RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.
I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and just said "so are you going to buy something?" and motioned toward the booklets. I didn't need a printed copy of the `sed` man page so I shrugged and he seemed quite annoyed, turned to his assistant with a notebook computer and started dictating something to them, as almost to make it clear that our interaction was over.
I'm not sure what the point of posting this is, but that's my RMS story - it was my first "never meet your heroes" moment, I guess.
So I walked up, I introduced myself and asked a question about the freedom of _data_ versus the freedom of _software_, and without looking up to me he said "I don't do smalltalk". So I got back to my seat and told my "story" to my immediate neighbors, who were keen to learn what he'd said.
(He is much more constructive by email.)
When you do this, you get his "rider". Google it, it's real, it's infamous for the "don't buy me a parrot" section.
Anyway, in that, he makes clear that if people at dinner are not interested in talking about free software, he's going to pull out his laptop and get on with his work relating to free software.
He doesn't care about fancy food, drinks, etc. - he wants to raise money for free software, and work on free software. He did this in a restaurant when three others of us were chatting about something else, and we all just accepted that's what he does, and that's him. It was fine.
If you're not familiar with him or this, then it's going to be a weird experience.
He also struggles with social interactions in my limited experience, particularly when it's a "fan boy" interaction.
I've seen him not being super nice to other people who were trying to have a conversation with him, not because he's not a nice person (I found him quite personable one on one), but it seems to me that he struggles to know how to behave around people who don't know how to just talk to him about things he wants to talk about.
I once saw him in the audience of a conference with quite a notable set of speakers [0], and I can't remember who it was who he started hectoring in the Q&A (I mean, look at the speaker list, whoever it was, it's somebody you've probably heard of), but he just diverted it into a little lesson about free software for the speaker and everyone else listening. It's the only thing he cares about talking about. It's either a super-power focus, or really annoying. I personally think at this point you just either need to meet him where he is, or avoid him if you don't want to. He's not going to change.
I'm glad I met him, I'm glad he does what he does, I know he's a little spikier than others around him and I'm OK with that. I also know plenty of people who never want to speak to him ever again and think free software needs a new figurehead.
[0] https://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/Turing100/www.turing100...
I'd argue that while he may be nice, it's also generally considered impolite to be someone who "only talks to him about the things he wants to talk about". It's meant to be a two-way street, generally. Someone who only wants to talk about what -they- are interested in, not what their conversation partner is interested in is not being nice or polite.
You could argue, in your description, the same about RMS - he might feel entitled to someone's time to talk about free software.
RMS set boundaries and that's perfectly reasonable.
It's not like politician's post, where random people can just decide to run for it. We don't really have many people that do what he does.
One explained me that they are bombarded non-stop by people for years and years and at the end they'd rather be mean than "waste" their time on the rare chance of having a meaningful interaction.
The overwhelming majority of their interaction ends up with people asking them for opinions about their projects, collaborations, etc, and it gets so tiring that they statistically prefer to lose the chance of having a nice meaningful interaction rather than take the chance of yet another waste of time.
I know it's mean, but I get it.
Not saying they are all like that, just saying it's quite common among famous developers, they are bombarded non stop by people wanting to chat.
Duh, obviously, he only lisps. /s
He was willing to civilly discuss and listen to a different point of view. We never reached agreement, but I felt that so long as an interesting twist on something dear to him is being discussed, he is patient for discourse.
But, RMS is known to be socially awkward, the same goes for many autistic individuals. It's just that he doesn't mask and comes out as “rude”. If send an e-mail, he will usually take his time to write down a succinct response.
"I know a guy with a leg missing, and he can still run, so clearly someone who has lost their legs is able".
I have had the discussion a bunch of times, I'm beginning to think that nobody other than me has spent a significant amount of time with severely autistic people.
Yes, some autistic people can mask quite well, and, some are mild cases.
But the crucial issue that most autistic people have is: they don't even become aware that they're being rude unless they spend active effort in first identifying, then understanding, then trying to fix it.
I'll tell you something else too: most people are uncomfortable with criticism, it makes them defensive and clam up. If you make someone defensive, enough times, then the situation becomes infected and very emotionally charged.
Now, imagine you have an illness that prevents you from processing your emotions properly, and the whole world is unkind to you, and you can't really understand why, but people call you rude.
It takes a lot of bravery and integrity to really reflect on that soberly.
Please, I implore you all to stop pretending you understand autism because you know someone- or a bunch of self diagnosed people, I keep seeing it[0], autistic people have great difficulty controlling how they're perceived, that's the whole issue.
I'm going to say that your definition of "severely autistic" is actually mild to moderate at worst.
The definition of "severely autistic" I know of and have seen in personal experience (family) and in my career has nothing to do with "masking" and such.
It's being a late teenager who is effectively non-verbal, who wore diapers until age 12, who has an "anchoring dog", a 150lb Newfoundland that was trained from birth with audio recordings of him screaming or tantrums, that acts both as an emotional support, but as a literal anchor - tethered to him so that when, as many severely autistic people do, he starts to wander based on internal stimuli - the dog can just sit down and tense up and say "Not unless you plan on dragging a very large dog with you that is trained to stay still when it notices you walking away from your family".
Things along those lines.
> they don't even become aware that they're being rude unless they spend active effort in first identifying, then understanding, then trying to fix it.
This is demonstrably not RMS. He is quite aware of this, and quite openly states he has no intention of apologizing for it, let alone "fixing it".
But of course there’s a whole range.
What concerns me though is that when I’m on the internet, people talk about autism like it’s a quirky character flaw that can be overridden with moderate effort.
Which feels criminally ignorant.
It seems like a diagnosis that would benefit from more distinguishing words so as not to conflate people at different ends of that spectrum.
It must be infuriating or Bewildering to see someone knowingly nodding along saying, “oh yeah. I’m autistic too,” when other autistic people you know literally aren’t capable of doing that.
Yes, most people have not met someone with more than mild autism.
I think the other issue is that people are confused as to _what_ autism is (it doesn't help that its a massive fucking spectrum) For most people, meeting a dutch grandmother for the first time would assume that they count as autistic.
I run a "uniformed organisation" for kids, and as we make sure that we take _all_ kids regardless of who they are, I bump into a large amount of interesting diagnosed and undiagnosed conditions. Currently I look after siblings, one who is mostly mute and diagnosed, and the other who is very much lightly on the spectrum.
There is another kid who is both ADD and autistic(Diagnosed). He is prone to RMS-like behaviour. If you talk to him in the right way, he can understand why certain behaviours are to be not repeated. However, he is and remains a teenager.
It just happens that I don't like hypocrisy.
I am not an antisocial and consider myself a very polite person and will often say hello and wish a good day to strangers when I am riding my bicycle in the trails or walking in a village / small town.
You realize people are different, and your knowledge of tiny number of data points tells you very little about people who aren't those people you know?
If anyone is going to support policy for our fellow humans spend an extra moment making sure to both have empathy and make sure we're comparing apples to apples.
You can also literally cat > /dev/printer
> For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
For instance, if you refuse to play around with LLMs out of some dogmatic reason that they're not "truly" open (note: I don't know what his true opinions are), then you risk completely missing the boat and can't meaningfully shape the space of modern discourse.
In addition you get those privacy aspects (website operators don't know where you are) and are blocked from "non-free JavaScript programs" and only deal with text with content, all else will not come through.
1. He was using a virtual console (ie. what you get when you press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and similar if using X), not an X terminal.
2. The virtual console was very likely not using a framebuffer (which would be a graphics mode), but was in fact just the Linux kernel's standard text mode output for virtual consoles, using the BIOS font.
Making a screenshot of such a text mode as a graphics file is actually not really something you can do. For the most part, the best you can do is to synthesize an equivalent image from scratch by rendering the text using another program.
That's likely what he meant when he said that he didn't know how to do a screenshot. Yes, it's overly specific, and the person who asked was probably just wanting to see what he was looking at on the monitor, which wouldnt require an exact pixel-for-pixel copy, but there you go.
Also, I'm pretty sure tty dumping tools (as root) do exist, this is Unix after all.
You can of course synthesize a new image based on the contents of that text buffer (and that would almost certainly have been fine for the purposes of the question), but you can't dump a graphics buffer that doesn't exist.
He would absolutely have known about script(1).
By the way, I think RMS doesn't have a mobile phone even now. Somebody's else could have taken a picture for him. Phones with cameras were not common back then because what would you do with it on GSM?
I bought one around that time (Olympus I think, sub-1MP), and used a script on Linux to extract the images. I was not a terribly early adopter.
Linus Torvalds often says that he does not know how to do X (like install a Linux distribution, or other simple stuff). I wager that it's a status thing.
Why am I am not good at excel, it is because I am the person who tends to fetch the data from the different systems and consolidates it for the analysts to analyse and some do use Excel to analyse the data.
Yes, it's a form of signaling. It's like a milloinaire showing "I have so much money that I can dump 10k on a Rolex and not even think about it", or a billionaire showing "I have so much money I don't even need to dump 10k on a Rolex to show how much money I have". These guy's version is "I'm so technically accomplished, that I can tell you I don't know X basic thing and you'll interpret it as a sign of my genius".
That's ok. In our society we attribute too much importance on money, I don't mind if the likes of Stallman and Linus get a bit more fanhood from the wider society than they currently do.
I think Linus and Stallman don't have disdain for "civilians". I think Linus in particular has deep disdain for people who pretend to be competent and then are not up to scrutiny; but he doesn't have those blowouts with dumbasses that he doesn't work with.
On the other hand, someone who strikes me has having universal disdain is Carmack.
I don't think the second answer even qualify as a screenshot nor why he should do that upon random request by strangers.
I also have no idea how to make screenshots of text terminal (as f1-f12 with no fb)
It is included as one of the utilities in busybox.