RMS to me is really a curious case. He doesn't know how to install GNU+Linux and relies on others to do it. He doesn't know how to take a screenshot, and I remember reading other snippets from him about not knowing how to perform other basic tasks.

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Boxxed 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I once asked a YC alum, "Got any good Paul Graham stories?" And he had a couple; apparently the dude would often ask for help with basic tech things like setting up his wireless. Same kind of thing, I guess.

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adalacelove 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most screenshots for these well known guys are quite boring. Coincidence? I think if you want to be good at something you need focus.

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venturecruelty 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know why people take him so seriously. He said some decent things about software freedom, and the rest of his entire existence seems to be him being deliberately obtuse and generally off-putting. I find it bizarre that there's this strange carve-out here for him, especially considering that he would absolutely loathe 99% of the software that gets discussed here.

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GuB-42 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

RMS is an extremist, and not the kind of person I tend to agree with, he seems to be a bit of an asshole too...

But that's also the kind of people we need. Companies are not going to compromise on their profits, we need someone to balance that and not compromise on software freedom. With these two extremes we can take an balanced position and that's how we got Linux and distros like Debian: it is free software, but it is also pragmatic. If we only had pure GNU (HURD), we wouldn't get far, but if we didn't have GNU at all, it would be even worse.

Richard Stallman didn't just talk. He actually wrote code, famously Emacs, and started the whole GNU project. I am not aware of recent technical contributions though.

	▲	hombre_fatal 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I lived a year in a great hostel run by a German girl in Mexico. She was always planning social events, hyping the place so that it was full of interesting people, and more. It was the most social part of my life even though I was 30. But she also was frantic and obsessive and short tempered which was off putting. Other guests would often complain about her, and they would phrase it as if she’d be cool if only she could turn down that one aspect about her. I had the same reaction at first too. But eventually it became painfully obvious to me that that’s not how people work. Because the quirk you’re complaining about is the same quirk that got her to start a successful hostel across the world that we’re all enjoying. We aren’t a bunch of independent levers that we get to adjust. Yet for some reason we pretend like that’s the case.
	▲	mcny 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This is very well put. I appreciate him because I can't or rather I won't be like him. We need people like him and I will be the first to say "not it".

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munificent 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> He said some decent things about software freedom

Well, he also created GCC and GNU Emacs.

Linux and the idea that developer tools should be free wouldn't exist without him.

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chemotaxis 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think that sort of goes hand-in-hand. "Normal", well-rounded people don't decide that software licensing is the most important thing in the world and don't devote their entire life to that. A normal person would be content with a 9-to-5 software engineering job at Sun, IBM, or Microsoft.

I think you see that with a lot of other revolutionaries. They often take unreasonable positions and behave in unreasonable ways. RMS' tragedy is probably that his side more or less won, so now he's just a weirdo without a cause.

	▲	MassPikeMike 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This puts me in mind of the words of George Bernard Shaw: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'

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gosub100 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

See also: Knuth. Literally wrote the book on algorithms, but barely is able to do more than open a window in FVWM.

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svat 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This couldn't be further from the truth. He has given several talks where he's projecting his computer, you can see him comfortably switching between all the programs he uses (Emacs, Mathematica, etc); in fact he is very efficient and has them customized just the way he wants it. (I even recall some blog post where the author watched one of these talks and was amazed by just wizardly he was navigating between programs or Emacs buffers or whatever.)

If you scroll down to the bottom of https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html you can see his configurations for Emacs and fvwm and even macOS keyboard layouts; some of them were updated as recently as this year.

This 2020 profile has a photo of him standing at his desk: https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knu... and in the 2008 interview with Binstock (https://mmix.cs.hm.edu/other/knuth-interview.pdf = https://web.archive.org/web/20250408034153/http://www.inform...) he mentioned the set of tools he uses, which includes even “in rare cases, on a Mac with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator”. Overall he is very comfortable with his computer.

> I designed my own bitmap font for use with Emacs, because I hate the way the ASCII apostrophe and the left open quote […] I prefer rxvt to xterm for terminal input. Since last December, I’ve been using a file backup system called backupfs, which meets my need beautifully […] Incidentally, with Linux I much prefer the keyboard focus that I can get with classic FVWM to the GNOME and KDE environments that other people seem to like better. To each their own.

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clra 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can you cite this in some way? Given he's shown the competence to write and typeset an impressive series of books, I find this claim pretty hard to believe.

	▲	gosub100 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/.fvwm2rc Here is his fvwm rc. Given that it's fully documented, I will walk back my assumption that he can barely open a terminal. I researched it a bit and recalled an interview where he said something like "all I use X windows for is is to open a terminal in FVWM", so he clearly can customize it, but he prefers a minimalist setup.