"When dealing with RMS, keep the following things in mind"
emacswiki.org
emacswiki.org
One of my favorite people in Microsoft is Ray Ozzie. Every single time I've mailed him, I've gotten a long, thoughtful reply. He is probably the best email handler I've seen.
BillG is pretty good at email and sending you prompt replies.
Sure, it's great for you to get an answer and kudoz for the people who really have the time to do that.
As far as I know, RMS does properly respond. He simply tends to be as terse as possible. Some people mistake it for rudeness.
However, in retrospect, what I wrote was pretty poorly written. It was my first major attempt at documentation, and Richard critiqued it heavily. I felt very hurt, but he was probably kinder than he needed to be given the low quality of my work, and, more importantly, he was correct. Once I got past feeling hurt, I learned a lot from his critiques. I essentially got free training in technical writing from Richard, and I look back on that as one of the more awesome moments in my life in software.
(ObOld: I remember the time when it was why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossible.au, not .mp3)
I always hear this but what is it exactly that he is doing that keeps him so busy?
In my experience, autistic-ish people (often geeks or nerds) sometimes confuse being polite with being social, which does take time. They then seem to think that if they don't have time (or really, the skill and desire) to be social, then they don't have to be polite.
This is a minority of geeks and nerds, of course.
But if he as a human has to have some personal flaws, am fine with sacrificing that.
Furthermore, politesse is not a lingual phenomenon. The politesse of a Texan is different from a New Yorker is different from a Minnesotan is very different from a Londoner.
That's exactly it, though. Politeness and terseness are often diametrically opposed in our society, and since there is no standard of politeness outside what society finds to be "polite", I'm not sure how you can say many people have an inability to distinguish.
If you email a long question to someone and they respond with "No.", many people would find this to be impolite or downright rude. It might be the most efficient thing and the hacker-type might think it's OK, but if most people think it's impolite, it is.
This isn't the end of the world. I'm kind of a jerk.
How do I respond politely to a four page essay without spending a significant amount of time on it?
He must get insane amounts of noise vs. signal in his email.
http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/rms-ama.html (Question 10).
I ran into him at a train station in Milan, and completely commandeered his time and attention for a good 30 minutes, despite the fact that he had a train to catch. He politely answered all of my questions, and he even responded to my criticisms with civility and respect.
If you ever get him in a casual, face-to-face conversation, you will find that he actually comes across as quite meek and restrained, rather than the arrogant blow-hard that he is generally portrayed to be.
On the other hand, I think just about everyone comes across a lot friendlier in person, merely because it's easier to portray interest and friendliness than over email.
It's kinda fun.
For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer.
(I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at
page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page
back to me.
It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
In a more recent article[1], Stallman voices his opposition to web-based SaaS applications, as they take away your basic ownership of the data stored there, limiting your freedom etc.
I can understand him in this regard. I'm not that idealistic and love the convenience of some web apps, so right now that wins in the end. I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of people seem to be annoyed of RMS – we never like to be shown that we maybe compromise a bit too much. But I digress…
So you don't like webapps. You do most of your discussions in usenet or email lists (this might sound sacrilegious here, but we I don't think reddit/HN/4chan is a step up from moderated newsgroups). You can just download news, either via the above-mentioned wget trick or via RSS. That does eliminate most of your web-browsing needs, or am I missing something really important? Especially if you live in Emacs, an don't care too much about rounded corners, gradients and typographical text.
He's basically like the guy you know who tells you that he doesn't watch TV and rather reads a book. You tell him that there's quality programming and you read enough books, too, but then you remember this conversation and feel kinda guilty while watching Castle.
The web as a timesuck is I guess a good argument, but limiting yourself to checking e-mail surely won't harness any inclination people have to read news or watch media. Right?
This meant a ~36h turnaround for his responses (average): he'd get your mail ~12h (average) after you sent it and would only (be able to) send the reply 24h after that.