Stallman has been right so many times, usually decades ahead of time. On each hype cycle when most of us were bewildering at the latest shiny thing, Stallman was spelling out exactly how companies would use it to exploit us. And I'm not talking about obvious garbage with zero upside like crypto and IoT, I'm talking about more subtle hype that actually did have a degree of upside, like the cloud or javascript for example. I think he deserves a little bit more respect than that. I'm not saying "lets suspend our critical thinking and just follow whatever RMS says", I'm saying "this guy has been decades ahead of time in the most fundamental matters like morality and justice, lets give his quirkness a little leeway".

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latexr 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

He’s also fairly arrogant and unreasonable in various interactions¹, forcing people to bend over backwards to accommodate his requests. He puts off a lot of people and severely harms his own movement by making people who are not part of it think he’s gross, both physically (the infamous picking something of his feet and eating it) and intellectually (I have examples in mind but don’t wish to start a flame war).

What good is it being a visionary if people ignore or actively reject the message because they are put off by the messenger? It’s not useful being a harbinger of doom if nothing changes anyway.

Stallman should be commended and recognised for starting the free software movement, but he should’ve stepped aside long long ago and let someone more charismatic be its figurehead.

¹ I’m sure someone reading this has had a different experience, but please do a cursory web search and recognise people’s negative interactions with Stallman are not rare.

	▲	ekjhgkejhgk 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> please do a cursory web search Each person reading this might come up with some different in their search. Do you have a specific example to point to?

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

Industrial IoT is far from useless. Consumer IoT is pretty dumb, but let's not get too sad about the IoT as a whole.

	▲	knollimar 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Wireless light switches are pretty cool. Digitally,wirelessly controlled light bulbs are neat. That's about it.

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Gud 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Disagree with you about crypto, it allows me to purchase high quality drugs online. Also disagree with you about "IoT", I use zigbee devices that I can control remotely.

What seems like "obvious garbage" to you, might be a treasure to another person.