Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

There are a few commercial clones. I use Epsilon (by Lugaru Software) because I think it's faster and behaves more reasonably on Windows than Gnu Emacs, and I'm used to it.

That said, I'm sure that Gnu Emacs is fine.

Over 20 years ago, I attained the PROFESSIONAL ENGINEER's License and have volunteered in many VOLUNTEER ORGANIZATIONS. These include 'open source' and the A.S.M.E. Which DIRECTLY AFFECTS YOU.

How? The Supreme Court Case - called Hydrolevel showed that the voluntary organization was 'corrupt' and 'friendly relations' and even 'cult of PERSONALITY' played a part. every time your car or plane does NOT crash and you are not forced to flee from the nuclear plant, think of an engineer.

    warning: controversial.
    1.)Mother Theresa doubted GOD!, yet she is a saint!  without
    her, supposedly the organization (church) will endure.
    2.)Warren Buffet, richest man on earth FIRED his successor,
    with no clear successor in sight.  Both have NOT repeat NOT
    been charged with Insider Trading/collusion.
    3.)President George Washington knew some or (many) of his
    officers were suspect like General Benedict Arnold.

    Our pledge is to the trust of 'open source' and the 'rule
    of law' above 'rule of man.'  The man is NOT the organization.

    It is my sad and unfortunate duty to request Dr. Stallman
    immediately designate at least three potential successors.
    His position will be like Guido, founder of Python,
    BENEVOLENT DICTATOR of the 'ADVISORY COMMITTEE.'  This
    committee has NO formal powers.

    Such successors will give most of THE POWER to the
    ORGANIZATION, not the person.

    Warning: highly controversial.
    Stallman's committee will be forming alliances with WOMEN
    GROUPS (yes, he is single) - that's STRATEGIC alliances,
    not personal ones.  Stallman's committee has NO RIGHT to
    SPEAK for all of us.  Stallman's committee shall have
    PERMANENT FUNDING, including a small stipend for the 'leader.'   After all he has not had a career working for
    MAJOR CORPORATIONS and saved HUGE amounts of money.

    The only other choice is to ask for ABOLISHMENT OF THE FSF!
    I am against this choice.

    Dear Alexeymk.com: Thank you for speaking up.  Thank you
    for showing your IGNORANCE of history.  Why do such GREAT
    DISASTERS like Hurricane Katrina and drowning of New Orleans,  GREAT Dust Bowl (overfarming), BP Oil Volcano Spill, Japan Nuclear Meltdown (not presently, the U.S. has
    MANY MORE OLD Reactor/Fuel Waste Pools) and the presence

    of closed source Microsoft/Adobe software at the nuclear
    and critical infrastructure?

    History of 'Open Source' in World War II:  The AXIS and GERMANS were winning!  So, the ALLIES (that's including the
    U.S.A.) broke their codes/secrets.

    Now, most of the leading research is OUT OF THE U.S.A. and
    the U.S.A. leads in areas like Windows botnets.  Go, America!

    The movement of Dr. Stallman, EMERITUS shall be accompanied
    with CASH PRIZE, honors, awards, recognition from WORLDWIDE
    universities and other volutary/non-profit organization.

    GOOGLE, now that it has lost the lawsuit on Linux, will perhaps (repeat perhaps) KICK IN a very small amount of
    FIVE MILLION DOLLARS.

    I shall be one of those to congratulate (I don't know him
    personally) Dr. Stallman as to his GREAT PRIZE WINNING,
    promotion and forthcoming WEDDING.

This 'crazy conspiracy' movie is pure FANTASY with 'no programming side effects', LOL http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Matrix

    Morpheus to Neo:    
        The very minds of the people we are trying to save. 
        But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. ...And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

        Maybe you have seen the movie and have been 'infected' by
        the CRAZY meme?

PS: Dear Alexeymk.com: When you see a flock of birds, using Particle Swarm Optimization, does the flock CONSPIRE to travel together? Can DISTINCT PATTERNS be caused by a MATRIX of stupid birds, not speaking to one another?

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 pure Stallman code can be found?

The lighter text does a really awesome job of highlighting the spam (so we can skip it).

It would be really great if there was a threshold where the entire comment was just collapsed (reddit does this, and it looks really nice)

/just a thought

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.

Right now I'm sitting in one of the design studios over at ASU borrowing some bandwidth and hanging out with one of my friends while she works on an architectural model. Something that I never realized until I spent some time talking with her was how unbelievably lucky we are as nerds.

I was talking to her about what an architect hopes for after college.

Spend tons of $$ on school->hope you get a good internship->Hope you get hired somewhere good->hope that you get the privilege of working on something cool->maybe get a good job doing something fun.

You have to spend other people's money, lots of it, in order to do cool things in architecture.

With open source software (and I understand that GCC isn't all of open source software, but it's important) this isn't true at all.

My passion is for building websites. My webservers run linux, I use python as a scripting language, I use apache as a webserver, I use mysql as a database. If I get really big, maybe I'll use nginx as a proxy cache.

The only limiting factor in how much stuff I can build on my computer is how fast I can input new information into my brain. I'm constrained by my ability to learn and that is pretty much it.

This is huge, and this is something that is pretty unique to computers.

And think about the ways in which this freedom to create has revolutionized the way that humans communicate with one another. Think about how equalizing this is across the economic spectrum.

(I'm sorry, I went kindof off topic there...)

You've got all of these absolutely wonderful things happening in OSS. If somebody wanted to give Dr. Stallman a Nobel Prize for contributions to humanity, I wouldn't bat an eye.

But to "the outside world" a lot of these things are hidden behind a personality that is incredibly off-putting, and that's a little bit tragic. I wish Stallman was a tiny bit more "normal" just because I want more people exposed to the things that he has done.