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Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

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Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#661

Post by lib-dev »

hutzlibu wrote: post #631
lib-dev wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know how you might make money. You build a game. Maybe its fun and ripe for mods like minecraft. Open source it under GPL. Build a community of hackers/gamers who want to learn and collaborate. Have an awesome collection of mods for your game. Once you build a name for yourself, take donations or release a new game or talk at conferences.

Soo, assuming I build something like Minecraft, something that made the developer millions (I think over 100) via the conventional way. And your proposal for how to make money with such a moneymaker game and the GPL is eventually down the years take on donations and talk at conferences? Was that irony? Then I missed it. Because the context was someone above claimed that it is only the stupid lawers fault, that compan…

If you don't like the idea, you don't have to do it. I mean you're making games. There's not much money in that to begin with.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#662

Post by mustacheemperor »

tokai wrote: post #401
oblio wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Like clockwork, women in tech continue to beg for our community to hold a reasonable standard for how half the humans on earth should be treated when they choose to work in this industry.

Woohoo RS and thank you for your contributions. But one of those contributions is being a living example of how brilliant and highly valuable people in this field can still need to learn the basics on how to treat other people with respect. For the women he's mistreated, it's very unfortunate they had to play a role in that collective lesson. The least we can do is not ignore it or rationalize it away.

On that note, I just don't appreciate or frankly understand the repeated insistence from some people that this is some kind of scheme, there is some kind of conspiracy to complain about successful contributors for mistreating the people around them. This take especially makes no sense to me when the mistreatment is well known and documented. Like, some of us don't want to be treated like shit! So we bring it up when the community lauds praise around someone who does! I don't think this is related to some personality complex held by RS' inferiors with a compulsion to tear down his achievements. Most of the time when I see these criticisms voiced, they are actually wrapped in a highly-polite package that includes heaps of praise besides.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#663

Post by toasteros »

jll29 wrote: post #187

I wish RMS all the best for his health, a long and happy life. I also know that if he reads this, it will be from an Emacs mail client on his dusty ThinkPad in text mode (no X11 or Wayland) by sending a URL to a service he wrote that will email him the Web page back - a clean process without any using any tainted proprietary software. He only ever exchanged one sentence with me when we had dinner together with other…

He uses X11 sometimes! I couldn't quite tell what the DE was, but it might have been XFCE. He found it easier to show us comics in X11 than in textmode emacs, so he swapped to the desktop to do that.

This was close to midnight in London when I was helping him get his stuff back to his accommodations (his bag is frikkin HEAVY). He needed to rest for a minute, and he whipped out his laptop to laugh at comics he'd written.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#664

Post by zajio1am »

op00to wrote: post #414
yura wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's eccentric, and most people would say that his social skills are subpar. But if you spend more than a few minutes reading his emails or watching him talk you'll realize that he is most definitely /not/ an asshole.

[flagged]

> "I don't do smalltalk" means "You are not worthy to communicate to me"

Many people like smalltalk, but for many other people, smalltalk with people they do not know is very uncomfortable. Why should people from the second group feel obliged to do smalltalk just to satisfy feelings of the first group?

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#665

Post by hedora »

hutzlibu wrote: post #300
newscracker wrote: post #270

I hope he’s able to manage it well (since the prognosis is good) and is around for a lot longer. We need absolutists like him who go to extremes and are known widely. For a few moments, leave aside his personality and what people have said about his behavior or hygiene. If he hadn’t been there, our world would’ve been a lot different and a lot poorer. A visionary is what he was and is. While the Free part of FOSS is…

"We need absolutists like him who go to extremes and are known widely." But what is he known for, outside tech circles, if he is known at all? When you want to deliver a message, it matters a lot, how you deliver it.

I'd say he's known for Linux and the building the base of TiVo, then Android, Chromebook, and MacOS (all of those impressions are wrong, but bear with me).

Most people don't know what the kernel is, but they do see user space, and that was largely GPLed for a while. I think IBM ran some super bowl ads about how amazing Linux and open source were, about ten years ago.

Also, stuff like raspberry pi and ssh exploits (yes, BSD, I know) also show up in pop culture. The Matrix and Mr Robot come to mind. During the end of the dot com boom, I think people were largely aware that Apache + Linux were what things ran on.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#667

Post by orblivion »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #5
freeqaz wrote: post #4

Some type of Lymphoma that is being managed, he said in the video. Does anybody have any other info about this?

The audio is really terrible, but he says that the cancer is being managed and that he will be around for many more years. I am glad to hear that. Before that, he talks about covid and long covid. But I couldn't tell if he says that he has long covid now. I know that he was being pretty careful to avoid covid, to the extent that's possible while travelling on planes as much as he does. I had some discussions with him…

His point about long covid is that it's a small but nontrivial chance of having brain fog for life and it would impede his work, and he suggests others make the same consideration for themselves. I think this implies that he doesn't have it.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#668

Post by tentacleuno »

honeybadger1 wrote: post #422

Sad news, even sadder that his critics just can't help themselves. He is greater than most, even if flawed.

Speaking of critics, I'm quite disappointed with some of the commentary on here, too[0][1].

Surely we can set our standards a touch higher than this sort of behaviour.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37705885 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37706055

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#669

Post by hota_mazi »

hedora wrote: post #665
hutzlibu wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We need absolutists like him who go to extremes and are known widely." But what is he known for, outside tech circles, if he is known at all? When you want to deliver a message, it matters a lot, how you deliver it.

I'd say he's known for Linux and the building the base of TiVo, then Android, Chromebook, and MacOS (all of those impressions are wrong, but bear with me). Most people don't know what the kernel is, but they do see user space, and that was largely GPLed for a while. I think IBM ran some super bowl ads about how amazing Linux and open source were, about ten years ago. Also, stuff like raspberry pi and ssh exploits (ye…

> I'd say he's known for Linux

Er... what?

He's known for forcing the name Gnu to be appended to Linux because of some wildly exaggerated claims of ownership.

We're talking about rms, not Linus.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#670

Post by safety1st »

packetlost wrote: post #641
leidenfrost wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot more understandable if you consider the state of computing he experienced while growing up: Programs were way simpler, and shipping the source code in paper was the de facto way of distribution. It's not like he was a wacko around his peers. He just created what seemed a logical step from that. I'm just sad that there's no young people to pass the torch for when the time comes and the founding fathers are…

> I'm just sad that there's no young people to pass the torch for when the time comes and the founding fathers are no more. TBH I would put Drew DeVault in this category.

Ironically Drew DeVault shared this thought about Stallman on his blog earlier this year:

> Fuck Richard Stallman and his enablers, his supporters, and the Free Software Foundation’s leadership as a whole. Shame on you. Shame on you.

(He uses the word fuck in that post five times.)

Drew has done some great work in OSS but he has a history of going after people he doesn't like in a very vicious way. You can't really behave like this and be a leader. A leader needs to unite not divide. For all the criticisms leveled against Stallman he saved most of his vitriol for the enemies of OSS. If everything he wrote had been as personal and expletive-laden as what Drew writes the FSF would not have gotten very far.

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