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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Stallman lacks a coherent vision. He has an end goal but he really doesn't have a great plan to get there. It's really frustrating. Emacs could be a lot better. For instance, it has taken forever to get a high-performance Lisp working inside of Emacs. I think Guile is partly there?

Anyway, since we'll all be long dead before his plan starts to work, I think the better solution is to support inexpensive software. For example, I pay for Sublime Text. Recently I bought PixelMator and Sketch, and I'm planning on learning how to use them soon. :-)

Sure it would be great if Free Software ruled but faster change comes with a paid ecosystem. The real problem was that software was expensive. If it's simply inexpensive, we'll get most of what we need.

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You misunderstand the point of the FSF. It's free as in freedom, not free as in no money. The whole thing started because rms wanted to modify a printer driver to give functionality their last printer had. He wasn't being stingy, he just wanted his workflow back. The FSF has no problems with charging for software, they have no objection to Red Hat, for instance, charging for the GPL Linux kernel (although they have other problems with Red Hat). The FSF is concerned with users having access to the source, not with everyone being users or non-users having access to the source.

The real problem was that software was expensive??

Also, I don't know how much of the success/failure of FOSS can be pinned on RMS. He's just one man. The plan was never for the entire movement to be dependent on him.

Moreover, the amount of work that he has done towards this end is incredible. His productivity (at least in the early days of GNU) was astounding and inspiring. Perhaps one RMS didn't get us there, but two? Or five? It'd be a treat to know what that would have looked like.

Is it that Stallman lacks a manager's mindset of breaking the vision into manageable pieces, and then delegating them out? Or is it that this is so against the ethos, that he couldn't make it happen with a volunteer workforce?

Well, I guess if you consider his other interests, like the GNU Userland (which is most of what users recognise as linux), the GPL licsense (and generally 'Free Software'), and his part in the opening up of the software/hardware market...

I think this was a joke from Stallman. Your comment reads like we can conclude from EMACS going off track that he sucks as a leader. You and I might (quick strongly in my case) dislike Free Software, but I think we can recognise that Stallman gets things done.

If you want to point at a place where Stallman didn't succeed, I'd probably look more at Herd. At least people use Emacs.

Fair enough. I consider Emacs a success by almost any measure. The question is, "If he wanted it for 25 years, why hasn't it happened?" It could be time and attention. It could be the ethos of working with volunteers.

This isn't coming from a dislike of Free Software per say, more just an appreciation of the challenges of herding cats (volunteers).

I find the $70 for a text editor (sublime) to be expensive. Price is relative.

I have used Sublime for around 50 hours a week, every week, for 20 months, when looked at like that, it is a bargain at about 1.5 cents an hour.

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