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Comment by For_Iconoclasm | Hacker News Reader

My biggest gripe with Stallman is his "I know what's best for you" mentality. His moral standards are more important than whatever you can come up with.

During a question & answer session somewhere, someone asked him a question about videogames. The questioner mentioned that the best games are just not free software. Stallman's answer was that the person should "adjust their tastes" and play free software games.

Adjust their tastes?

That is plenty more restrictive than using non-free software. I'll proudly wear "digital handcuffs" than sit in Stallman's oppressive, disrespecting, dogmatic ideological prison cell.

I appreciate what RMS has done for free software, but as soon as I learned that he thinks his interests are more important for me than my own, I decided it might be time to develop my own Stallman-libre philosophy on FOSS.

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My biggest gripe with Stallman is his "I know what's best for you" mentality.

My biggest gripe with Jobs was his "I know what's best for you" mentality.

Your criticisms of Stallman can equally be applied to Jobs. The user has to 'adjust their tastes' - to take on part of the Apple ecosystem means you have to take on all of it. Like gaming? Not on Apple. The user has to 'adjust their tastes' and play a limited subset of available games. Oppressive and disrespecting? Apple tried to make it illegal to jailbreak your own phone!

Duly noted! Although, I was not praising Jobs nor Apple in post. I was drawing a comparison (showing similarity) between the ideals of RMS and the ideals he was against. He is hypocritically fighting oppression in one field with oppression in another, and frankly I believe a person has more of a right to what goes on in their mind than what goes on in a computer.

Steve Jobs is not quite topical to what I said.

True enough, but it seemed to be in the context of the thread when I first read it.

I don't think of what RMS does as oppression, but more as 'toughlove'. Not for everyone, sure, but I think it's mischaracterised as oppression. He's more interested in having you be principled than using his products, and only his products.

It's one thing I respect about RMS. He has a well-defined set of (entirely reasonable) freedoms that he wants to promote, and whatever follows logically from those freedoms is what he recommends to everyone. "His products" are free software in general. I'm sure he wouldn't mind you using a working, free piece of software that solves your problem, even if it were made by Microsoft.

If you can argue with logic that your viewpoint does not conflict with his axioms, I'm sure he would find it agreeable. It's not oppression, since there is no compulsion, but RMS tries his darndest to promote what he sees is right, and he seeks to have a logical reasoning behind everything.

Jobs did not campaign to remove all options he didn't like from existence. Your equivalence is false and sad.

"Removed from the only source of software" might as well be "removed from existence" when your platform is iOS.

There are other platforms for you to choose. Stallman wishes for there to be no other choices.

This isn't rocket science.

That is some pro-grade delusion you've got there.

"Stallman wishes for there to be no other choices" I sprayed out my tea all over the keyboard! Seriously?

Yes, seriously. Stallman holds that it's immoral and unacceptable (in the world he would create) to have non-Free software. There are no exceptions.

Stallman desires to take away my choice to create (and implicitly, to use) software that doesn't meet his ideological vision of "Free" software. I reject that desire in toto; I do not presume to tell other developers of software what restrictions they may place upon software they right, just as I reject their attempts to do the same to me.

(Stallman's inability to fulfill his desire does not exculpate him from the moral failure of that desire.)

Really? Stories abound about how single-minded he was about his creation, whether it be haranguing developers about design points to petitioning presidents to bust unions. Even tried to make 'jailbreaking' your own phone illegal. As in, the government will step in and punish you for doing so.

Jobs was very, very much about doing things 'my way or the highway'. He was very much against people using options he didn't sanction.

EDIT: To be clearer, Jobs' rhetoric is "we offer an alternative", but the actions of Apple under Jobs was very much about crushing ideological opponents, much like RMS would like to do.

RMS is uncompromising to the point of being tactless. Always has been, based on the old email threads people pass around.

I wouldn't call him hypocritical, though. I think he's wrong about some things, but he goes to great lengths to make his life consistent with his ideology with no regard to practicality.

Jobs, too. When you talking about the persons rather than what they do, I think they are more similar than they're different.

>> I wouldn't call him hypocritical, though. I think he's wrong about some things, but he goes to great lengths to make his life consistent with his ideology with no regard to practicality.

Macbook Air with no DVD drive. Some people thought Jobs was wrong, because it had no regard for practicality.

Maybe RMS is saying freedom is more important than playing video games. I have no trouble understanding or agreeing with him there.

We all make sacrifices for freedom, whether it is traveling overseas, or opening a bank account, but playing video games seems such a silly one.

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