Dave Winer: Why I stand up for Stallman | Hacker News Reader

Dave Winer: Why I stand up for Stallman

scripting.com

423 pointsguan259 comments

I also stand up for Stallman. Yes, people think he is a weird guy. But we are all weird, and he's weird and has changed the world for the better. I don't see what there is to hate.

People worry that he might not be the best interface between Free Software and the rest of the world (because it's hard to relate to him), but who cares? If you can do a better job, do it. The only thing that's bad for the Free Software movement is worrying about who the leader is. It's you. Now get back to work and make us some awesome software.

Why do people from the U.S. use the word "hate" so lightly?

What makes you think I'm from the US?

Well to begin with, different words have different connotations and meanings in different languages.

In Canada we might say arse when we don't want to swear. My english friends tell me that arse is actually a pretty bad swear word over in there.

From my experiences, hate doesn't have a very strong meaning. My wife might say she hates brussel sprouts and I wouldn't think anything of it. That's just a normal expression.

Compared to which variety of English? I'm pretty familiar with British, American and Australian English, and I don't think that "hate" is a particularly strong word in any of 'em.

Depending on context, of course. A far stronger degree of dislike is conveyed by "I hate you" than "I hate lima beans".

In the US people have recently began using the the term 'hate' as a synonym for 'dislike', confusing not enjoying something (which may involve little regard at all) with caring about it greatly albeit in a negative way.

That's neither particularly recent nor particularly US-specific.

"dislike" has never been a synonym for "apathetic toward." Rather, it is generally used as a polite way of conveying "hate".

There's no confusion. The two senses of the word don't overlap; they can be used unambiguously in their own contexts.

Unless you think people are also "confusing" things when they say "I like my coffee sweet" and "What a sweet little girl"--?

Or, I don't know, the ringing of a bell and the ring on your finger? Or a flat object, a flat note, and a flat for rent?

This is how language works. Not just English, not just a language. All language. Remember Wittgenstein: "Let the use of words teach you their meaning" (PI 220).

I'd say it's just the common amplification style. Some other prefer understatements.

I don't think Stallman's a very effective activist in some ways. Stallman and the FSF could benefit from looking at the history of social justice movements to see what made them effective.

Of course that's no reason to treat him with disrespect.

Hmm. There are a few aspects of the FSF's strategies that I have never quite been a fan of, but I must say that Stallman has, in general, been much more effective at promoting free software than almost anyone else I can think of. Look at the GNU project, at Emacs, at GCC, look at how widespread the GPL is. Look at how many people know and care about what free software is, and what qualifies as free software (and despite the different name and different reasons given, the term "open source" is seen as meaning pretty much the same thing). That seems pretty effective to me.

What do you think he could do that would make him more effective? Compromise his position, say that maybe, sometimes, it might be OK to recommend non-free software? What value would he be providing then? While using a fully free software stack may not be for everyone today, the fact that he has pushed hard enough that it is possible is inspiring, and created benefits for people beyond just those who use entirely free software.

He's not an activist; that's what makes him effective. The history of "social justice" movements is full of examples where some people were in favour of revolution as opposed to mere reform. There are a lot of people that want to live in a world where free software can be used and sold alongside proprietary software; Stallman and other revolutionaries envision a world where proprietary software is seen as a horrible social evil that the only common sense choice is to write free software. However, he doesn't want to force you to that; he's simply talking about and discussing his alternative and hoping that you realize that it's better than the current situation.

Stallman doesn't need to waste his breath if there are many others who want to talk about reformist approaches.

Anyone can step in and do what they want with the "movement". I don't think RMS has a monopoly on speaking about free software and would probably welcome anyone who wanted to be an activist. But even if he didn't, it matters little. If you can do a better job then step in and do it.

I stand against Stallman. I'm no bully. I don't personally know or insult him. But I do disagree with his position on software (I agree with some of what he says, but I think we end up falling in opposing corners nevertheless).

But standing against someone and pointing out why you disagree I think is quite in the spirit of Stallman himself.

With that said, I don't know the extent of the abuse that Stallman has received from others, but its not obvious to an outsider what the abuse is. Some mocking over a rider? You should hear the abuse I've gotten over some of my haircuts.

I will say that while I disagree with RMS I do think his influence has been large and positive for most of his career. I don't think he's a particularly good spokesperson, but he makes up for it in other ways. I've even listed RMS as one I think is on the short list of potential Turing Award winners (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2305496).

I stand against Stallman, but I'm glad he's there to stand against.

actually RMS is an excellent spokesperson which is why the movement is so successful.

In a world of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Open Source, I wonder if FSM is actually successful. Sure it's had successes, but success-ful, I would hesitate to call it.

Also, I'm pretty sure the original commenter was implying that RMS is a bad spokesman because he is so polarizing/unattractive (idealogically).

How much did it cost you to learn to program? Before Free Software, it would have been a lot. Now you can learn and create amazing software without spending any money. And there is a culture of sharing that's made software one of the most successful fields to date.

This stuff is always difficult to figure out with any certainty, because the "what if" world will always remain hypothetical.

For instance, the FSF is fairly successful, but in an alternate universe, with, say, David Hasselhof (or, KITT, for that matter), as their spokesperson, maybe they would have been vastly more successful.

With regards to the availability of free software, who knows how much is due to them, how much is due to BSD type sharing, and how much is simply due to the economics of free software making a lot of sense for some kinds of programs.

gcc.

BSD predates the FSF by almost a decade. pcc predates GCC by about the same amount of time. I know that you know that projects like Perl have nothing to do with the FSF as well.

BSD however, was not BSD licensed untill the early 90s, and they clearly stated this move was in response to GNU and the GPL, to use BSD before that point required an extremely expensive AT&T source code license.

Most of the tools I used to learn to program would not qualify as Free Software by RMS's own definition. Most of these were Open Source.

Perhaps you are not aware that the vast majority of open source software does qualify as Free Software by the FSF's definition. Certainly BSD-licensed software does.

The vast majority of tools I used to learn how to program were not Free Software as defined by RMS.

But were OSS? An example, please?

BSD as it currently is(the "new" BSD licenses from 1999 on), because that's GPL compatible. The original BSD license does not count as FOSS as far as the FSF is concerned.

The original BSD license was free too, it was just not GPL compatible. The FSF has always recommended against it, but they have always called it a Free Software license.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OriginalBSD

I very much doubt that, since the definitions are very similar. Just because you could look at the source doesn't make it Open Source, as defined by the OSI.

Again, the vast majority of tools I used to learn how to program were not Free Software as defined by RMS.

I don't doubt that. I find it hard to believe they were Open Source.

Please don't pedal this nonsense.

"Free software" existed well before Stallman.

I learnt to program from magazines that had "free software" written out in BASIC. It was free (cost and freedom). After that we used to download free software from BBS's. Fractint etc.

Free software existed before, it'll always exist. It's existence has nothing to do with Stallman.

About as irritating as hearing 'Crockford invented JSON'.

That was "free software". This is Free Software.

Words and expressions often have more than one meaning. This is the case.

See Gratis versus Libre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre

Was it actually free as in libre? Did the magazine include a license for the code samples? If there was no explicit license then it was absolutely not libre due to copyright.

The Apple II, the first mass market personal computer, predates the "Free" software movement by several years, and came with Basic-- the most popular language at the time for hobbyists-- installed, by default, for free.

For the most part, Apple has given away development tools for free, or at very low cost, primarily to cover the overhead of offering them.

Since Mac OS X has been out, development tools have been free, and in the box. (Though now you download them rather than get them in the box, of course.)

XCode is just recently free, it always cost something before now. Without GCC being out there, would it have been free this whole time? I don't know either way, no one does, but I cheap != free. GCC has always been free.

> XCode is just recently free, it always cost something before now.

This is plainly false and easily checked by simply looking at archive.org's record for developer.apple.com.

Don't you think Basic was the most popular language at the time because it came for free with many home computers? C and other compilers were hideously expensive at the time, no wonder these languages weren't particularly popular.

And have you considered that one reason for OS X development tools being available free of charge these days might be because Free software changed the development tools landscape dramatically in the last two decades?

For the most part, Apple has given away development tools for free, or at very low cost, primarily to cover the overhead of offering them

There was no freely available compiler for the mac between System 1 and OSX. My fifteen-year-old self had to make an at-the-time pretty significant investment to buy Metrowerks Codewarrior.

That was the anti-golden-age of programming.

Stallman and GNU effectively ended the market for high priced proprietary dev tools. As a tool builder and user this is good and bad. That whole market segment has been removed for consideration and now the tool builder/user can sell their creations (the part that solves non-builder's problems while now giving away the tools they create while solving the user's problems). This transition has been very liberating. Now anyone with a modest hardware investment can have some of the best tools in the world to solve problems with. Amazing times.

My first C/C++ compiler cost nearly as much as the machine it ran on. This will never happen again and we can thank the GNU ecoSystem for jump starting the new ground rules.

I dumbfounded by all the awesome software I can use to build larger systems with everyday, literally millions of dollars worth of assets. Anyone anywhere could do this, with only food, water, hardware, electricity and internet.

RMS/GNU played a role. However, they had very little impact on the non-*nix space until prices of development tools had already dropped pretty sharply on DOS and then Windows. (Borland had a lot to do with it.) Tools, especially the pro editions and a lot of add-on libraries, were still a long way from free but the price points were coming down markedly. Ultimately though, I agree it was open source that drove the final nail into dev tools as a standalone business for most purposes.

GNU tools have profoundly changed the Microsoft platform, I remember when http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/ came out, everyone could get a legit C compiler for DOS/Windows. This was a huge deal.

Microsoft did its damnedest to kill Borland and its inexpensive tools.

Proprietary dev tools still exist, true, but the landscape is so vastly different. Even my favorite IDE IntelliJ has the source released under a BSD license, I actually reupped my license when they did this.

Did you forget about Apple's MPW? I don't know when you turned 15 but there was a very long span of time during which MPW was a good free option.

I'm not from the US and my first computer bought in year '94 was 5 times cheaper than an Apple.

It came with MS-DOS 6.22 and had QBasic. But it was useless. You see, I wanted to create games. And not shitty games using ASCII-art, but the kind of games I played daily.

I then got a pirated Turbo Pascal and I learned the ins and outs of it. But it was also useless -- I had to develop my own graphics primitives, but the environment was extremely limited. What I really needed was a C++ compiler that could compile executables for 32-bits protected mode and a library that already had graphics primitives optimized for something better than 320x240 Mode X in 80286 assembly.

Then I got to DJGPP, a GCC port for MS-DOS and Allegro. It was heaven-like from initial testing, but reading on DJGPP I began reading about Linux and for the first time I got the feeling that I was using an obviously crippled environment, because it was. And for Windows 95, since it was getting deployed everywhere, Visual C++ and Borland Delphi were expensive, too freaking expensive.

You may feel nostalgic about Apple II and that lovely Basic you loved so much. But it was also useless. And the "free development tools" from OS X? The compiler itself is GCC and the command-line environment is composed of lots of tools proudly wearing the GNU mark. Only in recent years has Apple started to consider other options, like LLVM, but that's because GCC has some technical issues, but otherwise it is the most mature and widely deployed compiler on this planet and has served Apple well.

You see, OS X wouldn't be OS X without the GNU tools and I really don't get how OS X can be used as an argument.

Mac OS X development tools are no more free in than Mac OS X.

It's also worth noting that Mac OS X's "free" development tools include the GNU suite.

They're completely free. The total cost of the Mac developer tools is zero; I bought a Mac and Apple packed them in. I didn't buy XCode, I bought a Mac. (Though, to be fair, there was a time when they were like $5 for an upgrade. Then they weren't.)

Now, they don't fit the FSF's definition of "free software", but I have little use for the redefinition of words to attempt to push a political viewpoint, so, y'know.

Redefinition? I think english has used "free" to mean either the state of having freedom or no cost for quite a while.

I only see one person here trying to redefine words to push their political viewpoint.

I'll cop to playing their game in jest, but more seriously: my definition does not exclude freedom. Nginx, for example, is free of charge. It is also permissively (one might say 'freely'!) licensed.

Stallman's, on the other hand, rather sadly attempts to pervert the discussion with such headscratchers as (say) "Visual Studio Express is nonfree." Well, no, it's quite free, I just downloaded it and they said the corporatey equivalent of "use in good health" (though this was, as is their sort of thing, buried in a EULA that was many many pages long). If they said "VS Express is not freely licensed," well, yeah, sure. Instead the FSF and similar unfortunates attempt to reverse the overload (underload?) of the word 'free' to mean only the meaning of 'free' that is politically appealing to them.

So, you're right, there's only one party committing etymological warfare in anger--though I'll cop to doing it in jest to get my point across. :)

You're completely missing the point. Or rather, the context. RMS/the FSF never tried to pervert the meaning of "free" to only mean "libre". It's just that in the context of their work, it makes little sense to use the other meaning of free (as in beer) - they acknowledge it exists, but it's rather irrelevant to them.

When you hear RMS using the word "free", it will mean "libre". So if RMS says something is "unfree", then it's glaringly obvious what he means, and in no way "etymological warfare".

You could just as well complain about the English language being ambiguous. It's quite unfortunate that free (as in Freedom) and free (as in beer) mean completely different things depending on the context, yet use the same word, but there's little we can do about that.

It's silly to say that XCode or Visual Studio Express are free, as in speech or beer. XCode is a fundamental component of the Mac OS X operating system, and though Apple doesn't put a price on it, it still figures into the cost of every Apple device, it just doesn't have a line item. Most of the components in a computer don't have line items, they all have a cost.

Visual Studio Express is the same basic deal. Microsoft doesn't give it away for free. They grant license to use it to anyone with a Windows license.

     "Visual Studio Express is nonfree." 
     Well, no, it's quite free

Try developing a plugin for it. That's lack of freedom right there.

Here, let me define freedom for you:

    the state of being free or at liberty rather 
    than in confinement or under physical restraint

Or here's another one:

    exemption from external control, interference, 
    regulation

Both definitions do not apply to Visual Studio Express, no matter how much wishful thinking you're trying to push ;)

ALSO, VS Express is not free as in cost either, as long as it only works on Windows, you do have to buy Windows Licenses. It's basically a complementary product. With GCC on the other hand you don't give a crap what platform you're using or what platform you're targeting. Well, actually you do give a crap because that's an extra benefit. Depends on your perspective.

The development tools might be free, but OSX certainly isn't, especially when you factor in the overpriced hardware. This is the number one reason I picked Android development over iOS.

No, it did not come 'for free'. It's included in the 'asking price' of Apple II. The money it cost Apple to bundle basic with the system was spent in order to make it more attractive and that cost is in turn part of the final price the customer pays when buying an Apple II.

Regarding the cost of learning to program: That's thanks to free-as-in-beer software, which is quite different from the FSF's free-as-in-speech software. (Though it is true that free-as-in-speech software also tends not to cost anything, since it's basically unsalable.)

And the culture of sharing exists outside of Stallman's highly restrictive copyleft bubble. Ordinary open-source software falls short of Stallman's demands, but it actually grants the user more freedom than GPL software does.

Since we value individual freedoms the most, the author decides what do with their software. Author's Choice. If you dont like the license on GPLd software, recode it and release as BSD. Go compete in the marketplace of ideas.

Free Software is successful because Apple and Google would not have been successful without it. OSX & iOS are built on BSD, and Google's entire back end is based on open source software (Linux, Java, et cetera).

BSD has nothing to do with the FSF and Stallman.

BSD does not use GNU software, IIRC. The BSDs use a separate re-implementation of the Unix base software under a BSD license (instead of a GPL license).

That said, I'm a little fuzzy on how much FSF may be inspired the BSDs to exist.

edit: I was overstating what I actually meant when I said that they don't use GNU software. I don't know about the current crop of BSDs, but I was referring to the original BSD system not being built on top of the GNU base.

Most of the current BSD projects do in fact use some GNU tools. BSD predates the FSF.

There are a lot of tools and major projects within the various BSD's that are GPL'ed software. This includes but certainly isn't limited to gcc, gdb, grep, binutils, diff, and more.

It is only recently in the last few years that the BSD projects have started removing GPL'ed software from their base trees and replacing them with BSD equivalents. clang is slowly being accepted by FreeBSD (a BSD compiler developed by Apple), tools like grep and diff are being redone under the BSD license, and OpenBSD is looking at pcc to replace the gcc compiler for their base system.

The main reason is simply because they want to create a fully BSD distribution of components, where none of it is under the GPL license, secondary only recently has there been a new compiler available that is as good as gcc and could be a viable replacement.

For people who care there are big differences between "free" and "open" and other similar terms.

BSDs are open source, and free as in beer, but there have been years-long flame wars between RMS (and FSF advocates) and Theo de Raadt (and BSD advocates).

Stallman may say that free software has not been successful when people use the term Linux instead of GNU/Linux. (and yes, I am aware that there exist Linux Kernels without GNU userlands.)

The BSDs are also Free Software.

Yes; thanks for the correction. I'm not sure where my confusion came from.

(http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html)

In a world of Apple, Google and Microsoft FSM seems to be our only hope...

Not to get bogged down in words, but you are saying, "I stand against Stallman," but isn't it better to just focus on the ideas? He is a man of ideas, after all.

If you disagree on the ideas, you could still be friends with the man (and he is an incredibly nice and friendly guy who treats people better than he gets treated, that's for sure.)

Just curious: by any chance, are you "standing against Stallman" while simultaneously using his work? I could not do my job without using Stallman's work in some form (in many forms in fact).

If you disagree on the ideas, you could still be friends with the man

Can you? Is it possible to be friends with someone who says that anyone who disagrees with his ideas is evil?

I'm an atheist, yet I have no problem with being friends with people who are religious. I do, however, have a problem with being friends with someone who ends every conversation with "... and you're going to burn in hell for an eternity". RMS' refusal to accept the possibility that any position other than his own might have value puts him firmly into that camp of people I don't want to have anything to do with.

> I don't want to have anything to do with

Gotcha, and I'm not trying to be argumentative, but do you use his work? And if so, are you okay with using his work, but disagreeing with his ideas?

I don't want to speak for anyone, but while Stallman definitely thinks that using work created from a differing ideological perspective is seriously problematic, one shouldn't assume the same from people who disagree with him.

For someone who claimed in a parent comment, "...puts him firmly into that camp of people I don't want to have anything to do with", I would.

"I put [X] firmly into that camp of people I don't want to have anything to do with, but I am fine with using [X]'s work for my everyday activities."

*but do you use his work?

I don't think so. I certainly use a bunch of GNU code, but as far as I know he didn't contribute to any of it. It's entirely possible though.

Do you use gcc?

Nope, I'm firmly in the llvm/clang camp.

     "... and you're going to burn in hell 
      for an eternity"

I never heard him say anything like that in his speeches.

Maybe I have a short memory, unless you mean the short NO answers he gives to people that ask whether bending the rules a little is OK to do or maybe you're referring to how he hasn't given up on correcting people about the GNU/Linux naming. I also heard multiple times about how he holds the FSF members to these higher standards.

But have you ever asked a Christian if you'll go to hell for being an atheist? The answer is pretty predictable. And compared to Christianity, a faith based on non-falsifiable beliefs, Stalman was proven right again and again.

Maybe he just got tired of repeating everything like a broken record? Maybe, just maybe, he worked for his whole life trying to build the GNU operating system without the results he wanted? And to put salt to the injury, OS X built on top of those tools. Wouldn't you be pretty pissed about it?

He's not young anymore, he may not have the same patience or pragmatism of 20 year old. He does sound like an old grump. His idealism is kind of obnoxious.

But regardless of that, he's one of those people that pushes the human race forward. It's OK, you don't have to be friends with him to give him a little respect.

"But have you ever asked a Christian if you'll go to hell for being an atheist? The answer is pretty predictable."

I'm guessing you haven't asked a very wide variety of Christians that question? Because in my experience you'd get a pretty wide variety of different answers...

You must from the US and it shows :)

From my experience there are 2 kinds of Christians: those that believe in the New Testament and those that reinterpret it here and there to suit their own feelings about what is right and wrong (after all, a father wouldn't punish his children for all eternity and why punish a good man, even if he's an atheist?).

However the New Testament doesn't really leave room for interpretation on this one. Non-believers will burn, says so Jesus. And if you ask any priest from any of the major Christian churches, like Catholic, Eastern Orthodox (my own), Protestant, the answer will be without doubt Yes.

Of course, there's always Jehova's witnesses, that simply rewrote the bible, but I don't think that counts.

There's nothing wrong with inventing your own religion based on a good set of moral values, especially casting away anything that leads to hatred of other people (dare I say it, Jesus would probably agree) and I do that myself, however I wouldn't shout from the roof-tops that I'm a Christian as that would be a little bending of the truth.

Since Vatican II, the official Catholic position is that salvation is open to non-believers. Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Anglicans believe similarly. In fact, most protestant denominations believe the same thing. Your opinion is not held by the majority of Christian denominations.

(From Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: "The non-Christian may not be blamed for his ignorance of Christ and his Church; salvation is open to him also.")

I actually tried that experiment at one point, and there were surprisingly few popular sets of hell criteria. The main disagreement seems to be over the following questions:

1. What is hell, and does anybody go there? (Popular answers: nonexistent, some kind of vague "separation from God", or a literal eternal torture place.)

2. Do people get saved from hell by faith, or by good deeds?

3. What about people who have never heard of Christianity, or who were indoctrinated into another religion so thoroughly that they will never accept it?

4. What about children who die before they can learn about religion?

These four questions cover the great majority of the variations in Christian hell-beliefs.

Well summarized.

Some surprising-to-me data points I researched last night while working on a longer response to bad_user I decided not to post:

1) Apparently (based on a couple of surveys) at least 25% of American Christians don't believe in hell at all.

2) Based on an admittedly quick survey, the four gospels seem to strongly emphasize the positive benefits of believing in Jesus. When they do speak of hell, like the Sermon on the Mount, it's all in terms of what will happen to you if you're not a good person: "Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire."

3) The strongest phrase I was able to find in the gospels was "...but whoever does not believe [in Jesus] is condemned already..." In that context (John 3), it seems to "be condemned" is to not have eternal life -- and then it immediately softens it up three verses later with "But whoever does what is true comes to the light..."

All in all, I found a lot less Biblical support for "If you don't believe in Jesus, you will go to hell" than I thought I was going to. Perhaps I just wasn't looking in the right places...

Can you? Is it possible to be friends with someone who says that anyone who disagrees with his ideas is evil?

Yes. Depends on definition of evil, I guess.

P.S. in Stallman case I guess definition of evil goes something like this: "I think with your rules you're doing harm to long term development of intellectual property like software. You're evil and you will burn in hell." Pretty mild definition of evil in my opinion?

Stallman is an atheist, but he uses religious expressions and extreme caricatures like that to be funny. If you're mortally offended, you're taking it the wrong way. He can be very witty, if your skin is thick enough to appreciate his sense of humor.

At a science fiction convention in the 80's, Mike and I (who worked for "Evil Software Hoarder" Unipress on Gosling's "Evil" commercial version of Emacs) ran across RMS:

Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?"

RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance."

Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!

Stallman didn't focus on Steve Jobs' ideas, so one can hardly be blamed for holding him to his own standards.

You misunderstood his position, he clarified it later and corrected the quotation he used.

AFAIK, he corrected the quotation, but did not take back anything he said and even insisted that the misquotation "did not alter the meaning." He did say "My feelings about Jobs as a person are not strong," but nonetheless stood by his gloating that Jobs — the person — is gone, and continued to attack him by name rather than just the abstract ideas Jobs stood for.

That is false.

He wasn't glad Jobs, the person, died, but he was glad Jobs, the CEO of Apple, is gone.

So if I use a tool or product, I must automatically agree with the maker's ideology?

I've used John Galliano aftershave, and I'm no racist.

First of all, this article was about standing up against people bullying Stallman for personal quirks. Is that what you stand against? You think it's bad for him to be a bit weird? Or did you just read the headline, and not the article?

Also, standing against a person isn't terribly productive, unless you think that person can do no good or have no good ideas. Do you disagree with everything that Stallman says? Will Stallman saying something make you automatically disagree with a position, even if you agreed with it before?

No? Then you don't stand against Stallman. You might disagree with some of his tactics. You might stand against free software. But I'm not sure why you would state this as "standing against Stallman," as if he, personally, is an affront to you.

I can't speak for kenjackson, but Stallman states that writing proprietary software is unethical, and I find that idea unpalatable. I generally think that its better for software to be open, but I don't think a person who writes a piece of proprietary software has taken anything away from society, nor have they done any harm. That puts me at odds with Stallman's philosophy, which is predicated on the idea that writing such software is unethical and enslaves the user.

RMS himself showed he'd accept some degrees in the evil scale. ie said Android is not really free but a great step in the right direction. He said also it is ok to use non free software, eg Google.

I'm not in his shoes nor in yours but I think there is a scale for proprietary software, ie if you write server side, it is less enslaving than client side, if your product use open formats and allow users to go away with their data, it is better than not, etc.

The assumption that proprietary software is slavery is the primary reason that I have no use for Richard Stallman.

(Secondary is, yes, his personal behavior. I don't make fun of him for his grooming or anything quite so superficial, but I think his behavior towards women in the tech community is notably not something to be proud of and his lack of common respect in other ways[1] is appalling.

[1] - "It doesn’t take special talents to reproduce—even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill." http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/36460 )

I don't see any thing untrue in the quote you propose to our reading. It is a bit untactful in our PC times but, guess what, I agree that RMS is not the most tactful guy in the world. I'd boldly say he might agree himself.

Slavery: It is a metaphor. A proprietary software handling my data, my content, my texts, my thoughts, my music or my relationships, and save these important personal assets into a format I cannot control, disallowing me to take it back in a useful way, is a kind of "ball and chains" that can be allegorically referred as "slavery": the user is losing important personal freedoms, most of the time unknowingly, or unknowing of the alternatives.

Stop right there. There is no slavery here. Nobody is forcing anyone to use a proprietary service or software product over a free alternative. Users now have more of a choice with FOSS alternatives than ever before.

This is a(and I really hate this term) first world problem of the greatest order. "I can't use Facebook because it's proprietary and they're evil." So what? Just don't use Facebook.

At this point(and RMS and the FSF have been a major contributors to this, for which they should be thanked), users have a choice in the software that they use. They have the freedom to choose what they want, whether it's proprietary software, OSS, or FOSS.

Slavery doesn't come into this. You believe that a product or service doesn't respect your freedom? Don't use it, or use an alternative that gives you what you want. That is the choice that Stallman has helped bring about.

> This is a(and I really hate this term) first world problem of the greatest order. "I can't use Facebook because it's proprietary and they're evil." So what? Just don't use Facebook.

You're forgetting another first world problem that many people have: peer pressure. "What, you're not on Facebook? Lol, looser." Besides, with bullshit like the Facebook Login coming up, it's not unreasonable to assume that you WILL be forced to use Facebook for many things on the web. While I personally don't care and can put up with the peer pressure, other people can't.

And people ARE being forced to use proprietary software. At home, at work, everywhere, and if it's only because they don't know any better, or have been locked in by proprietary formats. You don't always have a choice.

Furthermore, it's not just about having a choice. It's about breaking the dominance, and eventually getting rid of proprietary software altogether. The only rational choice for any human being who's interested in progress and long-term sustainability is Free Software. Proprietary software is opposed to both of these concepts.

peer pressure. "What, you're not on Facebook? Lol, looser."

Weird worldviews will result in you be treated weirdly. Deal.

And people ARE being forced to use proprietary software. At home,

Change. If it's that important to you, you will.

at work,

Quit. If it's that important to you, you will.

if it's only because they don't know any better

Then they don't care, and it's unimportant.

You don't always have a choice.

Yup. Life kinda sucks, huh? Wear a helmet.

This does not follow from...er...reality. Terribly sorry.

I write proprietary software (TEH HORRARS!). I am also interested in technological progress. The two are in no way opposed, unless as your postulate you take the really cretinous stance they they are--and once you do, well, sure, it's obvious. But that postulate is wrong and cretinous, so...

I hope you revisit some of his philosophical speeches and reconsider your position. When software runs the whole freaking world, it is entirely possible to enslave the world through onerous license, copyright, trademark, patent, etc. fees.

I've read his tripe. His postulates are wrong.

That he sees it as unethical at all makes our views incompatible. You're speaking of less evil, but I don't think proprietary software is evil at all. The idea that proprietary software being unethical is fairly fundamental to Stallman's thinking, and I can't reconcile that with my own thoughts on the subject.

Speaking to pragmatism, Stallman has unequivocally said in interviews that if you write proprietary software you should quit your job because you are doing something unethical.

Now, I'm glad Stallman is around. The FOSS movement is, I feel, very important, and its important that FOSS exists. I don't wish that Stallman would go away simply because we do not share the same fundamental beliefs regarding software. I think that would be a loss. But I'm also glad that there are like minded people like myself who do not view a proprietary app as some sort of violation of basic human freedoms.

Well, it depends on what you mean by "accept." He acknowledges that Android is a step in the right direction, being much more free software than iOS, and restricting what software end users can run less. But it's not something that he considers acceptable; he would never own an Android phone, unless it were running something like Replicant and the radio firmware were replaced by free software or locked in place (so that it acted more as hardware than as software).

The article wasn't about agreeing or disagreeing with Stallman's beliefs, it was about all the comments that inevitably pop up about how fat, weird, smelly, unkempt, etc. he is, which has absolutely nothing to do with his beliefs.

I agree. I was trying to offer a data point to lambda's question about how someone might "stand against" Stallman. I suppose I went off on a tangent. I agree with the gist behind the article that we should not attack Stallman based on the fact that he is not typical.

I still don't understand how you can "stand against" Stallman, as opposed to particular views of his. He has lots of opinions. Some of them you may share. Some of them you may not.

Just deciding that you disagree with some views that someone has and thus you stand against them entirely is a bit extreme.

Would it be possible for someone to call one of your habits unethical and you to find it palatable? If not, then palatability is probably not a good indicator of whether ethics questions directed at you are reasonable.

I don't use my feelings regarding the manner as a measure of reasonableness. I've really tried to understand Stallman's arguments, but I really can't come to agree that proprietary software is, in and of itself, unethical.

You said it perfectly, kenjackson. Everyone needs to chill and stop crapping their pants every time someone disagrees with Stallman. Public figures get insulted by morons like us all the time. They don't sweat it and if they do should get out of the public eye.

I'm a Steve Jobs fanboy but I certainly don't care if someone mocks him, even posthumously. I did get very offended by Stallman's comments the day after his death but that's a whole other animal there. Otherwise people need to stop taking our opinions so personally. If I disagree on just one point or everything he stands for it doesn't mean I don't like him unless I say so. It also doesn't mean I respect or don't respect his previous work. Enough with this cult of personality stuff already.

If you agree with Schopenhauer on "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." and if you accept that the space Dave operates is populated by hackers, entrepreneurs and lots of other people looking for the next big thing, then his point is particularly poignant:

  > Okay, you say it's weird. And I say weird is good. People 
    who show originality openly, without fear, are people I 
    admire. And people I stand up for.

Well put Dave. I agree.

edit: Fixed grammatical error.

I would say either we all demand parrots for our business trip in tge future or Schopenhauer lost a lot of credibility here.

The way that that quote gets used doesn't make sense to me. Even given that all truth does pass through those three stages, that doesn't mean that something passing through the first two stages is especially likely to be ever accepted as self-evident.

Right. They laughed at Einstein... But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Both were quite successful at doing their own thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_the_Clown

That is perspective.

Used in the context of looking forward, its just positive reinforcement.

Ridicule and violent opposition may be a necessary conditions for something to be true (not sure whether I agree with that but that doesn’t really matter), but they are certainly not sufficient.

John Gruber is even more guilty of this.

Parrot / breakfast point and laugh:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/10/26/rms

Linking to a site set up purely to mock Stallman:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/10/27/stallman-dialogu...

The latest episode of his podcast, about Stallman, is called "They Had to Burn the Sheets" (I haven't listened to it, but going by the title I think it's a safe assumption that it continues the theme):

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/10/27/the-talk-show-64

Gruber is so openly contemptuous of Stallman that I find it hard to believe that Winer is focusing on Kottke instead. In the episode of the Talk Show you linked to, Gruber's co-host Dan Benjamin keeps trying to rein Gruber in from being unfair to Stallman. He shuts down Gruber from talking about the infamous foot-eating incident on multiple occasions. And yes, the title is indeed about Stallman; Gruber repeats some anecdotes he heard about Stallman's hygeine. He makes Kottke look downright generous.

If you read what Winer is saying with Gruber in mind, it makes sense. But Kottke's entry strikes me as much more innocuous than Winer is making it out to be.

maybe, like many of us, winer doesn't pay attention to gruber.

who?

In that case he should stop paying attention to Kottke too, problem solved.

I've been reading HN for years, but I honestly have no idea who Kottke, Gruber, or Winer are.

Who cares about this nth-level gossip about people who like to gossip about other people?

Bloggers.

The point that Winer was making was that Kottke once stood up for him (Winer) in the face of bullies, and here, he seems to be joining in the bullying instead.

I suppose Gruber is just a small, mean-spirited bully of whom Winer has no special expectations.

I think Stallman is fantastic; I couldn't care less about Gruber. I actually found the rider thing oddly fascinating and not at all crazy -- I actually read through the entire thing in a single sitting, but I still laughed involuntarily when I looked at The Stallman Dialogues (the "mock" site):

  Friendly conference organizer: I'm happy to have you stay at my house, Mr. Stallman. I hope you find the couch comfortable, I vacuumed all the cat hair off of it. And here, let me get you a fresh set of sheets.
  Stallman: Thank you. I like this much more than staying in a hotel.
  Friendly conference organizer: Great!
  Stallman: It's a bit warm in here, though.
  Friendly conference organizer: Is it? I guess I'm used to it.
  Stallman: Above 72 fahrenheit (22 centigrade) I find sleeping quite difficult.
  Friendly conference organizer: Well... I'll see if I have a fan?
  Stallman: If the air is dry, I can stand 23 degrees.
  Friendly conference organizer: I don't know if I have a dehumidifier. I'll go grab our fan...
  Stallman: Thank you. A strong electric fan blowing on me enables me to sleep.

I also stand up for Stallman:

http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-also-stand-up-for-stallman

we -from the future of the universe- also stand up for stallman http://www.augmentedmadness.com/we-from-the-future-also-stan...

Regarding your blog entry, I don't think it's instructive to compare the way adults respond to an extremely blunt spoken person to your child being bullied. Stallman's an adult who doesn't pull punches -- he described Steve Jobs as "evil" right after his death. Is it bullying for him to get counterpunched, or just robust dialogue? I vote door number two.

As for your kid being bullied, you need to be all over that issue as a parent. No kid should have to endure it as the price for attending school.

I have no problem with people counter-punching Stallman on the issues. If you think that the closed iOS/Apple ecosystem is good and not evil, please, I want to hear your argument. But I heard very few people making that argument. The arguments tended to just be character assassination. Stallman lacks social graces, he doesn't recognize that it's necessary to be polite when someone dies, therefore his views are automatically irrelevant.

So I do think it's bullying, unless you're going to address the substance of the argument rather than its tactfulness.

I think the argument, with regards to Jobs, was rather that Stallman was inappropriate on writing his statements so soon after Job's death. Edit: To clarify, the bulk of the arguments where not against his ideas but rather directly concerned with his behavior. I don't consider it character assassination. The counter-argument was that he was correct, which does not actually excuse the way he stated it. You can say something correct in the wrong manner.

Now, regarding the rider for speaking engagement, I would agree that the outright mocking seen there was uncouth.

tl;dr summary

1) I was a popular guy in school. Ridiculously popular.

2) Although I was popular (even if I didn't hang out with the other kids), I am still a good guy because I hung around the weird kid in school. He still acted weird, but I was a good guy so I stuck it out.

3) Did I mention he never stopped being weird? Did I mention I was popular even though I didn't hang out with all the other people?

4) I was popular in high school so I fully expected to be popular on the Internet. I blazed a path and these people didn't even care, or like me! Editors note: Note the lack of introspection. Perhaps they don't like you despite the path you blazed (or claim to have blazed)?

5) I released my life's work under the GPL and the internet ganged up on me for it. Even strangers in real life picked on me. Why aren't I still popular?

6) Kottle highlighted a single odd entry in RMS's rider which made me ill. I'll defend RMS by saying "YEAH, so he's weird!"

errata: Winer went to a high school which had recess.

Your summary has a very sarcastic tone, just saying.

This is so over the top that I can't decide if it's a deliberate troll or not. But if you really think this kind of ridicule and lashing out is an appropriate response to a blog post about needless ridicule then... well, I don't know. Shame on you I guess. This is just sad.

Not every application of the written word needs to be documenting an event or opinion. This post isn't a good summary of what Winer wrote. It is, however, good reading.

Winer can be a little annoying from time to time. This post harps on that particular aspect of Winer without saying, "you know, Dave Winer annoys me." If you read through it, you laugh a bit, and think "yeah, this post sounds like it's about RMS but it's really about Winer", and that's interesting insight. parfe could have said exactly that, but why use one line to say what you literally mean when you can convey that message and entertain at the same time?

actually, i was pretty shocked when i read kottke's post. the parrot thing was supremely reasonable - it wasn't even remotely prima donnaish, despite the parallels kottke tried to draw. all it said was "i like parrots; if there is someone around who has a parrot i can visit, that would be nice". he even emphasised the fact that people should not go out and buy parrots just to keep him happy, and explained (gently!) exactly why that would be a bad idea. whichever way i slice it, i can see nothing more in that post than kottke picking on stallman simply because he's an easy target.

Winer could write a blog post criticizing the treatment of RMS without, say, whinging about Winer's hard lot in life. Since Winer made himself unnecessarily central to the blog post, it opens him up to criticism on those grounds distinct from any discussion of rms or people's behavior towards rms.

And though I pay virtually no attention to Winer, a cursory googling finds a trail of bad feelings and nasty behavior (lawsuits over $5k and handshake deals, nasty personal disputes, etc). So it's not unreasonable to suggest people in glass houses should keep their mouths shut.

I thought that recess part was weird too. Bronx Science had recess? There were seven future Nobel Prize-winning physicists pondering the universe on those teeter totters.

Do high schools in the United States not generally have recess? Classes all morning, then lunch, then classes all afternoon?

Aside from anything else, recess is a much-needed coffee break for the teachers.

That is correct.

Teachers have a "planning period" typically where they get 1 full class period off.

Up until now I just assumed all schools had both recess and lunch. It is required in Australia.

Anyway, much later in life, I was treated like Sam

I had a hard time taking his post seriously after this. As someone who was the "weird kid" growing up this sentence is so insulting, and so far past egotistical, that I'm not even sure there's a word capable of describing it. It's like someone trying to sympathize with a famine victim by complaining that they missed lunch yesterday.

Did Kottke even read the link about the Van Halen brown M&M thing? Because it wasn't some crazy whim; it had a perfectly reasonable justification. Saying that Stallman's parrot thing is "right up there" with the brown M&Ms doesn't make sense, if you're trying to laugh at Stallman.

Anil Dash, in comments section of Winer's post, makes the same mistake of having an idea withouth having enough knowledge:

> ... using that power to cow conference organizers and academics into submission to an arbitrary set of whims, the same as a rock star refusing to eat certain colors of M&Ms ...

http://scripting.com/stories/2011/10/31/whyIStandUpForStallm...

There is so much wrong with Anil Dash's long-winded comment. The first thing he gets wrong is expecting Stallman to handle traveling around for his cause just as well as others have done. Wrong. The personality traits from which people find themselves leading a cause are not the same ones which make people great traveling guests. Another big thing he gets wrong is understating GNU's role in Free Software Operating Systems. After reading that I'm convinced that he doesn't understand how important development tools are when creating a new platform.

FWIW I don't always say "GNU/Linux". I usually say "Linux". I certainly am not opposed to saying "GNU/Linux", however. I wish more people, Anil included, understood the pivotal role the GNU toolchain provided, but I don't think saying "GNU/Linux" is the best way.

The mythical interpretation of the brown M&Ms as signifying capricious demands made by popular people has overtaken the original meaning, so Kottke et al. should be understood as referring to that myth.

Probably true. But the actual link that he put on his page refers not to the popular meaning, but to the original one.

It seems like there are two possiblities:

1) Jason, a bright guy who is very familiar with the internet and characterized by Dave as standing up for those being attacked by the masses, did not read his own link and by chance chose a spectacularly poor but well-known example to ridicule and bully Stallman.

2) "It's cramazing" and "right up there" were not intended to signify ridicule and bullying.

My money's on the the second.

Of course, one weakness of this dichotomy is that Dave is also bright and internet savvy, and choosing Two would imply that Dave grossly misinterpreted Jason. Also low odds, but I'd guess more likely than One. Maybe we'll have to wait until Jason chimes in to clarify. Or maybe Dave already asked Jason to clarify and is certain of his interpretation? But we can still agree with moral of Dave's post, right?

I think crazy and amazing is used in an endearing sort of way, too.

> That's right up there with Van Halen's brown-free bowl of M&Ms and Lady Gaga's Cockney-speaking staff.

The second item links here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_%28theater%29#Notable_rid...

Where there are more people who are pretty good company to be on a list with, like Johnny Cash. If I edited the article to put Richard Stallman on that list, I wonder how long it would last...

Richard Stallman is one of my heroes in tech. He's a deeply fascinating and amazingly obstinate thinker who should be Walter Isaacson's next book project.

But does he really need anyone's help fending off bullies? A guy who described Steve Jobs as being guilty of "evil" after his death would eat bullies for breakfast. If he ate breakfast. Which he doesn't. And don't ask him why.

The glaring mistake that Dave Winer makes here is a misjudgement of RMS' intentions:

> I looked at him, and asked him if he seriously was going to do this, in front of Stallman. Yeah, he kept at it. That's how pervasive this culture of disrespect is. To Stallman's credit, he not only stopped it, but dug in. He wanted to understand what was at the root of this. <

Dave, he didn't defend you because someone was being mean to you. He didn't jump in because the tone of the discussion was disrespectful. He defended the GPL, plain and simple. You as a person were entirely unsubstantial to him. RMS sees the entire world through a very narrow filter. You were just lucky that your idea was in alignment with that filter at the time. If the roles were reversed, Richard Stallman would not stand up for you as a person the way you just did for him. He only stands up for the GPL. I believe he wouldn't even stand up for himself. Yes, he's that single-minded.

He only stands up for the GPL as a means to an end...

I'm not sure Stallman needs "standing up for." The Kottke post from Winer had a quote from Stallman's rider, and that's about it. http://kottke.org/11/10/richard-stallmans-rider .

Some people think Stallman's weird, but I'm certain he's decided his beliefs and attitudes are worth it. He made that decision on his own, as his own person, and I'm not sure he needs Winer to come save him from the big bad bullies.

That's the part that puzzled me. The comment was only that the parrot clause was "up there with" other extremely specific rider clauses. And the Van Halen clause is these days pretty widely known as an interesting system hack rather than mere eccentricity or weirdness. The Kottke post didn't come across to me as mocking at all, actually. (Unless you see "crazy" as exclusively of negative valence, I suppose.)

could you explain to me why you think stallman's parrot clause is crazy, or even overly specific? all he's saying is it would be nice if there were a friendly parrot he could see. the specific parts are telling people why they should not go out of their way to buy a parrot simply to make him happy.

For Dave Winer to stand up for Stallman, requires someone to pick on him and Stallman not being able to defend himself. I don't see either of it happening.

Stallman wasn't going to alter his behavior because of Kotte, and Kotte probabably isn't as affectionate with parrots - but that's OK with me.

There is no Pick-On-Stallman movement. He has his beliefs and it presents an alternate model for software cooperation. For some situation, it clearly works, while for others, not so much.

Of all the freedoms, the freedom to express an idea is one of the most important. As long as it is done in a manner that protects the weak. Stallman simply doesn't qualify. We recognize ad hominem for what it is, and Kotte's jibe is just that.

Disagree; there have been notable people in the FOSS community calling for a new leader of a Free Software movement and referencing stuff like this. I think it was worthwhile for Dave Winer to write this post and state his opinion that this kind of stuff shouldn't get in the way of Richard Stallman pursuing his dreams.

Why shouldn't the FOSS community, to the extent it supports FSF - not allowed to have their say about who leads them and who speaks for them? If there are alternate leaders let them step up and be counted.

Dave Winer can only stand with Stallman. FSF or not, Stallman will continue to speak his mind, and amen to that.

I took a look at the leadership of the FSF and found that it was much more well-rounded than I expected.

http://www.fsf.org/about/board

I don't know, if three or more of the board members besides FSF thought it would be best for one of the current board members to be president I wouldn't be opposed. That may be a few years down the road.

But I don't think Stallman should be replaced just because he's an odd fellow. If the change happens it should be for better long-term leadership.

From another post of his: "About open source and whether I have the standing to discuss it, I've made a huge contribution to open source with the 2004 release of Frontier under the GPL. I was releasing code long before the terms free software or open source existed. Even so, as you'll see, I don't believe in the boundaries, I think ideas should freely cross the boundaries, and they do." http://scripting.com/stories/2008/08/10/howViralIsGpl.html#p...

I had no idea what substantial contribution this guy provided. Turns out his company, UserLand, eventually GPL'd a content management system called Frontier http://frontierkernel.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UserLand_Software#Frontier

While I personally have not heard of it, the author believes quite strongly in its importance.

Dave Winer is widely regarded to have invented both RSS and blogging.

After seeing some other comments I went and looked into it. It seems Winer is the one who thinks he invented RSS.

Reality seems to say multiple competing XML formats for content syndication existed around the same time. Someone took some features of Winer's format and combined it with an existing one and called it RSS. Shrug

And on inventing blogging I read up thanks to wiki [1], as usual, and lo and behold! The claim his blog is one of the oldest is sourced! To an interview in which he claims it about his own blog, and then discounts it a sentence later.

I have no opinion on if this guy actually influenced as much of tech history as he seems to think, but history has either been very unkind to him, or he promotes himself beyond the facts.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogging

[2] http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082-985714.html

That would be a neat trick, since RSS was created at Netscape a full year before Winer got involved.

http://www.rssboard.org/rss-history

Over time, the number of Internet technologies Dave Winer didn't invent approaches zero.

To clarify, I don't have a dog in this hunt. I was just responding to the original comment about "who is this Dave Winer guy?"

The first blogger I ever encountered was, of all people, Bruce Campbell. He was doing regular, personal updates to his website way back around 2000.

The term "blogging" came a good time after this.

A couple of sources on the history of blogging. Bernstein's reminiscences of the personalities show that little changes...

http://tawawa.org/ark/p/jorn-barger-community.html

http://www.markbernstein.org/Jul09/Flames.html

I was actually heartened by the fact that most of the posts I read on HN about Stallman's rider had the same reaction I did: hey, all that sounds pretty reasonable.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that any blog post by Dave Winer must reference how he "blazed a trail" or some variation thereof.

Did you know he invented RSS, and its the most relevant thing on the web today?

You'd never guess.

I met Dave a few times back when I was with the tImes though I doubt he remembers me. He's nice enough in person but he has his own personal reality distortion field.

I had to stop following him in Google Reader and Twitter to stay sane.

That "I invented RSS" line is utter bullshit of the highest order. Ramanathan V. Guha and Dan Libby of Netscape created it back in 1999. Do not pass go, do not drink the Kool-aid.

Of course, Netscape's initial version of RSS sucked and didn't get much traction until Winer got involved. The history of RSS isn't a simple thing.

Except I wasn't talking about traction or the simplicity of history, but the assertion that Winer "invented" RSS, which is patently false.

Citation?

btw Guha prefers to be called Guha...

I'm pretty sure donohoe was being sarcastic. Maybe someday we'll learn that sarcasm is rarely an insightful addition to a discussion.

Yes, I was being sarcastic in the first instance. I'm Irish, without sarcasm I'd have nothing.

Dave Winer would agree with you:

November 2010: http://scripting.com/stories/2010/11/11/didYouInventRss.html January 2007: http://scripting.com/scripting2/davewiner/2007/01/02/rssWasn...

Here’s one characterization by someone else that he seems to approve of:

“[RSS] grew out of a good idea in 1997 from the software company Userland that got picked up and melded with one of Netscape's similar ideas.”

http://scripting.com/2003/04/14.html#lff229a9a0dde77eb6e47c1...

While you might still think that Dan Libby deserves more credit than Winer, this is a far cry from claiming that he invented RSS.

This comment contributes nothing to the discussion.

Dave's gone ahead and written a stand-out post that reflects upon bullying in general, and in tech in particular.

Why not take the reasonable viewpoint that whilst we might not agree with everything RMS does or says, he deserves enormous respect for dedicating his life to a quest that has benefited most of us in one way or another.

Actually, I'm kind of burned out on the "bullying" meme. But the point of my comment had nothing to do with RMS, it had to do with Dave's level of self-aggrandizement. That some people on HN buy the "I invented RSS" lie is visible upstream.

I'm with you. Winer is exhausting because he spends so much time trying to make sure his reader understands how impressive he is.

It gets dull.

Unlike the circle jerk that goes on in this forum, right?

(Are you instilling an entrepreneurial spirit in your children?)

I find it disturbing that you thinking bullying is a "meme."

I disagree. This comment supports Dave's argument about as well as any comment I could imagine reading.

I strongly agree with the point that wyclif is making. Dave has a bad habit of self-promotion, and he needs to be called out on it. The myth that Dave invented RSS is an especially extreme example.

Back on October 4th, 2006, I wrote up a fairly thorough overview of the controversy surrounding RSS: "RSS has been damage by in-fighting among those who have developed it". I documented in detail the extent to which David Winer interfered with other people's work, while claiming credit for that work. Please read this if you do not know much about the history of this conflict:

http://www.teamlalala.com/blog/2006/10/24/rss-has-been-damag...

This comment contributes nothing to the discussion.

On the contrary, it neatly illustrates what the OP is talking about.

Dave is a good example for HN, where there's too much aversion to self-promotion. See also patio11's recent post touching on the value (or lack thereof) of modesty: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3170766

FYI, when you invoke "truth universally acknowledged", people familiar with that phrase's origin will expect it to be followed by a bad assumption. See http://www.paulgraham.com/iflisp.html

How does "my ideas should be considered on their merits" jibe with major self-promotion?

Where did I say that everything Dave says is major self-promotion?

This comment reminds me of bikeshedding. There was this whole post, full of emotion and anger and sadness and conflict, written about people and behaviour and social ostracism, and you climbed onto your soapbox to say THAT?

I can’t help but feel that this is not your best work. I have no idea whether it’s true or not, but Dave’s personality is irrelevant to the argument, which is about online communities and cyber-bullying.

Unless, perhaps, you are trying to demonstrate how it works? Have I failed to catch the subtle way you demonstrate that if someone is disliked for something, no matter what they say and how important it is, people will focus on why they dislike that person?

you climbed onto your soapbox to say THAT?

In Critical Theory discussions, it's called "derailing", and once you have a name for it, it becomes even more frustrating.

Notice how now, we're not discussing the original ideas of the post, but are completely pushed into a tangential discussion.

At least HN has threaded discussions. When it happens in flat discussions like Facebook, it's an order of magnitude more annoying.

So, here's the problem I have: I agree with you. But I also had the same reaction the parent did. It's an irrational, unfair response, but I am so tired of reading Winer's writing that I find I'm not capable of considering his points. I even know this about myself, yet I still read the comments here, then I still read his post.

Short version: yes it's unfair, but yes, in this case, I'm unable to separate the message from the messenger.

I empathize with you. While I read Dave’s words without trouble, I confess that I struggle with Eric Raymond’s words for reasons unrelated to the words themselves.

It’s not easy for me to walk my talk, so I am loathe to criticize you for being just like me.

Perhaps my difficulty is that, when I read Winer's writing, I feel like he is inserting himself into the message. Instead of saying "this is my point," I feel he says "this is how I am related to my point."

the man routinely clarifies his involvements or lack thereof in the stuff that he is given credit for by others or by he himself. bottom line, he has been involved in important Internet endeavors and prior art. so you better believe that he will speak of it when applicable. i see faults in DW's personality and technical opinions and on occasion will point them out (as a nobody in his world). but i am completely willing to read his words and observe his works despite any of the shortcomings. i know my own faults and would hope that those faults would not deter other peoples willingness to read or listen to me when i have something to say.

I do respect everything I know about Dave Winer, except for one thing, his greatest perceivable flaw: He is too sensitive. Way too sensitive. He has blocked dozens of people on Twitter, including Kevin Marks(!). In his post he used phrases like "makes me feel ill," "here's what really pisses me off," and "I was so shaken to see." He strikes me as the kind of man around whom you'd have to walk on eggshells in person. That's not good.

Both he and Stallman have accomplished many great things. They've left (and continue to leave) their mark on the world. It's not a stretch to say that in the tech sphere, they are public figures. (Most of us here, I'd wager, don't even merit a Wikipedia biography). The more well-known you are, the more people talk about you and up goes the probability that some of it will be offensive. If you're Bill Gates, you might even take a pie to the face. It that sort of behavior acceptable? Of course not. But if you're going to put yourself out there, you need a thick skin. Stiff upper lip, Dave.

I also stand up for Stallman but not when the temperature is above 72 fahrenheit. I find standing quite difficult.

I think Winer misunderstands Kottke's feelings about Van Halen.

There's a sentence you didn't think you'd read today. But seriously.

I don't know anything about the author and found this piece lacking in a lot of important details. Such as what people are bullying him about? Without those details the piece read like it was authored by someone with a victim complex.

Edit: I see below some of the reasons.

I just don't like when people resort to pity to get their point across. That's some cheap rhetoric stunt. And that's exactly what Dave Winer tries here: poor Sam in high school, poor Winer tortured by them trolls. Don't lower Stallman there. He's not some poor victim Sam from a broken home. He's a man with his beliefs who made his life choices. That's not something a lot of people out there can profess. He's not asking for nobody's mercy. He's no Sam. He's no winer. He needs no stunts.

There is a lot to read in here - and it all looks like good stuff - but wouldn't be funny if his (RMS's) warning panned out - time will tell. To those who say one has choice - to use or not to use - well maybe - I believe that one of our basic rights in the USA - to vote - to elect who will represent me at the highest levels - is tabulated using closed source soft/hardware - such a shame - sometimes there is no choice.

And if you disagree, have the self-respect to express it with dignity.

Someone should tell that to Stallman who often proclaims people who disagree with him are evil.

"Anyway, much later in life, I was treated like Sam, in the blogging community. From my point of view, I expected the newcomers to like me, because I had blazed a trail for them, and wasn't asking for anything in return."

Does Winer ever pass up a chance to promote and feel sorry for himself?

Someone brings up RMS on a tech forum... http://i.imgur.com/xblF4.gif ;)

It is a very common flaw in reasoning that one party assumes that the opposition disagrees because they are scared or secretly agree. Atheists are all secretly christians, homophobes are all secretly gay, liberals are scared of "the truth."

People who mock Stallman for taking his shoe off and eating things he picked off his foot in the middle of a presentation are not terrified of him shattering their paradigm. They just think it's gross.

But people who use it as if it somehow disproves his position on the ethics of software are stupid or dishonest. Simple as that.

Except that kottke didn't say anything at all about Stallman's ethics, position on software, or the FSF. He just said it was ridiculous for him to put two paragraphs about parrots in his rider. Simple as that.

I'm pretty sure Weiner is talking about Stallman critics in general, making kottke just an example. This kind of reasoning is common amongst them.

He didn't say it was 'ridiculous'. He said it was 'crazy and amazing'. Not quite the same thing; even 'crazy' can be a compliment in some contexts. ("Here's to the crazy ones...")

Stallman is a walking PR nightmare, and you're getting mad at human nature?? I don't believe this.

99.9% of humans won't take you seriously if you eat your toejam. That's normal. Stallman is nearly the worst thing to happen to the FSF. He should sit back & let Eben Moglen do the talking.

Well, that's a bit of a false dichotomy. Disliking prejudice doesn't mean I don't wish RMS was a better spokesperson.

But I wasn't really taking about the people who take him less seriously, but those who use that as an argument in a discussion. The former is a flaw (from which I suffer too), but the latter is much worse.

The way your comment was going, I seriously thought you were going to say that people had a closet desire to publicly eat toejam.

Kottke called Stallman's rider (the whole thing) "crazy and amazing". Then he quoted the parrot thing, probably because it tickled his fancy. I don't agree that that constitutes "ridicule", in Winer's words.

That's how I read it, too. This whole thing is overblown and Kottke is being used as an excuse for some drama.

Indeed – Kottke didn't indicate shunning-disapproval or even necessarily 'ridicule' (as both Winer and others downthread summarize Kottke).

Kottke's chosen words aren't always meant negatively. ("Here's to the crazy ones...")

In Kottke's context, he's given a fair description: the rider is, objectively, quite peculiar and illuminating about Stallman's intense priorities. But whether a reader takes that as a reason to shun and ostracize Stallman, as with disrespectful 'ridicule', is up to the reader.

Do we think Kottke would counsel Stallman, if we were in some bizarro universe where Stallman sought others' advice, not to include those two paragraphs, because they're too ridiculous?

I think it's equally likely Kottke would chuckle and say, "the bit about the parrots is crazy and brilliant, better even than the Van Halen thing... move it up higher!"

Read Stallman charitably. Read Kottke charitably. Read everyone charitably.

> Read Stallman charitably. Read Kottke charitably. Read everyone charitably

This!

Always, every day. You might make the world a little bit better in the process, but you will make your life a good bit less stressful, just by being a bit more charitable, a bit less suspicious.

How is selectively quoting something from a larger document in order to call it "crazy" not ridicule? That sounds like the very definition of "ridicule", no? If Kottke wanted to go into a discussion about whether or not this kind of rider is helpful or hurtful to RMS's cause, that would be productive. But this is a full-on put down, done in public.

If this isn't ridicule, then what is?

When I read "crazy and amazing", that "crazy" reads like "wild, man". Not "idiotic".

Any quoting is going to be selective. What is he going to do, quote the whole thing? Also, Kottke's whole deal is curating unusual, interesting stuff on the web, and I would say this rider is definitely both unusual and interesting. This is just what Kottke does, he points to stuff and says "hey, look at this." Maybe you have a problem with that entire enterprise, in which case fair enough, but he's not doing anything with respect to the rider that he doesn't do for whatever else is on the web that day.

I agree that "crazy" is not exactly high praise, but it's a very overloaded term these days. I don't think it's meant to be as mean as Winer and everyone else is taking it.

I was disappointed in Kottke with the fact that he didn't know why Van Halen had requested brown free bowl of M&Ms in his contract. (It was so he would know if the stage crew read the contract which contained safety info on their equipment, to help ensure that no one was harmed during the show, as they had some of the most complicated and dangerous stage equipment at the time)

That's actually covered in the Snopes article Kottke linked to.

It is very likely that Kottke does know about the reasons behind Van Halen's free bowl of M&M's since the link in his article is to the Snopes page that exists for the sole purpose of explaining those reasons.

Ahh, didn't even notice that, and I have to admit that Kottke's article didn't seem very hate mongering.

I feel like those guys are projecting their own issues onto the situation. I didn't sense any malice in Kottke's post and certainly nothing that I would compare to high-school bullying.

Could someone more knowledgeable about internet community infighting explain what the hell Winer is talking about when he makes vague reference to being ostracized, persecuted, etc?

Was there some epic battle that is so well-known that Winer doesn't feel the need to explain or even give footnotes for?

I wasn't involved at the time, but what I've gathered over the years is that the early history of blogging and rss involved competing standards and personal and technical rivalries. My understanding is that Winer is an ardent self-promoter, quite opinionated, and rubs some people strongly the wrong way. He's created a bunch of cool and interesting stuff, and proudly claims credit for stuff some people don't think he deserves credit for. I don't really know who's right and who's wrong, I suspect there's at least a little fault on all sides.

I think if Winer had explained or given footnotes, it would have distracted from the point of what I thought was a very powerful essay, but then I agree with him about Stallman.

Dave Winer can claim credit only for the 2.0 version of RSS. The earliest version of RSS was invented by Dan Libby at Netscape. In 2006 I wrote up a thorough overview of the history of RSS up to that point:

http://www.teamlalala.com/blog/2006/10/24/rss-has-been-damag...

Wikipedia gives him credit for part of 0.91: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_web_syndication_tech...

Nevertheless, Winer's point about Stallman is valid and I personally agree with him.

I don't care who you are, or where you're from. Even if "I disapprove of what you say, ... I will defend to the death your right to say it" (- Voltaire? no primary source)

The internet would be a lot smaller and less interesting if we only let "normal" people in!

Everyone hates on his lack of tact. It has been made worse by his unfortunate recent comment on Steve Jobs. It's not infighting, it is the community almost as a whole.

There's also been a lot of people using his lack of tact to point out how weird he is, and how much they dislike him, which is kind of sad.

Sometimes, the worst oppressors are the formerly oppressed, and I think the same may apply to bullying. There's no scorn like the geek's scorn for someone geekier than they consider acceptable.

Stallman says something tactless and suddenly gets allot of coverage on HN leading to more discussion of free software etc.

Funny how that works , maybe he isn't as dumb as we think.

Mr Stallman recently said that although he regretted Mr Job's death, he wasn't sorry that the creator of the walled garden of locked down consumer computing devices was no more.

This caused some discussion along the lines of Mr Stallman :

1) should be hunted down and killed for mentioning the sainted Mr Jobs

2) is the only one with the courage to stand up and say what he believes.

(delete as appropriate)

Dave is someone who has strong opinions and has been involved in things like RSS and web logging for many many years. He is often early to the party or the driving force behind a lot of things we take for granted today. RSS, podcasting, blogging, XML-RPC, SOAP, significant work on outliners.

Often when others join the party and he has something to say about their implementation or contribution he will say it in a pretty direct manner. This has led to some interesting spats. Some that come to mind:

RSS vs ATOM

Harsh/sarcastic words and criticism by Mark Pilgrim (dive into python guy)

Aaron Swartz wrote a service to watch for edits in Dave's blogs posts a long time ago to see if he was chaining "history."

Finally, just scroll down on this page you will see that the general reaction seems to be more negative than usual. A lot of time resorting to personal attacks.

For those of you who don't know his writing he has stuff online back to '95 or maybe earlier and it would serve the younger techies well to go back and take a look with an open mind.

That wasn't Swartz. The late[1] Mark Pilgrim wrote the Winer Watcher software.

1: Late as in dead from the Internet since 10/4/2011, not dead as in life.

Apologies to Aaron for the incorrect attribution. I can no longer edit the post.

Dave Winer's feeling butthurt about the bad press he got in 2004 over abruptly taking 3,000 blogs offline at his free hosting site Weblogs.Com without giving those users any notice:

http://lawmeme.research.yale.edu/modules.php?name=News&f...

A year later he sold Weblogs.Com without all those freeloaders to VeriSign for $2.3 million, so you'd think he'd feel pretty good regardless.

But nobody nurses a grudge like him. Except maybe me.

So basically you stand up for Stallman because he reminds you of a kid in high school who used to get bullied? Not such a great reason. If I like Stallman I'd stand up for him because I believe in his ideals, respect his work, and want him to continue doing good. But then I'd remember he isn't doing much good.

Stallman needs no defending. He's a big boy that leaves himself open to attack. Public figures always have to deal with that sort of thing but I'm sure they don't lose any sleep about it.

But whatever, that doesn't bother me. What bothers me is people equating weird, eccentric, odd behavior and different views as automatically good. Novelty isn't always good. Different for the sake of different isn't always good. I'm going to wear my pants on my head and you shouldn't make fun of me because I'm different and eccentric which should translate into you thinking I'm a genius, right? No! Not at all. Stallman is certainly different and very possibly completely wrong. It's fun to make fun of his quirks even though we shouldn't (I'd like to add I never have made fun of him for quirks, only for actions and ideas) but why are we jumping in to defend this guy because he's different? There are a ton of people who think differently but we can't be applauding people for being different as it isn't that hard to do.

I'm not sure if 'stading up for Stallman' is what I do as I am insignificant in that context. I certainly agree with him in almost every matter he talks about. I do not care to explain nor getting into discussions with those who either disagree with him or think their view is more sophisticated/moderated/reasonable/whatever.

Stallman has very clear views about the matters he talks about. Personally I think his contribution to the world is a great inspiration. But I fail to understand why we would need to stand up for him, those who do not understand him, or reject to try to view things from his point of view are the ones that are missing the most.

As for all the critics, eerr... you give credit to whomever you want. I don't care if every last celebrity 'bullies' him, I'll still give more importance to what he says BECAUSE OF WHAT HE SAYS.

i guess the advanced high school was so advanced they still had recess...

So, uhm, what’s this meme all about? It has been mentioned here twice. What’s recess got to do with how good a school is? I’m from Germany and I have never heard anyone suggest that breaks are a bad thing. This seems completely bizarre to me.

"Recess" has rather specific connotations in American English. It is not simply another word for "break". It connotes a supervised, semi-structured playtime for young children, generally outdoors, in the presence of teachers.

By the time one hits high school (9th grade) in the US, such things do not occur. You may have free time between classes, but it is not referred to or treated the same way as the period known as "recess".

OT: Is there a way to remove all my comments from HN? I would like to give up.

Is there a way to remove all my comments from HN? I would like to give up.

Don't you see a delete link next to your recent posts? There is a time limit on how long you can delete or edit your posts, but you should still be within that limit for your most recent posts, all of which you can find if you look at the "threads" link at the top of the page when you are logged in.

Thanks, I've removed all my recent posts. Is there any way of removing all posts and all profile data?

Emailing pg and asking nicely seems to be the only solution.

Some folks miss the point. We only make fun of Stallman in an attempt to change his behaviour in a way that benefits both him and others. For instance, rms smells bad. If he could be persuaded to smell less bad, then everybody would benefit.

Ridicule is a valuable social mechanism for giving negative feedback to those who behave inappropriately. For those who say "but can't we give this feedback in a non-hurtful way?", the answer is no, for the same reason that your brain can't make pain non-painful -- some people are too damn stubborn to listen to non-painful feedback.

Here is a video of Richard Stallman, in the middle of a talk, eating something he's just picked off his foot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ

Your argument reminds me—painfully—of arguments in favour of physical bullying. “Hey, a few clouts to the head and he’ll get the idea.”

I don’t hit my children, no matter how stubborn they are.

Straw man.

Edit: I'm not saying that the original argument is correct, as it really isn't, but your response was a straw man.

Indeed. My original comment may have been somewhat over the top, but I would still argue that yes, a bit of ridicule can sometimes do someone good. That's a very long way from saying anything about violence.

You are trying to use "a bit of ridicule" to change rms's personal habits, then saying "That's a very long way from saying anything about violence".

I fail to see how this contributes to anything.

Googling:

"dave winer" jerk --> 75,700 "dave winer" ass --> 248,000 "dave winer" asshole --> 9,440

For some strange reason, I find myself not interested in reading Dave Winer denouncing others for "bullying", all the while reminding you, sotto voce, of how wonderful Dave Winer is.

There used to be a "Winer number", which was the number of times Winer had gone apeshit on you, typically in response to an innocuous comment.

"miked" ass --> About 769,000 results.

What is the point of this, exactly?

RMS is not a "weird guy", he's an obnoxious dickhead. If you disagree, you haven't been in a room with him for longer than 5 minutes. Sure, he's made very important contributions to FOSS, but -- I invoke Godwin's Law! -- Hitler made many important contributions as well, but I don't see many people standing up for him.

Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, William Faulkner, Van Gogh, JD Salinger, Denzel Washington. I've heard these guys are all massive assholes. Fortunately, I can still derive massive entertainment value and/or some form of personal or professional amelioration from their creativity. Same with Stallman. I use emacs every day, and GCC and GLIBC is the heart of just about every serious developer's toolkit.

The man's life is his affair; look to his work. I didn't like Hitler's work or its underlying philosophy, let alone the man.

Wow. You know what they say: never go full retard. you just went.

Why is this guy getting downvoted? People using the V arrow for disagree?

Premise: RMS is an odious $pejorative

.. I gotta agree with that. The man has done and continues to do good work, but he's still a complete unreasonable nutter. Being a nice likeable guy who accomplishes nothing or being a complete wad of dick who does all the things doesn't negate the other side of that balance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com