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.'