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I agree completely. Love or hate RMS, you have to respect that he says what he means and means what he says. He has absolutely no filter and is pathologically i
by compay 17y ago
I agree completely. Love or hate RMS, you have to respect that he says what he means and means what he says. He has absolutely no filter and is pathologically incapable of telling a lie. I don't always agree with him but I do admire him.
- jshen 17y agoI'm not sure it's good to admire ideological extremists. In fact, I think the opposite, what is admirable is empathy, the ability to see something from someone else's perspective. RMS seems incapable of this.
- compay 17y agoWell, if you have some empathy then you can admire somebody for their good qualities while at the same time being aware of their faults. The existence of free/open source software owes a big debt to RMS's idealogical extremism, and Emacs, GCC and GNU are pretty major (and admirable) achievements in programming. That's why I say I admire RMS, even if I wouldn't want him to date my sister.
- jshen 17y agoNo, we don't owe a debt to his extremism. There are thousands of people out there who have created open source software without the extremism. We do owe a debt to his work on those projects, but not to his extremism. The work could have, and often is, done without the extremism.