
Richard Stallman Inducted Into the 2013 Internet Hall of Fame - hornokplease
https://www.fsf.org/news/richard-stallman-inducted-into-the-2013-internet-hall-of-fame
======
RyanMcGreal
> Stallman had this to say upon his induction: "Now that we have made the
> Internet work, the next task is to stop it from being a platform for massive
> surveillance, and make it work in a way that respects human rights,
> including privacy."

The man never misses an opportunity to try and get people thinking about the
issues that matter.

~~~
gargoiler80
In _your_ opinion they matter.

I'm unconvinced. The majority of people are sharing more about themselves
online. Not less.

Outside this niche, people seem pretty uninterested that governments monitor
the internet. They pretty much assumed as much.

Stallman is just always swimming against the tide of what people actually
want.

~~~
CanSpice
People should be allowed to share what they want. At the same time, people
should be allowed to restrict others from sharing information about them.

These two are not at odds with each other. The whole idea of "look at these
people with 15,000 Foursquare checkins complain that the NSA is watching them"
is fallacious. People choose to share their location with Foursquare; they
don't choose (and currently cannot choose) to share their location with the
NSA.

~~~
mhurron
Except they are at odds. People are making information publicly available and
are then turning around complaining that people are looking at their publicly
available information.

People get to choose to share or not to share, but when they scream it out in
public they do not get to choose who hears it.

~~~
declan
This is incorrect. I haven't seen any complaint about FBI agents perusing
public web sites, or deputy US Marshals poking around public portions of
Facebook to try to track down a fugitive.

The flap over the last few weeks has been about government surveillance of
information that was _not_ intended to be public. Private email, private IMs,
private Facebook messages, etc. Where Americans do have a reasonable
expectation of privacy.

------
RyanZAG
I find it intriguing to consider that in history and philosophy textbooks in
100 years time, Stallman is likely to have a number of very positive (and
possibly even large) contributions to humanity, while Obama is likely to be
regarded very negatively for his wiretapping and with no notable positive
contributions. Meanwhile today, Stallman is regarded as some kind of madman
while Obama is an amazing celebrity.

~~~
MisterWebz
People denouncing Stallman's views just because he's not charismatic and
conventional has always bothered me. I hope people will start realizing that
using free and open software/hardware/web services exclusively isn't something
that only free software extremists should be doing.

~~~
rimantas
I denounce Stallman's views because they are plain stupid and not based on
reality and don't match with human psychology and sociology. Attempts to
portray recent privacy debacles as the proof of Stallman being right are even
more stupid, because it has nothing to do with software being open-source,
free or not. If my service runs Apache, MySQL, the source is on github, but
NSA has access to all the data, how does being open-source help?

People won't start using "free and open software/hardware/web services
exclusively", because none of that matters for the end users. I do like and
use open source for infrastructure, this is where it shines. But as Joe User I
prefer highly polished (and paid) apps to "free" software which is powered by
advertising. I am sick of this "advertising will pay for everything" world
with ever increasing noise and subpar quality. How about paying some real
money for some real work?

~~~
tikums
For a man of such strong opinions, you seem to have a poor grasp of Stallman's
philosophy. He's against SaaS, and would refuse to use a hosted service. He
doesn't object to charging a fee for software. The user must merely be free to
use it after the purchase. Yes, people are ready to sacrifice some freedom in
return for convenience. That in itself does not prove him wrong. Cellphones
_are_ tracking devices. The "cloud" _does_ allow for wholesale surveillance.
In light of recent revelations, his warnings seem to be more prescient than
ever.

~~~
bpatrianakos
It doesn't take a genius to figure out things like cell phones being tracking
devices and the cloud facilitating surveillance.

First we all knew it would happen, then we found out it was happening, and now
we're saying thank god for Stallman or we'd have never known and lets be sure
to listen to him from now on? Stallman's idea of freedom doesn't work unless
everyone gets involved. We live in the real world here and we know that isn't
happening. He needs to live and let live a little.

~~~
RyanZAG
You've got that part very confused. Nobody is saying "thank god for Stallman
or we'd have never known" \- what people are saying is "Stallman was right -
these tracking devices and cloud services are harmful to freedom and we should
find better solutions". There may not be better solutions though, but the
message is still very clear over which is harmful and what a solution might
look like.

------
SatyajitSarangi
Am I the only one surprised that it took such a long time for them to do this?

How did Jimmy Wales got there before Stallman, using an ideology that was
pretty much ushered by Stallman as Guerrilla Warfare?

I know that Stallman has his fair share of quirks, who doesn't? But I believe
in today's world, he is more of a forgotten hero, whose "quriks" get
highlighted more than his long list of achievements and just for inspiring
people to join the bandwagon of open source coding.

~~~
rdouble
Has anyone else even heard of the "internet hall of fame" before now?

~~~
reeses
It reminds me of those "best of the web" and "site of the day" badges people
put on their sites in Web 0.95 patch level c.

~~~
vacri
Though horrible and garish, it's good to see the million dollar homepage still
honouring his pledge.

[http://milliondollarhomepage.com/](http://milliondollarhomepage.com/)

------
mark_l_watson
While wearing my FSF Libre Planet t-shirt, I offer my congratulations to
Richard :-)

Congratulations offered, I would also like to point out that his concerns over
freedom, control of your own software and data now seems even more relevant
with the recent disclosures about the NSA.

------
dfc
I had no idea that stallman came up with the term POSIX:
[http://stallman.org/articles/posix.html](http://stallman.org/articles/posix.html)

------
derpapst
Many years ago, when I did my first steps in Emacs, I wrote Richard a mail
asking, why it has such unusual and sometimes awkward keyboard shortcuts. He
replied: "For fast and efficient editing."

I like that guy.

------
alex_doom
I was not even aware this was a thing.

~~~
gizbot
It started in 2012, which we all know as the real beginning of the Internet.

~~~
pvnick
Oh that makes sense, I was thinking "really, it took until 2013 to get RMS in
there?" It seems like the internet hall of fame would almost be specifically
created to contain Stallman.

~~~
IvyMike
Of COURSE if there is to be an Internet Hall of Fame, RMS has to be in it.

But they were between a rock and a hard place last year, given that the FSF
was itself founded by RMS. They probably waited a year to avoid immediate
whining of "RMS created an award to give to himself".

------
dpapathanasiou
I wonder if his browsing habits have changed since 2007:
[http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134979](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134979)

~~~
ealexhudson
I doubt it. He still travels an awful lot, and while people often make fun of
his "I browse via email" set-up, it's difficult to think of an alternative
off-line cache setup that would handle long latency that well.

I honestly believe if that "read everything offline" system was proposed on
some popular productivity blog as a new life hack, hipsters would be all over
it.

~~~
gngeal
And Knuth doesn't use e-mail at all. And Dijkstra didn't use a computer for a
very long time. I think it's safe to assume that this is the class of people
that develop habits that would seem strange to most people.

~~~
toolslive
I heard from people at the University of Belfast say that CAR Hoar had never
used the universities computer system during the time he discovered quicksort.
When asked about this he supposedly answered: "I proved it works, so why
should I implement it"

------
jwcrux
Full inductees also include Aaron Swartz and Jimmy Wales

[http://www.internethalloffame.org/blog/2013/06/26/internet-h...](http://www.internethalloffame.org/blog/2013/06/26/internet-
hall-fame-announces-2013-inductees)

------
dllthomas
Well deserved.

------
Uchikoma
Someone will not be happy with this one:

"Aaron Swartz (posthumous) Co-authored version of RSS"

------
mehrzad
Does anyone have a serious reason not to call it "GNU/Linux"? Curious.

~~~
timdev2
Both "GNU" and "/" are hard to pronounce.

~~~
drdaeman
Is it some sort of sarcasm or you're really implying /ɡnuː/ is hard to
pronounce?

------
counterpointer
I like RMS(even attended one of his talks, was fun) and he has been surprising
prescient about many things.

But he still seems to be falling victim to the "Smarter people are more likely
to believe in false conspiracy theories" rule.

In his post against Ubuntu's local searches being sent to Amazon, he claimed
as-a-matter-of-fact that Windows sends local searches to an internet server
and his friend proved so. This may be true in Windows 8.1 but is certainly not
true beforehand. I figure that if someone else said something similar about
FOSS in the same casual way, RMS himself would characterize(rightly so) it as
FUD tactics.

Still, I do think that we need more people like him rather than everyone else
who seem to be aligning themselves with some or the other corporate entity and
thus lose their moral compass in the process.

~~~
SatyajitSarangi
Most of his detractors think that technology has outpaced him. He thinks that
technology has outpaced us, rather spoilt us.

~~~
gngeal
_technology has outpaced him_

It feels sort of weird to see such claims about a guy who was hacking on
computer systems that were almost two decades ahead of everything else. (But
that probably depends on what one sees as "technology". Shrinking transistor
size is definitely technological progress, but I don't think that this alone
has ever had a qualitative influence on the impact of computing systems -
unlike their ubiquity, which, on the other hand, is not as much a
technological advancement as it is a social one.)

~~~
dinkumthinkum
He was a brilliant technologist. I'm not sure how much programming he does
anymore. But the technology outpacing stuff ... Have you looked into the sorts
of devices and technologies he currently uses?

------
rmsify
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as internet
hall of fame, is in fact, GNU/internet hall of fame, or as I've recently taken
to calling it, GNU plus internet hall of fame. Internet hall of fame is not an
operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully
functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and
vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many
computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without
realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is
widely used today is often called 'internet hall of fame', and many of its
users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU
Project. There really is a internet hall of fame, and these people are using
it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Internet hall of fame is the
kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to
the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an
operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context
of a complete operating system. Internet hall of fame is normally used in
combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU
with internet hall of fame added, or GNU/internet hall of fame. All the so-
called 'internet hall of fame' distributions are really distributions of
GNU/internet hall of fame.

------
racl101
Just now? Geez. This guy should've been inducted in the first year.

------
xenator
He belongs to Wall of Shame.

~~~
HNJohnC
Yup, apparently very few capitalists around here. It's easy to shout rah rah
rah in response to RMS from the sidelines but if he had his way very few of
the posters here would be making a living writing code, perhaps they don't
though, that would explain it I guess.

I've not been a HN member for long but the support for Stallman here is one of
the most surprising things I've seen about this place.

~~~
omegaham
There are Congressmen that are really, really far left and far right. They're
widely seen as kooks, but they serve a valuable purpose - they go against the
groupthink of everyone else and get them to think about things differently.
Sure, they're crazy. Often their ideas are completely at odds with reality.
But the more rational parts of their beliefs also get communicated with their
kookiness, and it helps everyone.

For example, Dennis Kucinich made a great Congressman. That being said, he
would most definitely not make a good President.

Richard Stallman is the same way. Is it a terrible idea to take all of his
ideas and mold the programming community in his image? Yes. It would be
impractical and completely insane to expect everyone to work for free. But
that doesn't mean that we should completely discount everything that he says.
There are great ideas in there right alongside the craziness.

~~~
gillianseed
>It would be impractical and completely insane to expect everyone to work for
free.

Do you have any examples of him saying that code should be free of cost. As
far as I know he has no problem with people charging for programs, only that
the source code should be made available to recipients, along with rights to
modify and redistribute (the latter obviously poses problems for business-
schemes based upon artificial scarcity).

I also seem to recall him arguing for micropayment schemes to be used to
finance developers (and artists), this is something which could perhaps become
a reality in the (hopefully not too distant) future, as shown by successful
kickstarter type projects like for example openshot:

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/421164014/openshot-
video...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/421164014/openshot-video-editor-
for-windows-mac-and-linux)

