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Comment by zalew | Hacker News Reader

so... it's perfectly ok to publish tons of linkbaits about 'how steve jobs changed my life' even if they are vague and repetitive boring opinions, but nobody can state his negative views on this occasion. gimme a break. death is sad, but it's good that there are people who had decided to stay out of this bubble.

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Here, I'll let someone with much more eloquence than me explain to you why Stallman's diatribe is poorly wrought.

If Stallman had to make a statement emphasizing his dislike of Jobs' influence, he could still have done so respectfully. Consider this; "I didn't share Steve Jobs' vision of computing, and I wish he'd chosen to embrace free software. I'm very sorry that he's gone and we've lost the opportunity to have that conversation. My sympathies are with his family at this time." There's no need to pretend that Stallman liked Jobs, but his post is contemptible.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/10/why-fsf-found...

most of "I also must deliver you the news that Steve is dead, because you obviously didn't hear it in ALL THE NEWS OF THE WORLD" posts are also poorly wrought or could be tldr'd to 'I like my ipod', and those which aren't (mainstream blogs) look like a template written a long time ago. most of them are just linkbaits and karmawhoring.

> he could still have done so respectfully

and the rest of bloggers respectfully chace self-promotion and ad revenue by reposting stuff that has already been said. well, RMS gave them the occasion to continue this nonsense, but at least his view is original.

It was posted on his personal "politics" mini-blog, which consists of basically nothing but 2-3-line annoyed and not very nuanced statements on various topics. People who read it expect what they get there, and most people don't read it. Here's an example the quality of political cartoons you can also expect...: http://stallman.org/images/cartoon-6.jpg

As can be seen from the Update to that linked article, I think a big part of the problem is that these Web 2.0 "journalists" don't read, so in a game of telephone it's been turned into "FSF head Richard Stallman issues press release saying Jobs sux". If we're going to do that, you could manufacture about 300 scandals from his blog; "FSF head Richard Stallman equates U.S. President to Saddam Hussein!", etc.

Maybe it's still contemptible as it stands, but I think people are either missing or deliberately ignoring the context when evaluating it. I take his "politics" ticker as closer to an IRC chat than a place for carefully thought out statements (that's what his Essays are for). I like that in geek culture we don't have this weird demand for people to be 24/7 ensconced in a professional PR-oriented persona, like a CEO or politician, but allow people like RMS, ESR, and Theo de Raadt to have crazy personal opinions. (Heck, Jobs had some pretty offensive and harmful opinions about science and alternative medicine, and we allowed that.)

Honestly I'm more offended by this level of shameless profiteering with Steve-Jobs-death linkbait. Huffington Post, for example, shat out 188 separate Steve-Jobs-death posts within 24 hours: http://exploreto.tumblr.com/post/11114571981/huffingtonpost-...

Stallman has made himself a public figure, and is a spokesman. Even on a "personal" blog, he has a responsibility to be tactful and not to make angry, hurtful, and unnecessary comments.

I guess that's an idea I fundamentally disagree with, and even find a bit offensive. As I said above:

I like that in geek culture we don't have this weird demand for people to be 24/7 ensconced in a professional PR-oriented persona, like a CEO or politician...

If people are pulling things out of a personal blog and broadcasting it across the web in sensational terms, I blame the yellow journalists more than him. I might still disagree with him, but I don't blame him out of context of his blog, as some kind of always-on spokesperson.

Plus, it's not like he hasn't telegraphed, for almost 30 years, that he doesn't plan to be that kind of PR-oriented spokesperson, so one can hardly be shocked about it in 2011.

I don't think he has any responsibility to be tactful at all. The question is this: by whose standards should someone's words be judged as "angry, hurtful, and unnecessary"? Yours? His? Mine? Many years ago, it was very clear whose standards were relevant -- those who held political power. In societies that are blessed with freedom of speech, this is no longer the case. The responsibility is entirely with the reader to be mature enough to hear a dissenting opinion.

It is trying to appease this exact demand that has saddled the modern world with spineless, do-nothing politicians, who have a teflon public face which doesn't reflect how they actually govern.

I hate to say it but that post is impossible. RMS couldnt say it. Most kids on slashdot couldn't either. For better or worse computing atracts the worst asocial and negative people around. This is why every company goes apeshit when hiring new IT. Its difficult to tell in an interview if you're dealing with some kind of aspie misanthrope. I've worked with guys like this, and they are like RMS. Dogmatic zealots with zero people or persuasion skill. If Linus went with BSD instead of the GPL, RMS would have been long forgotten by now. His entire career was impressing a Finnish teenager to use his license.

And, ofcourse, this is exactly what stops most people from reaching the truth on any matter. What you just described is being a politician, it's putting form over substance. The truth has little room for niceties for it often stings. This is why most people cannot be programmers or scientists or engineers - they are too focused on the social dances and miss out on all of the glory of the rest of the universe.

Given the hordes of people who seem keen to use Stallman's words against him I think he should perhaps have put a bit more thought into them, but I'm extremely glad he didn't make the kind of bland, wishy washy PR statement you suggest.

If it wasn't obvious from the past few days, HN is that bubble. If you don't like the circle jerking about Steve Jobs, come back in a week or two.

the first day I saw this http://i.imgur.com/xlNGD.png, today I took the risk to click HN and was very surprised the frontpage doesn't look like that. when you've heard the news, it's not news anymore.

Mike Daisey in the NY Times was far, far more eloquent and actually in some ways, even more bitingly critical of Jobs than Stallman:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/jobs-looked-to-the...

But he was also basically respectful.

EDIT: Already it's own post now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3084961

Wow! Easily the best Steve Jobs article I've read this week!

For me, this paragraph captures it all:

I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, “It’s a kind of magic.”

Stallman is not some random blogger.

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