7 ms·

I met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the

I met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. He had printed copies of man pages printed and stapled together with covers laid out in front of him. I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and just said "so are you going to buy something?" and motioned toward the booklets. I didn't need a printed copy of the `sed` man page so I shrugged and he seemed quite annoyed, turned to his assistant with a notebook computer and started dictating something to them, as almost to make it clear that our interaction was over. I'm not sure what the point of posting this is, but that's my RMS story - it was my first "never meet your heroes" moment, I guess.

Longlius 10mo ago
I feel like rms just doesn't like human interaction generally. I've noticed that a lot of visionaries are that way.
- tjr 10mo ago
  I've worked with RMS a good bit over the past few decades, and, in my interactions with him, he has always come across kind, helpful, and professional.
- wahnfrieden 10mo ago
  [flagged]
BobbyTables2 10mo ago
Did he print those out on a printer with closed source software? (;->
- iberator 10mo ago
  Why? Nroff/troff is literally designed to be printed with CUPS or Postscript etc etc etc You can also literally cat > /dev/printer
  - jagged-chisel 10mo ago
    Don’t forget the firmware
    - smsm42 10mo ago
      If there's a printer with OSS firmware, Stallman likely owns it.
dotancohen 10mo ago
For what it's worth, I've never met the guy but I wrote to him once regarding the image of free software that people who are selling unsupported LibreOffice CDs are causing. He was willing to civilly discuss and listen to a different point of view. We never reached agreement, but I felt that so long as an interesting twist on something dear to him is being discussed, he is patient for discourse.
- agumonkey 10mo ago
  Could also be a different psychological path in person and through text. I know I behave much more anxiously irl and I might act colder than my personality can be.
kh_hk 10mo ago
YMMV I guess, he was cool with signing my laptop at FOSDEM in 2013 and even exchanged a couple of jokes. Humans be humans.
khannn 10mo ago
You sucked up to an autist, what did you think was going to happen? That's like trying to use Disney Dollars at Universal.
- mrweasel 10mo ago
  To some people, like myself, it has only in later years become apparent that RMS is autistic. In the late 90s, early 2000s is when I became aware of Stallman and his work on GNU and FSF. All that was pretty much always in form of writing and articles. Only semi-direct interaction was when a friend of mine invited him to talk at the local LUG, which he refused, if it wasn't change to GNU/Linux User Group, he was told "NO" and that was it. He always came across as difficult, but only in later years have many of us become aware that he might actually have a diagnoses of some form, until then he was just labeled at "difficult".
  - collingreen 10mo ago
    This is a really important perspective to remember in all our daily lives but also when motivated politicians say things like "autism epidemic". I guess there might be an equivalent decline in people labeled as difficult? If anyone is going to support policy for our fellow humans spend an extra moment making sure to both have empathy and make sure we're comparing apples to apples.
jll29 10mo ago
I met RMS at a lunch in his honor at an Edinburgh vegetarian restaurant with very high ranking scholars/academics present, after an invited talk of his. Everyone was talking, eating, drinking and having a good time, whereas he was sitting at the head of the table doing email on his ThinkPad (yes, in text mode). So I walked up, I introduced myself and asked a question about the freedom of _data_ versus the freedom of _software_, and without looking up to me he said "I don't do smalltalk". So I got back to my seat and told my "story" to my immediate neighbors, who were keen to learn what he'd said. (He is much more constructive by email.)
- kirubakaran 10mo ago
  Ha I finally got it once I realized it's not about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk
  - prmoustache 10mo ago
    I am pretty sure his choice of words was a conscious decision to do the pun.
- andai 10mo ago
  Sounds like you stumped him ;)
- PaulRobinson 10mo ago
  I put him up for the night on my sofa once. When you do this, you get his "rider". Google it, it's real, it's infamous for the "don't buy me a parrot" section. Anyway, in that, he makes clear that if people at dinner are not interested in talking about free software, he's going to pull out his laptop and get on with his work relating to free software. He doesn't care about fancy food, drinks, etc. - he wants to raise money for free software, and work on free software. He did this in a restaurant when three others of us were chatting about something else, and we all just accepted that's what he does, and that's him. It was fine. If you're not familiar with him or this, then it's going to be a weird experience. He also struggles with social interactions in my limited experience, particularly when it's a "fan boy" interaction. I've seen him not being super nice to other people who were trying to have a conversation with him, not because he's not a nice person (I found him quite personable one on one), but it seems to me that he struggles to know how to behave around people who don't know how to just talk to him about things he wants to talk about. I once saw him in the audience of a conference with quite a notable set of speakers [0], and I can't remember who it was who he started hectoring in the Q&A (I mean, look at the speaker list, whoever it was, it's somebody you've probably heard of), but he just diverted it into a little lesson about free software for the speaker and everyone else listening. It's the only thing he cares about talking about. It's either a super-power focus, or really annoying. I personally think at this point you just either need to meet him where he is, or avoid him if you don't want to. He's not going to change. I'm glad I met him, I'm glad he does what he does, I know he's a little spikier than others around him and I'm OK with that. I also know plenty of people who never want to speak to him ever again and think free software needs a new figurehead. [0] https://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/Turing100/www.turing100.manchester.ac.uk/programme/programme.html https://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/Turing100/www.turing100...
nkrisc 10mo ago
Some people don’t want to be your hero. Until you meet them, you can pretend they do want to be.
RealCodingOtaku 10mo ago
Unsure why this is a reply to the OP, the only thing common is RMS and nothing else. But, RMS is known to be socially awkward, the same goes for many autistic individuals. It's just that he doesn't mask and comes out as “rude”. If send an e-mail, he will usually take his time to write down a succinct response.
- tedggh 10mo ago
  I know a few autistic people including one of my nephews. They are different in some ways particularly when they are very young and are still struggling with expressing their emotions. But none of them are arrogant and disrespectful. I think you can be autistic and also a jerk, one doesn’t justify the other.
  - dijit 10mo ago
    I'm going to be rude now, but I don't mean it to be taken that way. "I know a guy with a leg missing, and he can still run, so clearly someone who has lost their legs is able". I have had the discussion a bunch of times, I'm beginning to think that nobody other than me has spent a significant amount of time with severely autistic people. Yes, some autistic people can mask quite well, and, some are mild cases. But the crucial issue that most autistic people have is: they don't even become aware that they're being rude unless they spend active effort in first identifying, then understanding, then trying to fix it. I'll tell you something else too: most people are uncomfortable with criticism, it makes them defensive and clam up. If you make someone defensive, enough times, then the situation becomes infected and very emotionally charged. Now, imagine you have an illness that prevents you from processing your emotions properly, and the whole world is unkind to you, and you can't really understand why, but people call you rude. It takes a lot of bravery and integrity to really reflect on that soberly. Please, I implore you all to stop pretending you understand autism because you know someone- or a bunch of self diagnosed people, I keep seeing it[0], autistic people have great difficulty controlling how they're perceived, that's the whole issue. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37200502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37200502
    - 10mo ago
andai 10mo ago
Dang, until I read your story I thought he was a totally normal guy!
seec 10mo ago
[flagged]
- collingreen 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - seec 10mo ago
    [flagged]
- tehjoker 10mo ago
  I don't think Stallman is a communist. I'm a communist and initially I looked into it to learn more, but it's just a kind of techno-anarchism. The thing he misses is the thing that many (not all) anarchists miss: that there is a larger centralizing logic to capitalism that can't be resisted by small scale decentralized efforts and legal maneuvers. Rather, he does recognize the centralizing logic (the reason d'etre behind the GPL!) but I think it's become clear at this point that the general course of the evolution of the landscape has favored capitalist interests even though free and open source software has had a significant (and in many cases quite favorable) impact. Free software gives people part of the means of production. In the 1980s/early-1990s model where personal computers were common but most software was run locally, it was an effective challenge to corporate interests, but since the evolution of robust networks and remotely processed software, it has ceased to be nearly as effective. However, it's important to note that if free software ever truly challenged industrial interests, they would just get the laws changed to prevent it from restricting them in any real way using some bizarre legal maneuver. As it is, it is tolerable and produces useful products corporations can use for free. That's what it means to live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
  - seec 10mo ago
    Potato, potahto. I mean, I appreciate you putting in the effort to argue about precise categorization, but it is not terribly relevant to my perspective. The fact is that he is just one more type of asshole who spends most of his time arguing about other people needing to work for free or requiring utopian collectivization of the work (process, output, etc.). The details are not essential because the idea is still the same: preferring the nebulous idea of collective freedom against individual freedom (and this includes moral corporations). There is no centralizing characteristic to capitalism. It is, in fact, exactly the contrary and the main reason that what we call “capitalism” is the de facto system of exchange ever since humans evolved past primitive needs. Capitalism relies on self-interest to function, and there is no central entity. One could argue about the government and the money supply control as a central entity, but it's actually not a requirement, just a convenience. If government money becomes untrustworthy, you just switch to using something else as a medium of exchange (often other moneys or precious metals). On the other hand, communism absolutely requires centralization and violence/coercion to force people to comply. I have no idea how you can jump to the conclusion that capitalism is centralizing when it's absolutely the reverse. As for the free software and the parallel to possessing the means of production in communism, it is very interesting because it basically disproves the whole theory without much effort. Software development is a field where the capital requirements to get started are extremely low, yet hardly any people with access to this capital have been able to produce value, both at the individual level and group/business level. Clearly it is not enough to be able to access the capital and all the tools for free. What's more, all of this is only possible because there are some other people working on things that allow software development to even exist. Those things are entirely dependent on the capitalist system. Thinking you can build a “free utopia” on top of a capitalist system is delusional and extremely dumb. I can't argue all day, but at this point I really don't understand how some people who are not very young anymore can still believe in the bullshit of communism and its derivatives. I don't really care per se, but the problem is the moral posturing and constant activism of those communists. If their stuff was any good, they wouldn't need to spend all day trying to convince productive people to buy into their utopia.
giancarlostoro 10mo ago
He's gotta have a weird thing with his feet. My old boss saw him at a talking event here in Orlando, and he said he was picking skin off his toes or something weird the entire time he was talking. He's the hero we needed but probably deserve (as punishment for being bad humans).
- FireBeyond 10mo ago
  Better than the televised interview panel he did where not only was he doing that, he then appeared to eat the skin flakes on multiple occasions...
  - IAmBroom 10mo ago
    Weirdly paralelling heroin dependency... (mostly in the picking, but still)
torginus 10mo ago
I guess if you are popular and an introvert who likes to be left alone, then being nice and personable is not an option :)
- manmal 10mo ago
  That’s clearly not only introversion, but (probably little masked) autism.

Longlius 10mo ago

I feel like rms just doesn't like human interaction generally. I've noticed that a lot of visionaries are that way.

tjr 10mo ago
I've worked with RMS a good bit over the past few decades, and, in my interactions with him, he has always come across kind, helpful, and professional.
wahnfrieden 10mo ago
[flagged]

BobbyTables2 10mo ago

Did he print those out on a printer with closed source software? (;->

iberator 10mo ago
Why? Nroff/troff is literally designed to be printed with CUPS or Postscript etc etc etc You can also literally cat > /dev/printer
- jagged-chisel 10mo ago
  Don’t forget the firmware
  - smsm42 10mo ago
    If there's a printer with OSS firmware, Stallman likely owns it.

dotancohen 10mo ago

For what it's worth, I've never met the guy but I wrote to him once regarding the image of free software that people who are selling unsupported LibreOffice CDs are causing. He was willing to civilly discuss and listen to a different point of view. We never reached agreement, but I felt that so long as an interesting twist on something dear to him is being discussed, he is patient for discourse.

agumonkey 10mo ago
Could also be a different psychological path in person and through text. I know I behave much more anxiously irl and I might act colder than my personality can be.

kh_hk 10mo ago

YMMV I guess, he was cool with signing my laptop at FOSDEM in 2013 and even exchanged a couple of jokes. Humans be humans.

khannn 10mo ago

You sucked up to an autist, what did you think was going to happen? That's like trying to use Disney Dollars at Universal.

mrweasel 10mo ago
To some people, like myself, it has only in later years become apparent that RMS is autistic. In the late 90s, early 2000s is when I became aware of Stallman and his work on GNU and FSF. All that was pretty much always in form of writing and articles. Only semi-direct interaction was when a friend of mine invited him to talk at the local LUG, which he refused, if it wasn't change to GNU/Linux User Group, he was told "NO" and that was it. He always came across as difficult, but only in later years have many of us become aware that he might actually have a diagnoses of some form, until then he was just labeled at "difficult".
- collingreen 10mo ago
  This is a really important perspective to remember in all our daily lives but also when motivated politicians say things like "autism epidemic". I guess there might be an equivalent decline in people labeled as difficult? If anyone is going to support policy for our fellow humans spend an extra moment making sure to both have empathy and make sure we're comparing apples to apples.

jll29 10mo ago

I met RMS at a lunch in his honor at an Edinburgh vegetarian restaurant with very high ranking scholars/academics present, after an invited talk of his. Everyone was talking, eating, drinking and having a good time, whereas he was sitting at the head of the table doing email on his ThinkPad (yes, in text mode). So I walked up, I introduced myself and asked a question about the freedom of _data_ versus the freedom of _software_, and without looking up to me he said "I don't do smalltalk". So I got back to my seat and told my "story" to my immediate neighbors, who were keen to learn what he'd said. (He is much more constructive by email.)

kirubakaran 10mo ago
Ha I finally got it once I realized it's not about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk
- prmoustache 10mo ago
  I am pretty sure his choice of words was a conscious decision to do the pun.
andai 10mo ago
Sounds like you stumped him ;)
PaulRobinson 10mo ago
I put him up for the night on my sofa once. When you do this, you get his "rider". Google it, it's real, it's infamous for the "don't buy me a parrot" section. Anyway, in that, he makes clear that if people at dinner are not interested in talking about free software, he's going to pull out his laptop and get on with his work relating to free software. He doesn't care about fancy food, drinks, etc. - he wants to raise money for free software, and work on free software. He did this in a restaurant when three others of us were chatting about something else, and we all just accepted that's what he does, and that's him. It was fine. If you're not familiar with him or this, then it's going to be a weird experience. He also struggles with social interactions in my limited experience, particularly when it's a "fan boy" interaction. I've seen him not being super nice to other people who were trying to have a conversation with him, not because he's not a nice person (I found him quite personable one on one), but it seems to me that he struggles to know how to behave around people who don't know how to just talk to him about things he wants to talk about. I once saw him in the audience of a conference with quite a notable set of speakers [0], and I can't remember who it was who he started hectoring in the Q&A (I mean, look at the speaker list, whoever it was, it's somebody you've probably heard of), but he just diverted it into a little lesson about free software for the speaker and everyone else listening. It's the only thing he cares about talking about. It's either a super-power focus, or really annoying. I personally think at this point you just either need to meet him where he is, or avoid him if you don't want to. He's not going to change. I'm glad I met him, I'm glad he does what he does, I know he's a little spikier than others around him and I'm OK with that. I also know plenty of people who never want to speak to him ever again and think free software needs a new figurehead. [0] https://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/Turing100/www.turing100.manchester.ac.uk/programme/programme.html https://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/Turing100/www.turing100...

nkrisc 10mo ago

Some people don’t want to be your hero. Until you meet them, you can pretend they do want to be.

RealCodingOtaku 10mo ago

Unsure why this is a reply to the OP, the only thing common is RMS and nothing else. But, RMS is known to be socially awkward, the same goes for many autistic individuals. It's just that he doesn't mask and comes out as “rude”. If send an e-mail, he will usually take his time to write down a succinct response.

tedggh 10mo ago
I know a few autistic people including one of my nephews. They are different in some ways particularly when they are very young and are still struggling with expressing their emotions. But none of them are arrogant and disrespectful. I think you can be autistic and also a jerk, one doesn’t justify the other.
- dijit 10mo ago
  I'm going to be rude now, but I don't mean it to be taken that way. "I know a guy with a leg missing, and he can still run, so clearly someone who has lost their legs is able". I have had the discussion a bunch of times, I'm beginning to think that nobody other than me has spent a significant amount of time with severely autistic people. Yes, some autistic people can mask quite well, and, some are mild cases. But the crucial issue that most autistic people have is: they don't even become aware that they're being rude unless they spend active effort in first identifying, then understanding, then trying to fix it. I'll tell you something else too: most people are uncomfortable with criticism, it makes them defensive and clam up. If you make someone defensive, enough times, then the situation becomes infected and very emotionally charged. Now, imagine you have an illness that prevents you from processing your emotions properly, and the whole world is unkind to you, and you can't really understand why, but people call you rude. It takes a lot of bravery and integrity to really reflect on that soberly. Please, I implore you all to stop pretending you understand autism because you know someone- or a bunch of self diagnosed people, I keep seeing it[0], autistic people have great difficulty controlling how they're perceived, that's the whole issue. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37200502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37200502
  - 10mo ago

andai 10mo ago

Dang, until I read your story I thought he was a totally normal guy!

seec 10mo ago

[flagged]

collingreen 10mo ago
[flagged]
- seec 10mo ago
  [flagged]
tehjoker 10mo ago
I don't think Stallman is a communist. I'm a communist and initially I looked into it to learn more, but it's just a kind of techno-anarchism. The thing he misses is the thing that many (not all) anarchists miss: that there is a larger centralizing logic to capitalism that can't be resisted by small scale decentralized efforts and legal maneuvers. Rather, he does recognize the centralizing logic (the reason d'etre behind the GPL!) but I think it's become clear at this point that the general course of the evolution of the landscape has favored capitalist interests even though free and open source software has had a significant (and in many cases quite favorable) impact. Free software gives people part of the means of production. In the 1980s/early-1990s model where personal computers were common but most software was run locally, it was an effective challenge to corporate interests, but since the evolution of robust networks and remotely processed software, it has ceased to be nearly as effective. However, it's important to note that if free software ever truly challenged industrial interests, they would just get the laws changed to prevent it from restricting them in any real way using some bizarre legal maneuver. As it is, it is tolerable and produces useful products corporations can use for free. That's what it means to live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
- seec 10mo ago
  Potato, potahto. I mean, I appreciate you putting in the effort to argue about precise categorization, but it is not terribly relevant to my perspective. The fact is that he is just one more type of asshole who spends most of his time arguing about other people needing to work for free or requiring utopian collectivization of the work (process, output, etc.). The details are not essential because the idea is still the same: preferring the nebulous idea of collective freedom against individual freedom (and this includes moral corporations). There is no centralizing characteristic to capitalism. It is, in fact, exactly the contrary and the main reason that what we call “capitalism” is the de facto system of exchange ever since humans evolved past primitive needs. Capitalism relies on self-interest to function, and there is no central entity. One could argue about the government and the money supply control as a central entity, but it's actually not a requirement, just a convenience. If government money becomes untrustworthy, you just switch to using something else as a medium of exchange (often other moneys or precious metals). On the other hand, communism absolutely requires centralization and violence/coercion to force people to comply. I have no idea how you can jump to the conclusion that capitalism is centralizing when it's absolutely the reverse. As for the free software and the parallel to possessing the means of production in communism, it is very interesting because it basically disproves the whole theory without much effort. Software development is a field where the capital requirements to get started are extremely low, yet hardly any people with access to this capital have been able to produce value, both at the individual level and group/business level. Clearly it is not enough to be able to access the capital and all the tools for free. What's more, all of this is only possible because there are some other people working on things that allow software development to even exist. Those things are entirely dependent on the capitalist system. Thinking you can build a “free utopia” on top of a capitalist system is delusional and extremely dumb. I can't argue all day, but at this point I really don't understand how some people who are not very young anymore can still believe in the bullshit of communism and its derivatives. I don't really care per se, but the problem is the moral posturing and constant activism of those communists. If their stuff was any good, they wouldn't need to spend all day trying to convince productive people to buy into their utopia.

giancarlostoro 10mo ago

He's gotta have a weird thing with his feet. My old boss saw him at a talking event here in Orlando, and he said he was picking skin off his toes or something weird the entire time he was talking. He's the hero we needed but probably deserve (as punishment for being bad humans).

FireBeyond 10mo ago
Better than the televised interview panel he did where not only was he doing that, he then appeared to eat the skin flakes on multiple occasions...
- IAmBroom 10mo ago
  Weirdly paralelling heroin dependency... (mostly in the picking, but still)

torginus 10mo ago

I guess if you are popular and an introvert who likes to be left alone, then being nice and personable is not an option :)

manmal 10mo ago
That’s clearly not only introversion, but (probably little masked) autism.