Richard Stallman is the hero the internet needs | Hacker News Reader

Richard Stallman is the hero the internet needs

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106 pointstjakab49 comments

I've always argued that RMS is an excellent counter-balancing influence. While the line for acceptable behavior keeps being pushed by corporate and state interests away from privacy, away from user and developer freedom, away from the notion that there are conversations that should be free of marketing, he holds the other end down, making the center fall somewhat closer to recognition of human dignity in digital matters.

That said, we need new voices and more voices, on that end of the spectrum. RMS has never been the ideal spokesperson for a movement, though his passion is beyond question, and his technical achievements impressive. The world of computing RMS represents is old-fashioned to the current generation. I fall in between the old generation and this new generation that has never known a time without the Internet dominating everything, and I can see where the language of RMS can seem to miss the point to a lot of younger folks. While he has always been prescient on these fronts, and I think he understands the world we live in better than most, I don't think he can be the voice of the current generation of hackers, the way he was the voice of prior generations.

The GNU project as a whole has the feel of a relic, and I worry every time I go to gnu.org and see the state of it. A few years ago, there were GNU projects for all sorts of modern things; there was Savannah to address the problems inherent in SourceForge (again, prescient...SF.net turned evil just as RMS assumed they would). But, GNU has nothing for github (there are Open Source github alternatives, but GNU is nowhere in the story).

Anyway, I don't know what needs to happen, but I know a few things: GNU is so much less relevant than when I started using Linux 20+ years ago. RMS speaks to an older generation of hackers; even though he should be heeded by the young, I doubt he is. And, I can't think of any other voices for software freedom that are as consistent or as effective as RMS and GNU was 20 years ago.

I think part of the problem, at least that I've found, is how do you properly articulate to and galvanize a young crown on the concept of relinquishing convenience? To adopt Stallmanism is to sacrifice conveniences like the iPhone, and kids/teens/young adults are flocking to Apple/Google.

How can you get a kid to say no to an iPhone, when what you're asking him to do is extrapolate a vague and possibly non-existent threat of privacy loss? It's incredibly difficult and honestly without some real-world event to bring it home for these children I fear it can't really be done. Without an event, you'd be reliant on a cultural tidal shift -- it would have to be "cool" to be anti-Apple, or anti-tracking devices. It would have be cooler for kids to own burners than smartphones because they don't track you.

There will always be a subset of people who truly understand what Stallman is saying and will probably adopt his behaviors. But to actually appeal to younger audiences and disseminate that message effectively to a mass amount of them seems to be too difficult.

Forget about smartphones for a moment; with minimal exceptions, he doesn't use the web interactively (https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html). That very much makes him a "relic", and detached from so much knowledge, the Zeitgeist of the times.

Good luck getting people to adopt to this behavior, when we are so massively leveraged by what we can look up on the web. It works to an extent for him because of where he's been situated since 1970, but try telling a kid who's not in The Athens of America (the Boston area) that he should cut himself off from most of the world's useful, and cheaply obtained info, and you're not likely to get many sales.

I don't follow. How does supporting RMS' ideals imply you have to adopt his computing habits to the fullest? I don't recall him ever making such a claim. His is mostly to avoid profiling and non-free JavaScript, but not something he insists everyone advocating free software to do.

One point is that his take on the "technological vastness of the future" we now live in has become so circumscribed that his advice WRT to is is getting less and less relevant.

At another level it's making him more and more ignorant, since the price for him to do the research necessary to chart wise paths in things like FSF/GNU governance is so high.

To draw back from the weeds, how can he be "The Hero the Internet Needs" when he is so disconnected from it? Per the essay, his argument has no nuance, it is to not be a part of this thing which, at least to my paranoid mindset, is indeed just as dangerous as portrayed, but which offers vast benefits for being (a careful) part of. Especially for the vast majority of us who, aren't, you know, (any more) a part of the MIT community or the like.

ADDED: Maybe to draw back even further, he's not wise; that doesn't disqualify him from being A Hero of the Internet, but it's a significant thing.

I still don't follow. Most noteworthy computer scientists, programmers and hackers have workflows that are totally heterodox or outside the norm. That doesn't make them any less authoritative or informed.

He definitely is informed on the subject, too. You can tell from his constant political notes and regularly updated boycotts or calls to action. He's active enough that he understands much of the web's giants from third-party sources or observation without having to directly use any services himself. Or are you suggesting that one cannot understand and criticize Facebook or Twitter without being a regular user? What a puerile and ludicrous assertion.

He's not disconnected from the Internet, nor the Web. He merely limits his exposure to it. Again, does one need to be intimately involved in their social media profiles to have the necessary prerequisites to speak against it?

I further do not understand how heterodox computing habits make the free software message any less relevant. What is so grand about the web that such a conclusion should be derived? SaaS? Non-free JavaScript? He voices out against those.

Agreed. Popular culture has begun to appreciate nerds, but usually only the ones that have exhibited sort of evil tendencies at least some of the time (Zuckerberg, Jobs, etc.). So, a rich nerd who abuses privacy or profits from monopolistic practices is cool, but a nerd without a shitload of money is still just a nerd. Especially if the non-rich nerd is weird and uses weird phones, computers, etc. while treating it like it is an ethical decision rather than just being weird and isolated.

I can't criticize the general public, and kids, too harshly, because while I use Linux and Open Source software almost exclusively on my laptop and desktop, I also use gmail a lot, I have an Android phone (if I could find a decent Firefox phone in the US, I'd switch), I have an active facebook and Twitter account, etc. It's hard to treat these things as inherently dangerous, and thus something to actively avoid, when the world is so tied to them. And, replacing them is hard, because it takes millions of dollars and armies of engineers to build GMail or facebook at scale.

Which is kind of what I'm getting at. Without a mass movement of brilliant hackers, or at least very prolific ones, building open alternatives, we will eventually lose everything resembling privacy, developer freedom, and communities free of marketing. I'm not arguing things are worse or better than they were 20 years ago (that's an extremely complex and nuanced discussion to have, and for every stride forward, there have been dramatic losses), but there was an almost religious fervor behind the development of the Internet. Nearly everything that ran the Internet in the beginning was aggressively free or Open Source software: Apache, BIND, Sendmail, Postfix, QMail, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Perl, PHP, Linux, BSD, etc. Even the web browser, and all the other client software, started out free. It was based on a cultural belief that this thing we were building was meant to be free; a safe haven from state and corporate power, and a place where an individual had a meaningful contribution to make without needing permission.

So, while there's more Open Source and Free software than ever, and more developers building more code in public, I think that religious fervor has faded, and I think it's to our detriment.

I don't know what to do about it, and it may be that I miss the subtleties of what can be done about it (I grew up without the Internet, and learned it as a second language as an almost-adult; maybe there's something positive happening that I don't see or understand). But, I feel vaguely like we (anyone who cares and understands where we're from and where we're heading) should be doing something about it.

The religious fervor has definitely faded, yet we're in the largest open source software renaissance of all time. The reason is probably because OSS has "won". Not in the absolute sense that all software is open, but in the sense that businesses have fully realized the impact Eric Raymond prophesied in the late 90s.

That's why I think you're right. Without a growing movement of FOSS developers committed to making both software AND hardware, there won't be the necessary alternatives that regular people need to satisfy their underlying desire for the conveniences they're used to.

Each of these services would have to be dropped or replaced for you to consider yourself a full Stallmanite:

    - Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat
    - Gmail, Outlook
    - Google Calendar
    - Google Maps, Mapquest, Bing maps
    - Mac computers, any non-Gnu laptop or desktop
    - Dropbox, iCloud, Skydrive, G-Drive
    - Google search
    - iPhones, Android phones

That's just some, and even I use Gmail because I can't find a valid alternative! That list is daunting and you're leaking privacy if you use even one of them. This is why the problem is so difficult: because you have to convince someone to stop using Facebook when you can't provide even a moderately valid alternative. Until there exists a compelling alternative to these services and devices, you have to rely on the general population developing that religious fervor.

So what do you do, build compelling alternatives? Or do you try to incite the masses on the dangers of privacy loss? It doesn't seem like option #2 has been working very well, but it actually does start to feel like #1 is developing. I'm starting to see more attempts at FOSS hardware on things like Indiegogo/Kickstarter. Maybe the secret isn't to replace each service, but to allow users to continuing using them more anonymously.

I attribute this at least in part to the dot.com bust. FOSS, commodity x86s, etc. became a necessary virtue when you couldn't get VCs to shovel enough money to you to buy the expensive closed source stuff.

Did anyone use MySQL because it was a better database than Oracle? (OK, it was probably easier to administer, so substitute DB2 if you wish.)

> The reason is probably because OSS has "won". Not in the absolute sense that all software is open, but in the sense that businesses have fully realized the impact Eric Raymond prophesied in the late 90s.

This is kind of problematic and exactly why rms insists that we call it "free software" instead of "open source". The big goal shouldn't be to be a better business, but a better ethic.

> RMS speaks to an older generation of hackers; even though he should be heeded by the young, I doubt he is.

I'm part of an older generation, and I view RMS largely as a crank. Yes, some of his ideas are valid and some of his warning seem almost prescient. But even way back when he wasn't the only person railing against injustice. I'd say that Stallman's effect has been net positive, but he's definitely not always on the right side of things.

We need not only new voices, but different voices coming from a different sensibility. We don't need an updated, modern Stallman. We need someone else, who shares Stallman's passion and commitment but not his off-kilter perspective.

The polarization with regard to how Stallman should be interpreted is, I believe, one of the preliminary illustrations of the rift between the entrepreneurial hacker and MIT-style hacker subcultures, modulo OSI diehards such as Eric S. Raymond.

There was a funny discussion on an MIT mailing list this summer when an (apparently) tone-deaf email was sent out by MIT Professional Education entitled "4 Ways You May Be Enabling Hackers"... which warned about the dangers of cybersecurity-style hackers.

RMS's response was:

> These MIT professors ought to know better than to smear us hackers by using the word "hacker" as synonymous with "security breaker".

The article trivializes Stallman by labeling him an extremist. The author seems to say, hey, Stallman may have a point but is still a bit too weird to emulate. Hey, if RMS is right, then most of us are severely ethically compromised when it comes to our computing decisions. If he's wrong in part (maybe it's OK to enrich and empower Google / the Government through our choice of systems?) then why is he wrong, and what does that mean for computer users and hackers?

He's an ideologue, not a hero. Heroism implies courage and noble qualities.

It doesn't detract from his authority on the subject, not in the least, but is he a hero? I don't think so.

He would likely scoff at being called a hero too.

In any event, the vast majority of people will know no privacy other than from each-other's affairs. Frankly I think the advent of cheap home delivery will push the privacy issue higher into the general consciousness, and people will be alarmed that all of their purchases are now tracked and indexed.

The gap between online and offline purchasing will disappear over the next 18-36 months, and those on the forefront of this will be in a significant position of power. The synthesis of Big Data(TM) between related firms will reach new heights, and that will actually scare people.

It's hard not to think of Stallman's crusade against the major powers as not requiring courage, and his endless fight for other people's freedoms as not a noble quality. He's basically a civil rights warrior.

Out of curiosity, whom do you consider to actually be a hero in the modern day?

Target has been profiling people by their offline purchases long enough to be printed in books.

I have always considered his work on Lisp machines back in the early eighties heroic. When Symbolics stopped sharing their developments, he endeavoured to match them feature for feature, single-handedly, and give away the reimplementation for free. To quote Steven Levy, "RMS had single-handedly attempted to match the work of over a dozen world-class hackers [1], and managed to keep doing it during most of 1982 and almost all of 1983". He saw what Symbolics created, and then reimplemented it and gave it away.

Greenblatt noted that he was out-hacking the whole bunch of them. Gosper called it incredible.

When Stallman finally couldn't keep up, he set a new goal that he hoped would solve the problem permanently. GNU.

There is, of course, the other side of the story, although I find the dismissal of the complexity of the features RMS was matching a little disingenuous - how complex they were seems irrelevant compared to the fact that he was doing it alone and Symbolics was doing it with a bunch of world-class hackers: https://web.archive.org/web/20080112153822/http://dlweinreb....

[1] Some people on HN define "hacker" as "person who can code". The definition in use here is older.

The "dismissal", as you call it, is hardly unfair (note, I was an eyewitness to all this, the players were largely in my social circle and I worked for Lisp Machines Inc during that period, heck, we both gave up on Lisp Machines in general at the same time). As DLW relates, RMS didn't do the designs of the new features, he copied some of them. In part I believe this is because he's much more an improver than an innovator when it comes to code and systems. This can have massive qualitative results, like after he took over ITS EMACS, but it deprives him of the cachet of "inventor", for what that's worth.

Copying is much easier than inventing.

Damn I was not aware of that toe thing.. Still, the man is a necessary figure in my mind, he's our "Dark Knight"

A more apt reference would probably be Rorschach from Watchmen. At least this sort of stuff should deter Hollywood from any plan of a RMS biopic, so all in all it may be good thing.

Just because you are paranoid, doesn't mean they are out to get you. I wouldn't use the word hero, but he did found the Free Software stuff while being intermittently homeless. He didn't sleep on the street. He slept in a hacker space where he worked. He finally got to exercise his right to vote when an article in a national publication validated that he was homeless and sleeping at his job. This convinced the Registrar's office to issue him his voter registration card.

So he certainly made significant sacrifices for what he believed in. I would not call him a hero because I think that cheapens the word. We typically apply that word to people who put themselves in harm's way for the greater good and my father, my ex, my ex's father and grandfather all served in the military. So I would not personally write a piece describing him with that term

But he did make personal sacrifices for a cause he believed in and to which he devoted himself while being crapped on and disrespected and managed to make a real difference in the world in spite of how much hostility he was met with. Props to him.

> I would not call him a hero because I think that cheapens the word.

This is a blaming statement and is judgemental. The point here is that someone else thinks he's a hero. Heroism implies bravery, which is an emotion. You don't get to speak for other's feelings or emotional responses (like mine) in that regard just because he was homeless and your relatives fought in a war. Those arguments are biases and ad hominem in nature. I would note that you will be unable to present an equivalent valid logical argument without the introduction of biases. The biases are the 'tell' for the misapplied logic.

Heros don't need to be well spoken, socially normal or face danger. All they need is to display the characteristics of a hero, which includes someone who, from a position of weakness, displays courage. This describes RMS perfectly given the guy has stood by what he believed (courage) while being homeless (a position of weakness).

I am currently homeless while pursuing something I believe in. He has nothing but my deepest respects and it was meaningful to me to read his bio while on the street myself.

I didn't say other people were wrong to call him a hero. I said I would be unlikely to use the word and explained why. I think you have misread and mischaracterized my remark.

Choosing to sleep at school or work is not the same as being homeless. As far as I know, rms wanted to pursue his own interests, so slept wherever he was allowed, rather than live a more traditional lifestyle involving paid work and board.

And if rms is not a hero, then who is?

His bio describes him as, according to his own words, finding himself between apartments periodically and thus sleeping in the hacker space. Technically, that makes him homeless, even though not literally out on the street. It is possible to be homeless without being out on the street. (I have had a college class on the subject, so I am aware of official definitions in use.) (Edit: Also, on one occasion, his apartment burned down, leaving him without a home. I think that surely qualifies as homeless.)

I already stated what makes a hero in my mind. My father fought in two wars. He got a purple heart. I am currently homeless, and literally out on the street. So I am experiencing things far harder than what rms endured. Hardship and heroism are not the same thing.

That's just my opinion. If you see him as a hero, you are entitled to your opinion. Having known people who did put themselves in harm's way and paid a real high price for it, I can't say that sleeping in a hacker space rates the same as what it takes to get a purple heart.

Anyway, I am not planning to argue this further. I already responded to a different reply making much the same point you made. So I am not sure why you are repeating what was basically already said to me.

but he did found the Free Software stuff while being intermittently homeless.

Do you mean the FSF, or the preceding GNU project? Because we were roommates when he founded the latter, and he most assuredly wan't homeless then. His willingness to be "homeless" later might in part be an artifact of a couple of kids playing with matches and kerosene burning that building down (in a not so good part of Cambridge, MA) and his losing his worldly possessions. Not that he was, to my observation, very materialistic.

As for "being crapped on and disrespected", well, if you've spent enough time with him, you'll understand why that was a common reaction, he's ... a difficult person, and is proud of ignoring a number of social norms, including ones that tend to keep a person and their friends alive.

But a lot of it after the GNU/FSF started was due to his extreme abrasiveness towards many people who didn't entirely buy into his mission. We were, for example, called "Software Hoarders" (this, while working for for Unipress, the legal licensee of the version of Emacs he stole to start Gnu Emacs, and we ran on a "gated open source" model, if the licencor of a piece of software agreed, you got a copy of the source, you just couldn't distribute it, but you could share patches with other customers). His regular imputation of ill will when there is none (well, to start with), his gross distortions of the historical record (especially as seen in Levy's Hackers, but also see GNU/Linux) ... they lose him a lot of support he might otherwise get.

Do you mean the FSF, or the preceding GNU project?

I read his biography, but I don't follow his work or life very closely. So I used a vague, hand-wavy term because I have a vague, hand-wavy understanding of it all. Therefore, I cannot clarify.

As for "being crapped on and disrespected", well, if you've spent enough time with him, you'll understand why that was a common reaction, he's ... a difficult person

Yeah, I get called "difficult" all the time. I have a life threatening, incurable medical condition. I am pretty laid back, inclined to go along, to get along, and a conflict avoider. But, unfortunately, in order to be socially acceptable, I would need to politely die a slow gruesome death. Failing to go along with that plan for me has caused me shitloads of social problems.

Thus, I am inclined to be sympathetic to rms. Many of his predictions have come true. There is no telling how much more problematic things would be had he not stuck to his guns.

"Difficult" sometimes just means you aren't going along with social norms. If you firmly believe those social norms to be a very serious problem, it is foolish to go along with them. In my experience, no matter how politely you decline to go along with them, and no matter how compelling your reasons for politely declining, simply declining will get you a fuck ton of backwash.

"... difficult" was my trying to be minimally polite, I'm quite sure from even our short interactions over the last few days that there's at least an order of magnitude difference. E.g. his baseline does not include "pretty laid back, inclined to go along, to get along".

More like "Do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like, without regards for consequences, including lethal harm to bystanders." The latter lost him more than a few friends/acquaintances.

Which biography would you be referring to?

I don't recall which biography off the top of my head. I kind of am under the weather this weekend, so the brain is not in gear.

Sorry, I don't mean to dismiss your observation that he is difficult. But I see it as more complicated than "he is just difficult."

My oldest son is genuinely difficult, but I get along well with him. One of the reasons I get along well with him is that I recognize that his IQ is higher than mine, so unless I have a specific objection, I have a tendency to go along with what he wants because it tends to get better results, even though my default personality is risk averse and his default personality is risk seeking, so he really makes me crazy at times. I have long experience with dealing with difficult people and doing so in a manner that makes them easier to deal with rather than making them more intractable. Most of the time, difficult people are dealt with in a manner that causes them to dig in their heels.

So while I don't doubt that Stallman can be genuinely difficult, I also don't doubt that the degree to which he has been given crap while being repeatedly proven correct most likely only makes his bad habits intractable when they didn't necessarily have to become so. My son gets real respect from me on things where he is more knowledgeable than I am and he gives me real respect and defers to me on subjects where my knowledge is superior. If I just crapped on him all the time, there would not be a two way street of respect.

It gets really difficult to put a stop to a negative social dynamic once it gets going. At this point, it is probably impossible to break rms of his bad habits because, from his perspective, it probably never seems to matter if he is right, if he is polite, etc. It does bad things to someone's personality to be consistently right and get no respect because people do not like what you are saying. I have had a taste of that, so I have sympathy for his side.

I'm sorry that probably makes no sense to you.

Part of the problem is that RMS is an all or nothing proposition. Look at some of the major things he rails at, like closed source and DRM. He's got lots of company (and it's near universal when it comes to DRM), but if you don't buy into his "copyleft is more important than software quality or uptake in the real world" approach, you're not just wrong, you're evil. GCC, one of the two biggest crown jewels of the GNU project, is in dire straits and being replaced by the non-copyleft LLVM, not so much because of the different licenses, but because of his totally inflexible ideological stewardship that is not allowing GCC to do some things that are now expected of compilers but that would make it easier for Software Horders to use GCC in ways anathema to him. (As a steward of software development projects, he's really, really, REALLY bad, large parts of which are due to those "bad habits" discussed below.)

Your eldest son may be a risk taker, but does that go so far as (truly futilely) hitting on a gangster's moll while eating with a group of innocents who didn't sign up for that level of danger when they went for a normally routine run to the favorite late night Cantonese restaurant?

As for his "intractable" "bad habits", they were set in stone long before GNU/FSF, and as for respect ... hmmm, I don't know, he's weird about that. But not very flexible (I'm not the best person judge all that, seeing as how you grant me a degree of respect or else, and he did that).

Stallman sounds really socially clueless. My son doesn't hit on gangster's molls, in part because he identifies as asexual so he doesn't hit on anyone. He was born really socially deficient and still gets reactions like people would like to strip search him for using his debit card to pay for pizza in the presence of his mother.

My son probably qualifies as ASD, though he has no formal diagnosis.

I am sure I wouldn't want to be within 30 feet of Stallman. I did not watch the video of him eating something off his foot, but I have a compromised immune system. For me, cleanliness is extremely important and I will end relationships over people being unable to abide by my (necessary) standards of cleanliness.

There is probably little point in me trying to convince you of my view of how social dynamics work. Perhaps we should leave this for now.

:-)

Heh. I have no trouble with your view of social dynamics, I just don't see its relevance WRT to RMS, and that's probably why you think you're not getting that part of your message across.

You can safely assume it's accepted and that I'd be happy to, e.g., share a meal with you at a restaurant with high levels of cleanliness (assuming they even exist, or do you e.g. depend on cuisines where they do a good enough job of killing the food dead?).

Oh, well, I see it as relevant because I was briefly Director of Community Life for The TAG Project while homeschooling my profoundly gifted sons. I have no official recognition anywhere of my expertise in the social and emotional challenges of gifted individuals, but I have reason to suspect that I understand the unfortunate interplay between group dynamics and the problems of highly gifted individuals far better than average. So, to me, Stallman's difficult personality traits are well established as a side effect of being genuinely smarter than most people around you and routinely crapped on because of it. Plus, traits like OCD, ASD, and ADHD are so commonly associated with high IQ that some people refer to them as "co-morbidities" for lack of a better term.

I think the social problems typical of high IQ can be significantly ameliorated, but my private parenting blog only has two subscribers and life has gotten in the way of me updating it this past month. So my views are unlikely to start changing things anytime soon, if ever.

Best.

Ah, I see what you're saying, and, yeah, there are most assuredly pathologies that crop up the "profoundly gifted".

And, yeah, I have no idea what things were socially for him before he attended Harvard, and that can be an ... unusual place for the really intelligent, very possibly one reason he gravitated to MIT, although MIT being one of the world's top 4 CS schools, and the world's #1 engineering school, and Harvard being ... not so good in those two areas is almost certainly a bigger part. I only know of RMS as of when he showed up to MIT ... and there, he was an outlier amongst a whole bunch of outliers. But no apparent co-morbidities (is high intelligence a morbidity? I sometimes wonder :-) besides perhaps ASD, which really wasn't a "thing" back then and which I have essentially no knowledge of.

But certainly his fairly fixed by then personality is consistent with your hypothesis. He certainly fits into the Sigma category in this fascinating socio-sexual hierarchy essay: http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2011/03/socio-sexual-hiera... and you don't get there without ... well, as the essay mentions at the end, "Sigmas usually acquired their outsider status the hard way; one seldom becomes immune to the social hierarchy by virtue of mass popularity in one's childhood."

> We typically apply that word to people who put themselves in harm's way for the greater good and my father, my ex, my ex's father and grandfather all served in the military.

Weirdly, the US has become a place where anyone joining the military is now a 'hero' (and military opponents are never described so graciously). It used to be that you had to show uncommon valour in the military to be called a hero; now it's just signing up that gets you the appellation.

We prove Stallman was right time after time. Which is almost as humiliating as proving Kafka was right. That we do too.

Stallman has been a bit hard on me in one interaction but I think that is just the way he is if you don't totally match his views.

I very much respect him and I think he has done enormous service with the FSF and arguing for privacy. I also like using the cloud and think a lot about this: secure and private personal and small group clouds. Not too difficult to set up for storage, email, web apps - but conveniences like Google Now are an imposibility unless a very large developer community contributed.

At risk of down votes I prefer my heroes to be a bit more sanitary :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ

Who else is a close contender for what RMS is doing? Only ones I can think of are Eben Moglen and Bradley M. Kuhn, but they're far too dry and analytical for a mass audience themselves.

Why the fuck is this relevant to what he is saying? Why is it trotted out every single time his name is mentioned on HN?

Hitler liked dogs.

Richard Stallman is paranoid.

I don't know in what world he lives, but it's not real. Like most people here, he values privacy way too much and doesn't seem to realize that we need as much information as possible about everything (including people) to make educated decisions as a society.

He's socially inept, and in no way a hero.

And yet a remarkable number of his predictions have come true, in particular about abuses.

None of his predictions are surprising or unexpected. I mean, it's clear to all of us that no data is truly safe.

What I meant by paranoid is that he refuses for the world to have access to information about himself for who knows what reasons.

In retrospect, I should have used "insane" or "selfish".

So your opinion is that the sane choice is to give up?

Not give up.

Give it away.

Just because something makes a more efficient society doesn't make it right.

Well, not in my view. There are political views in which the efficiency of society trumps all.

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