Last time I checked iOS (the router OS) is not free, he probably does violate his own principles connecting to the Internet.
Rms is like a vegan always preaching some moral high ground and always violating it whenever it becomes inconvenient.
Rms is like a vegan always preaching some moral high ground and always violating it whenever it becomes inconvenient.
RMS is precisely NOT like that type of vegan (not that I think that this is at all typical of vegans, either). If indeed you think that kind of consistency is the highest good, you should hold RMS in very high regard indeed.
Not to mention: iRMX, IRIX, IOS-XR.
Perhaps the problem is actually with the idea of hypocrisy itself -- the idea that consistency is a greater virtue than whatever virtue an inconsistent man might be talking about, and that personal life and public policy must always be girded up and gridded up to resemble each other.
Let me put an alternative point of view. Someone living in a castle, and owning a castle, could very usefully speak about post-materialism. Someone paying five figure utility bills would be in a very good position to talk about -- and act on -- the theme of energy wastage; they would be an expert on it, and have a vested interest in change, and actually have the possibility to make changes on a scale a pauper huddled over a candle could only dream of.
Ad hominem: There are many reasons a charge of hypocrisy might be reactionary and counter-productive. First of all, the hypocrisy mindset pays too much attention to people's personal lives and too little to their programmatic or ideological outlook. If someone is a visionary, or is trying to solve a widespread problem, it's likely that his personal life will reflect the problem whereas his policies will reflect the solution. It would then be pretty stupid to accuse him of saying one thing and doing another -- especially if everyone were pretty much in the same boat, at least until an alternative infrastructure is set up. A charge of hypocrisy might well be a pre-emptive strike designed to stymie future solutions to universal problems.
Consistency above correctness: Consistency is the hobgoblin of petty minds.
Wanting things to be less complex, and wanting people and societies to be without internal contradictions is understandable, but small-minded.
It ignores the fact that it is often only by sinning ourselves that we can learn exactly why sinning is bad. At a certain point we are all saying one thing and doing another. This is, apart from anything else, a sure sign of our complexity, and of our capacity to rise above our current way of living and search for alternatives, no matter how deeply we're mired. Allow it, brothers!
Give me moral perfection or give me corruption: We often strike down people with a spotted reputation only to replace them with people who are unapologetically evil. We hate to be preached at so much that we ignore the sermons we need to hear and prefer unalloyed corruption. At least it's consistent, right? At least there's no hypocrisy there! At least change is taken off the agenda! Thank Christ "hypocrisy" has absolved us of the need to feel wrong, and to make a painful change!
100 people in a room: There are 100 people in a room, all doing A Bad Thing. They know it's a bad thing, a thing that will damage the room and everyone in it, but they can't stop. Suddenly a Visionary makes a powerful and moving speech. "We must stop doing The Bad Thing!" he says. His speech is effective: everyone stops. Except the Visionary himself, who keeps doing it. This, however, is a minor detail: the room is a better, safer place. Instead of 100 people doing The Bad Thing, only one is doing it.
Suddenly a Commentator gets up. "Suckers!" he shouts. "You've stopped doing The Bad Thing, but the man who made you stop still does it! You've been had... by a hypocrite!" Soon everyone in the room is doing The Bad Thing again. But tell me, please, who has damaged the room more, the Visionary or the Commentator? Who has the best chance of helping the room?
(yes, you are no doubt correct. I do still view him as an unusual type of rare bearded canary that has decided to take up residence in the coal mine through some form of altruistic bloody-mindedness)
[edit] Plus, whatever you may think of him, he is bloody smart.
His system fails to fundamentally solve problems people actually have. I'm sure RMS's systems perfectly solve RMSs problems, and that's great if you're a self-centered pretentious asshole focused solely on your own needs. Unfortunately, if you're a regular joe with average needs his system doesn't solve very many of your problems. Gates and Jobs wisely recognized that catering to the needs of others is actually better for society than focusing solely on one's own needs.
Software freedom for the vast majority of people is having their spreadsheet save them hours of manual calculations so they can catch their kids ballet recital.
Freedom is a tradeoff, that's why we don't live in a society ruled by natural law.
>His system fails to fundamentally solve problems people actually have.
There is of course something to be said for usability and the "regular joe," as you say, but Stallman's intentions have always been entirely moral. He really does believe he is acting in your best interest. (Which most people aren't. I'm certainly not.)
Why bother hating?
And as far as what "most people need", "most people" would do fine with a copy of LibreOffice and Firefox running on Ubuntu or whatnot.
It's a panacea I don't know why anyone would waste 2 billable hours on paying money to avoid the embarrassment of having to fuck around with your operating system for 15 minutes while you attempt to make a presentation. It's not 1994 anymore, people expect computers to work and it reflects poorly when they don't. And what am I saving this $300 for? For the privilege of being able add the code that should have been there in the first place.
The issues you describe are attributable to what's between the keyboard and the chair. Try getting a standard mac to work with the majority of projectors, without any adapters. The LibreOffice issues you are having are due to an arms race where Microsoft break compatibility with their previous formats each release. You have to learn to use the computer you have properly or you will embarrass yourself with it. This is true for all operating systems. Not everything is going to work exactly as you suspect, at least you're in a position to do something about it on your own linux machine. That's never going to be the case with the competition.
Give it another 100 years, whose software is still going to be around, Stallman's, Jobs' or Gates'? It's not as feature complete, but it has greater longevity.
For example fglrx fails very often to wake up the graphics card in my notebook. The open source radeon driver never had that problem.
People implementing power saving seem to often complain about buggy ACPI implementations. Is this email legit? Did any action come from it? I don't know. But I wouldn't be surprised. http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/...
fglrx's xrandr support kind of works, but is shaky with the virtual size set to a minimum and if not set high manually needs to restart X every time one wants to set a higher resolution on a secondary screen. The open source radeon driver on the other hand has beautifully working xrandr support. Nvidia's blob... Well, the proprietary twinview doesn't support rotating single screens and when I watch videos of presentations I see mostly people trying to get nvidia-settings to set the correct resolution on the projector.
The microsoft documents you speak of, are these in the proprietary, undocumented, closed formats or the new, questionably standardized, overly complex, formats? I personally think that it is microsoft's intention that you need to buy their product to be fully "compatible" with their document format and that's what they get. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_...
I don't know about you but the presentations I see around here in the university are mostly with open source intel drivers (which I have not seen failing in that regard yet) and a PDF viewer showing the presentation made with the latex beamer class. I fortunately don't have to give many presentations but for some I do have used LibreOffice Impress and I was quite satisfied. Sure, it was quite buggy some time ago but it has improved much.
I fail to imagine how I would spend 15 minutes "fucking around with my operating system". I simply "ctrl+r" the relevant xrandr command from my shell history (something like "xrandr --output LVDS --preferred --output HDMI-0 --preferred --right-of LVDS --rotate normal") - if you don't like the command line, just use a simple gui like arandr - and start the presentation. That takes a few seconds... Maybe you can elaborate?
What are you saving $300 for? Try listening to a presentation from Richard Stallman. You may have heard of him... He speaks about that topic.
Without the efforts of the GNU people the world would be a place of much less choice and freedom in computing. That the majority of people is served better by a spreadsheet is a non-sequitur. The world is probably even served better by something else than software.