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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

I read it back when it was published, and thought: "this logic is incontrovertible, but assumptions are way dark; what is the probability he's right?"

In less than a decade, I was convinced RMS had been right. This is why I look very warily at anything based in a third-party cloud, because later RMS warned about its downsides, too, way earlier than the general crowd started to realize them.

Before 23 years have passed, I'd like to remind about another gloom-and-doom warning, by Cory Doctorow in 2012: https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

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RMS has always been prophetic. He's got the biggest Cassandra syndrome of anyone I've known. He's 100% right most of the time (at least evaluated a decade or two later), and most people have always thought that he sounds like a nutcase.

He's devoted his life to letting people know, and so few listen.

I'm super grateful he dedicated his life to spreading such anti-mainstream ideas about intellectual property. He wasn't the first at all to think outside the actual box that is the mind prison living under a copyright regime puts you in, but he had profound impact on so many to break us out of it. Technology would be nowhere near where it is now if not for the millions of us that gave the sweat of our brow to free software. Which also coincidentally created the largest concentration of wealth and power in the history of the species on the backs of that collective labor but I digress.

Thank you for the reference of the "Cassandra" metaphor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_(metaphor)

It's something which I have struggled with. Not that I think my ideas are all prophetic, or ignored/misunderstood, but that in the past some of my ideas have been prophetic but ignored, until some point in time where they were validated to be true. With that being a possibility, I struggle to know whether or not an idea that I feel strongly about, but is misunderstood or discounted, whether or not it should be discounted or discarded. It's hard to know what the right thing to do is when you are pretty confident that you're right, but you know you could just simply be wrong.

It's mostly about trying to figure myself out that I'm bewildered, not issues that apply to society at large. But even in that limited domain, I'm still gripped by analysis paralysis for that reason.

RMS is a stellar example of why we should avoid falling into the genetic fallacy[1]. Yes he is stupid about inter-sexual relations and sexual relations in general. But I don't look to RMS for dating or sex advice and neither should anyone else. Contrarily, just because he's stupid about some things doesn't mean we shouldn't listen to him in the domains where he's literally a genius[2], like software and information freedom.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy

[2] Genius in the seminal sense.

Yes, it's amazing. He was using systems with Free bootloaders and bios etc. before Librem Purism was a thing at all, and has continually been on the bleeding edge of privacy and freedom.

The problem is, of course, that he's socially Quite Something, and that makes people have a natural level of disbelief that is the polar opposite of, say, the effect that a good cult leader, con man, grifter, or salesman has in terms of convincing people. He has like a -10 to Charisma, except he's actually really engaging and interesting, like a street preacher with 150 IQ.

The change he has affected in the world is phenomenal. It will continue to be a thing long after he's gone. Would be that people would walk around with his bearded visage on their shirts instead of Che and Marx.

https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/RMS-Face-of-freedom-by-h.... :D

I saw a Reddit thread of some obviously new programmers having their first introduction to how... interesting... a character Stallman is. He's not normal, but it takes all sorts to make a world (as the saying goes)

It is both a testament to him and a terror that programmers are now coming of age who have effectively been born post- open source. A BSD licence is far better than nothing but the GPL has almost been hurt by its own success these days.

We currently program in an environment where people just open source stuff for the sake of it (and good on them/us for doing it), but with the advent of the mobile phone as a general purpose computer (You can't just download C code and run it on your iPad any more) and the cloud (same shit from a difference arsehole when it comes to user freedom) the pendulum will swing back the other way.

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