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Comment by tgma | Hacker News Reader

P.S. Struck me as quite sad to see "Hacker" News crowd who presumably should know better sometime mock RMS, an actual, proven, hacker, without having an understanding of his principles, even if they are not in agreement with them. Rarely people understand what he stands for, that his not the poster child of "Open Source", and all they know is that he ate something off his foot in a video.

I sometimes worry most have no idea he wrote an Emacs and he was the one who conceived of much of the operating system they call "Linux."

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Indeed, it's worthwhile to study rms and his cause in more details. For instance, the "he wrote an Emacs" part is actually more complex. But also the reason why you put Open Source in quotes is part of rms' story, and as newer generations of hackers come onto the scene, this part of history faces a risk of becoming forgotten.

As a matter of fact, coming to think of it, the IT world is so fast paced that I'm worried there aren't currently any appropriate measures in place to record historical developments, because in IT, "history" is something that happens over a few years, rather than a few decades or centuries.

Stallman is a hacker, but his interest and cause is not so much on a technical than a societal level. The free software movement, it seems to me, has experienced a considerable reduction in public interest, and likely this has to do with the controversies that arose around rms. But there's also something to be learned about why the term "Open Source" is ubiquitous while "Free Software" is not. It is not only because of the unfortunate ambiguity of the latter, but also because of the implications of the underlying philosophies for corporate IT.

Yes. I was careful to say "he wrote an Emacs" mainly as a supporting argument that he indeed a Hacker, unlike many contemporaries interested in technology who merely read TechCrunch.

Even the fact that there is more than one Emacs might be news to some of the youngsters, unless they're so young that their first reaction is "what's an Emacs?"

As a matter of fact, when I started a new job a couple of years ago, I asked the sysadmins whether they could install Emacs on my machine, and they had literally never heard of it.

Genuine question, why is that bad?

I had contact with emacs in university, decided I do not like it and moved on to more modern tools.

And today so many moved on that they do not even mention it in some schools and academies.

Or is knowing Emacs a condition to qualify as a hacker? Well, that wouldn't be my definition.

No, son, it is not, just keep using vim and all will be okay.

> P.S. Struck me as quite sad to see "Hacker" News crowd who presumably should know better sometime mock RMS, an actual, proven, hacker, without having an understanding of his principles, even if they are not in agreement with them.

I share this feeling. But frankly I think that nowadays the word "hacker" is largely meaningless.

It's not wonder, however, that Stallman is regarded as the last "true hacker".

"without having an understanding of his principles, even if they are not in agreement with them"

I know the sentence was longer, but even in context that still sounds to me: "Those who do not agree, have apparently not understood it". Maybe you meant it different, but this is the vibe I am getting often from GNU folks. This is what people criticize as cult like behavior. And statements around here like RMS the "last true hacker", fit into that.

Well, I have not seen much code from him lately.

And assuming he rather became an "societal hacker", well, then apparently not a very succesful one, if this is the result:

"Rarely people understand what he stands for, that his not the poster child of "Open Source", and all they know is that he ate something off his foot in a video."

It's possible to recognize Stallman's accomplishments without necessarily conferring sainthood on him.

I don’t know where you got the suggestion of sainthood. I personally am not a communist-adjacent like he is and believe me I cringed when I typed the term “oppressed.”

The point is that most people, even most new hackers, misunderstand who Stallman is and what his principles are. At best they see him and some random crazy pedant that’s probably never wrote a line of code like most politicians or lawyers in his space. They don’t understand the dude wrote the world’s most popular compiler for three decades or more (I won’t be surprised to hear they think BillG is more technical than him if you survey). Nor do they have a grasp of his movement to the degree they attribute Open Source, a deliberate and successful attempt to derail his PoV, to himself!

None of that implies sainthood or value judgement on him. It stops at hearing what the guy really says carefully.

I personally think FOSS software is a fine thing, while not being overly fond of the GPL.

If you allegedly "give" me something for "free", but still assert the right to tell me what I can do with it afterward, it's not "free" in either sense of the word. It's not "free as in beer", nor is "free as in freedom".

Stallman's monomania on this subject became tedious and counterproductive decades ago.

Yes, he wrote some great software. So did dozens of others.

I don't share the same feelings about GPL idea and see it as extremely valuable, especially now that rug pull and Amazonification is pervasive.

I do share the feeling towards the free terminology. Over the years he has been fond of libre more and more.

That said I think the reason behind the confusion over the term free is less sincere and somewhat of a Freudian slip in retrospect. I think his original view was indeed against commercialization and he pivoted to the current iteration of Free Software advocacy. By the way, Linus is on the record making the same mistake and initially licensing Linux under a non-commercial license.

He has made some very powerful enemies keen to smear him by any means possible.

The quickest and most common way to do this is by labelling someone crazy or a sex offender, both of which are constantly tried against RMS, to the point where there's a whole website to counter the most common misinformation: https://stallmansupport.org/

I'm sure you didn't mean to imply it but the way your post is worded could be misunderstood as if you were saying that some powerful entity is trying to mute rms through defamation.

However, the website you cite points out that the beginning of the whole sex offender thing was a single MIT alumna who wrote a blog post. It seems unlikely that this was part of a greater conspiracy (by big business) to cancel Stallman.

Hm, I do recall many people calling that girl a hired gun from the big proprietary evil bigcorp alliance.

And that really put me off, because reading a bit about her with an open mind showed quickly, she was genuinly enraged and a real simple student. She was maybe not right, but her anger was for real.

And dismissing this as hired defamination prevents seeing why the outside world has no idea about what RMS want to tell the world.

> I'm sure you didn't mean to imply it but the way your post is worded could be misunderstood as if you were saying that some powerful entity is trying to mute rms through defamation

I said what I said, though, you should understand there doesn't need to be some 'entity' making dictates. Just powerful people whose interests align; who all went to the same schools, are in the same clubs, and have the same fucked up views [0].

'Muting' isn't the word I'd use; I'd go with 'marginalize'. Close enough though.

RMS' vision of free software is an existential threat to big tech, and to the ecosystem of mass surveillance they enable.

Much as Assange's autism was weaponized to paint him as 'arrogant' in corporate media, RMS' quirks have been magnified to mark him as 'crazy' despite the fact that it's possible no one alive, ever, has had such a clear view on software freedom.

> However, the website you cite points out that the beginning of the whole sex offender thing was a single MIT alumna who wrote a blog post.

Whereever the initial spark came from, it was carefully nurtured into a blaze, most obviously by Vice. Vice deliberately twisted RMS' words, craftily removing clear and vital context to make RMS look as creepy as possible.

Then, corporate media took that steaming turd of a Vice article and repeated it ad nauseum, without talking to Stallman, without ever adding context, and without any apology or retraction after the truth slowly filtered through.

Here's [1] a great and short article that shows how people like Stallman (Assange, Snowden, Donziger, non-establishment Pres candidates, etc) go through 'ritual defamation' in the US. Once you start seeing it, it's everywhere - look at how people protesting war and genocide are being labelled as terror supporters, for example.

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAFd4FdbJxs

1 - https://stallmansupport.org/the-practice-of-ritual-defamatio...

Stallman has done far more to enable corporate surveillance than anyone else.

FAANG would literally not exist without "open source" software. Being able to use volunteer developer effort for free has saved the industry trillions and made today's corporate Internet possible.

Open source has also spread more than a few backdoors, some apparently written by state actors.

(Of course we've found all of them now. Of course we have.)

As a politician, Stallman is an idiot. His pitch - "You can write your own printer driver and customise your OS and this will save the world" is a naive appeal to the tiny minority of the population which enjoys tinkering.

It excludes most users - which you'd think would be an obvious issue. So in practice it's an adolescent, oppositional and tribal view of how computing operates, socially and politically.

Global infosec, corporate exploitation, user accessibility and customisation, three letter agency surveillance, personal privacy, disinformation factories, user empowerment, developer trust, attention farming, ad tech, and the politics and economics of data ownership are all hugely complex issues.

"Give everyone the source code to everything and poof! - you'll solve all of them" is just such a stupid take.

So no - he is neither a threat, nor a martyr. He's a distraction, and politically that's all he'll ever be.

> Stallman has done far more to enable corporate surveillance than anyone else.

Do you want to be taken seriously? Starting your comment with such a claim is no means to do it.

> FAANG would literally not exist without "open source" software.

Open-source software has contributed to the technological ecosystem. Attributing the entire existence of major corporations solely to open source is silly, and I find it hard to believe anyone could do so in good faith.

> Open source has also spread more than a few backdoors, some apparently written by state actors.

And closed source hasn't? I honestly can't tell if this is advanced satire.

> As a politician, Stallman is an idiot

Most of us are - that's a good thing. Being a canny political actor without being a shitbird of a human being is about a one in a million skill.

> His pitch - "You can write your own printer driver and customise your OS and this will save the world" is a naive appeal to the tiny minority of the population which enjoys tinkering.

Your strawman sucks - that's not his pitch. Stallman's advocacy focuses on empowering users with the ability to control and modify their software, not expecting everyone to write their own software.

> in practice it's an adolescent, oppositional and tribal view of how computing operates

What's "adolescent, oppositional and tribal" is making weak strawmen like this.

> "Give everyone the source code to everything and poof! - you'll solve all of them" is just such a stupid take.

Another strawman. Stallman's advocacy for free software is not a panacea for all societal and technological challenges, nor did he ever claim it to be. It addresses fundamental issues of user rights and autonomy, complex though they may be.

> So no - he is neither a threat, nor a martyr. He's a distraction, and politically that's all he'll ever be.

Fortunately, Stallman’s significant contributions to the philosophy and practice of free software, with their enduring impacts on technology, privacy rights, and digital freedoms, do not depend on your opinion. For your own sake though, I hope you clear up your thinking; because once you blame open source software for surveillance you've probably lost the run of yourself completely.

RMS - "Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it," . . . "Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm her psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/richard-stallman...

It shouldn't take years of conversations to understand that pedophilia is bad.

Ironically BSD doesn't have "a ruler", a cult-like leader like RMS. It is more democratized than GNU.

> It shouldn't take years of conversations to understand that pedophilia is bad.

[Without taking the bait of addressing "pedophilia," but the specific comment RMS made that got generalized...]

Your objection is he committed thoughtcrime by not taking certain gospel on a taboo subject at face value, has actually thought about it and discussed it with folks, and even changed his opinion on the subject in the end. Note that there is zero evidence he has shown any personal interest in having sex with children and this is some abstract analysis by a heterodox, and analytical mind, dare I say neurodivergent and on the spectrum, looking at it.

If it helps, what you consider such an obvious settled matter, even on its simplest dimension, the age-of-consent, varies among the united States, let alone the entire world where lots of cultures have different opinions about it.

> Ironically BSD doesn't have "a ruler", a cult-like leader like RMS. It is more democratized than GNU.

The BSD community has had their fair share of drama and accusations of misogyny too. RMS is hardly the driving force behind modern decisions that drive Linux distros. That crown, if any, probably belongs to Red Hat.

> Your objection is he committed thoughtcrime by not taking certain gospel on a taboo subject at face value, has actually thought about it and discussed it with folks, and even changed his opinion on the subject in the end. Note that there is zero evidence he has shown any personal interest in having sex with children and this is some abstract analysis by a heterodox, and analytical mind, dare I say neurodivergent and on the spectrum, looking at it.

Thank you for stating this.

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