although I don't remember hearing any horror stories, other than an amusing anecdote about how his ultra-free netbook wouldn't connect to the wireless, whereas the proprietary Macbook worked perfectly... http://www.ukuug.org/newsletter/17.2/#repor_paul_
Why would you expect any different? Wifi is pushing the bleeding edge of how proprietary a technology can be. Short of buying a semiconductor fab and replacing every access point and wlan chipset on earth, there is not a lot Stallman can do to prevent this problem. (Even then, the FCC does not care for radios that can be modified by their users. So this is why he has to advocate for Free Software: it's already illegal in some applications.)
Much like Steve Jobs, RMS is a visionary. Most visionaries aren't necessarily pleasant people in any conventional sense, they can be peremptory, irritatingly specific and detailed in their demands.
Please don't compare the two. Steve Jobs created a massive company. Thousands of jobs. He created products we all love and use. Stallman just goes around ranting mad rants at people.
Emacs has allowed me to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars. Apple products? Nope.
I, too, was disappointed by Richard Stallman' talk. We were a bunch of students in a conference in general software engineering. And he was invited to give a talk about copyright and freedom.. cool, right? Not exactly. He came in and started acting like he really didn't wanted to be there and didn't care at all about us, the place and the organizers. I'm usually not the kind to judge someone else dressing but Stallma…
I see this come up in RMS threads again and again. "There are ways to make things change. But you have to adapt." Why should he? He's famous and you're not. Why should he take advice from you that's clearly not working?
Also, he did change the system from the inside. This is why people deal with his quirks.
I, too, was disappointed by Richard Stallman' talk. We were a bunch of students in a conference in general software engineering. And he was invited to give a talk about copyright and freedom.. cool, right? Not exactly. He came in and started acting like he really didn't wanted to be there and didn't care at all about us, the place and the organizers. I'm usually not the kind to judge someone else dressing but Stallma…
I agree totally. The most frustrating part about Stallman's "free software" is that he has to control how everyone else uses it. Linux people don't even get the freedom to name their own operating system.
I don't think Stallman ever said that you don't have the freedom to call Linux Linux. He's simply asking that you don't.
As you can see, it's very easy to ignore his requests. That doesn't mean he should stop making them.
Please don't compare the two. Steve Jobs created a massive company. Thousands of jobs. He created products we all love and use. Stallman just goes around ranting mad rants at people.
Emacs has allowed me to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars. Apple products? Nope.
Some of the things in the rider are definitely odd, but the only one that I would really consider unreasonable is the "GNU/Linux" thing. Yes, I know that the GNU project has done a lot of work for Linux, but on the other hand there are a lot of Linux distros that do not use an all-GNU userland anymore.
I wonder what the "least-GNU" distro is at this point. Are there any that use LLVM/clang and uclibc, for example?