Every time an article involving Richard Stallman gets posted here I cringe as I read through the comments. There are a range of opinions so I don't want to overgeneralize but there are a large number of people here that seem to almost despise Stallman and the FSF. People make fun of him and make comments about how he has a net negative impact on software and computing. It pains me to see so many people, who quite likely rely on emacs, Xcode with gcc, gnu coreutils, or an operating system that would've never been possible without the Free software movement, sit around and ridicule RMS because he eats toe jam or really, really likes parrots. He's had more of a far reaching and positive impact on software than people with such naive views will probably ever realize.

What I really wanted to comment about though (I couldn't hold back a short rant...) is how these Steve Jobs comments relate to the E-Parasites Act that was discussed yesterday. I read a lot of great comments there about how we're losing our freedoms incrementally and how this will shape the future. In the US we've seen this ratchet effect taking place to a frightening extent in the last decades both inside of computing and in general. If the US ever ends up in a place where there's widespread censorship on the internet then you can bet that it can trace its ancestry back to the DMCA and something like the E-Parasites act which will allow entire sites to get shut down with lots of room for abuse. Every step we take in that direction makes it easier to keep stepping in that direction.

So why don't as many people feel this way about Apple? Because we like their products? Iphones have made it normal to buy a computing device that has artificial restrictions preventing you from running whatever software you want on it. If they had their way then it would have actually been illegal to jailbreak your phone in order to circumvent this. Sure, iphones are really cool but this is a step in a terrifying direction. If it ever becomes illegal to upgrade the RAM in your laptop yourself or to install third party software on it then you can bet that you can trace the ancestry of those laws back to the shifts in public perception of computing freedom caused by companies like Apple. Laws like that might seem laughably extreme now but with every step in that direction they seem less and less so.

Stallman sees this and he has dedicated his life to moving us in the opposite direction. He's been hugely successful at this and he's been almost prophetic in his opinions about what we should be worrying about. He was criticizing Apple for trying to take away peoples' freedoms and Steve Jobs for steering the company in this direction. He wasn't condemning him as a person, as he said "My feelings about Jobs as a person are not strong, since I barely knew him." I don't see expressing this view after Steve Jobs' death as being particularly disrespectful. Steve Jobs is known to the majority of people only for his role at Apple. This role is what he was praised for across the internet and in magazines after his death. This role is what Stallman condemned.