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Comment by skimbrel | Hacker News Reader

Okay, rms is officially being an ass here. That response is the grown-up equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going "Nyah nyah I can't hear you!".

He is, at this point, no better than fundamentalist Christians who refuse to even entertain the smallest possibility of the notion that any piece of what they're doing is wrong.

Intellectual discussion requires all parties involved to be open to an exchange of ideas. Rejecting a source of ideas out of hand because it disagrees with your ideas is ultimately only going to hurt you.

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He's a fundamentalist and has been for some time now. This isn't news, and Christians didn't invent religion, so yeah, there is a connection between rejecting the author's "ideas," and the author not accepting the Founder's principles.

I don't like baseball, should I be commissioner? The author is talking out of turn and deserved that one-sentence reply.

Notice anything funny about this followup post, by the way? The author links to all kinds of praise, but doesn't link at all to the original letter! I don't know if he expects the world to have memorized or bookmarked it already, but it sure tells you where his priorities are. I bet he silently updates it with a link, but the fact remains that it didn't even occur to him to link back to the original article.

Finally, why is it more important for RMS to stop marginalizing himself than it is for the author to stop trying to drag RMS to compromise? I'm no RMS fanboy, but the author sure seems to think him an idiot who doesn't know what he's doing. Have you read the original post? Here's a sample of the author's compelling rationale:

  Dr. Stallman, Google Docs is really useful. I imagine you're unlikely
  to have tried the service yourself, abstaining as you have from proprietary
  software for the past several decades.  It may be worth trying the
  service out, if only to better relate to your target audience.

Several decades!

Link to original article added (albeit not silently). Fair point, though the oversight came more from negligence than malice (I figured only the HN crowd that had seen the original article would be interested).

Anyways, the whole 'speaking out of turn' thing kind of rubs me the wrong way.

I'm only using the Google Docs as an example, but it's written like you're trying to convince your mom.

RMS wrote fucking emacs, dude. Do you know what emacs is? I've never used it and I probably know more about it than I do vi, which I do use every day, and have for the past 15 years! I'm not arguing from authority with that, btw, just an illustration about how much I don't use emacs. That said, let's not even countenance gcc and gdb.

There are myriad issues I could take issue with RMS over, but his need for advice on word processors is not one of them. He already has one. Everybody knows this. He wrote it. 35 years ago. A zillion other people use it too.

"Talking out of turn" was the wrong way to articulate that, so sorry about that. Ask anybody who knows me and they'll tell you I'm not much for hierarchies and authority (I'm certainly not afraid of being negged on HN), and I don't put RMS on a pedestal, but he has several important, long-standing, and long-recognized accomplishments in the history of personal computing, and computing in general (cf. his AI algo he wrote before emacs, still in use). This is undeniable. Google Docs! Sorry dude, I just can't get over it!

Thing is, I bet all of this was already spelled out in the HN thread for the original letter post, which I didn't read. Did you?

I didn’t read that as advice on a word processor at all. He should try it out (not actually use it) to see what all the fuss is about. To see why people don’t want to give it up. Emacs is not even comparable with Google Docs. They are different things.

Not claiming Google Docs is amazing (it's not), but since when was emacs good for collaborative real-time document editing over the internet?

Regardless, having made important contributions to computing does not let you off the hook when you act like an ass.

Indeed. rhizome's quote is taken out of context. The google docs example isn't about word processing, it's about collaborative editing. When your options are using a tool like google docs or emailing around a file, only staunch idealism would make a person side with email. That was Alexy's point. Mainstream pragmatists aren't going to dump a technically superior tool because a seemingly crazy idealist told them it is the Right Thing to Do.

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