
Richard Stallman is the hero the internet needs - tjakab
http://liminality.xyz/richard-stallman-is-the-hero-the-internet-needs/
======
SwellJoe
I've always argued that RMS is an excellent counter-balancing influence. While
the line for acceptable behavior keeps being pushed by corporate and state
interests away from privacy, away from user and developer freedom, away from
the notion that there are conversations that should be free of marketing, he
holds the other end down, making the center fall somewhat closer to
recognition of human dignity in digital matters.

That said, we need new voices and more voices, on that end of the spectrum.
RMS has never been the ideal spokesperson for a movement, though his passion
is beyond question, and his technical achievements impressive. The world of
computing RMS represents is old-fashioned to the current generation. I fall in
between the old generation and this new generation that has never known a time
without the Internet dominating everything, and I can see where the language
of RMS can seem to miss the point to a lot of younger folks. While he has
always been prescient on these fronts, and I think he understands the world we
live in better than most, I don't think he can be the voice of the current
generation of hackers, the way he was the voice of prior generations.

The GNU project as a whole has the feel of a relic, and I worry every time I
go to gnu.org and see the state of it. A few years ago, there were GNU
projects for all sorts of modern things; there was Savannah to address the
problems inherent in SourceForge (again, prescient...SF.net turned evil just
as RMS assumed they would). But, GNU has nothing for github (there are Open
Source github alternatives, but GNU is nowhere in the story).

Anyway, I don't know what needs to happen, but I know a few things: GNU is so
much less relevant than when I started using Linux 20+ years ago. RMS speaks
to an older generation of hackers; even though he _should_ be heeded by the
young, I doubt he is. And, I can't think of any other voices for software
freedom that are as consistent or as effective as RMS and GNU was 20 years
ago.

~~~
mikegioia
I think part of the problem, at least that I've found, is how do you properly
articulate to and galvanize a young crown on the concept of relinquishing
convenience? To adopt Stallmanism is to sacrifice conveniences like the
iPhone, and kids/teens/young adults are flocking to Apple/Google.

How can you get a kid to say no to an iPhone, when what you're asking him to
do is extrapolate a vague and possibly non-existent threat of privacy loss?
It's incredibly difficult and honestly without some real-world event to bring
it home for these children I fear it can't really be done. Without an event,
you'd be reliant on a cultural tidal shift -- it would have to be "cool" to be
anti-Apple, or anti-tracking devices. It would have be cooler for kids to own
burners than smartphones because they don't track you.

There will always be a subset of people who truly understand what Stallman is
saying and will probably adopt his behaviors. But to actually appeal to
younger audiences and disseminate that message effectively to a mass amount of
them seems to be too difficult.

~~~
hga
Forget about smartphones for a moment; with minimal exceptions, _he doesn 't
use the web interactively_ ([https://stallman.org/stallman-
computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)). That very much
makes him a "relic", and detached from so much knowledge, the _Zeitgeist_ of
the times.

Good luck getting people to adopt to this behavior, when we are so massively
leveraged by what we can look up on the web. It works to an extent for him
because of where he's been situated since 1970, but try telling a kid who's
not in The Athens of America (the Boston area) that he should cut himself off
from most of the world's useful, and cheaply obtained info, and you're not
likely to get many sales.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
I don't follow. How does supporting RMS' ideals imply you have to adopt his
computing habits to the fullest? I don't recall him ever making such a claim.
His is mostly to avoid profiling and non-free JavaScript, but not something he
insists everyone advocating free software to do.

~~~
hga
One point is that his take on the "technological vastness of the future" we
now live in has become so circumscribed that his advice WRT to is is getting
less and less relevant.

At another level it's making him more and more ignorant, since the price for
him to do the research necessary to chart wise paths in things like FSF/GNU
governance is so high.

To draw back from the weeds, how can he be "The Hero the Internet Needs" when
he is so disconnected from it? Per the essay, his argument has no nuance, it
is to not be a part of this thing which, at least to my paranoid mindset, is
indeed just as dangerous as portrayed, but which offers vast benefits for
being (a careful) part of. Especially for the vast majority of us who, aren't,
you know, (any more) a part of the MIT community or the like.

ADDED: Maybe to draw back even further, he's not _wise_ ; that doesn't
disqualify him from being _A_ Hero of the Internet, but it's a significant
thing.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
I still don't follow. Most noteworthy computer scientists, programmers and
hackers have workflows that are totally heterodox or outside the norm. That
doesn't make them any less authoritative or informed.

He definitely is informed on the subject, too. You can tell from his constant
political notes and regularly updated boycotts or calls to action. He's active
enough that he understands much of the web's giants from third-party sources
or observation without having to directly use any services himself. Or are you
suggesting that one cannot understand and criticize Facebook or Twitter
without being a regular user? What a puerile and ludicrous assertion.

He's not disconnected from the Internet, nor the Web. He merely limits his
exposure to it. Again, does one need to be intimately involved in their social
media profiles to have the necessary prerequisites to speak against it?

I further do not understand how heterodox computing habits make the free
software message any less relevant. What is so grand about the web that such a
conclusion should be derived? SaaS? Non-free JavaScript? He voices out against
those.

------
vezzy-fnord
The polarization with regard to how Stallman should be interpreted is, I
believe, one of the preliminary illustrations of the rift between the
entrepreneurial hacker and MIT-style hacker subcultures, modulo OSI diehards
such as Eric S. Raymond.

~~~
krilnon
There was a funny discussion on an MIT mailing list this summer when an
(apparently) tone-deaf email was sent out by MIT Professional Education
entitled "4 Ways You May Be Enabling Hackers"... which warned about the
dangers of cybersecurity-style hackers.

RMS's response was:

> These MIT professors ought to know better than to smear us hackers by using
> the word "hacker" as synonymous with "security breaker".

------
zekevermillion
The article trivializes Stallman by labeling him an extremist. The author
seems to say, hey, Stallman may have a point but is still a bit too weird to
emulate. Hey, if RMS is right, then most of us are severely ethically
compromised when it comes to our computing decisions. If he's wrong in part
(maybe it's OK to enrich and empower Google / the Government through our
choice of systems?) then why is he wrong, and what does that mean for computer
users and hackers?

------
ihsw
He's an ideologue, not a hero. Heroism implies courage and noble qualities.

It doesn't detract from his authority on the subject, not in the least, but is
he a hero? I don't think so.

He would likely scoff at being called a hero too.

In any event, the vast majority of people will know no privacy other than from
each-other's affairs. Frankly I think the advent of cheap home delivery will
push the privacy issue higher into the general consciousness, and people will
be alarmed that _all_ of their purchases are now tracked and indexed.

The gap between online and offline purchasing will disappear over the next
18-36 months, and those on the forefront of this will be in a significant
position of power. The synthesis of Big Data(TM) between related firms will
reach new heights, and _that_ will actually scare people.

~~~
EliRivers
I have always considered his work on Lisp machines back in the early eighties
heroic. When Symbolics stopped sharing their developments, he endeavoured to
match them feature for feature, single-handedly, and give away the
reimplementation for free. To quote Steven Levy, "RMS had single-handedly
attempted to match the work of over a dozen world-class hackers [1], and
managed to keep doing it during most of 1982 and almost all of 1983". He saw
what Symbolics created, and then reimplemented it and gave it away.

Greenblatt noted that he was out-hacking the whole bunch of them. Gosper
called it incredible.

When Stallman finally couldn't keep up, he set a new goal that he hoped would
solve the problem permanently. GNU.

There is, of course, the other side of the story, although I find the
dismissal of the complexity of the features RMS was matching a little
disingenuous - how complex they were seems irrelevant compared to the fact
that he was doing it alone and Symbolics was doing it with a bunch of world-
class hackers:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20080112153822/http://dlweinreb....](https://web.archive.org/web/20080112153822/http://dlweinreb.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/rebuttal-
to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi/)

[1] Some people on HN define "hacker" as "person who can code". The definition
in use here is older.

~~~
hga
The "dismissal", as you call it, is hardly unfair (note, I was an eyewitness
to all this, the players were largely in my social circle and I worked for
Lisp Machines Inc during that period, heck, we both gave up on Lisp Machines
in general at the same time). As DLW relates, RMS didn't do the designs of the
new features, he copied some of them. In part I believe this is because he's
much more an improver than an innovator when it comes to code and systems.
This can have massive qualitative results, like after he took over ITS EMACS,
but it deprives him of the cachet of "inventor", for what that's worth.

------
superskierpat
Damn I was not aware of that toe thing.. Still, the man is a necessary figure
in my mind, he's our "Dark Knight"

~~~
baghira
A more apt reference would probably be Rorschach from Watchmen. At least this
sort of stuff should deter Hollywood from any plan of a RMS biopic, so all in
all it may be good thing.

------
Mz
Just because you are paranoid, doesn't mean they are out to get you. I
wouldn't use the word _hero_ , but he did found the Free Software stuff while
being intermittently homeless. He didn't sleep on the street. He slept in a
hacker space where he worked. He finally got to exercise his right to vote
when an article in a national publication validated that he was homeless and
sleeping at his job. This convinced the Registrar's office to issue him his
voter registration card.

So he certainly made significant sacrifices for what he believed in. I would
not call him a _hero_ because I think that cheapens the word. We typically
apply that word to people who put themselves in harm's way for the greater
good and my father, my ex, my ex's father and grandfather all served in the
military. So I would not personally write a piece describing him with that
term

But he did make personal sacrifices for a cause he believed in and to which he
devoted himself while being crapped on and disrespected and managed to make a
real difference in the world in spite of how much hostility he was met with.
Props to him.

~~~
hga
_but he did found the Free Software stuff while being intermittently
homeless._

Do you mean the FSF, or the preceding GNU project? Because we were roommates
when he founded the latter, and he most assuredly wan't homeless then. His
willingness to be "homeless" later might in part be an artifact of a couple of
kids playing with matches and kerosene burning that building down (in a not so
good part of Cambridge, MA) and his losing his worldly possessions. Not that
he was, to my observation, very materialistic.

As for " _being crapped on and disrespected_ ", well, if you've spent enough
time with him, you'll understand why that was a common reaction, he's ... a
difficult person, and is proud of ignoring a number of social norms, including
ones that tend to keep a person and their friends alive.

But a lot of it after the GNU/FSF started was due to his extreme abrasiveness
towards many people who didn't entirely buy into his mission. We were, for
example, called "Software Hoarders" (this, while working for for Unipress, the
legal licensee of the version of Emacs he stole to start Gnu Emacs, and we ran
on a "gated open source" model, if the licencor of a piece of software agreed,
you got a copy of the source, you just couldn't distribute it, but you could
share patches with other customers). His regular imputation of ill will when
there is none (well, to start with), his gross distortions of the historical
record (especially as seen in Levy's _Hackers_ , but also see GNU/Linux) ...
they lose him a lot of support he might otherwise get.

~~~
Mz
_Do you mean the FSF, or the preceding GNU project?_

I read his biography, but I don't follow his work or life very closely. So I
used a vague, hand-wavy term because I have a vague, hand-wavy understanding
of it all. Therefore, I cannot clarify.

 _As for "being crapped on and disrespected", well, if you've spent enough
time with him, you'll understand why that was a common reaction, he's ... a
difficult person_

Yeah, I get called "difficult" all the time. I have a life threatening,
incurable medical condition. I am pretty laid back, inclined to _go along, to
get along_ , and a conflict avoider. But, unfortunately, in order to be
socially acceptable, I would need to politely die a slow gruesome death.
Failing to go along with that plan for me has caused me shitloads of social
problems.

Thus, I am inclined to be sympathetic to rms. Many of his predictions have
come true. There is no telling how much more problematic things would be had
he not stuck to his guns.

"Difficult" sometimes just means you aren't going along with social norms. If
you firmly believe those social norms to be a very serious problem, it is
foolish to go along with them. In my experience, no matter how politely you
decline to go along with them, and no matter how compelling your reasons for
politely declining, simply declining will get you a fuck ton of backwash.

~~~
hga
"... difficult" was my trying to be minimally polite, I'm quite sure from even
our short interactions over the last few days that there's at least an order
of magnitude difference. E.g. his baseline does not include "pretty laid back,
inclined to _go along, to get along_ ".

More like "Do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like, without regards for
consequences, including lethal harm to bystanders." The latter lost him more
than a few friends/acquaintances.

Which biography would you be referring to?

~~~
Mz
I don't recall which biography off the top of my head. I kind of am under the
weather this weekend, so the brain is not in gear.

Sorry, I don't mean to dismiss your observation that he is difficult. But I
see it as more complicated than "he is just difficult."

My oldest son is genuinely difficult, but I get along well with him. One of
the reasons I get along well with him is that I recognize that his IQ is
higher than mine, so unless I have a specific objection, I have a tendency to
go along with what he wants because it tends to get better results, even
though my default personality is risk averse and his default personality is
risk seeking, so he really makes me crazy at times. I have long experience
with dealing with difficult people and doing so in a manner that makes them
easier to deal with rather than making them more intractable. Most of the
time, difficult people are dealt with in a manner that causes them to dig in
their heels.

So while I don't doubt that Stallman can be genuinely difficult, I also don't
doubt that the degree to which he has been given crap while being repeatedly
proven correct most likely only makes his bad habits intractable when they
didn't necessarily have to become so. My son gets real respect from me on
things where he is more knowledgeable than I am and he gives me real respect
and defers to me on subjects where my knowledge is superior. If I just crapped
on him all the time, there would not be a two way street of respect.

It gets really difficult to put a stop to a negative social dynamic once it
gets going. At this point, it is probably impossible to break rms of his bad
habits because, from his perspective, it probably never seems to matter if he
is right, if he is polite, etc. It does bad things to someone's personality to
be consistently right and get no respect because people do not like what you
are saying. I have had a taste of that, so I have sympathy for his side.

I'm sorry that probably makes no sense to you.

~~~
hga
Part of the problem is that RMS is an all or nothing proposition. Look at some
of the major things he rails at, like closed source and DRM. He's got _lots_
of company (and it's near universal when it comes to DRM), but if you don't
buy into his "copyleft is more important than software quality or uptake in
the real world" approach, you're not just wrong, you're evil. GCC, one of the
two biggest crown jewels of the GNU project, is in dire straits and being
replaced by the non-copyleft LLVM, not so much because of the different
licenses, but because of his totally inflexible ideological stewardship that
is not allowing GCC to do some things that are now expected of compilers but
that would make it easier for Software Horders to use GCC in ways anathema to
him. (As a steward of software development projects, he's really, _really_ ,
REALLY bad, large parts of which are due to those "bad habits" discussed
below.)

Your eldest son may be a risk taker, but does that go so far as (truly
futilely) hitting on a gangster's moll while eating with a group of innocents
who didn't sign up for that level of danger when they went for a normally
routine run to the favorite late night Cantonese restaurant?

As for his "intractable" "bad habits", they were set in stone long before
GNU/FSF, and as for respect ... hmmm, I don't know, he's weird about that. But
not very flexible (I'm not the best person judge all that, seeing as how you
grant me a degree of respect or else, and he did that).

~~~
Mz
Stallman sounds really socially clueless. My son doesn't hit on gangster's
molls, in part because he identifies as asexual so he doesn't hit on anyone.
He was born really socially deficient and still gets reactions like people
would like to strip search him for using his debit card to pay for pizza in
the presence of his mother.

My son probably qualifies as ASD, though he has no formal diagnosis.

I am sure I wouldn't want to be within 30 feet of Stallman. I did not watch
the video of him eating something off his foot, but I have a compromised
immune system. For me, cleanliness is extremely important and I will end
relationships over people being unable to abide by my (necessary) standards of
cleanliness.

There is probably little point in me trying to convince you of my view of how
social dynamics work. Perhaps we should leave this for now.

:-)

~~~
hga
Heh. I have no trouble with your view of social dynamics, I just don't see its
relevance WRT to RMS, and that's probably why you think you're not getting
that part of your message across.

You can safely assume it's accepted and that I'd be happy to, e.g., share a
meal with you at a restaurant with high levels of cleanliness (assuming they
even exist, or do you e.g. depend on cuisines where they do a good enough job
of killing the food dead?).

~~~
Mz
Oh, well, I see it as relevant because I was briefly Director of Community
Life for The TAG Project while homeschooling my profoundly gifted sons. I have
no official recognition anywhere of my expertise in the social and emotional
challenges of gifted individuals, but I have reason to suspect that I
understand the unfortunate interplay between group dynamics and the problems
of highly gifted individuals far better than average. So, to me, Stallman's
difficult personality traits are well established as a side effect of being
genuinely smarter than most people around you and routinely crapped on because
of it. Plus, traits like OCD, ASD, and ADHD are so commonly associated with
high IQ that some people refer to them as "co-morbidities" for lack of a
better term.

I think the social problems typical of high IQ can be significantly
ameliorated, but my private parenting blog only has two subscribers and life
has gotten in the way of me updating it this past month. So my views are
unlikely to start changing things anytime soon, if ever.

Best.

~~~
hga
Ah, I see what you're saying, and, yeah, there are most assuredly pathologies
that crop up the "profoundly gifted".

And, yeah, I have no idea what things were socially for him before he attended
Harvard, and that can be an ... unusual place for the really intelligent, very
possibly one reason he gravitated to MIT, although MIT being one of the
world's top 4 CS schools, and the world's #1 engineering school, and Harvard
being ... not so good in those two areas is almost certainly a bigger part. I
only know of RMS as of when he showed up to MIT ... and there, he was an
outlier amongst a whole bunch of outliers. But no apparent co-morbidities (is
high intelligence a morbidity? I sometimes wonder :-) besides perhaps ASD,
which really wasn't a "thing" back then and which I have essentially no
knowledge of.

But certainly his fairly fixed by then personality is consistent with your
hypothesis. He certainly fits into the Sigma category in this fascinating
socio-sexual hierarchy essay:
[http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2011/03/socio-sexual-
hiera...](http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2011/03/socio-sexual-
hierarchy.html) and you don't get there without ... well, as the essay
mentions at the end, " _Sigmas usually acquired their outsider status the hard
way; one seldom becomes immune to the social hierarchy by virtue of mass
popularity in one 's childhood._"

------
guard-of-terra
We prove Stallman was right time after time. Which is almost as humiliating as
proving Kafka was right. That we do too.

------
mark_l_watson
Stallman has been a bit hard on me in one interaction but I think that is just
the way he is if you don't totally match his views.

I very much respect him and I think he has done enormous service with the FSF
and arguing for privacy. I also like using the cloud and think a lot about
this: secure and private personal and small group clouds. Not too difficult to
set up for storage, email, web apps - but conveniences like Google Now are an
imposibility unless a very large developer community contributed.

------
SixSigma
At risk of down votes I prefer my heroes to be a bit more sanitary :

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ)

~~~
vacri
Why the fuck is this relevant to what he is saying? Why is it trotted out
every single time his name is mentioned on HN?

~~~
SixSigma
Hitler liked dogs.

------
miguelrochefort
Richard Stallman is paranoid.

I don't know in what world he lives, but it's not real. Like most people here,
he values privacy way too much and doesn't seem to realize that we need as
much information as possible about everything (including people) to make
educated decisions as a society.

He's socially inept, and in no way a hero.

~~~
Natanael_L
And yet a remarkable number of his predictions have come true, in particular
about abuses.

~~~
miguelrochefort
None of his predictions are surprising or unexpected. I mean, it's clear to
all of us that no data is truly safe.

What I meant by paranoid is that he refuses for the world to have access to
information about himself for who knows what reasons.

In retrospect, I should have used "insane" or "selfish".

~~~
Natanael_L
So your opinion is that the sane choice is to give up?

~~~
miguelrochefort
Not give up.

Give it away.

