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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually fine with RMS being intransigent about licensing and code and so on. Where he stepped over the line was attacking Miguel in person. If he wants to be personally nasty to anyone who has anything to do with proprietary software, he's going to end up a very lonely person.

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Have you met Richard Stallman? Not exactly a people person, anyways :)

To be clear, I have nothing but mad respect for Stallman, even though my personal beliefs differ from his. He can be extreme sometimes, but his firm adherence to his beliefs is important. Calling him a traitor is completely out of line.

Yeah, I have, and no, he's definitely not a people person. There's a difference between being a 'people person' and deliberately saying nasty things about other people who have worked their asses off producing free software, though.

You're right in any case: name calling is out of line, for everyone involved, starting with RMS. If he doesn't like Mono or Microsoft or Debian or Apache or whatever, that's fine. But please refrain from personal insults.

I guess my point in saying he's not a people person is to reiterate that folks should just kind of ignore him when he says something like this. Getting personally offended by a Richard Stallman comment is like getting personally offended by a young child wetting the bed. His role is 'tireless proponent of a powerful idea', not 'personable leader'.

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