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Comment by keyist | Hacker News Reader

RMS has the FSF and Defective By Design sites as soapboxes if he wished to gain more attention from Jobs's death. This was a post on his political notes page. He did nothing to publicize it.

He didn't post to aggregators or tweet to ask for upvotes (technically it was posted on his Identi.ca account which is linked to his political notes feed, but it got no special treatment).

If some major sites hadn't picked up on it and provided the publicity, most readers would never know. So RMS wrote a politically incorrect opinion on his personal page. Can we move on now?

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When you're a public figure, you have no personal pages. If it's public, it's part of your image.

But there's still a distinction between RMS and the FSF.

And please don't think of forking the FSF because RMS made fun of Steve Jobs if that is what people think he did.

While he might not have asked for the publicity, it would be very easy for Stallman to issue a public apology.

I can't believe there are people who think it was ok for Stallman to call Jobs evil. It was a tasteless attack without merit even in better times.

Hey, you seem to be as clueless about communication as he is.

What I find more interesting: are you as good at hacking as rms? Or is being better at communication the only thing you can take pride in? I suspect that might be behind all the ranting.

I have nothing whatsoever on rms’ hacking.

Anyway, I regret getting involved in this thread. Sorry for my comment.

What an excellent way to make your point: with an ad hominem attack!

I think I’m justified in saying that someone is clueless about communication if that person honestly believes that a statement by a very public spokesperson in any public place – no matter how obscure – will or should remain obscure.

That’s not how communication works. Sorry.

I thought that was sort of implied by my comment, no need to explicitly say it, because it’s so damn obvious. But I’m sorry if you though that my comment was nothing but an attack.

I understood what you meant, I just found it ironic in the extreme that you chose to complain about poor communication by genuinely using poor communication, especially given the context of the thread.

You've been commenting that Stallman should have deported himself better, and yet you break out with a comment like that yourself.

My argument doesn’t require me to lead by example. I’m some random commenter.

And since you understood me perfectly well there doesn’t seem to be a problem in this specific case.

Understanding you perfectly well isn't the issue at point, it's the manner of how you present yourself - witness all the crap in this thread about RMS from those people who now accept that he didn't wish Jobs dead, but still say he should have been more polite about it. You don't have much of a credible leg to stand on if you don't engage in that which you request of others.

Edit: changed 'moral' to 'credible' to avoid semantic bickering about the loaded word.

Morals? I think I have been talking squarely about effective communication, not morals.

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