7 ms·
I was reminded of RMS's autoreply: I am not on vacation, but I am at the end of a long time delay. I am located somewhere on Earth, but as far as responding to
by jrcii 11y ago
I was reminded of RMS's autoreply:
I am not on vacation, but I am at the end of a long time delay. I am
located somewhere on Earth, but as far as responding to email is concerned, I appear to be well outside the solar system.
After your message arrives at gnu.org, I will collect it in my next batch of incoming mail, some time within the following 24 hours. I will spend much of the following day reading that batch of mail and will come across your message at some point. If I write a response immediately, it will go out in the next outgoing batch--typically around 24 hours after I collected your message, but occasionally sooner or later than that. Please expect a minimum delay of between 24 and 48 hours in receiving a response to your mail to me.
If your message is hard to understand or responding takes real work,
the response could take longer.
So please wait 48 hours after sending a message before you resend it,
remind me about it, or ask if I have received it. If it has been less
than 48 hours, the absence of a response from me only means you have not given me time to answer.
If you are having a conversation with me, please keep in mind that each message you receive from me is a response to the mail you sent 24 to 48 hours earlier, and when writing it, I probably had not yet downloaded your later mail.
If you are in big hurry to speak with me, and one day's delay would be a serious problem, you can ask my FSF assistant to phone me. Send mail to <rms-assist@fsf.org> saying what you would like to talk with me about, and giving your telephone number. You can also call the Free Software Foundation office at 617-542-5942 (weekday Boston business hours) and ask them to phone me on your behalf. If it's really important, try both!
An intermediate measure is to email me your phone number and ask me
to phone you.
But if there isn't enough hurry to warrant phoning me, please don't bother the FSF people. The mail you already sent me will reach me before any mail they could send me now on your behalf. I will respond as soon as I can.
To contact the Free Software Foundation, use one of the addresses in
https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/email https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/email.
If you do not wish to receive this message ever again, please send a message to rms-autoreply-control@gnu.org with the subject "OFF".
Otherwise, you might receive a reply like this one up to once a month.
- hengheng 11y agoSo he's self-centered enough that he expects everybody to read through all of this essay. Interesting.
- Etheryte 11y agoNo, he's reasonable enough to explain why and how long it takes to respond to the massive amount of mail he must receive daily.
- sdegutis 11y agoEarly in my professional career, I learned something: nobody in the professional world wants to hear what anyone else has to say, unless money is involved (e.g. one of you is the other one's client or customer), and even then they want to hear as little as possible. I had to learn how to professionally communicate with my employers and clients, which means learning to say as little as humanly possible while still mostly getting the point across.
- lolidaisuki 11y agoExcept people email RMS specifically because they want to hear what he wants to say. Professional field and the hacker and activist cultures are very different in nature.
- chucksmash 11y agoSo you optimize for communicating with that sort of person if you need money from them. Never having met the guy, that doesn't really sound like rms' MO.
- adrianN 11y agoHe also has rather complex rules about inviting him for a talk https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/#!msg/mysociety-community/zkyZpOXjgoQ/_8xyXSxv9zYJ https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/#!msg/mysoci... To people who think like rms, these rules are very helpful, but I think many people will get the impression that he is being very rude by having a long document with his preferences.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 11y agoReminds me of the infamous "no brown M&M's" rider...
- jason_slack 11y agoStallman also talks about how he does his computing and how he checks e-mail: https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html