[ProgClub list] RMS Dialogues
jedd
jedd at progclub.org
Sun Oct 30 04:03:42 AEDT 2011
On Sat, 2011-10-29 03:53:37 AM John Elliot wrote:
> I don't really think it's very funny. Poor Stallman, all he ever did was
> insist on freedom and he cops so much flack.
I like rms too. He did a talk here in London a few months ago and
I convinced a few colleagues to head down and listen to him. It
was a bit of an eye-opener for them (but now they know why I always
write out GNU/Linux, and use the word free rather than open source).
Bit of a paradigm shift for most, though. The realisation that every
decision you make might (and probably does) have an ethical
component is something people seem to resist. Can't work out
why - I think it makes things more interesting. Perhaps it's the
freedom from choice thing that people are trained to prefer.
Actually, my biggest problem was that most of the people that had
turned out - and this was for IET - a moderately sophisticated group
of people by all accounts - had little of no understanding of the
field or the history/writings of rms. And so once again this guy
with so many interesting things to say was, at the end, plagued by
the same old boring questions that he's heard every time he's
given a talk the past two decades. People just seem to like to play
the 'let's try to catch rms out', as though it is, for him, a game,
and that he may forget what his answers are meant to be (rather
than knowing what his ethics really are).
ObLink - mostly for John. Apropos nothing in this thread :)
http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=subversion+git+mercurial+bazaar&show_installed=on&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&want_ticks=on&from_date&to_date&hlght_date&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1
j.
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