Hacker News Reader

Comment by alxlaz | Hacker News Reader

Lacking in charisma hardly describes a person like Theo de Raadt. I've never met the man, but I doubt that someone who lacks charisma could have lead a dedicated, opinionated team through more than 40 releases (counting OpenBSD releases alone!), over a period of almost 25 years now, a team which not only developed a sturdy (if equally opinionated) operating system but also a bunch of highly successful projects like, I dunno, Open-bloody-SSH.

I mean, maybe it's not too much charisma but I'd be glad if I had only like 10% of that...

View on HN

the same applies to Stallman, if you consider that the FSF has been running for 34 years.

But I believe grandparent didn't mean they lack charisma, but that they didn't have enough to swerve the general public.

I would posit that:

    impact = charisma * funding

so .1 charisma score of some faceless tech exec * 1B in VC funding goes alot more than 2.0 charisma score * 50k of grasroots funding..

But funding is also a function of charisma, among other variables.

I would posit that:

    funding = charisma * suitability for capitalism

so .1 charisma score of some faceless tech exec * 1B in VC funding goes alot more than 2.0 charisma score * 50k of socially oriented funding..

I wish i could favorite a comment.

You can. Click on the timestamp of the comment, and then click "favorite"

Woah thanks. Dunno why someone downvoted this lol

I'm not sure, but commenting on downvoting is likely to attract downvotes as it's explicitly against the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair. But thank you for the information.

With charisma, it’s not just quantity but quality. What appeals to some will repel others. De Raadt has qualities that entice him strongly to some, but are irksome to many, many more. See for example the trollish attitude to Comic Sans.

And Stallman is very off-putting to many with how unabashed and unashamed he is about some of his more extreme progressive views. Unfortunately for him, that excludes almost half of the potential support he would receive.

I'm a right-wing libertarian, and I've never felt excluded or anything like that because of his leftist views. This for many reasons:

1) He's not a hypocrite in any way. He's honest and you can tell that he has truly thought about his opinions.

2) In my country, I get bombarded with a ralentless stream of leftist ideology. The worst kind of leftism: the lazy 'slogan' leftism, from people too stupid to realize the full implications of their discourse. In comparison to them, Stallman is a moderate, thoughtful, sweet person.

3) I see his leftism as orthogonal to his software freedom ideology. I use and support free software, and I'm more pro-capitalism than Milton Friedman.

> 1) He's not a hypocrite in any way. He's honest and you can tell that he has truly thought about his opinions.

I think that's crucial. I remember he was discussing one of the aspects of software freedom with my friend and she said "I don't agree." He answered: "No problem, you have your view, I have mine, we don't have to agree on everything."

It struck me as I had expected he'll try to convince and win her over his ideas.

RMS has seen (and likely started) more flamewars in his lifetime than most of us ever will. He has clearly developed (or adopted) a meta-system to deal with differing views. If you ever talk to a smart priest, it's the same playbook: when it comes to deep beliefs, there is no point hammering something in your face, because it won't stick. Either you get to "truth" out of your own reasoning, or it's not worth it.

I don’t care about his views on those kind of politics at all. But when it comes to free software he is an ideological maximalist. Take a look at how he uses computers personally, his values (at least currently) don’t fit in with most users expectations of what personal computing should be. His contributions aren’t in question, and his voice is a valuable one to have in the choir, but he’s not a person willing to accept a middle ground, and as such the RMS way of doing things is never going to be widely accepted.

>> but he’s not a person willing to accept a middle ground

You need somebody as guideposts to stand at the extreme ends. I am glad RMS stands at his end.

From my perspective, The RMS Way and Libertarianism have this in common:

They aren't meant to be widely adopted, but mean, rather, as a critique of the status quo.

I don't think Stallman's political views are that extreme when you consider that a lot of free software advocates are actual communists.

I think deep down all people are communists - they all like things for free.

I disagree. Just because people like free stuff doesn't mean they want to force others (and themselves) to provide that free stuff. Some certainly do, but there are plenty who don't.

But people are "forced" to work anyway, free stuff or not.

"Forced" by human nature (hunger, cold, etc), but not forced by other people.

I’ll take a commie over a pedophile apologist any day.

It simply means he can convince some people who are open to technical arguments and do not think too differently from him. And that's about it.

Charisma means being able to persuade all kinds of individuals, regardless of their inclinations and initial positions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com