4 ms·
Oh don't be silly, "real people"? Richard Stallman is as real as it gets. He's a decent programmer from what I can tell from emacs. Note that there is a distin
by bitdiddle 17y ago
Oh don't be silly, "real people"? Richard Stallman is as real as it gets. He's a decent programmer from what I can tell from emacs.
Note that there is a distinction between open source and free software. I think it's important to not conflate the two, which I see a lot these days (in the real world :)
I predict 500 years from now people will remember him. They won't remember Bill Gates. Without googling try to recall who was the richest man in Rome?
All the best
- axod 17y agoWe see 2 very different futures then. I see a future where people just access 'the web', via whatever small thin client web browser device they like. The vast majority of software will be running on servers, and end users won't really care if it's open source as long as it does what they want it to. Real people use web browsers.
- bitdiddle 17y agowe've been to this future before, when mainframes ruled. We called them dumb terminals. Not as sexy as small thin web clients using comet and ajax and other cleansers but they worked. kidding aside, I don't buy it. P2P with local datastores will have a place. There's no way my tax returns will reside on google docs.
- axod 17y agoYour tax returns will reside on the governments web interface :/ In the UK practically nothing tax related is done via paper forms any more, it's all done via their website. Works pretty well.
- rsheridan6 17y agoCrassus?
- lionhearted 17y agoBeat me to it. Maybe Trajan, depending on how your accounting systems attribute what belonged to the Republic and what to Trajan the man/military commander/later emperor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan#Maximum_extent_of_the_Empire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan#Maximum_extent_of_the_Em...
- bitdiddle 17y agowell done. Admittedly I've read parts of Gibbon and still don't recall this.
- nfnaaron 17y ago"I predict 500 years from now people will remember him. They won't remember Bill Gates." That future is going to spring from this present, where N people use Windows and Word and know who Bill Gates is, but M people use emacs and know who Richard Stallman is?
- krobertson 17y agoIf you go up to any person on the street today and ask who Bill Gates is, they'll more than likely know who. You average person would have no idea who Richard Stallman. If your average person doesn't know who he is today, I doubt that'll change to being more noteworthy in 500 years.
- pg 17y agoThe first part is true, but in general the second part is false; in general, there is a big difference between the people who are most famous in their lifetimes and those who are most famous later from that period.
- gradschool 17y agoNot everyone knows who Bill Gates is. http://www.geeks.co.uk/12352-bill-gates-is-a-thief-and-a-dongle-is-a-sex-toy http://www.geeks.co.uk/12352-bill-gates-is-a-thief-and-a-don...
- rms 17y agoGNU is a lot more likely to be around in 500 years than Microsoft or Windows.
- axod 17y agoPossible. But no one will know/care it's GNU.