5 ms·

Stallman's greatest strength - his uncompromising, liberty or death approach to computing - is also his greatest weakness. With all due respect, by refusing to

Stallman's greatest strength - his uncompromising, liberty or death approach to computing - is also his greatest weakness. With all due respect, by refusing to use proprietary software under any circumstances, and taking extreme measures to avoid various forms of tracking, he isolates himself into a sunshine and rainbows bubble of free software. Stallman is very good at predicting what the worst case scenarios may look like under various regimes of technological oppression, but he has no idea what the current state of affairs is outside his freedom bubble. He can't see what direction the state of the art is moving in, and has no first hand experience with any of the various evils he dedicates his life to fighting. Stallman wrote my favorite text editor, and the original version of the C compiler I've fiddled with for the past decade, so I can't complain about the guy. He's a living legend. I just think that the potential negative results of hard-line free software purism don't get enough discussion within the free software community.

rahoulb 10y ago
I'm not a huge free-software advocate but I do broadly agree with rms. But I went to hear him speak a while back and came away feeling more anti-free-software than before hearing him.
noufalibrahim 10y ago
I consider RMS like the highest speed on my speedometer. I'm probably never going to drive that fast but that gives me a sense of perspective about how fast I can go and what's safe.
h1d 10y ago
Not sure why one wants to criticize him as academic space needs extremist for broader opinions and we should learn from them than try to keep everyone nice and adapted to what we had on that day. If he didn't paint the world with the term GPL, maybe we didn't have services like github yet.
newscracker 10y ago
> ...but he has no idea what the current state of affairs is outside his freedom bubble. He can't see what direction the state of the art is moving in, and has no first hand experience with any of the various evils he dedicates his life to fighting. I see misunderstandings and misstatements. Firstly, it's incorrect to say he has no idea of the current state of affairs "outside his freedom bubble" (a term that sounds derogatory and insulting to me). Look up his posts on Uber, AirBnB, Amazon [1] and several others and decide for yourself if he seems as clueless as you believe him to be (but remember he always talks from the premise of freedom). First hand experience is not a necessity in order to criticize something. We all criticize things without first hand experience, based on hearsay, based on what we've read on social media (just because something came from "a friend") and so on. He does resort to strong absolutist positions in his posts, but do we have anyone else like him in the world? Honestly, I consider myself a "weak person" who succumbs to the pleasures of life taking the easy route when I look at his writings and his stance, and I wish we had more people like him with a lot more money and influence to fight for our freedoms and create things that would make the world and its people free over time (whereas in the last few decades we've been seeing our freedoms taken and controlled by large, fast growing corporations). [1]: https://www.stallman.org/amazon.html https://www.stallman.org/amazon.html

rahoulb 10y ago

I'm not a huge free-software advocate but I do broadly agree with rms. But I went to hear him speak a while back and came away feeling more anti-free-software than before hearing him.

noufalibrahim 10y ago

I consider RMS like the highest speed on my speedometer. I'm probably never going to drive that fast but that gives me a sense of perspective about how fast I can go and what's safe.

h1d 10y ago

Not sure why one wants to criticize him as academic space needs extremist for broader opinions and we should learn from them than try to keep everyone nice and adapted to what we had on that day. If he didn't paint the world with the term GPL, maybe we didn't have services like github yet.

newscracker 10y ago

> ...but he has no idea what the current state of affairs is outside his freedom bubble. He can't see what direction the state of the art is moving in, and has no first hand experience with any of the various evils he dedicates his life to fighting. I see misunderstandings and misstatements. Firstly, it's incorrect to say he has no idea of the current state of affairs "outside his freedom bubble" (a term that sounds derogatory and insulting to me). Look up his posts on Uber, AirBnB, Amazon [1] and several others and decide for yourself if he seems as clueless as you believe him to be (but remember he always talks from the premise of freedom). First hand experience is not a necessity in order to criticize something. We all criticize things without first hand experience, based on hearsay, based on what we've read on social media (just because something came from "a friend") and so on. He does resort to strong absolutist positions in his posts, but do we have anyone else like him in the world? Honestly, I consider myself a "weak person" who succumbs to the pleasures of life taking the easy route when I look at his writings and his stance, and I wish we had more people like him with a lot more money and influence to fight for our freedoms and create things that would make the world and its people free over time (whereas in the last few decades we've been seeing our freedoms taken and controlled by large, fast growing corporations). [1]: https://www.stallman.org/amazon.html https://www.stallman.org/amazon.html