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There is being direct and then there is speaking like an edgy teenager for entirety of your adult life. It's so difficult to take Stallman seriously when he mak
by psv1 7y ago
There is being direct and then there is speaking like an edgy teenager for entirety of your adult life. It's so difficult to take Stallman seriously when he makes these extreme generalisations.
- tsukurimashou 7y agoI think he really just speaks his mind, I'm not sure he is trying to be edgy or anything, he always had quite radical ideas and positions. I mean people have been calling him a lunatic for years, he has been fighting for free software and warning people about proprietary software and the obvious risks it carries. Despite being proven right about quite a lot he warned about, people views never really changed about him.
- ezkl 7y agoWhat exactly do you consider radical about his position in this instance?
- ac29 7y agoRadical might not be my choice of words, but he's got a certain type of ideological purity around free software that's definitely on the extreme end. Here's a paraphrased version of what he's saying: "GitHub [...] has done terrible harm to our community. GitHub was so bad for free software, all along[.]" Now, if you were to define "our community" as the open source community, this would be laughable - very few people would argue that open source software has been terribly harmed by GitHub (on the contrary, the rise of GitHub has seen many projects flourish). I don't necessarily think he means the wider open source community, though - he's referring to his own Stallman flavor of free software.
- ezkl 7y agoI absolutely agree. His lack of self-awareness and seeming inability to see the generally positive aspects of the growth of open source just doesn't sound radical to me. Quite the opposite in fact.
- tsukurimashou 7y agoSorry I said radical because we use the same word in french but the meaning is probably a bit different, I should have said perhaps extreme or very opinionated? I wanted to say that he cares very deeply about free software and the whole philosophy of it, which can make him appear as "radical" to some people. I hope I was able to clarify.
- Kovah 7y agoI can second this. While there are a lot of developers out there who respectfully and objectively push free software forward, Stallman looks more like a maniac preacher to me. His extreme views and statements are more annoying for me, than helpful. If Free Software was a religion like Christianity, Stallman would probably be called an extremist preacher.
- de_watcher 7y agoI think that it's just because of the mailing list formatting. It would look very reasonable on Twitter or Reddit. (of course he doesn't use that)