

Richard Stallman is nuts. Here's why. - diegogomes

1) He says that you should not own a mobile phone;<p>2) He criticizes Bill's charities, but have never done anything.<p>3) He believes in paper voting over machine voting<p>4) He doesn't use a browser; rather, he uses wget and reads the fetched pages from his e-mail mailbox;<p>How can someone hear him when he says something like this: 
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3083349
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arctangent
I saw Richard speak recently and I have to say he doesn't come across as being
crazy.

However, his world view is very much permeated by the importance of individual
freedom and he is somewhat zealous in getting his message out there.

I like to think I have a more pragmatic approach to individual freedom than
that - I'm happy to sacrifice freedoms in some areas if they grant me
freedoms/abilities in other areas.

~~~
bmelton
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety,
deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

~~~
josephg
I really like that quote too, but that doesn't make it true.

Being able to freely develop software on all the CPUs I own isn't an essential
freedom.

~~~
burgerbrain
How could it not be? As you said, _you own them_. We're talking basic property
rights here.

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noodly
Oh noes, Stallman is nuts :(

1) So what ?

2) He did few things. He launched Free Software Movement, started Free
Software Foundation, and GNU project. He is main author of GPL :)

3) So what ?

4) So what ?

"How can someone hear him when he says something like this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3083349> "

Because he's not hypocrite.

~~~
SkyMarshal
_2) ... author of GPL_

Yes, imho the GPL (and the idea of viral copyleft that it inspired) deserves
to be treated as one of the greatest legal inventions of our time. Given the
ongoing reduction of just about _everything_ to information, the ascendancy of
code and data among the human race, and the extent to which it will shape our
future history, a viable, effective, encompassing legal framework to ensure
its freedom is one of the most valuable contributions to computing that anyone
has made.

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mooism2
I believe in paper voting over machine voting. (Actually, I believe in paper
voting; I'm happy for machines to count the vote, but I want to make my vote
on paper.)

The vote counting process has to be transparent, and closed source voting
machines are not transparent.

Are you calling _me_ nuts as well?

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ugh
I thought nearly everyone with internet or web socialization was for paper
voting and squarely against any kind of anonymous machine voting? That doesn’t
strike me as an unusual view at all, it seems like the most common view to me.

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Greg12x
4) He doesn't use a browser; rather, he uses wget and reads the fetched pages
from his e-mail mailbox;

Haha. AWESOME.

~~~
jbk
This is not true anymore.

He browses Internet from emacs.

~~~
Greg12x
Way cooler.

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karlzt
>> _1) He says that you should not own a mobile phone;_

He shouldn't use a mobile phone, there are reasons why he would get tracked.

>> _4) He doesn't use a browser; rather, he uses wget and reads the fetched
pages from his e-mail mailbox;_

He needs privacy more than anyone else.

You see as a political activist/famous person he should be more careful with
these things.

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gte910h
Are there people who understand computing and electronics who thinks
electronic voting is good?

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FrojoS
_3) He believes in paper voting over machine voting_

For important elections, so do I and many others. Its much easier to steal an
election based on an opaque computer systems.

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burgerbrain
See my previous comment to you....
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3084650>

------
rman666
Yes, he's crazy (aren't we all?) but he knows how to dance:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pube5Aynsls>

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diegogomes
This guy confuses software with religion. I wonder what search engine he might
use, Google or Bing?

~~~
nske
Not really. He might be defending his position with the same zeal that others
defend their religion (it's difficult not to be zealous about something for
which you have made important sacrifices), but there is a huge difference.

Religions have questionable basis and use: it is both impossible to prove they
are objectively true (at least through the scientific method, the only way we
currently have to discover what is true) and to claim that they offer
something valuable, which could not exist otherwise, to a human society.

Software freedom (or lack thereof) on the other hand has objective, practical
consequences. They might not be direct, or apparent, or significant for every
user in every possible use-case, but it is rather easy for a semi computer-
literate person to understand that they exist and that they can be pretty
negative and serious in too many cases.

