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Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that you can write RMS, the leader of the Free Software movement, and he'll respond to you within the day for no charge because he think's that's a morally important thing to do. You can in contrast write Marc Andreessen, one of the figure heads of the propriatary software and privacy violating movement of every bigger information companies, and he'll charge you for the pleasure.

Interesting dichotomy, at least to me.

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RMS contributed some incredibly influential and useful software back in the day, but you'd have to pay me a lot more than Andreessen is charging to read the ranting drivel he passes off as philosophy.

I don't think that's a fair or charitable charictatization of his opinions and if you do feel that way, even after you've read his works, you can still email him about technical questions. I don't know how much of a help he'd be but you can always try and ask his opinion on how to do something.

I have emailed him about technical stuff. I used to treat the guy like a hero until I talked with and met him.

I once offered to create a front-end for GCC for a programming language that, at the time, was only supported by proprietary compilers. (This was back before GCC was eclipsed by clang, with its sane licensing that allows more organizations to contribute.) I got back a disjointed screed about how evil the company behind it was because not all their software was free and they were basically fascists who ate babies and if their kind wasn't defeated then the universe was doomed. (I'm paraphrasing because this was 20+ years ago, but that was the general theme.)

I've also had the displeasure of working with him more than once at conferences, and he brings the same sort of good-vs-evil delusion to even the simplest things in everyday life. He sought out opportunities to harangue volunteers about everything from lighting to the beverages available, prepped with hours of obviously practiced diatribe to "support" all his bizarre ideas. He even showed up in the middle of a conference once--the schedule for which had been finalized months earlier--and asked when he could speak, and complained about the time slot we managed to find for him and how there were speakers talking about things that weren't GPL-licensed and we shouldn't be giving them a platform to promote such evil, etc. Honestly, he's the biggest ass I've ever had to deal with at such an event.

He's an atheist, but he has way more in common with the nuttiest of religious nuts than he does with any kind of philosopher. He's right about a few things (perhaps by accident, given how many things he's wrong about), and because he happened to be right about them first, he continues to be treated with reverence and many of his ideas are given way more credence than they should be.

Not implying this is the case here but sometimes people charge like Google chrome store charges $5 for submitting a chrome extension. The small investment is like a filter for really in-demand people to separate the wheat from the chaff.

> sometimes people charge like Google chrome store charges $5 for submitting a chrome extension

Coincidentally I don't like using Google Chrome. I stopped using the browser after they removed that ad-confusion extension and switched to FireFox. I never used it but I think it's not right for google to do it. I mean, I expected it to happen but it broke the camals back.

If I had known that there was a $5 charge for chrome extensions I would have stopped using it sooner.

Which extension are you referring to?

The one that clicked on ads in the background to pretend you visited the site. It was an attempt at hiding your identiy by making it difficult to track click behavior.

https://adnauseam.io/press.html

Just to be clear, the $5 is a one time charge to be able submit extensions to their store, not a charge for users to download extensions. I think it's a good solution to help keep pure garbage from being uploaded... if you upload something, you think it's worth $5 (hopefully a trivial sum to you.) If you don't want to pay the fee, you can tell people to download your extension from your own page and manually install it. Uploading it to the store just helps people discover your extension and makes installing the extension a one click thing.

The money's all being donated. It's a fundraiser.

You know what's funny... I heard a very similar thing said by a company making a device for medical purposes. They said that they needed to charge a high price because it was for the betterment of humanity. They were planning on donating some of the raised funds to charity and put the rest of the money back into R&D to make more life saving drugs.

That excuse was made by Martin Sshkreli on a news show if memory serves me right. He was talking about the price hikes on one of their medical products.

In my opinion "It's fine! We're going to develop life saving drugs with this!" is a very similar argument to "It's fine! We're going to give the money to charity!".

I know these are very different but I'd like to hear what others have to say about this.

In Martin Shkreli's case it really, really makes sense though, at least from my POV.

How is it an excuse for a pharmaceutical company to ask for more money so they can do more business? Their business just happens to be saving lives.

In Marc Andreessen's case it really, really makes sense though, at least from my POV.

How is it an excuse for a technology company to ask for more money so they can do more business? Their business just happens to be giving people technology.

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To put it in clearer terms, Marc Andreessen is with the crowd that has the most to gain from charity contributions. He's got his fingers in all the right pies to make a lot of money from the results of more charity activities. He can is described as "a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He sits on the board of directors of Facebook,[5] eBay,[6] and Hewlett Packard Enterprise,[7] among others" according to wikipedia and he was apperently involved with Free Basics.

You can read more about this here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Criticism

The Free Basics thing is exactly the worst possible thing for any third world county I can think of. Getting spoon fed the "right" information from an overload mega-corp.

I think it's fair to say that his buisness is collecting data on people and manipulating them and that "just happens to include providing technology" which is one of the things he can do by finding selective charities.

Sometimes RMS's access to technology limits the value of his responses, however.. ;-) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.linux.advoca...

The people in that link are being plain jerks.

Never tried personally, but read somewhere Steve Wozniak does the same

Well if someone ends up giving it a go after reading this comment please tell him that there's a college student on the East Coast willing to buy a sheet of $2 bills from him for the cost of the sheet and a free lunch.

Wozniak seems like your one friends dad who knows all the corniest jokes and has a past that took him into some of the funniest situatins alive. He also happens to be a great hardware guy which makes him infinitly cooler.

from his LinkedIn:

contact: ideas@woz.org

Yeah, I cold-emailed Woz once with a bunch of questions and he replied to me.

Interesting. Have you ever written to RMS?

Two or three times. Once about emacs, and I think the others were either questions about the morality of specific program distrobution methods. His responces were long winded and tailored to my situation although they did include his talking points.

It's listed at https://stallman.org/ under "Please send comments on these web pages to rms at gnu period org."

He'll happily explain or debate any points he has with you although there is a standard 24hr return time for every email because of the way he processes all of his emails he gets. He's got a post about how he does it efficiently somewhere.

Oh man I went down the RMS rabbit hole and found this : https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/bos/533096562.html?lan....

while i see your point, one important thing to note is that Marc's fee goes to charity.

I would regard that $100 as an indicator that you have a real question that is important to you. Marc doesn't need or care about the money.

Makes total sense. Let's suggest the same thing to our local, state, and federal representatives. They should charge $100 to get their ear to make sure people only raise important questions. Maybe we should even set it at $1000! Raising the bar really filters out all of those annoying and pesky people.

If you can't tell it just feels wrong to me. Just something's off about this concept.

Isn't this exactly how it works? If you're a big contributor, the rep hears your concerns. If not, they're filtered through multiple layers of staffers or dropped on the floor.

> If you can't tell it just feels wrong to me. Just something's off about this concept.

It's your representative's job to represent you. Marc has no obligation to answer your question.

Not endorsing it. For starters, $100 means a lot more to some people than others. But it's not like this is a money making venture for him, it pretty well has to be operating as a filter.

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