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Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
- tzs 16y ago"iGroan"? "iBad"?
- iamjustlooking 16y agoSadly no Micro$oft though.
- _pi 16y agoI saw him speak, while I agree with some point of his argument, and disagree with others, and think that some points of his argument aren't fully developed and too clear cut. The worst part about it was hearing those stupid names.
- swilliams 16y agoI think names like that (and Digital Restrictions Management and all the others) just undermine the seriousness of their position. They sound like the playground taunts of children.
- ynniv 16y agoI'm not fond of the "iGroan", but Digital Restrictions Management is a great clarification of what the term means.
- RodgerTheGreat 16y agoIn the term "Digital Rights Management", the "Rights" refer to the rights of the copyright owner, not the rights of a consumer licensee. It's a lot like "Trusted Computing"- a surface reading might suggest it means the computer is "trustworthy" or dependable to the user, while it actually refers to a "Trusted System" in a security engineering sense.
- jsz0 16y agoGNU/Grow Up hasn't reached a stable milestone yet. Someday.
- cheald 16y agoYup. That was the point that I shrugged and closed the article. The guy has done an awful lot for OSS as we know it, but it's really difficult to take him seriously when he talks like a 14 year-old. Why not just throw in a Micro$oft and Crapple in there while we're at it?
- openfly 16y agoChrist, what an asshole. You know, still not surprised rms has the honor of being the first person to start a flamewar on the LKML.
- benofsky 16y agoIn response to software which requires a lot of development time to create, specifically tax software or games, RMS says: > The reason I don't use nonfree software is that it would take away my freedom. I don't want to let that happen. So I don't consider installing nonfree program, even as an possible option. I treat them as poison. I hope that you will too. This man lives in an imaginary world where no one has to make any money (or if they do, they are evil) or deserves to live a comfortable lifestyle by receiving monetary rewards for good and hard work. Frankly, I believe that this tone and rhetoric devalues some of the great things he has done. EDIT: clarification where I say (or if they do) I mean if they want to. EDIT 2: I don't understand why I'm being downvoted for expressing my opinion...
- ajscherer 16y agoIt doesn't look like he said nobody should make any money. He said that nobody should install non-free software, which if everyone did as RMS wanted (they won't) would imply that one couldn't make money selling non-free software. Why is it that so many people believe they have a God-given right to make money by doing a certain activity? I see this same thinking all the time in arguments about the future of newspapers. Programmers are generally smart people. I'm sure most of them could find a way to make money if everyone stopped buying proprietary software.
- logic 16y agoYou have a right to try to start a business around a given activity. You do not have the right to succeed.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ZeroGravitas 16y agoYou might want to read question 4, where his answer says the exact opposite of what you are claiming, and points to this article for further information: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
- milesf 16y agoI lost patience with RMS years ago. The problem with Free Software is a marketing problem. If you have to keep explaining things over and over again, saying "Free as in Freedom", or trying to get GNU/Linux to take hold instead of just Linux, you're doing it wrong. Richard is a tremendous hacker, but he's a lousy salesman. I'm not a big fan of salespeople in general, but guys like DHH have proved that it's not enough to be a great hacker if you want your code and ideas to flourish. You need to understand that marketing really does matter. Glad to hear he's lightened up a bit over the years, though. Maybe GNU will finally see a rebranding. GNU is such an ugly logo.
- tjr 16y agoGNU is such an ugly logo. A few years ago I asked Duane Bibby to do some artwork for The GNU C Reference Manual. I rather like his whimsical approach on the gnu... http://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/gnu-db-1.jpg http://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/gnu-db-1.jpg
- celoyd 16y agoWhimsical line art of the ugly, hairy wildebeest. Dot dot dot. If GNU wants to brand itself to anyone other than hardcore hackers, it’s probably going to need the kind of logo that hardcore hackers will complain is generic and corporate-looking. The 1975–era homebrew esthetic is exactly the kind of surface feature that people dismiss RMS for. (Not that he’d necessarily be super popular even if he were a charismatic Lawrence Lessig type, but it couldn’t hurt.)
- Jach 16y agoI don't consider myself a hardcore hacker, but I certainly enjoy the GNU (along with Tux) far more than a frikkin Window or an Apple. Changing the name/logo would be a step in the wrong direction. I wasn't aware that GNU tools had a marketing problem, since they're all over the place, even in business worlds. Leave the marketing to the distros and programmer employees.
- 16y ago
- gaius 16y agoI decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people A $1M grant from the MacArthur foundation and another $1M from the Takeda foundation tends to skew one's view of economics somewhat.
- gabrielroth 16y agoHe got less than a quarter of that from MacArthur (http://tech.mit.edu/V110/N30/rms.30n.html http://tech.mit.edu/V110/N30/rms.30n.html) and not quite a million from Takeda either (http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N59/59stallman.59n.html http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N59/59stallman.59n.html).
- whyenot 16y agoHe had no permanent residence, no salary, and lived out of his office at MIT for years before he got either of those awards.
- tjr 16y agoNo salary, but he used to do software consulting, working just enough to get the money he needed. (I vaguely recall he worked about two months out of the year as a paid consultant?)
- gaius 16y agoOut of lifestyle choice. You trying living in your employers office and see how long before the call the cops! Note also in that article he talks about how much he likes to travel, and slates BP a paragraph later. Hypocrite, much?
- shadowfox 16y agoMaybe he walks all the way ;)
- adulau 16y agoHe got a genius grant ($240,000) from MacArthur foundation and the grant from Takeda was $830,000. [1] http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N59/59stallman.59n.html http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N59/59stallman.59n.html
- logic 16y agoI expect most responses here will be pretty negative, and I honestly can't defend his position because our politics differ so greatly (and his stance spins directly out of those philosophical roots). Nor can I forgive his personal attitude and general arrogance over the years, although it has softened significantly of late. But I'll give the man a grudging amount of respect: he hasn't budged one inch on his position toward "freedom to tinker" as it relates to software in the entire time I've been aware of his work. And, more than that, he walks the walk; he won't urge anyone to do something or take on a position that he's not willing to jump into wholeheartedly himself. He's a fundamentalist, but any successful movement needs people with "clarity of purpose". He has it in spades, allowing many of the rest of us to be rather more pragmatic.
- milesf 16y agoStallman is like a goalpost. He's as far over to one side as you can be. We need people like him since we all tend to measure our views and beliefs in reference to others. I just wouldn't want to hang out with the guy. I say "Linux" and buy proprietary software. I'm sure he wouldn't want to hang with me either, but I do respect him.
- Flemlord 16y agoI read all of his comments in a Dwight Schrute voice.
- jballanc 16y agoAh RMS, same fundamentalist as always! One thing I would suggest, for those not familiar with RMS's history, is to take a moment to read the Wikipedia page on Lisp Machines. Specifically, this passage: Symbolics still had the major advantage that while 3 or 4 of the AI Lab hackers had gone to work for Greenblatt, a solid 14 other hackers had signed onto Symbolics. There were two AI Lab people who did not get hired by either: Richard Stallman and Marvin Minsky. Stallman, however, blamed Symbolics for the decline of the hacker community that had centered around the AI lab. For two years, from 1982 to the end of 1983, Stallman worked by himself to clone the output of the Symbolics programmers, with the aim of preventing them from gaining a monopoly on the lab's computers - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine I find, knowing a bit of the backstory, that RMS is a more sympathetic character. Honestly, I can't say that, put in the same position, I might not have arrived at the same world view he did.
- protomyth 16y agoThe counterpoint: http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about...
- tjr 16y agoAnd some counter-counterpoint: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html#foot-3 http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html#foot-3
- _delirium 16y agoIt also makes his grumpiness a bit less of an outlier to consider him in that context. If you run into 60s/70s-era AI/Lisp-hacker types at AI conferences, they're usually pretty grumpy, but also quite intelligent, so they get away with their grumpiness and not-very-polite negative questions (often complete with Stallman-style interruption of people in the middle of a talk to correct some minor point). (Not true of everyone, of course.)
- tptacek 16y agoHere is someone who really, really needs to read Saul Alinsky: 15. MendaSpain: Hi Richard. I love all GPL software, but I have a dilemma: I'm writing a program which needs a lot of time to be coded but at the same time it's really easy to be used. I could license it as GPL and wait for donations, but from other people's experience just almost nobody make donations to free software projects. Support is not necessary because as I've said before, it's a really easy to use software and nobody would pay for a 3 page manual. For "big" software it's easy to get money using any GNU license, but for "little" software the only option I see is selling it using the Apple App Store approach. What can I do in this case? RMS: You have a choice between deserving a reward and not getting a material reward, and getting one but not deserving it. RMS: I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people. I hope you will do the same, because that way your program will be a contribution to society instead of a social problem. Yikes.
- angusgr 16y agoI'm not sure I follow. Any chance you could elaborate at all?
- jseliger 16y agoSaul Alinsky wrote a number of books about community organizing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals , including Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals. Community organizing is about bringing people in communities together and helping them achieve some kind of goal; in the case of Alinsky, he was envisioning physical communities that needed things like coops, particular kinds of government services, and the like. One of his major principles is that the community organizer has to help people see why it's in their best interest to organize or make change. According to Alinsky, arguing that people should agitate and work for change because of the common good or because the change is the right thing simply doesn't work. I believe the OP is saying that Stallman isn't doing a great job of incorporating that aspect of Alinsky's principles and in doing so is setting back the free software movement. EDIT: I just read a little further down in the thread and saw this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1559283 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1559283 : "The problem with Free Software is a marketing problem." That's similar to an Alinsky comment, although in different language: if you can't "market" the change you're trying to encourage by making people realize why it benefits them, you're not going to make that change happen.
- akkartik 16y agoHis opinions that were new to me: "I value freedom more than technical progress." "We need to make it so hard to move production from one country to another that each company will be stuck in one country, so that country will be able to regulate it.
- tomjen3 16y agoThats interesting. As far as I recall (and I used to read his website everyday, before PG slapped me with his "how to create wealth" essay and showed me how wrong that world-view was) Stallman has always been a leftist, never liked corporations, and always been interested in human rights. He may have refined his position over the years, but it hasn't changed much.
- bosch 16y agoI don't care what this guy has to say anymore. After he pulled his sock off, picked his foot and ate whatever the fuck it was he picked off, all in front of what appears to be a lecture class sized audience - I lost all respect for the guy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ No wonder computer people have a brutal rep for social interaction. WTF.
- okmjuhb 16y agoI wonder how many Hacker Newsers really remember what it was like back before the GPL and the FSF. The availability of a high-quality open source unix system is pretty much the defining quality of modern computing, and it took us out of the dark ages of a half dozen mutually incompatible proprietary OSs, compilers, and commandline utility packages (sometimes broken - with fixes impossible). Stallman's contribution is much greater than that of cheerleader or discussion framer - the ecosystem that exists in large part because of him is, I suspect, tremendously important in the day to day lives of many of the people reading this.
- protomyth 16y agoGiving the GPL sole credit is a little bit of a stretch, BSD / MIT / Apache licensed projects have made major contributions to the current ecosystem.
- evgen 16y agoI wasn't really online _before_ GNU/FSF, but I was around early enough to remember ordering GCC on 9-track magtape from the FSF to help support them back in the day. I was also pulling down great kit from mit (like X), project athena (kerberos, etc), and free code and utilities from hackers around the world (many that were later "embraced and extended" by GNU/FSF.) Maybe working in a university computing center gave me a distorted view of the world at the time, but I am reasonably certain that we would have gotten along just fine without RMS. Some things might have taken longer to appear or converge on a standard, but other things might also have moved a lot faster if the BSD license was the dominant format within the open source movement.
- rbanffy 16y agoFor CAD, I would suggest investigating BRL-CAD. And a hybrid between a Unix box and a Lisp machine would be awesome. Too bad GNU didn't turn out that way. edit: apparently, BRL-CAD has no teapotahedron primitive: http://brlcad.org/gallery/s/diagrams/primitives.png.html http://brlcad.org/gallery/s/diagrams/primitives.png.html Someone must add it.
- Aaronontheweb 16y ago"I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people." Thank God Stallman helped all of those sick kids with Malaria in Africa with by giving them GIMP and GCC. Way better than the billions of dollars and thousands of vaccinations Bill and Melinda Gates gave to them. In all seriousness, if we're going to argue the ethics of charging for software,at the end of the day who has done more good? Bill Gates who made himself rich, gave thousands of people jobs, created products that made the lives of millions of other people easier (all snarking about Windows and Office aside, they ultimately made computing more accessible to everyone), and has created the world's most well-funded charity which actually goes out and does good, like giving vaccinations to sick kids around the planet. When I compare the more calculus of capitalism and propreitary software against Stallman's dogmatism, it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good.
- kiba 16y agoWhen I compare the more calculus of capitalism and propreitary software against Stallman's dogmatism, it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good. Free software have nothing to do much with capitalism. Stallman probably agree with the idea of competition improving life. What he disagree with is what he called combat.(Or what I least remember from reading one of his essay) Rather than improve over your competitors and sell great stuff to customers, you seek to annihilate your competitors by unethical means and gain control over your customers.
- rick888 16y ago"Free software have nothing to do much with capitalism." So why does the GPL make it so difficult to make any kind of money. Many of the supporters are also against any and all forms of commercial software. "What he disagree with is what he called combat.(Or what I least remember from reading one of his essay) Rather than improve over your competitors and sell great stuff to customers, you seek to annihilate your competitors by unethical means and gain control over your customers." His answer to this is to force everybody to the same level (IE: as soon as a company improves their software, all competitors should get those improvements).
- koeselitz 16y agoSomebody get that guy a parrot, stat.
- dedward 16y agoIf he said anything different, everyone would be chastizing him for flip-flopping - but when he stands his ground - we need to get him a parrot? At least he's consistent.
- zerohp 16y agoThe comment was referring to Stallman's statement that if he did not travel and could care for a pet, he would get a parrot. It was not derogatory.
- zacharypinter 16y agoYou seem to be implying that the parent comment was an insult. RMS said he wanted a parrot: > No. I spend most of my time travelling, so I could not have any pets. > If it were possible, I would like to have a friendly parrot.
- dasil003 16y agoHats off to Richard Stallman. Whatever your views on software—and by default most people will disagree with him on many points—his contributions to the software world are undeniable. There are a lot of fundamentalists out there, and 99% of the time they scare the shit out of me because of what their unchecked advocacy could ultimately lead to. Stallman's fundamentalism on the other hand, does not seem likely to ever lead to any detrimental effect on society. In other words, it's not just about respecting Stallman's conviction, but also acknowledging that his convictions are well-placed, even though my lifestyle would never allow me to share his position per se.
- smallblacksun 16y agoHis anti-business views, if widely adopted, would lead to a massive economic meltdown.
- alanh 16y agoThere is a formatting issue in #12. It becomes ambiguous what parts of that section are RMS and which are the question-asker.
- sandee 16y agoTo all those, who find RMS weird and eccentric : PG > Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. ... We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html RMS was the first to venture into the new world of OpenSource , software freedom .. and so he has all the traits of early explorer.
- tome 16y agoFWIW, RMS would definitely not say "Open Source", he'd say "Free Software".
- tmsh 16y agoall this time i never understood what FSF was about really. in some ways, the guy is right. annoyingly, stubbornly, horribly-marketedly right. to get people to really understand how freedom to modify software is important the way freedom of speech is important (i.e., it just saves time for everyone in the long run. take the gates-has-done-more-good-for-kids-in-africa argument. the counter argument is that those kids wouldn't have malaria if something more akin to the freedom to modify software were believed by more people. i.e., we did not excuse exploitation and we safeguarded against it heavily. against de beers. against remnants of colonial governments. against rebel armies. against anyone who takes advantage of other people.) -- anyway, to get people to see why it's important (and it took me -- what -- two decades of interaction with software as a user and now a developer?) -- this may sound lame, but i think there is a great character out there that could be part of some novel or screenplay. it would be like sue sylvester as a team leader / tech lead. this incredibly uncompromising hardass who for some reason insists on free software. total jerk to new hires. rejects code left and right, almost arbitrarily (i'm reminded of the whole xemacs situation, but i suppose that's different.) but then one day you'd have the sue sylvester's sister episode or whatever. maybe some unexpected vulnerable conversation with our once brow-beaten, junior-developer protagonist. and the glorious recognition scene would hit you and you'd realize -- f-, in some ways that dude is right.
- DaniFong 16y agoMost of life consists in trading one kind of freedom for another. What is striking about RMS is that in his defense of software freedom he sacrifices other freedoms of life that you and I enjoy.
- JulianMorrison 16y agoOn a modern Linux system, Gnu is the command line userland, one compiler (among many, and not the dominant one for work if you're a Java shop), and Emacs. And that's it. Not X, not really Gnome, not KDE at all, not the polish put on by Ubuntu etc, and not most of the OS underpinnings either nowadays (dbus, hal, udev, upstart, dpkg, network-manager...). Tell me again, why he should get the Gnu/... in front of the kernel name?
- jff 16y agoThank you! I think many of the more recent Linux users will spend the entire day without once using a GNU tool, except indirectly. And, of course, you could say the kernel and most of the tools were compiled with GCC, but that's not something to be proud of--that just means Linux is full of GCC-idiocy and potentially breaks every time there's a minor upgrade in GCC.
- JulianMorrison 16y agoAlso GCC's days as the dominant C compiler may be numbered - clang is catching up, and they are even trying to get it to compile the Linux kernel http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=4068 http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=4068
- avar 16y agoThis doesn't really address your main point, but GNOME is part of the GNU project. Which means that most of the both the GUI and command-line UI on e.g. Ubuntu is in fact GNU software. But obviously less so under KDE.
- JulianMorrison 16y agoGnu brands it, the Gnome developers build it, and seemingly Red Hat mostly pays for it. This is what I meant by "not really".
- avar 16y agoWell, can you name some examples of programs you think GNU really maintains? It has always been an umbrella project, they haven't employed any developers for over a decade now. While Emacs, GCC and coreutils are more historically "GNU" than say GNOME the vast majority of GNU projects almost from the very beginning has been donated code or projects that otherwise fell under the GNU umbrella.
- jhuckestein 16y agoThis makes me a little sad, maybe I even pity RMS. He is the most vigorous defender of a great cause but has also sacrificed his life for that cause. Some people say he softened up over the years, but sometimes it appears to me as if he were just growing wary. In another interview that was on HN a while back he said something along the lines of "It is not great, but this is the life I have chosen for me and I have to live it this way". Am I the only one who feels that way? Maybe it's just because I'm listening to the Schindler's List theme ...
- pradocchia 16y agoI must be showing my age but I can't believe the animosity displayed by some here towards RMS. He's the archetypal "stubborn man", and anyone who uses computers today is in his debt.
- 10ren 16y agoAbout the lisp in unix question (#3): ocaml has struck me as lisp +c, because it's functional + mind-blowing performance. I'm not experienced in ocaml, it's just that when I tried it, it was that fast. I don't know if it has the homoiconism of lisp. It is statically typed, which is a pain (the type inference requires methods like "print_string" - perhaps these are rare if you code in ocaml idioms). I'm very glad to see him looking happy. Love his geek answer to "what's your favourite movie?". Why don't normal people react better to answers like that? Perhaps the love for him is because, for anyone who is even the least little bit weird perhaps in secret, Stallman is a shining beacon of weirdness. More power to him!
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoI have to admit I've always considered RMS somewhat of a freak (but one who has done some amount of good in this world). However, I have now lost all respect for him for making non-free software a human rights violation. EDIT: Grammar
- Maro 16y agoI spoke to Richard Stallman after an FSF talk some years ago. He has no manners and is a rude.
- igravious 16y agohacker.
- loewenskind 16y ago>but I am sure that if you try, you can stretch your taste for games so that you will enjoy the free games that we have developed. This is a terrible way to sell. You're going to have a hard time convincing people that the only way to be "morally acceptable" (in the eyes of someone they don't even know, no less) is to take a step back in most of your computing experience. He would have had an easier time getting fat kids to eat their spinach.
- mseebach 16y agoHis answer regarding games show the bounds of his philosophy. I don't know whether our community will make a "high end video game" which is free software, but I am sure that if you try, you can stretch your taste for games so that you will enjoy the free games that we have developed. The asker wants a high end video game, and is prepared to pay for it and accept non-freedom. RMSs position is basically "you're wrong for wanting that which doesn't fit into my dogmatic world view". I mean, his Hollywood-answer is coherent (don't give money to Hollywood, they spend that money to actively destroy your freedom), but this is declaring bankruptcy on his philosophy. His "iGroan/iBad" and "Billionaire Polluters" puns doesn't make him sound less like a 12-year old. Does he also spell Microsoft with a $?
- filosofo 16y agoI have a great amount of respect for Richard Stallman, but I don't understand how he reconciles his concerns about a large "surveillance state" (#24) with his insistence that governments take away enough power from companies to make them "squeal." (#17) Doesn't one work against the other? In other words, a government with enough power to make citizens' organizations squeal by practical necessity risks becoming a "surveillance state."
- Semiapies 16y agoIt's old hat to note how carpenters don't get tribal about their preferred brands of hammers and whatnot. As much as I like GNU, free software, and open source, I can't help thinking that carpenters also don't construct fervent ideology about hammers, either.
- aaronz3 16y agoWow. I've never really read much about Stallman in the past, but he really comes across as an arrogant jackass in most of those answers.