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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

I love how I know RMS = Richard M Stallman, but my brain always auto expands it to Root Mean Squared first. Definitely up there in the divine rankings of the three letter acronyms of old.

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For whatever reason, I've always associated the acronym "RMS" with Stallman. (Even though I have no idea what the "M" in his name is.) I then immediately think of the famous "Stallman Jesus" photo.

In the '90s (or early 2000's?), I remember seeing a photo of Stallman Jesus on the left arrayed against Bill Gates on the right, with Stallman being the figurehead for the open-source coalition arrayed against the might of Microsoft. I've not been able to find that photo since though.

> Even though I have no idea what the "M" in his name is.

Matthew, which goes well with his moniker of Saint IGNUcius.

For some reason, I immediately thought "Milhous" when I read the parent comment, and then after seeing your response, it took me a moment to realize that somehow got confused with Richard Nixon.

Long ago (a decade or more before the GNU manifesto) he would sometimes sign his name as the root of the square, in ascii art.

I guess this habit wasn't deeply rooted, else we'd still see him doing it.

/joke

He should really change his first name to "RMS" to make it another recursive acronym.

RMS is not at all mean.

Try to use GPL-licensed software in your proprietary software without releasing it under GPL. You'll see how mean he is.

Why shouldn't he? If you do, you're breaking the license.

Of course he should, but I was attempting to make a joke, since I thought that the parent comment was also a joke (word play on two meanings of the word "mean").

Apparently I failed. Sorry.

i found it funny

Because he built his career on "freedom" advocacy? Doesn't he support pirating ebooks? Didn't he plagiarize, then just copy, emacs source? Turnabout's fair play.

For me, whenever people mentioned CRT monitors my mind always first went to "Chinese remainder theorem."

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