9 ms·

The issue is not at all with his opinion. It is that he expressed it in a horrendously, gratuitously crass and offensive way. Here is a transliteration into hum

by jpadvo 15y ago

The issue is not at all with his opinion. It is that he expressed it in a horrendously, gratuitously crass and offensive way. Here is a transliteration into humane language of what he said: "My heart goes out to Steve Jobs' family in their time of grief. And my heart also goes to the millions of people who looked up to him as an icon and inspiration. But we need to not get so carried away honoring the dead that we forget the damage that Jobs' work had on the Free Software movement. His pioneered the software walled garden, which destroys freedom and choice. And he targeted it at people who would not understand what they were sacrificing by giving up their freedoms. We can only hope that his successors make Apple a more free company, or failing that, are not as effective at spreading it as he was." Wasn't that better? And it communicated substantively the same thing, but without all the name calling and the seeming glee over the death of another human. Disclaimer: I typed this on my Macbook Air. Edit: One more thing to add. Saying "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone" is tripe. Being gone is a euphemism for being dead. The reason we mourn when a loved one dies is precisely because that means they are gone. Maybe RMS sees a subtle distinction between death and gone-ness in his head. But I promise you that people in grief see absolutely no distinction between the death and the loss of the person they mourn.

sliverstorm 15y ago
It's ironic- it would seem to be RMS who is getting carried away. A great man has died, and all RMS can think about is what this means for the Free Software movement? To me, this discredits him more than anything I have ever heard him say. Software is not more important than life. Disclaimer: Actively avoids Apple products
- aaronmorey 15y ago
  I think this is a microcosm of a problem I've seen in the open source area in general... a preference for code over people. Open source software won't take over by being 1.86x faster and using a totally sweet heap sort algorithm. I'm a geek and I find that kind of thing interesting at an intellectual level, but it doesn't make me want to spend an entire Saturday trying to get Linux to recognize my sound card. "Normal" people absolutely don't care and won't put up with the hassle. With Steve gone, there's a taste-shaped hole in the entire technology world that I can't see anyone stepping in and taking over. Until the open source world gets its own Steve Jobs -- someone out there who starts focusing relentlessly on the users (how to make software "just work" and look/feel great at the same time), it's never going to unseat the dominant players (as much as I might want it to).
  - 0x12 15y ago
    > but it doesn't make me want to spend an entire Saturday trying to get Linux to recognize my sound card. Stuff like that is FUD though, linux sound support is pretty good these days and the amount and variety of devices supported dwarfs the best the commercial world has to offer. In general, Linux support of legacy devices is amazing. Newly minted hardware without a factory supported driver is a different kettle of fish but you can't really blame the Linux driver writers for that, they need information to work with and if manufacturers are not going to supply that info it needs to be painstakingly recovered, which is not always possible and almost always incomplete to some extent.
    - rufugee 15y ago
      This. I haven't had to troubleshoot a hardware problem in years, and I use Linux daily and install it quite often (I touch a lot of hardware). Don't subtly degrade something with FUD unless you speak from recent experience.
      - aaronmorey 15y ago
        The open source world will also be better off when everyone stops using the word "FUD". It's a knee jerk term that allows the speaker to ignore criticism as lies. I am speaking from experience. The sound issue happened to me about two years ago. About six months ago I tried dual booting Linux on my MacBook and couldn't get it to shut down without hanging. You're making my point. I (someone who works in the software industry) had a problem with a piece of open source software. If the open source world is going to go mainstream, the reaction can't be "That's FUD." It has to be "That's unacceptable, we need to fix this immediately." Don't do it for me. If I decide the tradeoff of effort vs. benefit is worthwhile, I can eventually resolve the problem myself. Do it for my mom, who just wants the printer to work so she can print handouts for her students. Do it for your grandparents who just want to check their email and look at their grandkid's pictures. Or just tell me I'm an anti-open source propagandist and dismiss me. I've made my decision. Computers are made for people, not people for computers.
        15y ago
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  >Software is not more important than life. // How about freedom? Is freedom from, for example, capitalist overlords more important than life? People give their lives for freedom all the time. >A great man has died, and all RMS can think about is what this means for the Free Software movement? // Meh. I don't see the problem with someone who didn't know Steve Jobs personally simply addressing how a change in leadership of Apple Computers affects him and his causes. Mountains out of mole hills if you ask me.
  - tychobrahe 15y ago
    Ever heard of "blame the game, not the player"? Trying to put all the blame on Steve Jobs' shoulder, right after his death, is horrendous. Steve Jobs wasn't the enemy of freedom RMS paints him as. That he personally wrote letters against DRM on media-stores and against the closed-platform called Flash asking everyone to favor HTML5 made much much difference in those two specific areas than most things Stallman did lately. (Funny, reminds me that that FOSS advocates here on NH are okay with Android prolonging Flash's life and using closed-source software only as a means to gain market share) Granted, he never open sourced the whole operating system, but why would he? To see Apple collapse again while Dell/HP and others strive? What's the point? Then we start all over again? We'll have open-source chips manufactured by 2 or 3 companies? What's the fucking point? Seriously, I'm tired of Stallman's half-assed socialism. It's an offense to me. You don't destroy capitalism by destroying companies, or people. You destroy capitalism by destroying the core of it...
    - tallanvor 15y ago
      I actually agree with Stallman, not because I believe everything has to be FOSS, but because I believe users should have the freedom to make their own decisions about how they use their devices, and that's something that Apple products work hard to remove - case in point, their refusal to allow Flash to run on iOS. They may not want it there and HTML5 may be the better choice in the long run, but they are denying users the option to decide for themselves.
      - 15y ago
forensic 15y ago
>horrendously, gratuitously crass and offensive way. And? It's rms. He's the biggest nerd in the world. Nerds are expected to be horrendously, gratuitously crass, offensive and insensitive of people's emotions. This is like being mad that the sky is blue. Pointless outrage.
- praptak 15y ago
  The point of the linked article, as I understood it, was that "it's just Stallman being Stallman" should no longer be an excuse for tolerating this behaviour. It casts bad light on the free software community as a whole.
  - forensic 15y ago
    I guess you need to specify what you mean by "tolerate" If you're saying it's organizationally foolish to let Stallman be the face of the FSF due to his insensitivity... I can see a good argument there. If you're saying we need to stop "tolerating" nerd insensitivity by condemning them on blogs and refusing to use their software and stuff like that, then I just think that is childish and pointless.
    - praptak 15y ago
      Gosh, I certainly did not mean the latter. I'm ok with Stallman being crude on his own. I am not ok with this behaviour representing the free software movement.
- DanBC 15y ago
  It's not outrage at Stallman's comments, but asking whether someone who is horrendously, gratuitously crass, offensive and insensitive of people's emotions should be "cheerleading" free software. See also RMS's disappointment at the developer busy with a new child - start here (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/36137 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/36137) His inability to understand people is distracting from the aims of FSF.
  - 15y ago
cookiecaper 15y ago
>Maybe RMS sees a subtle distinction between death and gone-ness in his head. But I promise you that people in grief see absolutely no distinction between the death and the loss of the person they mourn. It is not legitimate for the mass of HN to be "in grief" because of Steve Jobs's death. You may be sad, but certainly no grieving period should be necessary for strangers. Stallman was not overtly disrespectful imo, and there's a solid distinction between "gone" and "dead". "Gone" can mean retired just as well as it could mean dead -- the point is that that person is no longer influential in the circles they were affecting.
- 0x12 15y ago
  He could have made that statement when Jobs stepped down but chose to do it after he died, so I'm assuming that he made no such distinction. That said, I do agree that walled gardens are bad but there are more effective ways of delivering that message, to use someones death and name recognition to further your agenda is not in good taste.
  - angus77 15y ago
    When Jobs "stepped down", he remained on the board of directors. He became remarkably less active, but certainly wasn't presented as being "gone".
- pushingbits 15y ago
  >It is not legitimate for the mass of HN to be "in grief" because of Steve Jobs's death. You may be sad, but certainly no grieving period should be necessary for strangers. When was this decided? And by who? Did I miss a memo? I've never owned an Apple product in my life, but the computers I have used, the smartphone I own, the tablet I will eventually get, the world I will live in 20 years from now, probably would not exist if it wasn't for Steve Jobs. The world has lost an exceptional human being, and along with him, we have lost a chunk of the future he would have created if he'd lived longer. So who's deciding how we are to legitimately feel about that?
  - forcefsck 15y ago
rwmj 15y ago
The RMS posting is hardly "horrendously, gratuitously crass and offensive".
- danieldk 15y ago
  No, it is completely distasteful, and representative of actions that caused me to slowly change from being an FSF associate member to believing that FSF is a threat to free software rather than an asset. Of course, RMS is not speaking for the FSF here, but there in recent years there is a history of missteps (Emacs virgins) and childish campaigns (Windows 7 sinds, Bad Vista, etc.) associated with the FSF. It seems that RMS and the FSF (through zealotry) have become disconnect to most of society. Take the Apple Genius Bar DDoSing action of the FSF a few years ago. To the FSF it will probably seem heroic, but to the general public it's just annoying. You needed some help with your iPod, and then there is a bunch of annoying geeks blocking the Genius Bar, making you wait hours rather than minutes, just when you had to pick up your child from school. The next time that person reads about 'free software' or a 'free software operating system' he/she will think back about that bad experience and probably dismiss it. Where is the humanity?
  - rwmj 15y ago
    You've got to be reading a different RMS posting from the one I'm reading. It's certainly not "completely distasteful". As for the rest of your reply, I don't see how it relates to this. For reference, this is the RMS posting I'm reading: http://stallman.org/archives/2011-jul-oct.html#06_October_2011_%28Steve_Jobs%29 http://stallman.org/archives/2011-jul-oct.html#06_October_20...
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
  - jsavimbi 15y ago
    > Where is the humanity? Exactly.
  - vacri 15y ago
gbog 15y ago
> All progress depends on unreasonable men. This is a very bold generalization grounded on nothing. Once we had rational discussions here.
- julian37 15y ago
  GP is presumably referring to George Bernard Shaw's use of the term. "Reasonable people," wrote Shaw, "adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."
jessriedel 15y ago
Mostly off-topic, but... >The reason we mourn when a loved one dies is precisely because that means they are gone. Not true! If I knew my close friend or family member was moving to a remote location such that I'd never see or hear from them again, I'd be sad but it would be a lot less sad than if they died. When someone dies, we don't just mourn the loss of their interactions we us (wouldn't that be a bit selfish?), we mourn the fact that they are aren't experiencing life anymore.
bad_user 15y ago
Wasn't that better? And it communicated substantively the same thing Personally I'm tired of people kissing ass and sucking cock, delivering shit in chocolate coating with a cherry on top. No, that isn't better and it does not communicate the same thing.
Tloewald 15y ago
I think better still would be to say nothing. By completely failing to acknowledge what Jobs did that was positive (even within his own value system) Stallman shows just how clueless he is. To put it another way, Stallman is fine with people being imprisoned in the walled garden of a computer priesthood, so long as the software they don't know how to use is "free".

by jpadvo 15y ago

sliverstorm 15y ago

It's ironic- it would seem to be RMS who is getting carried away. A great man has died, and all RMS can think about is what this means for the Free Software movement? To me, this discredits him more than anything I have ever heard him say. Software is not more important than life. Disclaimer: Actively avoids Apple products

aaronmorey 15y ago
I think this is a microcosm of a problem I've seen in the open source area in general... a preference for code over people. Open source software won't take over by being 1.86x faster and using a totally sweet heap sort algorithm. I'm a geek and I find that kind of thing interesting at an intellectual level, but it doesn't make me want to spend an entire Saturday trying to get Linux to recognize my sound card. "Normal" people absolutely don't care and won't put up with the hassle. With Steve gone, there's a taste-shaped hole in the entire technology world that I can't see anyone stepping in and taking over. Until the open source world gets its own Steve Jobs -- someone out there who starts focusing relentlessly on the users (how to make software "just work" and look/feel great at the same time), it's never going to unseat the dominant players (as much as I might want it to).
- 0x12 15y ago
  > but it doesn't make me want to spend an entire Saturday trying to get Linux to recognize my sound card. Stuff like that is FUD though, linux sound support is pretty good these days and the amount and variety of devices supported dwarfs the best the commercial world has to offer. In general, Linux support of legacy devices is amazing. Newly minted hardware without a factory supported driver is a different kettle of fish but you can't really blame the Linux driver writers for that, they need information to work with and if manufacturers are not going to supply that info it needs to be painstakingly recovered, which is not always possible and almost always incomplete to some extent.
  - rufugee 15y ago
    This. I haven't had to troubleshoot a hardware problem in years, and I use Linux daily and install it quite often (I touch a lot of hardware). Don't subtly degrade something with FUD unless you speak from recent experience.
    - aaronmorey 15y ago
      The open source world will also be better off when everyone stops using the word "FUD". It's a knee jerk term that allows the speaker to ignore criticism as lies. I am speaking from experience. The sound issue happened to me about two years ago. About six months ago I tried dual booting Linux on my MacBook and couldn't get it to shut down without hanging. You're making my point. I (someone who works in the software industry) had a problem with a piece of open source software. If the open source world is going to go mainstream, the reaction can't be "That's FUD." It has to be "That's unacceptable, we need to fix this immediately." Don't do it for me. If I decide the tradeoff of effort vs. benefit is worthwhile, I can eventually resolve the problem myself. Do it for my mom, who just wants the printer to work so she can print handouts for her students. Do it for your grandparents who just want to check their email and look at their grandkid's pictures. Or just tell me I'm an anti-open source propagandist and dismiss me. I've made my decision. Computers are made for people, not people for computers.
      - 15y ago
pbhjpbhj 15y ago
>Software is not more important than life. // How about freedom? Is freedom from, for example, capitalist overlords more important than life? People give their lives for freedom all the time. >A great man has died, and all RMS can think about is what this means for the Free Software movement? // Meh. I don't see the problem with someone who didn't know Steve Jobs personally simply addressing how a change in leadership of Apple Computers affects him and his causes. Mountains out of mole hills if you ask me.
- tychobrahe 15y ago
  Ever heard of "blame the game, not the player"? Trying to put all the blame on Steve Jobs' shoulder, right after his death, is horrendous. Steve Jobs wasn't the enemy of freedom RMS paints him as. That he personally wrote letters against DRM on media-stores and against the closed-platform called Flash asking everyone to favor HTML5 made much much difference in those two specific areas than most things Stallman did lately. (Funny, reminds me that that FOSS advocates here on NH are okay with Android prolonging Flash's life and using closed-source software only as a means to gain market share) Granted, he never open sourced the whole operating system, but why would he? To see Apple collapse again while Dell/HP and others strive? What's the point? Then we start all over again? We'll have open-source chips manufactured by 2 or 3 companies? What's the fucking point? Seriously, I'm tired of Stallman's half-assed socialism. It's an offense to me. You don't destroy capitalism by destroying companies, or people. You destroy capitalism by destroying the core of it...
  - tallanvor 15y ago
    I actually agree with Stallman, not because I believe everything has to be FOSS, but because I believe users should have the freedom to make their own decisions about how they use their devices, and that's something that Apple products work hard to remove - case in point, their refusal to allow Flash to run on iOS. They may not want it there and HTML5 may be the better choice in the long run, but they are denying users the option to decide for themselves.
    - 15y ago

forensic 15y ago

>horrendously, gratuitously crass and offensive way. And? It's rms. He's the biggest nerd in the world. Nerds are expected to be horrendously, gratuitously crass, offensive and insensitive of people's emotions. This is like being mad that the sky is blue. Pointless outrage.

praptak 15y ago
The point of the linked article, as I understood it, was that "it's just Stallman being Stallman" should no longer be an excuse for tolerating this behaviour. It casts bad light on the free software community as a whole.
- forensic 15y ago
  I guess you need to specify what you mean by "tolerate" If you're saying it's organizationally foolish to let Stallman be the face of the FSF due to his insensitivity... I can see a good argument there. If you're saying we need to stop "tolerating" nerd insensitivity by condemning them on blogs and refusing to use their software and stuff like that, then I just think that is childish and pointless.
  - praptak 15y ago
    Gosh, I certainly did not mean the latter. I'm ok with Stallman being crude on his own. I am not ok with this behaviour representing the free software movement.
DanBC 15y ago
It's not outrage at Stallman's comments, but asking whether someone who is horrendously, gratuitously crass, offensive and insensitive of people's emotions should be "cheerleading" free software. See also RMS's disappointment at the developer busy with a new child - start here (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/36137 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/36137) His inability to understand people is distracting from the aims of FSF.
- 15y ago

cookiecaper 15y ago

>Maybe RMS sees a subtle distinction between death and gone-ness in his head. But I promise you that people in grief see absolutely no distinction between the death and the loss of the person they mourn. It is not legitimate for the mass of HN to be "in grief" because of Steve Jobs's death. You may be sad, but certainly no grieving period should be necessary for strangers. Stallman was not overtly disrespectful imo, and there's a solid distinction between "gone" and "dead". "Gone" can mean retired just as well as it could mean dead -- the point is that that person is no longer influential in the circles they were affecting.

0x12 15y ago
He could have made that statement when Jobs stepped down but chose to do it after he died, so I'm assuming that he made no such distinction. That said, I do agree that walled gardens are bad but there are more effective ways of delivering that message, to use someones death and name recognition to further your agenda is not in good taste.
- angus77 15y ago
  When Jobs "stepped down", he remained on the board of directors. He became remarkably less active, but certainly wasn't presented as being "gone".
pushingbits 15y ago
>It is not legitimate for the mass of HN to be "in grief" because of Steve Jobs's death. You may be sad, but certainly no grieving period should be necessary for strangers. When was this decided? And by who? Did I miss a memo? I've never owned an Apple product in my life, but the computers I have used, the smartphone I own, the tablet I will eventually get, the world I will live in 20 years from now, probably would not exist if it wasn't for Steve Jobs. The world has lost an exceptional human being, and along with him, we have lost a chunk of the future he would have created if he'd lived longer. So who's deciding how we are to legitimately feel about that?
- forcefsck 15y ago

rwmj 15y ago

The RMS posting is hardly "horrendously, gratuitously crass and offensive".

danieldk 15y ago
No, it is completely distasteful, and representative of actions that caused me to slowly change from being an FSF associate member to believing that FSF is a threat to free software rather than an asset. Of course, RMS is not speaking for the FSF here, but there in recent years there is a history of missteps (Emacs virgins) and childish campaigns (Windows 7 sinds, Bad Vista, etc.) associated with the FSF. It seems that RMS and the FSF (through zealotry) have become disconnect to most of society. Take the Apple Genius Bar DDoSing action of the FSF a few years ago. To the FSF it will probably seem heroic, but to the general public it's just annoying. You needed some help with your iPod, and then there is a bunch of annoying geeks blocking the Genius Bar, making you wait hours rather than minutes, just when you had to pick up your child from school. The next time that person reads about 'free software' or a 'free software operating system' he/she will think back about that bad experience and probably dismiss it. Where is the humanity?
- rwmj 15y ago
  You've got to be reading a different RMS posting from the one I'm reading. It's certainly not "completely distasteful". As for the rest of your reply, I don't see how it relates to this. For reference, this is the RMS posting I'm reading: http://stallman.org/archives/2011-jul-oct.html#06_October_2011_%28Steve_Jobs%29 http://stallman.org/archives/2011-jul-oct.html#06_October_20...
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- jsavimbi 15y ago
  > Where is the humanity? Exactly.
- vacri 15y ago

gbog 15y ago

> All progress depends on unreasonable men. This is a very bold generalization grounded on nothing. Once we had rational discussions here.

julian37 15y ago
GP is presumably referring to George Bernard Shaw's use of the term. "Reasonable people," wrote Shaw, "adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

jessriedel 15y ago

Mostly off-topic, but... >The reason we mourn when a loved one dies is precisely because that means they are gone. Not true! If I knew my close friend or family member was moving to a remote location such that I'd never see or hear from them again, I'd be sad but it would be a lot less sad than if they died. When someone dies, we don't just mourn the loss of their interactions we us (wouldn't that be a bit selfish?), we mourn the fact that they are aren't experiencing life anymore.

bad_user 15y ago

Wasn't that better? And it communicated substantively the same thing Personally I'm tired of people kissing ass and sucking cock, delivering shit in chocolate coating with a cherry on top. No, that isn't better and it does not communicate the same thing.

Tloewald 15y ago

I think better still would be to say nothing. By completely failing to acknowledge what Jobs did that was positive (even within his own value system) Stallman shows just how clueless he is. To put it another way, Stallman is fine with people being imprisoned in the walled garden of a computer priesthood, so long as the software they don't know how to use is "free".