Yesterday’s Man: The Fall of Richard Stallman

I used to have a lot of respect for rms. Sure he was quirky but at least he was principled. Sure his last actual free software contribution was in 1995 but he did a lot of advocacy afterwards. Sure he was very annoyingly intransigeant but he said things that were true but inconvenient to hear (regarding Facebook, Google, Amazon et al.). All in all, I thought that for all his flaws, the world needed someone like him.

But now, it seems everyone's coming out of the woodwork with one damning story after another that I didn't know of. I don't know if the spider plant thing is true, but the pleasure cards thing is ludicrous. Looking back, one can't help but wonder if in hindsight he was more of a hindrance to the cause.

If anything, the disgrace of rms should be the final nail to the coffin of the so-called hacker spirit as enshrined by the likes of him and esr, and which I've always kind of perceived as 'you can be as much of an obtuse dick as you like as long as you're technically correct'. Maybe such 'hackers' were necessary in 1970 when computing was niche and restricted to certain demographics for various historical/sociological reasons. Now that the pool of available talent has largely increased, we should ask ourselves: for one brillant but obtuse dick, how many brillant and chill people are out there? Is it worth latching on the former at the risk of missing out on potential scores of the latter?

>his comment that one of Jeffrey Epstein’s underage victims willingly prostituted herself

I don't get it, why journalists so persistently misrepresent Stallman's words. I mean, yeah, what he said was tone-deaf to say the least, but that's not what he said.