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Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

richard.stallman.usesthis.com

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Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#51

Post by slowpoke »

mhurron wrote: post #29
rudiger wrote: post #15

You have to give the guy some credit; Stallman believes in the free software movement, fights for it, and refuses to compromise his rights or values.

Which by and large hurts his position if that is to be held up as what it takes to follow the free software movement.

Quite the contrary. It shows that something is severely wrong and in dire need of improvement if you need to go to those lengths to be able to run entirely on Free Software. Someone who wants to run only Free Software should not, by any means, have to rely on a 9" netbook from a single, Chinese manufacturer. It should be easy to buy hardware that is open, just as much as it should be a non-issue to run Free Software. Actually, it should always be the preferred solution.

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#52

Post by bkirwi »

sek wrote: post #6

Well, not the best way to expand your horizon. When he would use things like the iPad from time to time, he would understand that convenience is the biggest threat to open source. Nobody cares how free Stallman's device really is. When he would speak for better open source devices, he would actually make progress. Right now is Shuttleworth advancing the free software movement to be accessible for everyone. Reminds me…

Saying Torvalds 'made everything possible' is technically true, but a bit misleading. If there was no Linux kernel, the free software project would have taken much longer, but without the GNU userspace the kernel would have been not much more than a curiosity. There's still more GNU code in your average Linux distro than anything else.[0]

People forget how much impact the lunatic fringe have on the rest of us. Before the free software movement, it would have seemed insane for a company to give away their code for free -- there was no precedent for it. When you shift the extremes, you also change what counts as being 'moderate'. Would anyone have taken Canonical's business model seriously twenty years ago?

TL;DR: We need people like Stallman to make the rest of us look less crazy.

[0] http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#53

Post by AlexandrB »

_delirium wrote: post #22
asto wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of ultra-geek uses that sort of setup? The current generation of that notebook has a processor that runs at less than 1GHz! The only reason he gets away with it is that he mostly does mail on emacs from console. It's too minimalist for any present day software development work

I know a reasonable number of present-day developers who use a setup not much more complex than that: emacs or vim in a console. Not very practical for webdev, but you can do scientific-computing or embedded dev that way. For scientific computing you'd probably want a beefier CPU to run tests, but those are often run remotely on a computing cluster anyway.

Yup. For embedded dev I use Vim in a console. It's convenient to have a big screen so I can have multiple terminals and reference materials open at the same time, but using a tiny computer like that is not out of the realm of possibility.

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#54

Post by nknight »

pooriaazimi wrote: post #48
dalke wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What limitations does the GPL license place on a web startup? AGPL, yes, but GPL?

Read the linked HN discussion (and also the original FreeBSD.org article). As an example, You can't (technically) use GPL'd code inside your iOS application. GPL is not the greatest license, that's why they created LGPL (to remove some of its stupid restrictions) and even that wasn't enough...

> You can't (technically) use GPL'd code inside your iOS application.

Web startups don't generally build iOS apps, they build web apps.

> GPL is not the greatest license, that's why they created LGPL (to remove some of its stupid restrictions) and even that wasn't enough...

Enough for whom? Microsoft? I know it's hard to believe, but some people do not have "allow companies to benefit from my work without giving back anything in return" as their top priority.

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#55

Post by elwin »

sek wrote: post #6

Well, not the best way to expand your horizon. When he would use things like the iPad from time to time, he would understand that convenience is the biggest threat to open source. Nobody cares how free Stallman's device really is. When he would speak for better open source devices, he would actually make progress. Right now is Shuttleworth advancing the free software movement to be accessible for everyone. Reminds me…

I don't think RMS could advance the Free software movement by using a more normal setup. There are already plenty of people who think open source is sort of cool, and install it on their MacBook Pros when it's convenient, and sometimes help develop it. And they're better at making Free software accessible for everyone than RMS could be. They don't need his help. He contributes more by disturbing our perspectives in a way that no one else does.

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#56

Post by there »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #50

Sadly, this didn't actually provide the details of the most interesting bit of this setup: a separate system that receives URLs via email and emails back a text version of the webpage, which allows integrating browsing into an almost entirely offline batch-processing setup.

He probably e-mails his assistant to do it, just like he speaks out against cell phones but will just ask to borrow someone else's.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/10/27/rms-cell-phones

Edit: according to http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html he does use normal web browsers from time to time and even has a Twitter account for posting comments on websites. For text articles, his script probably just runs something like "lynx -dump" on the URL and e-mails it back.

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#57

Post by [deleted] »

jorgecastillo wrote: post #47
rudiger wrote: post #15

You have to give the guy some credit; Stallman believes in the free software movement, fights for it, and refuses to compromise his rights or values.

Don't take this the wrong way but I personally feel that the GPL is not a free software license, I feel it's a community software license. BSD is a free software license, BSD code is truly yours, you want to create a proprietary fork you can do it, you want to create a GPLed fork you can do it, you want to expand the BSD code base you can do it. One thing I really love about BSD licensed code is that I feel like I ow…

[deleted]

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#58

Post by slowpoke »

jorgecastillo wrote: post #47
rudiger wrote: post #15

You have to give the guy some credit; Stallman believes in the free software movement, fights for it, and refuses to compromise his rights or values.

Don't take this the wrong way but I personally feel that the GPL is not a free software license, I feel it's a community software license. BSD is a free software license, BSD code is truly yours, you want to create a proprietary fork you can do it, you want to create a GPLed fork you can do it, you want to expand the BSD code base you can do it. One thing I really love about BSD licensed code is that I feel like I ow…

>you want to create a proprietary fork you can do it

Why should you be allowed to take away the Freedoms of others? The one thing the GPL restricts is your Freedom to restrict the Freedom of others. That's the foundation of copyleft: your rights stop where mine begin, and that includes being granted the four Freedoms of software as defined by the FSF.

In an ideal world, we would not need the GPL. Everyone would have realized already that it is in no one's prolonged interest to make proprietary software, and it would be frowned upon to do so. We would have implicit CC-BY (or -Zero) for everything and be done with it. No more copyright and licensing crap.

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#59

Post by jrockway »

there wrote: post #56
JoshTriplett wrote: post #50

Sadly, this didn't actually provide the details of the most interesting bit of this setup: a separate system that receives URLs via email and emails back a text version of the webpage, which allows integrating browsing into an almost entirely offline batch-processing setup.

He probably e-mails his assistant to do it, just like he speaks out against cell phones but will just ask to borrow someone else's. http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/10/27/rms-cell-phones Edit: according to http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html he does use normal web browsers from time to time and even has a Twitter account for posting comments on websites. For text articles, his script probably just runs s…

RMS said he would ask someone nearby for a phone, not necessarily a cell phone. Landline phones don't use software, they're a microphone connected to some wires. But you can't exactly carry one around with you.

Not sure why John Gruber cares about this, but...

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#60

Post by crististm »

When this link appears on HN I make a quick diff on two things and none of them change: what Stallman uses and what the comments are (I can make a bet I'll see comments about his mail forwarded web pages). And there are also comments about how GPL is restrictive and BSD is not...

But hey - this guy has principles and sticks to his guns. I respect him for that and I don't give a dime if he uses a one inch display on a PC with 64K of RAM

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