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Comment by lone_haxx0r | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

>> 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.

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