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Comment by deadcyclo | Hacker News Reader

You can't blame that on Stallman. He has always been completely clear and up front about what he will and will not speak about. And he always agrees on the topic ahead of time with who ever is arranging the event.

In other words. Who ever arranged this graduation obviously did a horrible job, and is the person you should blame.

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I think it's fair to assume most people have basic "people" skills, humility, manners etc. Unfortunately that isn't the case with Stallman. He's an obsessive fundamentalist only concerned with one topic.

That fact is well known.

If your university hired someone who only spoke Mongolian, would you be upset at the speaker, or the idiot who hired him?

It's well known within a certain rather narrow community of people. The folks who booked him may just have read his name on a list of "vaguely important people who are willing to give speeches".

If your university hired someone who only spoke Mongolian but spit in people's faces when they extended their hand for a handshake, would you be upset at the speaker or the idiot who hired him?

RMS lacks basic social graces. He preaches to the choir but somehow still manages to piss them off with pedantic shit like GNU/Linux. Why doesn't he just copyright it so he can plaster the GNU logo all over everything and be done with it.

"If your university hired someone who only spoke Mongolian but spit in people's faces when they extended their hand for a handshake, would you be upset at the speaker or the idiot who hired him?"

If their spitting was common knowledge, as RMS's eccentricities are, then yes. Of course I would be upset primary with whoever booked them...

> He preaches to the choir but somehow still manages to piss them off with pedantic shit like GNU/Linux.

Maybe, just maybe, you aren't in the choir. I'm only saying this because you dismiss things many people find important.

He does, however, provide a rider before to anyone considering inviting him to speak that makes his personal obsession and his inflexibility around that obsession abundantly and explicitly clear.

I have a suspicion that whoever booked him simply didn't read it, or didn't understand it.

I mean, come on now -- other people make lots of noise about his eccentricities, and he himself basically wears a signboard explaining them, and then people are still surprised?

There are plenty of eccentrics who are still nice people.

And there are plenty who have no social graces. What of it?

If you book a speaker without researching them, you have only yourself to blame when things go wrong.

Yes; they are likely better candidates for commencement speakers.

I wouldn't say rms "isn't a nice person" in this context -- he's just very focused on his cause, and he doesn't take detours or "tone it down" for the sake of avoiding temporary inconvenience to others. It's rare for people to stick to their own principles so studiously (unfortunately, perhaps?), so he even goes out of his way to warn them.

It's not exactly stepping on puppies.

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