Richard Stallman Resigns From The Free Software Foundation

[moilami]

He created a dang software license. 99.9% of people have no idea who he is. No one will ever build monuments or erect statues in his honor.

He happened to create software too, and many writings. He is a philosopher. If we pick 100 people 99 of them would had done less and influenced less the humankind.

[alcalde]

He happened to create software too, and many writings. He is a philosopher. If we pick 100 people 99 of them would had done less and influenced less the humankind.

He wrote a compiler and a word processor. How are the police and firefighters who keep people safe, the teachers who educate thousands of children over a career, researchers who seek cures for diseases, etc., any less influential? The world would have done just fine without emacs. I don't understand how you can elevate these things to the level of influencing humankind.

[fuzz]

1. There is a "we" to represent - the Linux community. Linux today is produced by corporations all over the world, not a bunch of non-conforming hackers. Heck, Microsoft is a major contributor to the kernel today!
2. Linux would be used a lot more if ordinary people knew it even existed. As someone once told me whom I showed Linux to, "I didn't know you could run anything on a computer other than Windows!" To sell Linux and open source, as any idea, you need sensible, intelligent, non-threatening, patient people able to explain the product and its nature succinctly and appealingly. It helps mightily if they're neither creepy nor nasty.
3. Linux isn't supposed to be some secret that only you and a select few know about. More people using it is not terrible. Not putting our most cringeworthy ambassadors forward is not a terrible idea. Between Stallman (remember the time he was upset someone was going to take time off from contributing to emacs because his first child had just been born and Stallman couldn't understand how that was more important?), Torvalds (telling people they should go kill themselves after a spate of high-profile bullying-related suicides) and Eric S. Raymond (assorted racist rants, including explaining that there are less black people in tech because they have lower IQ), we put forth the most unappealing emissaries we possibly can. It needs to be recognized that coding Linux and advocating for Linux are two separate skill sets best left to different people. Think The Woz vs. Jobs - one was a tech guy, the other was a master salesman.

Just because people use something doesn't mean they get to dictate what the creator does with it.

You are assigning people to groups and telling them they have to work within confines of these groups. Just because you and I both use linux and post on phoronix does not mean we should follow the same, subjective social norms. And no one needs to "advocate" to linux. This isn't a for-profit greedy corporation. It was created and exists to solve a problem.

Do you also insist upon 5000 different genders to impose upon people?

[fuzz]

He created a dang software license. 99.9% of people have no idea who he is. No one will ever build monuments or erect statues in his honor.

Monuments do not mean anything. The software license has affected the industry dramatically whether people know about it or not.

[moilami]

He wrote a compiler and a word processor. How are the police and firefighters who keep people safe, the teachers who educate thousands of children over a career, researchers who seek cures for diseases, etc., any less influential? The world would have done just fine without emacs. I don't understand how you can elevate these things to the level of influencing humankind.

A teacher can influence on average 30 people x 40 years = 1200 people. 30 students a year times 40 years. You can multiply that by 10 if considering a teacher will have multiple groups of students a year, which would make it 12 000 people. However, the influence done is telling what people have invented and done over the course of history. There is next to nothing original work, so to say, by the teacher influencing students. A TV news reader can "influence" almost in the same way millions of people. But they are not really influencing more than just broadcasting information. A broadcaster is not an influencer. Socrates is an influencer even 3000 years after his death, his ideas and arguments affect people this day. A broadcaster makes service to real influencer, even though of course a broadcaster do have influence.

Just because you are prepared to save lives does not mean you are actually influencing the society. You are just helping in maintaining the society like a janitor or truck driver. You bring no ideas no values to the society. Who invented polices and fire departments? They are the influencers. Polices and firefighters are not even broadcasters, even though their work is important in maintaining the society as is janitor's work important.

The first thing what came to my mind was that you are "toxic" Then I read your post again, taking note of your claims and arguments, and realized current general chatting culture is toxic, and very far from academical ideals of free and critical thinking regardless of subject. So yeah, a good posting by you.

[techzilla]

I abandoned any fondness towards free software as a movement, once it became intertwined with the broader progressive agenda. More specifically, once politically minded people realized the amount of power they could wield by directing such a movement. How many people they could control, by being able to direct funding, and how many interests they could also serve. We didn't just end up in a totalitarian dystopia by accident, the undermining of free software was just another weapon that was used to fight whatever remained of free society.

So a guy who I once admired, who promoted some great ideals, had been selling a fantasy designed to undermine whatever said ideals were about to begin with. What is the value of free software, when you live in a panoptican more hostile to the user, consumer, and citizen than the proprietary software ever was in the first place? It was only what could have been done, with the ideals of free software, that might have been able to progress towards a more free or just world. From the inception of free software, until now, it was a campaign against the less powerful large players, for the benefits of the largest players. Said largest players, have in turn created a neo-fuedal economy with destabilizing levels of inequality, like a stomping boot on every face. ... the rest should kinda be self-evident.

Did Stallman know this would occur when he started it? I'd assume so, I guess one could ask the same question to Marx.
Does it mean nothing good came out of it all? No, there were good things that happened for society, they just were limited in scope and impact. Most of the good came from the people involved, despite the institutions, but that is really how most things are... A police state offers great career opportunities in law enforcement, Hitler got the trains running on time, etc... there is always something positive, you can find buried somewhere, on the path towards a horrible conclusion.

There is no justice in totalitarian systems, because only power determines who gets punished. I guess you could say, I don't relish the thought of a horrible monster eating one of the people who fed and cared for it only on weekends and holidays, because it isn't justice. That would be selective justice, and selective justice is itself a great injustice. Stallman didn't get fired for whatever stupid crap he said in that email, that was just the plausible pretext, nobody is punished in a totalitarian system for the reasons officially stated. We might never know who he upset, or which interests he failed to serve diligently enough, or if they merely needed to get fresh meat in his office to keep the lights on. This was a political job, plain and simple, and no matter how much you think Stallman deserved it... he got canned because he somehow upset far worse people.