Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

There are undoubtedly others that are able to fill that role, and while they may not be as bombastic or driven, they could be more constructive and willing to engage in serious discussion rather than mock and ridicule anything that is not pure.

His stubborn refusal to use things like Google Docs makes him completely blind to what that sort of tool can do. Where's the open-source version of same?

It's like to him using the MIT or BSD licenses is the same as heresy and if he had the power to, like some ordained pope, he'd excommunicate all those that refused the GNU license.

That's why being "creepy, petulant and obnoxious" is a serious problem.

I don't understand how he can be almost literally losing his mind about Windows, which is of no real threat to anyone, when the real problems are closed source code inside hardware embedded in cars, medical equipment and voting machines where the stakes are much, much higher.

If you ask me, he's fighting the right war on the wrong battlefield.

I completely agree. Thank you RMS!

> he wouldn't have that credibility if he compromised and made his position more palatable.

To an extent I agree, but you can stick to your positions without snide remarks ("Swindle") or needlessly provoking on issues unrelated to your mission (9/11 truther material).

Drop those things, and you can have your positions and increase credibility. They hurt the mission, as the article's author says, for no benefit.

But the only people he has any visibility or credibility to are people who a) know who he is, and b) agree with him. I can't imagine any situation in which his arguments would sway someone who currently disagrees with him.

I'm willing to bet that if you talked to the majority of geeks these days who weren't already using linux in 1998, most either wouldn't have heard of him, or would have heard of him in the same vein as Eric Raymond, Dennis Ritchie, or Donald Knuth: people who have done great things in computing, in times long since past, and who have no relevance to what's happening in computing today beyond those legacies.

So imagine Stallman showing up to a CS class, looking and behaving like a bushman who'd been lost in the wilds of Alaska for 40 years, insinuating that the US government was responsible for 9/11 and telling them to stop using Facebook and Google Docs and cell phones. What possible credibility could he ever have?

The FSF, with him at the helm, is going to continue to remain a valuable organization, but the FSF without him at the helm would be a valuable organization that would finally have a real chance at being taken seriously.

Side note: I spoke to my 25-year-old coworker, and he had only the vaguest idea of who Stallman was, proving my point that, to this generation of programmers, he's almost completely irrelevant except in a historical context.

BTW, those four images are inflamatory. I can't find them on the fsf.org web site. If the author placed those there, and they have nothing to do with the FSF or Stallman, then this article should be hell banned, if that is possible. If Those four inflamatory images are from FSF or Stallman's web properties then I would like to see evidence (URLs please). Shame, shame, shame on the author if he just placed those images to be provacative.

"I don't believe that the US government directly planned or instigated [the attacks of September 11]. But in a larger sense it laid the foundation for them, through two decades of support for armed religious fanatics in Pakistan and Afghanistan, up to and including the Taliban."

No, I don't think stallman is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. When people quote Stallman they tend to be vague, and the quote in the article simply said:

"even if you believe that the government had nothing to do with the attacks of September 2001,"

What is lacking is context. It may be simply a comment regarding the US Foreign policy. After all, the reason Al-Qaeda had power in the first place can be directed linked to weapons and money which the US gave to Al-Qaeda in order to have a proxy war with the Soviet.

I give Stallman credit for his commitment to his cause, but at the same time I have to criticize him for maintaining his methods.

You want people to stop using Google Docs, because it's proprietary and hordes your data under Google's control? How about encouraging, spearheading, and promoting the creation of an open-source alternative? The suggestion of 'Just don't use Google Docs' isn't practical; people use it for a reason, and he doesn't seem to understand it, presumably because he doesn't 'collaborate' on documents the way that teams often have to. But if you put a free alternative in front of people, I'd wager you'd get a lot more converts.

Hell, how about just some modifications to OpenOffice to allow multi-user document edits using your native app, facilitated by a central server or peer-to-peer networking (e.g. zeroconf/avahi). Boom, now your full-featured word processor, which is better than Google Docs, has all the features you want, plus a local copy of the file.

Stallman's arguments seem to be 'This thing you like is bad, so just don't have it'. It's like someone without any children saying "Why do you need a playpen? And so many toys? And baby gates? Just don't let your kid go near the stairs, problem solved.' If you don't understand the challenges involved, which he obviously does not, you can't really provide input on the process.

He's also generally opposed to Clang/LLVM, for the sole reason that it provides an even more freely-licensed replacement for GCC. Now don't get me wrong, GCC is ridiculously important, and might be the most important thing the FSF has ever produced, but it also devolved into a complex, unmaintainable mess. Very few people in the world were capable of adding substantial features, and even fewer were willing to do so.

Now we have a competitor, an open-source compiler toolchain which provides better results faster than GCC, while also including tons of new features that makes a lot of work easier for everyone (e.g. integrating source code parsing into your IDE so you can find programming errors as easily as your spell checker can correct words). Clang/LLVM have forced the GCC team to sit up and start implementing all the things they had no time or interest to implement before. Now everyone gets a better compiler, no matter what OS you're on or what you choose to use. GCC is a significantly better compiler, and Apple is largely to blame. But because Apple is involved, LLVM is bad, because it can be used in non-free build systems, like Apple's or Adobe's.

And yet, despite Apple's use of it in non-free software, it's still far better than GCC in a lot of ways. So his fundamental objection is that proprietary software exists and can be used, and not that it's being forced on users. Apple and other corporations have advanced the state of computing and compiler technology, and he's upset about it because of the very reasons these corporations were able and willing to put the money in to give us all something better.

I can't take him seriously anymore. He's been tenured for too long, and disconnected from users for so long. He has a lot to say about how the users of 1995 should use their computers, but nothing new since then.

Anyway, it's a bad analogy because apathy regarding privacy is not an addiction. It's just apathy, informed or uninformed. Anybody who was likely to care about privacy but was ignorant/uninformed should not need to be weaned off privacy-abusing services. Anybody who was never going to care about privacy need not be pursued further.

Stallman's ideological intransigence is the backbone of the free software world. If he was even a little bit "reasonable", free software would have been nibbled to death by ducks by now. Instead it's still going strong after thirty years.

Freedom isn't reasonable, and there will always be a few people who go to unreasonable lengths to defend it. This is a good thing, and Stallman has managed to do so by not killing anyone, not overthrowing anything, but by building something unequivocally positive and good.

Free software is going to win, of course, because it will never go away. Companies are transient. Ownership is temporary. Freedom is persistent, so long as the rule of law is operative. GPL is still the dominant open-source license: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2012/02/15/decline-of-the-gpl/ (or it was as of 2008-ish)

The thing that gives free software power is precisely the freedom Stallman baked in: the freedom of developers to change the code. A decade from now any given proprietary system will be a pile of undifferentiated hexidecimal sludge, but we'll still be able to compile the Linux kernel from source, on architectures that aren't even invented yet.

For all that he rants about users using non-free software, the core freedom Stallman is defending is developer's freedom. To paraphrase George Orwell, "Freedom is the freedom to modify source. Grant that, and everything else follows."

That said, it's unfortunate that the standard for free software rhetoric is shrill, conspiratorial, and purposefully marginal.

Most successful organizations realize the value of aesthetics. There's a good reason that the World Wildlife Organization has a panda as its logo and not, lets say, a water buffalo.