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Stallman's hubris is shocking -- and I'm not talking about his claim that the world is a better place for him having lived. I'm talking about this line of shit

Stallman's hubris is shocking -- and I'm not talking about his claim that the world is a better place for him having lived. I'm talking about this line of shit: > I’m the last survivor of a dead culture.

jf 16y ago
That quote makes a lot more sense when taken in context. It's from the 1983 epilogue to Hackers. In 1983, there was no "free software" as we have today. No FSF, no EFF, no Creative Commons. Additionally, Stallman's interview is at the end of a book about the guys who started "hacker culture". These guys did some amazing stuff: they physically modified one of their computers to add new machine instructions, wrote editors, compilers and games from scratch, etc, etc. Then they made their code available for free. When I read that quote in the book, I interpreted it as Stallman expressing sadness over the loss of hacker culture.
- ErrantX 16y ago
  I think that is what apotheon means! Hacker culture is far from dead; it is alive and well, just different. It's just him being stuck in the "glorious past" (nothing really wrong with that) and assuming that hackers should be working with computers on that sort of level. Things move on; if we still had to do all that computing wouldn't have moved on very fast :P I heartily disagree that the culture is materially different - it's just spread out a bit more (instead of being on the university campus' etc.)
  - apotheon 16y ago
    Hacker culture not only is alive and well -- it was alive and well through those years, too. It was just less visible, and since Stallman was moving through different circles, it wouldn't have felt as much to him like it was all clustered around his immediate vicinity. It is to some extent in human nature to assume that what's happening around someone is what's happening everywhere -- but that's really no excuse for declaring himself the last of his breed as he did. In fact, I'd say that the rise of the cypherpunks was a stronger resurgence in the hacker culture tide than Stallman's generation, and actually far more committed to freedom in an essential sense. The fact things change doesn't mean the good stuff has all died off. I think we're a lot better off for the modern state of hacker culture than if there was still the kind of hacker culture that existed Way Back When. Concepts of freedom, inquiry, and improvement that are central to a hacker culture have become more refined and encompassing than they were in those early days, which is pretty much what happens with everything that sees long-term success; it starts out less well-defined, and feeling more "special" because of its rarefied nature, then grows more widespread, better defined, and more generally applicable, thanks to the efforts of people who pick up where a previous generation left off to add their own efforts to the continuing evolution of the movement. Far from being the last of his breed, he went from being an early visionary to a late relic, from what I can see. I might not have used such harsh terms for it, but his own statements about being the last of his kind pretty much completes the picture of Stallman as a dinosaur who has died and is too stubbornly attached to his own illusions to realize it. Yeah, the culture isn't materially different. It has simply continued developing. If it had remained exactly the same as it was for Stallman's early peers, that wouldn't have been success. It would have been stagnation. He should learn to take a cue from people like Ken Thompson, who has managed to remain relevant and continue to contribute fresh new ideas to the state of general purpose operating system design all these years. Yes, advocates for freedom in our software development model are of critical importance; I'm not arguing otherwise. I think, though, that Stallman's apparent idea that such advocacy should focus on trying to recapture a communal sharing model that worked for a very small number of people who mostly knew each other, at least peripherally, is naive at best. Furthermore, the way Thompson and his spiritual descendants lead by example does almost as much for effective advocacy as the actual advocates (e.g., Bruce Perens and Theo de Raadt, to name a couple out of many -- who are, unlike Stallman, well-known for being currently contributing developers as well as advocates, thus lending credence to their statements even when they're abrasive in the extreme as de Raadt can sometimes be). Looking at things with a critical eye, Stallman is the only guy I can think of who is granted so much relevance as both a developer and an advocate for freedom in software use and development whose achievements are always described in the past tense.

jf 16y ago

That quote makes a lot more sense when taken in context. It's from the 1983 epilogue to Hackers. In 1983, there was no "free software" as we have today. No FSF, no EFF, no Creative Commons. Additionally, Stallman's interview is at the end of a book about the guys who started "hacker culture". These guys did some amazing stuff: they physically modified one of their computers to add new machine instructions, wrote editors, compilers and games from scratch, etc, etc. Then they made their code available for free. When I read that quote in the book, I interpreted it as Stallman expressing sadness over the loss of hacker culture.

ErrantX 16y ago
I think that is what apotheon means! Hacker culture is far from dead; it is alive and well, just different. It's just him being stuck in the "glorious past" (nothing really wrong with that) and assuming that hackers should be working with computers on that sort of level. Things move on; if we still had to do all that computing wouldn't have moved on very fast :P I heartily disagree that the culture is materially different - it's just spread out a bit more (instead of being on the university campus' etc.)
- apotheon 16y ago
  Hacker culture not only is alive and well -- it was alive and well through those years, too. It was just less visible, and since Stallman was moving through different circles, it wouldn't have felt as much to him like it was all clustered around his immediate vicinity. It is to some extent in human nature to assume that what's happening around someone is what's happening everywhere -- but that's really no excuse for declaring himself the last of his breed as he did. In fact, I'd say that the rise of the cypherpunks was a stronger resurgence in the hacker culture tide than Stallman's generation, and actually far more committed to freedom in an essential sense. The fact things change doesn't mean the good stuff has all died off. I think we're a lot better off for the modern state of hacker culture than if there was still the kind of hacker culture that existed Way Back When. Concepts of freedom, inquiry, and improvement that are central to a hacker culture have become more refined and encompassing than they were in those early days, which is pretty much what happens with everything that sees long-term success; it starts out less well-defined, and feeling more "special" because of its rarefied nature, then grows more widespread, better defined, and more generally applicable, thanks to the efforts of people who pick up where a previous generation left off to add their own efforts to the continuing evolution of the movement. Far from being the last of his breed, he went from being an early visionary to a late relic, from what I can see. I might not have used such harsh terms for it, but his own statements about being the last of his kind pretty much completes the picture of Stallman as a dinosaur who has died and is too stubbornly attached to his own illusions to realize it. Yeah, the culture isn't materially different. It has simply continued developing. If it had remained exactly the same as it was for Stallman's early peers, that wouldn't have been success. It would have been stagnation. He should learn to take a cue from people like Ken Thompson, who has managed to remain relevant and continue to contribute fresh new ideas to the state of general purpose operating system design all these years. Yes, advocates for freedom in our software development model are of critical importance; I'm not arguing otherwise. I think, though, that Stallman's apparent idea that such advocacy should focus on trying to recapture a communal sharing model that worked for a very small number of people who mostly knew each other, at least peripherally, is naive at best. Furthermore, the way Thompson and his spiritual descendants lead by example does almost as much for effective advocacy as the actual advocates (e.g., Bruce Perens and Theo de Raadt, to name a couple out of many -- who are, unlike Stallman, well-known for being currently contributing developers as well as advocates, thus lending credence to their statements even when they're abrasive in the extreme as de Raadt can sometimes be). Looking at things with a critical eye, Stallman is the only guy I can think of who is granted so much relevance as both a developer and an advocate for freedom in software use and development whose achievements are always described in the past tense.