I really respect everything he's done and his opinions, but to me he's much like a devout religious figure. His dedication to free software is akin to a Buddhist monk. I appreciate his devotion (like I do non-atheists) but respectfully disagree with his strong feelings.
Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
201–210 of 293 posts
Re: Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to think he was an abrasive fanatic. Oh wait, I still do. I'm tired of being told my decisions are compromises, and wrong ones at that. I'm tired of being told I owe everything to someone by people who completely ignore history. Imagine if someone told you "If it weren't for Abraham Lincoln, half the population would still be living in slavery today." You'd laugh in their face.
Because slaves would have magicked out of slavery due to the passage of time? I'm not sure why you would laugh in their face rather than suggest alternative scenarios where other processes might have eliminated slavery if Lincoln hadn't happened. I'm not smart enough to understand your comment. Are you saying that free software would have inevitably come to exist with or without Stallman? If you are, I'd say the burd…
I'll just mention that the MIT license is not the GPL and leave it at that. (yes, that's proof enough for me.)
Re: Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> His movement has consciously coopted the word [freedom] > for ... something ... less important I don't think you realize how ubiquitous and critical to everyday life software is becoming. It's not just "freedom to play with source code," it's freedom to travel, read and form relationships as one sees fit and without being tracked.
"I don't think you realize how ubiquitous and critical to everyday life software is becoming." You can talk to people and drive around in your car. You feel you need to use things that track you, but it's not true. You choose to. There is a difference.
When those things become essential to civic discourse, the line between need and choose gets blurry. How many people choose to go without cell phones without being branded as RMS-type weirdos? And the recent thread on RMS's rejection of facebook had lots of complaints about the resistance people face for staying off facebook, and the price they pay in terms of disconnection from the discourses of their social circles. Yes, these are choices, but the price paid for rejecting these choices is getting higher and higher.
Re: Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
#204I view Richard Stallman's attitude to this as though he has set himself up as some kind of social/technological guinea-pig for the general public good. Yes, he is fanatical in several senses, especially nasal and botanical, by all accounts ( read Stallman does Dallas: http://stallman.org/articles/texas.html ). But the day that Stallman cannot get on the internet, without compromising his own set of restrictions, is t…
But this idea of having dominion over any computational object (or really any object) is a fantasy. Are you going generate your own electricity riding your generator bike (powered by veggies from your garden) as you code? That's where I think his ideals go off the rails, their totality beyond common sense. FOSS of various flavors is cool. Of course it's not really free though. It's created by people in the context of…
a lot more people live off-grid, generating all their own power, than do computering like RMS.
Re: Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to think he was an abrasive fanatic. Oh wait, I still do. I'm tired of being told my decisions are compromises, and wrong ones at that. I'm tired of being told I owe everything to someone by people who completely ignore history. Imagine if someone told you "If it weren't for Abraham Lincoln, half the population would still be living in slavery today." You'd laugh in their face.
Because slaves would have magicked out of slavery due to the passage of time? I'm not sure why you would laugh in their face rather than suggest alternative scenarios where other processes might have eliminated slavery if Lincoln hadn't happened. I'm not smart enough to understand your comment. Are you saying that free software would have inevitably come to exist with or without Stallman? If you are, I'd say the burd…
Software originally was free as in beer, and mostly free as in liberty because most money was made from selling expensive hardware. Software was included as a convenience, an afterthought, and represented such a small proportion of the total (astronomical) costs that no one thought there was money to be made commercializing it. In other words if you were willing to pay the millions of 1960's dollars for the hardware, you could do whatever you wanted with the software. It wasn't until hardware prices came down to more affordable levels that companies started applying their copyrights in liberty infringing ways.
Re: Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've wanted to purchase a Leemote laptop/computer for a while now, and each time I go searching for them I come back empty handed. That being said, a quick Google search did return valid results this time around, particularly that it is for sale on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Screen-Lemote-Yeeloong-8101_B-Netbook/... It is a $499 dollar 10.1" netbook that runs at 1 Ghz with 1 GB of ram and a 160 GB hard disk. With…
Actually I hope that developers start using less powerful machines with less screen estate, less memory, less CPU power and less battery. That should make them care about things like focused UX, memory consumption and power-aware programming. I used a slow PowerPC machine with Linux for a while. After that I really realised how important is to use non-proprietary packages (do you want to scan? here is a 20KB x86-only…
I work on building distributed fault tolerant high performance server systems. Compiling all of the code for the project on a Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of ram takes about 2 minutes and uses about 2.5 Gb of ram while linking.
I don't care about power consumption or UX with what I am currently working on, it is going to be running on 64 core beasts with 128 GB's of ram...
That being said, as a developer I still want a generous amount of screen real estate to get more work done faster, the more code I can display on my screen the better I can and faster I can develop without having to get my tasks back on track, without having to context switch.
I understand where you are coming from, and I understand the idea behind it, but at the end of the day I want to spend less time waiting for my compiler.
Re: Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've wanted to purchase a Leemote laptop/computer for a while now, and each time I go searching for them I come back empty handed. That being said, a quick Google search did return valid results this time around, particularly that it is for sale on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Screen-Lemote-Yeeloong-8101_B-Netbook/... It is a $499 dollar 10.1" netbook that runs at 1 Ghz with 1 GB of ram and a 160 GB hard disk. With…
"a quick Google search did return valid results this time around, particularly that it is for sale on Amazon." It's kinda amusing that in your quest for more RMS-inspired freedom you came in contact with two of his companies-non-gratae.
I didn't really want it for RMS-inspired freedom, as a hardware hacker/tinkerer I think it would be interesting to own a machine where I could change the way the BIOS worked, where I can get full access to the datasheets.
Some of RMS's policies and ideas and thoughts seem completely foreign to me... for example, I absolutely love my iPhone and enjoy working on OS X as my day to day machine, but every so often I really just want to tinker and that is when I enjoy hardware/electronics (such as the MSP430, Atmel AVR, and others)...
Re: Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've wanted to purchase a Leemote laptop/computer for a while now, and each time I go searching for them I come back empty handed. That being said, a quick Google search did return valid results this time around, particularly that it is for sale on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Screen-Lemote-Yeeloong-8101_B-Netbook/... It is a $499 dollar 10.1" netbook that runs at 1 Ghz with 1 GB of ram and a 160 GB hard disk. With…
I have an (old) aspire one with about the same characteristics, but for the processor which is an Atom and the RAM which is 512MB. Limited memory is the only seriously annoying factor for web browsing, but I have no problem running vim or emacs on this machine... And you can connect it to a bigger screen. And it's really lightweight.
The biggest thing for me is the processor speed, and the ram. When I am linking our proprietary code base it can use up to 2.5 Gb of ram ...
Re: Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what the grand-parent was talking about, but if you want to read something that he foresaw before everybody (AFAIK) check the Right to Read essay ( http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html )
So, what is he right about?
That DRM would eventually lead to unusable computer systems. That a completely free software OS was possible. That software patents were bad things. That chasing profit in the LISP machine market would destroy the MIT hacker community. That "look and feel" lawsuits would hurt free software. That a copyleft license would not hurt software adoption by commercial vendors.
You want me to go on? He was on all this stuff (some of it critically important, some of it less so) before, in many cases years before the rest of us caught up.
Let me turn it around then: find something he was verifiably wrong about. There aren't that many cases, and what there are are mostly tactical things (e.g. picking the fight about GNU/Linux was, I believe, counterproductive), not factual ones.
Re: Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're asking a hypothetical that can't be answered, but it's based on the (very faulty, imo) premise that a world without Stallman would not have any free software. Open source was (and would be) alive and well without him.
>Open source was (and would be) alive and well without him. You're making a assertion with no evidence or argument, and using it as a premise to dismiss a rhetorical question.
[deleted]