Comment by logjam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logjam | Hacker News Reader

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Stallman's honors and awards for just some of the great work he's done (like launching the GNU Project, founding the Free Software Foundation, developing the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs):

1986: Honorary lifetime membership of the Chalmers University of Technology Computer Society

1990: Exceptional merit award MacArthur Fellowship ("genius grant")

1990: The Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award "For pioneering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS (Editing Macros)."

1996: Honorary doctorate from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology

1998: Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award

1999: Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award

2001: The Takeda Techno-Entrepreneurship Award for Social/Economic Well-Being (武田研究奨励賞)

2001: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow

2002: United States National Academy of Engineering membership

2003: Honorary doctorate, from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel

2004: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad Nacional de Salta.

2004: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería del Perú.

2007: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.

2007: First Premio Internacional Extremadura al Conocimiento Libre

2007: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad de Los Angeles de Chimbote.

2007: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Pavia

2008: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, in Peru

2009: Honorary doctorate, from Lakehead University

2011: Honorary doctorate, from National University of Córdoba.

2012: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad César Vallejo de Trujillo, in Peru

2012: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad Latinoamericana Cima de Tacna, in Peru

2012: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad José Faustino Sanchez Carrió, in Peru.

Source: Wikipedia

But here on Hacker News (of all places), let's instead criticize his personal preferences on fucking ties.

Copy pasta much?

> But here on Hacker News (of all places), let's instead criticize his personal preferences on fucking ties.

So someone writes about their personal life, and then people discuss it. What the heck does a whole bunch of honorary doctorates from Latin America have to do with this? Obviously the people in Latin America like him.

As far as I'm concerned, a single actual doctorate is worth more than all of that, or say an equivalent feat like writing gcc, emacs, gdb, and the GPL (iirc). But nevertheless, even those significant accomplishments don't make his personal opinions sacred to the point of inoculating them against possible counterpoints.

Guy states a bunch of preferences on internet, preferences are now up for discussion. End of. I thought it was an interesting read.

Perhaps a nit, but he didn't "write" any version of EMACS to my knowledge, just improved existing versions of them, in the two cases I'm most familiar with, making a significant qualitative difference.

Guy Steele provided the start of the first (in that there were 3 or so visual TECO systems, each with its own key bindings etc., and he got enough people to agree on one), and RMS took off with it and made it into much of what makes EMACS good (minus normal users writing code, since that version was in TECO). I'm sure he contributed to the the Lisp Machine's EMACS, but Dan Weinreb was the major author of its two initial versions (EINE Is Not EMACS, ZWEI Was Eine Initially).

The current EMACS we use was written by an obscure guy at CMI who included a bytecode compiler in it, you might have heard of him, James Gosling ^_^. RMS illicitly started with a copy of this, the rights holders, UniPress, which ran as much as possible then on the "gated community open source" business model, including EMACS, were savvy enough not to try to do anything about this (heck, even in the face of some pretty vicious stuff from RMS, up to and including an face to face accusation that they set his house on fire (it was a couple of kids with matches and ... kerosene as I recall); we did name our Laserprinter "Software Hoarder" :-).

Don't know about gdb, but he does to my knowledge get full credit for starting gcc, the GNU project and of course the GPL, essentially the modern FOSS movement, and it's hard to overstate the value of that.

Disclaimers: acquaintance/sort of friends for a while ... until I went to work for UniPress, I worked for Lisp Machines Inc. (LMI) at a time when he was pretty much the only guy working on the MIT/LMI fork and keeping it fairly close to feature complete with Symbolics, and we were roommates for a few months in the latter part of 1983, starting a bit before the launch of the GNU Project, in that (half of a) house that later was torched.

> The current EMACS we use was written by an obscure guy at CMI who included a bytecode compiler in it, you might have heard of him, James Gosling ^_^.

This doesn't seems like a fair characterization of what happened. GNU Emacs was never something one could consider "written by Gosling."

GNU Emacs did start out with bits of Gosling Emacs in it, in particular the redisplay and buffer-management code (which were tricky to get right), but Gosling Emacs and GNU Emacs were always very different programs, internally as well as in their UI. In particular, of course, GNU Emacs had a real full-fat lisp interpreter whereas Gosling Emacs used a rather weird language with a vaguely lisp-like syntax called Mocklisp. GNU Emacs was influenced a lot by Gosling Emacs in other ways, of course, e.g. the use of real buffers to display completions instead of an ephemeral completion display like the original EMACS.

Up until that time, Gosling Emacs had been widely used and freely shared at CMU (where Gosling was a grad student), and RMS thought he had a verbal agreement with Gosling to use those parts he did. However Gosling then sold it to Unipress, and Unipress didn't agree... It's not clear exactly what Gosling really said to RMS, but my interpretation is that he didn't care so much about such issues and probably just said "yeah, yeah, sure" when RMS asked—after all, everybody else was using Gosmacs in source form—but of course a commercial company did care about such issues, and took a much more hardline stance.

So, RMS had to rewrite the parts he got from Gosling Emacs.

I suspect the end effect of all this could be described as positive though, because it made very clear the importance of paying attention to the legal details as well as the technical ones.

Ummm, no. I was a front line witness to all this, after all (at one point I realized I could be a witness if this had gone to court).

By the time this was playing out, I was intimately familiar with the C base of (UniPress) Gosling EMACS, from having finished a MS-DOS port and was working on an Amiga port. So it was no trouble to look at GNU EMACS to determine it was, in the the legal, copyright sense, a derivative work, not something that was influenced by it, which is not something that RMS/GNU were even claiming at the time.

They said, based on an email they claimed to have received (that as I recall they never produced, but as you note all this hardly matters), that they were authorized to start with an old version of Gosling EMACS, and they claimed they fixed this legally by rewriting every part of it they got from Gosling EMACS ... which doesn't cut it, legally. If UniPress had been run by junkyard dogs they could have done an USL v. BSDi and put the GNU under a legal cloud, except they probably would have won. It was an unconscionable risk for RMS to take.

Fortunately, all they did was verbally disagree, they thought GNU EMACS would create a bigger market for Gosling EMACS, which I'm sure was true for a while (the version GNU started with was ancient and missing a lot of polish), and that no one would win if they took it to the courts. It probably helped that they'd previously worked at Plauger's Whitesmiths and the separation was as ugly as you can imagine, although the legal drama was cut short when the other side's lawyer was caught burglarizing their office, which doesn't tend to impress judges....

Note the other comments in this discussion about how RMS isn't a good steward of many of the efforts under his control, and I'd add specifically "look at how GCC died and was replaced by a community version", the Lucid Emacs/XEmacs mess (in the link that points out RMS can't sing), and Hurd's beyond Duke Nukem Forever path.

As I said, parts of it were copied, but many parts of it were not. You cannot say in any reasonable sense that Gosling "Wrote GNU emacs" (but of course that is not necessary to win a copyright challenge; part is enough).

[I also spent tons of time looking at the source code for both versions at the time, and both the similarities and differences were pretty clear.]

Obviously I disagree (although I don't think our disagreement is very large), I would say the truly essential parts were written by Gosling, and that RMS and company's biggest value adds were on top. Hmmm, I suppose that it might be a bit like "GNU/Linux", except the gcc etc. tool chain makes the argument for the latter stronger.

Without reviewing my Finseth, what is there besides buffer management and its linked redisplay, built in commands (a lot of which were copied, like my favorite marker of backup-by-copying-while-linked, which in the '80s was to my fairly extensive knowledge unique to Gosling EMACS), keymappings and the extension language? (Half my professional work in the '80s was on many different versions of EMACS, and I believe I worked on every significant UNIX one, although only Steve Zimmerman's CCA Emacs was a real competitor to Gosling/GNU EMACS as machines got enough memory. Note when I say "worked on" I might mean nothing more than porting; today's young whippersnappers are spoiled by the Linux mono-culture and/or modern package systems :-)

You say the first two "were tricky to get right" ... you've got that right, back in those days when resources were dear and performance was critical (Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping :-), they were in my opinion the hardest parts, especially since the superiority of the buffer gap vs. linked lines wasn't necessarily intuitive, and didn't the main file of the Gosling redisplay code have a skull and crossbones at the top? Although I'll admit to some bias since buffer management on the PDP-11 and non-VM PCs and 68000 workstations was problematic, in this case especially for a code base that started on a paging super-minicomputer (the VAX). Once you had those, building on top of them is fairly obvious, and a if not the largest part of the quality was a matter of taste, where RMS was vastly superior to Gosling, from using "standard" keymappings to a real LISP.

Wow, that was some pretty interesting history, thanks for sharing it.

Do you honestly think that he would face such intense criticism if he were just some guy on the internet? You seem to be defending a double standard by arguing that there shouldn't be a double standard.

I don't consider the posts in this thread to be intense criticism relative to many of the flame wars here, nor do I think that the choices are lots of criticism or zero criticism.

From what I've seen, it generally seems like intense criticism on HN is directed at attention seekers irrespective of their celebrity. I don't find this to be a particularly attention seeking post, but nevertheless RMS has engaged in a fair amount of attention seeking behavior in the past.

At any rate, the views being most criticized are actually critical of others anyway, including the one about ties.

Surely several of these are possible, by any individual, at once.

You can admire and benefit from Stallman's work and achievements, without necessarily agreeing with all of his positions.

And if someone essentially judges you morally deficient for as much as using a cellphone or MS Windows, it's kind of open season to judge him on superficial things like his choice of ties or personal habits, in return.

"And if someone essentially judges you morally deficient for as much as using a cellphone or MS Windows, it's kind of open season to judge him on superficial things like his choice of ties or personal habits, in return."

No. It's really not.

I think it is. If you make such a tremendous claim (and it is one), you're likely to hear some counterclaims. Even if they are 'your singing totally sucks'

http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossi...

Only if you're prepared to explain why a choice of ties is a moral imperative, and are ready for the ridicule of people who don't agree with you.

Except that, in explaining his choice of no ties at all, RMS resorts precisely to moral imperatives.

By my reading, he says people who wear ties because they feel they need to are complicit. If you just honestly like ties, I don't think he has any beef with you, provided you're not trying to force them on others.

Yeah, okay, I can see that reading. I interpreted it more like, by wearing a tie, you pressure others to wear a tie, whether you personally like it or not. I would actually agree with this, because it makes sense if you think about our desire to conform to group behavioral norms. It's similar to the pressure women feel about wearing high heels, despite that many of them love to. But you don't need to proclaim moral imperatives in order to be a non-conformist; ironically, an insistence on non-conformity is exactly the same kind of pressure that conformists exert.

Don't get caught in the desire to "judge back". If anything you stoop to Stallman's level. It's perfectly fine to be critical, but at the end of the day, who cares if Stallman doesn't like wearing a tie? If you don't either, cool. If you do, that's cool too.

We don't need to mock vegans, so why should we mock Stallmans? Just live your life and ignore the meaningless fact that they think you're doing wrong according to their personal morality (after you explore the origin/reason for their lifestyle to the extent of your curiosity).

I think HN is excessively critical of Stallman, but to be fair, this is a thread about his personal preferences.

Criticizing people for their personal preferences is about as useful as criticizing a cat for licking itself. You look like an idiot and the cat ignores you.

Dare I point out that his personal preferences in ties are the topic RMS spends the most amount of text on?

That is a statistical lie.

His music preferences are described with 2076 characters, while ties uses 1838.

You could state that ties is the singular item under a bullet point list with most text. However then we are either saying that music isn't "a singular item", or that in a compositional sense, RMS hasn't spaced the tie text with bullet points where for music he do.

I thought his opinion on ties (or really on the social pressure of ties) was one of the more interesting sections.

BTW, he uses more text to describe his taste in music.

I think the principle he talked about using the "ties" allegory was the most interesting part:

"The people who wear ties under these circumstances are victim-coperpetrators: each one who cedes to this pressure and wears a tie increases the pressure on others. This is a central concept for understanding other forms of propagating nastiness, including nonfree software and Facebook. In fact, it was in regard to ties that I first recognized this phenomenon.

I don't condemn victim-coperpetrators, since they are primarily victims and only secondarily perpetrators. But I believe I should not be one of them. I hope my refusal to wear a tie will make it easier for others to refuse as well."

I don't really see wearing or not wearing ties as some kind of moral imperative.

Yes. He started some great stuff. I don't see what a list of what amounts to MyFace "likes" adds to that. What matters is the great stuff.

What's with all the honorary doctorates from Peru?

Your first sentence is deeply meaningful.

The rest is all gunk -- it's basically his equivalent of his Facebook friends list.

It's maybe me being subjective, but the last one seems to have a bit of meaning too.

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