7 ms·

Richard Stallman is the hero the internet needs

106 points by tjakab 11y ago

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
The polarization with regard to how Stallman should be interpreted is, I believe, one of the preliminary illustrations of the rift between the entrepreneurial hacker and MIT-style hacker subcultures, modulo OSI diehards such as Eric S. Raymond.
- krilnon 11y ago
  There was a funny discussion on an MIT mailing list this summer when an (apparently) tone-deaf email was sent out by MIT Professional Education entitled "4 Ways You May Be Enabling Hackers"... which warned about the dangers of cybersecurity-style hackers. RMS's response was: > These MIT professors ought to know better than to smear us hackers by using the word "hacker" as synonymous with "security breaker".
ihsw 11y ago
He's an ideologue, not a hero. Heroism implies courage and noble qualities. It doesn't detract from his authority on the subject, not in the least, but is he a hero? I don't think so. He would likely scoff at being called a hero too. In any event, the vast majority of people will know no privacy other than from each-other's affairs. Frankly I think the advent of cheap home delivery will push the privacy issue higher into the general consciousness, and people will be alarmed that all of their purchases are now tracked and indexed. The gap between online and offline purchasing will disappear over the next 18-36 months, and those on the forefront of this will be in a significant position of power. The synthesis of Big Data(TM) between related firms will reach new heights, and that will actually scare people.
- vacri 11y ago
  It's hard not to think of Stallman's crusade against the major powers as not requiring courage, and his endless fight for other people's freedoms as not a noble quality. He's basically a civil rights warrior. Out of curiosity, whom do you consider to actually be a hero in the modern day?
- vlehto 11y ago
  Target has been profiling people by their offline purchases long enough to be printed in books.
- EliRivers 11y ago
  I have always considered his work on Lisp machines back in the early eighties heroic. When Symbolics stopped sharing their developments, he endeavoured to match them feature for feature, single-handedly, and give away the reimplementation for free. To quote Steven Levy, "RMS had single-handedly attempted to match the work of over a dozen world-class hackers [1], and managed to keep doing it during most of 1982 and almost all of 1983". He saw what Symbolics created, and then reimplemented it and gave it away. Greenblatt noted that he was out-hacking the whole bunch of them. Gosper called it incredible. When Stallman finally couldn't keep up, he set a new goal that he hoped would solve the problem permanently. GNU. There is, of course, the other side of the story, although I find the dismissal of the complexity of the features RMS was matching a little disingenuous - how complex they were seems irrelevant compared to the fact that he was doing it alone and Symbolics was doing it with a bunch of world-class hackers: https://web.archive.org/web/20080112153822/http://dlweinreb.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080112153822/http://dlweinreb.... [1] Some people on HN define "hacker" as "person who can code". The definition in use here is older.
  - hga 11y ago
    The "dismissal", as you call it, is hardly unfair (note, I was an eyewitness to all this, the players were largely in my social circle and I worked for Lisp Machines Inc during that period, heck, we both gave up on Lisp Machines in general at the same time). As DLW relates, RMS didn't do the designs of the new features, he copied some of them. In part I believe this is because he's much more an improver than an innovator when it comes to code and systems. This can have massive qualitative results, like after he took over ITS EMACS, but it deprives him of the cachet of "inventor", for what that's worth.
  - lispm 11y ago
    Copying is much easier than inventing.
guard-of-terra 11y ago
We prove Stallman was right time after time. Which is almost as humiliating as proving Kafka was right. That we do too.
Mz 11y ago
Just because you are paranoid, doesn't mean they are out to get you. I wouldn't use the word hero, but he did found the Free Software stuff while being intermittently homeless. He didn't sleep on the street. He slept in a hacker space where he worked. He finally got to exercise his right to vote when an article in a national publication validated that he was homeless and sleeping at his job. This convinced the Registrar's office to issue him his voter registration card. So he certainly made significant sacrifices for what he believed in. I would not call him a hero because I think that cheapens the word. We typically apply that word to people who put themselves in harm's way for the greater good and my father, my ex, my ex's father and grandfather all served in the military. So I would not personally write a piece describing him with that term But he did make personal sacrifices for a cause he believed in and to which he devoted himself while being crapped on and disrespected and managed to make a real difference in the world in spite of how much hostility he was met with. Props to him.
- kordless 11y ago
  > I would not call him a hero because I think that cheapens the word. This is a blaming statement and is judgemental. The point here is that someone else thinks he's a hero. Heroism implies bravery, which is an emotion. You don't get to speak for other's feelings or emotional responses (like mine) in that regard just because he was homeless and your relatives fought in a war. Those arguments are biases and ad hominem in nature. I would note that you will be unable to present an equivalent valid logical argument without the introduction of biases. The biases are the 'tell' for the misapplied logic. Heros don't need to be well spoken, socially normal or face danger. All they need is to display the characteristics of a hero, which includes someone who, from a position of weakness, displays courage. This describes RMS perfectly given the guy has stood by what he believed (courage) while being homeless (a position of weakness).
  - Mz 11y ago
    I am currently homeless while pursuing something I believe in. He has nothing but my deepest respects and it was meaningful to me to read his bio while on the street myself. I didn't say other people were wrong to call him a hero. I said I would be unlikely to use the word and explained why. I think you have misread and mischaracterized my remark.
SwellJoe 11y ago
I've always argued that RMS is an excellent counter-balancing influence. While the line for acceptable behavior keeps being pushed by corporate and state interests away from privacy, away from user and developer freedom, away from the notion that there are conversations that should be free of marketing, he holds the other end down, making the center fall somewhat closer to recognition of human dignity in digital matters. That said, we need new voices and more voices, on that end of the spectrum. RMS has never been the ideal spokesperson for a movement, though his passion is beyond question, and his technical achievements impressive. The world of computing RMS represents is old-fashioned to the current generation. I fall in between the old generation and this new generation that has never known a time without the Internet dominating everything, and I can see where the language of RMS can seem to miss the point to a lot of younger folks. While he has always been prescient on these fronts, and I think he understands the world we live in better than most, I don't think he can be the voice of the current generation of hackers, the way he was the voice of prior generations. The GNU project as a whole has the feel of a relic, and I worry every time I go to gnu.org and see the state of it. A few years ago, there were GNU projects for all sorts of modern things; there was Savannah to address the problems inherent in SourceForge (again, prescient...SF.net turned evil just as RMS assumed they would). But, GNU has nothing for github (there are Open Source github alternatives, but GNU is nowhere in the story). Anyway, I don't know what needs to happen, but I know a few things: GNU is so much less relevant than when I started using Linux 20+ years ago. RMS speaks to an older generation of hackers; even though he should be heeded by the young, I doubt he is. And, I can't think of any other voices for software freedom that are as consistent or as effective as RMS and GNU was 20 years ago.
- mikegioia 11y ago
  I think part of the problem, at least that I've found, is how do you properly articulate to and galvanize a young crown on the concept of relinquishing convenience? To adopt Stallmanism is to sacrifice conveniences like the iPhone, and kids/teens/young adults are flocking to Apple/Google. How can you get a kid to say no to an iPhone, when what you're asking him to do is extrapolate a vague and possibly non-existent threat of privacy loss? It's incredibly difficult and honestly without some real-world event to bring it home for these children I fear it can't really be done. Without an event, you'd be reliant on a cultural tidal shift -- it would have to be "cool" to be anti-Apple, or anti-tracking devices. It would have be cooler for kids to own burners than smartphones because they don't track you. There will always be a subset of people who truly understand what Stallman is saying and will probably adopt his behaviors. But to actually appeal to younger audiences and disseminate that message effectively to a mass amount of them seems to be too difficult.
zekevermillion 11y ago
The article trivializes Stallman by labeling him an extremist. The author seems to say, hey, Stallman may have a point but is still a bit too weird to emulate. Hey, if RMS is right, then most of us are severely ethically compromised when it comes to our computing decisions. If he's wrong in part (maybe it's OK to enrich and empower Google / the Government through our choice of systems?) then why is he wrong, and what does that mean for computer users and hackers?
superskierpat 11y ago
Damn I was not aware of that toe thing.. Still, the man is a necessary figure in my mind, he's our "Dark Knight"
- baghira 11y ago
  A more apt reference would probably be Rorschach from Watchmen. At least this sort of stuff should deter Hollywood from any plan of a RMS biopic, so all in all it may be good thing.
SixSigma 11y ago
At risk of down votes I prefer my heroes to be a bit more sanitary : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Who else is a close contender for what RMS is doing? Only ones I can think of are Eben Moglen and Bradley M. Kuhn, but they're far too dry and analytical for a mass audience themselves.
- vacri 11y ago
  Why the fuck is this relevant to what he is saying? Why is it trotted out every single time his name is mentioned on HN?
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    Hitler liked dogs.
miguelrochefort 11y ago
Richard Stallman is paranoid. I don't know in what world he lives, but it's not real. Like most people here, he values privacy way too much and doesn't seem to realize that we need as much information as possible about everything (including people) to make educated decisions as a society. He's socially inept, and in no way a hero.
- Natanael_L 11y ago
  And yet a remarkable number of his predictions have come true, in particular about abuses.
  - miguelrochefort 11y ago
    None of his predictions are surprising or unexpected. I mean, it's clear to all of us that no data is truly safe. What I meant by paranoid is that he refuses for the world to have access to information about himself for who knows what reasons. In retrospect, I should have used "insane" or "selfish".
    - Natanael_L 11y ago
      So your opinion is that the sane choice is to give up?
      - miguelrochefort 11y ago
        Not give up. Give it away.
- EliRivers 11y ago
  Just because something makes a more efficient society doesn't make it right. Well, not in my view. There are political views in which the efficiency of society trumps all.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
Stallman has been a bit hard on me in one interaction but I think that is just the way he is if you don't totally match his views. I very much respect him and I think he has done enormous service with the FSF and arguing for privacy. I also like using the cloud and think a lot about this: secure and private personal and small group clouds. Not too difficult to set up for storage, email, web apps - but conveniences like Google Now are an imposibility unless a very large developer community contributed.

106 points by tjakab 11y ago

The polarization with regard to how Stallman should be interpreted is, I believe, one of the preliminary illustrations of the rift between the entrepreneurial hacker and MIT-style hacker subcultures, modulo OSI diehards such as Eric S. Raymond.

krilnon 11y ago
There was a funny discussion on an MIT mailing list this summer when an (apparently) tone-deaf email was sent out by MIT Professional Education entitled "4 Ways You May Be Enabling Hackers"... which warned about the dangers of cybersecurity-style hackers. RMS's response was: > These MIT professors ought to know better than to smear us hackers by using the word "hacker" as synonymous with "security breaker".

ihsw 11y ago

He's an ideologue, not a hero. Heroism implies courage and noble qualities. It doesn't detract from his authority on the subject, not in the least, but is he a hero? I don't think so. He would likely scoff at being called a hero too. In any event, the vast majority of people will know no privacy other than from each-other's affairs. Frankly I think the advent of cheap home delivery will push the privacy issue higher into the general consciousness, and people will be alarmed that all of their purchases are now tracked and indexed. The gap between online and offline purchasing will disappear over the next 18-36 months, and those on the forefront of this will be in a significant position of power. The synthesis of Big Data(TM) between related firms will reach new heights, and that will actually scare people.

vacri 11y ago
It's hard not to think of Stallman's crusade against the major powers as not requiring courage, and his endless fight for other people's freedoms as not a noble quality. He's basically a civil rights warrior. Out of curiosity, whom do you consider to actually be a hero in the modern day?
vlehto 11y ago
Target has been profiling people by their offline purchases long enough to be printed in books.
EliRivers 11y ago
I have always considered his work on Lisp machines back in the early eighties heroic. When Symbolics stopped sharing their developments, he endeavoured to match them feature for feature, single-handedly, and give away the reimplementation for free. To quote Steven Levy, "RMS had single-handedly attempted to match the work of over a dozen world-class hackers [1], and managed to keep doing it during most of 1982 and almost all of 1983". He saw what Symbolics created, and then reimplemented it and gave it away. Greenblatt noted that he was out-hacking the whole bunch of them. Gosper called it incredible. When Stallman finally couldn't keep up, he set a new goal that he hoped would solve the problem permanently. GNU. There is, of course, the other side of the story, although I find the dismissal of the complexity of the features RMS was matching a little disingenuous - how complex they were seems irrelevant compared to the fact that he was doing it alone and Symbolics was doing it with a bunch of world-class hackers: https://web.archive.org/web/20080112153822/http://dlweinreb.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080112153822/http://dlweinreb.... [1] Some people on HN define "hacker" as "person who can code". The definition in use here is older.
- hga 11y ago
  The "dismissal", as you call it, is hardly unfair (note, I was an eyewitness to all this, the players were largely in my social circle and I worked for Lisp Machines Inc during that period, heck, we both gave up on Lisp Machines in general at the same time). As DLW relates, RMS didn't do the designs of the new features, he copied some of them. In part I believe this is because he's much more an improver than an innovator when it comes to code and systems. This can have massive qualitative results, like after he took over ITS EMACS, but it deprives him of the cachet of "inventor", for what that's worth.
- lispm 11y ago
  Copying is much easier than inventing.

guard-of-terra 11y ago

We prove Stallman was right time after time. Which is almost as humiliating as proving Kafka was right. That we do too.

Mz 11y ago

Just because you are paranoid, doesn't mean they are out to get you. I wouldn't use the word hero, but he did found the Free Software stuff while being intermittently homeless. He didn't sleep on the street. He slept in a hacker space where he worked. He finally got to exercise his right to vote when an article in a national publication validated that he was homeless and sleeping at his job. This convinced the Registrar's office to issue him his voter registration card. So he certainly made significant sacrifices for what he believed in. I would not call him a hero because I think that cheapens the word. We typically apply that word to people who put themselves in harm's way for the greater good and my father, my ex, my ex's father and grandfather all served in the military. So I would not personally write a piece describing him with that term But he did make personal sacrifices for a cause he believed in and to which he devoted himself while being crapped on and disrespected and managed to make a real difference in the world in spite of how much hostility he was met with. Props to him.

kordless 11y ago
> I would not call him a hero because I think that cheapens the word. This is a blaming statement and is judgemental. The point here is that someone else thinks he's a hero. Heroism implies bravery, which is an emotion. You don't get to speak for other's feelings or emotional responses (like mine) in that regard just because he was homeless and your relatives fought in a war. Those arguments are biases and ad hominem in nature. I would note that you will be unable to present an equivalent valid logical argument without the introduction of biases. The biases are the 'tell' for the misapplied logic. Heros don't need to be well spoken, socially normal or face danger. All they need is to display the characteristics of a hero, which includes someone who, from a position of weakness, displays courage. This describes RMS perfectly given the guy has stood by what he believed (courage) while being homeless (a position of weakness).
- Mz 11y ago
  I am currently homeless while pursuing something I believe in. He has nothing but my deepest respects and it was meaningful to me to read his bio while on the street myself. I didn't say other people were wrong to call him a hero. I said I would be unlikely to use the word and explained why. I think you have misread and mischaracterized my remark.

SwellJoe 11y ago

I've always argued that RMS is an excellent counter-balancing influence. While the line for acceptable behavior keeps being pushed by corporate and state interests away from privacy, away from user and developer freedom, away from the notion that there are conversations that should be free of marketing, he holds the other end down, making the center fall somewhat closer to recognition of human dignity in digital matters. That said, we need new voices and more voices, on that end of the spectrum. RMS has never been the ideal spokesperson for a movement, though his passion is beyond question, and his technical achievements impressive. The world of computing RMS represents is old-fashioned to the current generation. I fall in between the old generation and this new generation that has never known a time without the Internet dominating everything, and I can see where the language of RMS can seem to miss the point to a lot of younger folks. While he has always been prescient on these fronts, and I think he understands the world we live in better than most, I don't think he can be the voice of the current generation of hackers, the way he was the voice of prior generations. The GNU project as a whole has the feel of a relic, and I worry every time I go to gnu.org and see the state of it. A few years ago, there were GNU projects for all sorts of modern things; there was Savannah to address the problems inherent in SourceForge (again, prescient...SF.net turned evil just as RMS assumed they would). But, GNU has nothing for github (there are Open Source github alternatives, but GNU is nowhere in the story). Anyway, I don't know what needs to happen, but I know a few things: GNU is so much less relevant than when I started using Linux 20+ years ago. RMS speaks to an older generation of hackers; even though he should be heeded by the young, I doubt he is. And, I can't think of any other voices for software freedom that are as consistent or as effective as RMS and GNU was 20 years ago.

mikegioia 11y ago
I think part of the problem, at least that I've found, is how do you properly articulate to and galvanize a young crown on the concept of relinquishing convenience? To adopt Stallmanism is to sacrifice conveniences like the iPhone, and kids/teens/young adults are flocking to Apple/Google. How can you get a kid to say no to an iPhone, when what you're asking him to do is extrapolate a vague and possibly non-existent threat of privacy loss? It's incredibly difficult and honestly without some real-world event to bring it home for these children I fear it can't really be done. Without an event, you'd be reliant on a cultural tidal shift -- it would have to be "cool" to be anti-Apple, or anti-tracking devices. It would have be cooler for kids to own burners than smartphones because they don't track you. There will always be a subset of people who truly understand what Stallman is saying and will probably adopt his behaviors. But to actually appeal to younger audiences and disseminate that message effectively to a mass amount of them seems to be too difficult.

zekevermillion 11y ago

The article trivializes Stallman by labeling him an extremist. The author seems to say, hey, Stallman may have a point but is still a bit too weird to emulate. Hey, if RMS is right, then most of us are severely ethically compromised when it comes to our computing decisions. If he's wrong in part (maybe it's OK to enrich and empower Google / the Government through our choice of systems?) then why is he wrong, and what does that mean for computer users and hackers?

superskierpat 11y ago

Damn I was not aware of that toe thing.. Still, the man is a necessary figure in my mind, he's our "Dark Knight"

baghira 11y ago
A more apt reference would probably be Rorschach from Watchmen. At least this sort of stuff should deter Hollywood from any plan of a RMS biopic, so all in all it may be good thing.

SixSigma 11y ago

At risk of down votes I prefer my heroes to be a bit more sanitary : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Who else is a close contender for what RMS is doing? Only ones I can think of are Eben Moglen and Bradley M. Kuhn, but they're far too dry and analytical for a mass audience themselves.
vacri 11y ago
Why the fuck is this relevant to what he is saying? Why is it trotted out every single time his name is mentioned on HN?
- SixSigma 11y ago
  Hitler liked dogs.

miguelrochefort 11y ago

Richard Stallman is paranoid. I don't know in what world he lives, but it's not real. Like most people here, he values privacy way too much and doesn't seem to realize that we need as much information as possible about everything (including people) to make educated decisions as a society. He's socially inept, and in no way a hero.

Natanael_L 11y ago
And yet a remarkable number of his predictions have come true, in particular about abuses.
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  None of his predictions are surprising or unexpected. I mean, it's clear to all of us that no data is truly safe. What I meant by paranoid is that he refuses for the world to have access to information about himself for who knows what reasons. In retrospect, I should have used "insane" or "selfish".
  - Natanael_L 11y ago
    So your opinion is that the sane choice is to give up?
    - miguelrochefort 11y ago
      Not give up. Give it away.
EliRivers 11y ago
Just because something makes a more efficient society doesn't make it right. Well, not in my view. There are political views in which the efficiency of society trumps all.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

Stallman has been a bit hard on me in one interaction but I think that is just the way he is if you don't totally match his views. I very much respect him and I think he has done enormous service with the FSF and arguing for privacy. I also like using the cloud and think a lot about this: secure and private personal and small group clouds. Not too difficult to set up for storage, email, web apps - but conveniences like Google Now are an imposibility unless a very large developer community contributed.