
Talking to the Mailman – Interview with Richard Stallman - clydethefrog
https://newleftreview.org/II/113/richard-stallman-talking-to-the-mailman
======
zekevermillion
I prefer reading written interviews with RMS. Live interviewers never seem to
be able to stop themselves from interrupting him, and he needs more than
soundbite-length to make his points.

------
Synaesthesia
Although he’s very committed to free software and individual freedom
ideologically, his arguments for them are quite excellent. I find his
political views are very common sense too

~~~
falcor84
Why "although"?

~~~
snakeboy
I think they meant that he can argue for those principles rationally, even
though he has an ideological bias towards them.

~~~
smadge
It still seems like a strange distinction. Is the implication that RMS did not
arrive at his opinions through reasoning?

~~~
mwfunk
He most definitely got started down his path for emotional reasons, he had a
sweet gig at MIT and he wanted to ride that train forever. When people at the
lab he worked in left to join Symbolics, he was left behind and he has borne
that grudge ever since. He has certainly backed up his philosophy since that
time with much reasoning and writing, but even his most rational writings seem
trapped under the weight of emotions IMO. It’s all good vs. evil, fire and
brimstone stuff, he never assumes good faith on the part of those who disagree
with him, and has never seen a bridge he didn’t want to burn.

~~~
eric24234
This post gives the impression to the reader that RMS had put his ego first
and then rationalized it with fsf philosophy.From what i had read online he
was pissed off when the printer manufacturer at MIT stopped sharing the source
code to modify the software and he has formed(or thought about it and
discovered) his philosophical leanings at that time. Very soon symbolics was
formed developing closed source software and he was invited to it. But he
believed strongly in his philosophy and was working hard to keep the free
software up to date which symbolics was developing. Also the symbolics
engineer had told in one of the interviews they were 5 people and RMS single
handedly was keeping up with them. So the conclusion i had was he was 5x
capable to the symbolics engineers (who are very smart people) and if he was
that capable he could have become rich easily, but due to his strong
philosophical belief he sacrificed his life for the greater good. If you have
the links to the contrary please share.

~~~
watwut
Based on mailing lists I read, some of those 5 people who RMS single handedly
was keeping up with were kind of pissed off about that framing a long after.
Kind of ... disagreed. He did not done the same amount of work as them,
meaning work on other projects, prototyping, design work etc, through it is
true that he could more or less copy functionality of the thing plus minus
bugs. Designing it and trying out various ways how to do the thing takes more
time then copying the project. I am fully confident in that, because I was
porting a couple of projects in the past so I know how much time is saved.

Aside everything else, self-glorifying stories about heroic saviors who are
single so much better then second smartest person in a room should be treated
with suspicion - and it is completely puzzling to me that some people are
believed them so easily. Because really, for me to believe in that much of an
unusual hero, I would like to have confirmations from other primary sources
then just said hero and people who worship him. (That is not to say that he is
incapable on the other extreme, absolutely not. But you can be extremely good
and still not the god this story is about.)

~~~
SquishyPanda23
> I would like to have confirmations from other primary sources then just said
> hero and people who worship him.

Sure, I'll bite. This is a passage about Stallman's performance in Harvard's
Math 55, which has a reputation as the hardest single undergraduate math
course in the US:

To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess, and the other SHP alumni
had to get through Math 55. Promising four years worth of math in two
semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. "It was an amazing
class," says David Harbater, a former "math mafia" member and now a professor
of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's probably safe to say
there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that
intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to people just to get it across is
that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the
differential geometry of Banach manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug
out, because most people don't start talking about Banach manifolds until
their second year of graduate school."

Starting with 75 students, the class quickly melted down to 20 by the end of
the second semester. Of that 20, says Harbater, "only 10 really knew what they
were doing." Of that 10, 8 would go on to become future mathematics
professors, 1 would go on to teach physics.

"The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman."

Seth Breidbart, a fellow Math 55 classmate, remembers Stallman distinguishing
himself from his peers even then.

"He was a stickler in some very strange ways," says Breidbart. There is a
standard technique in math which everybody does wrong. It's an abuse of
notation where you have to define a function for something and what you do is
you define a function and then you prove that it's well defined. Except the
first time he did and presented it, he defined a relation and proved that it's
a function. It's the exact same proof, but he used the correct terminology,
which no one else did. That's just the way he was."

It was in Math 55 that Richard Stallman began to cultivate a reputation for
brilliance. Breidbart agrees, but Chess, whose competitive streak refused to
yield, says the realization that Stallman might be the best mathematician in
the class didn't set in until the next year. "It was during a class on Real
Analysis, which I took with Richard the next year," says Chess, now a math
professor at Hunter College. "I actually remember in a proof about complex
valued measures that Richard came up with an idea that was basically a
metaphor from the calculus of variations. It was the first time I ever saw
somebody solve a problem in a brilliantly original way."

Chess makes no bones about it: watching Stallman's solution unfold on the
chalkboard was a devastating blow. As a kid who'd always taken pride in being
the smartest mathematician the room, it was like catching a glimpse of his own
mortality. Years later, as Chess slowly came to accept the professional rank
of a good-but-not-great mathematician, he had Stallman's sophomore-year proof
to look back on as a taunting early indicator.

"That's the thing about mathematics," says Chess. "You don't have to be a
first-rank mathematician to recognize first-rate mathematical talent. I could
tell I was up there, but I could also tell I wasn't at the first rank. If
Richard had chosen to be a mathematician, he would have been a first-rank
mathematician."

Source:
[https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch04.html](https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch04.html)

~~~
watwut
None of it proves that he did the work of five people nor that those people
were unfairly stolen from his lab. It shows he is great at math through. The
original claim is that he single handedly did work of those 5 "very smart"
people. Especially when main point in dispute is whether what he did was
equivalent amount of work and which software had more bugs.

This does not even directly implies he is a good programmer (he is actually
good programmer in reality, but high level math skills don't prove it).

~~~
rick22
The following exert is from the
[https://archive.org/stream/faif-2.0/faif-2.0_djvu.txt](https://archive.org/stream/faif-2.0/faif-2.0_djvu.txt).
If you read above this paragraph its clear stallman did not for the purpose of
his ego choose the ideology. Its the other way.

<BEGIN> Already renowned for his work with Emacs, Stallman's ability to match
the output of an entire team of Symbolics program- mers - a team that included
more than a few legendary hackers itself \- still stands as one of the major
human accomplishments of the In- formation Age, or of any age for that matter.
Dubbing it a "master hack" and Stallman himself a "virtual John Henry of
computer code," author Steven Levy notes that many of his Symbolics-employed
rivals had no choice but to pay their idealistic former comrade grudging re-
spect. Levy quotes Bill Gosper, a hacker who eventually went to work for
Symbolics in the company's Palo Alto office, expressing amazement over
Stallman's output during this period:

I can see something Stallman wrote, and I might decide it was bad (probably
not, but somebody could convince me it was bad), and I would still say, "But
wait a minute - Stallman doesn't have anybody to argue with all night over
there. He's working alone! It's incredible anyone could do this alone!" 16
<END>

------
mothsonasloth
I like RMS however the sad thing is that most people don't care.

We can call those people sheeple or whatever, but at the end of the day they
are just users who don't have the time/knowledge to care about free software.

It took me a few times before I could grasp free software Vs open source and
I'm knee deep in the code most days.

Another issue this ideology faces is it's main proponent; RMS. He's not
charismatic and as another user pointed out, does not present well on videos
or talks. If he wants free software to continue, then he should pick new
champions and take a step back.

~~~
simion314
The thing I like about RMS is that when he speaks it is like presenting a
mathematical proof, he explains the terms, rules and shows the logic
arguments, the interviewers are most of the time impatient or incapable to
understand such a rigorous style of response.

~~~
SquishyPanda23
I really think this is how Stallman thinks. As far as I know, he's never
mentioned the words "deontic logic" in writing, but I get the impression he
believes he's attempting to give a formal logical argument for morally
obligatory behavior.

Aside from the hassle involved with using only free software, I think one of
the things holding him back is that he's much better at math/comp sci/logic
than he is at social skills, and he's not especially suited to being the
leader of a popular movement.

~~~
igni
Nobody else is doing it.

I don't think he needs to hand over - if someone else was doing a better job
of the advocacy of Free Software then perhaps he could choose to 'retire', but
until then he is the best there is.

------
newnewpdro
"If China and the US are in a race for Orwellian tyranny, I hope the US
loses."

RMS is generally right, and I have the utmost respect for his adherence to
such a principled stance for the social good all these years.

Imagine all the opportunities to become filthy rich in the tech world he's
ignored, having lived through multiple tech bubbles while being more than
qualified to capitalize on them through developing proprietary software or
otherwise exploiting users.

------
saagarjha
Just a couple of comments as I read through this:

> Non-free, proprietary software is also much more likely to be malware—to
> contain malicious functionalities, of which there are many kinds. Non-free
> programs can spy on the users, report on them. Many are designed
> specifically to restrict what users can do—that’s their purpose.

I think this is a mischaracterization, since these things apply to _free_
software as well. The difference is that it is usually much easier to detect
when such things are happening, and modify the program so that it no longer
does these things.

> Another form of malicious functionality is tying the program to a specific
> remote server

Again, this doesn’t seem to me to be a “free software” argument. The reason
this doesn’t usually happen with free software is that there is no central
entity that controls the software, whereas with non-free software one
company/server/person can control their products and “backdoor” them.

> If a program is written in Swift, you can now install it yourself from
> source code.

This is not quite true. I can do the same for a program written in Objective-C
as well, and I can still write an app in Swift and send you a compiled binary
for you to install. Perhaps Stallman was talking about Swift Playgrounds, but
even here there are issues: you cannot necessarily change the code on your
device itself, and the environment that your code runs in is much more
restrictive.

> free software is something businesses can use and develop and sell.

I have seen many companies _use_ free software, but very few actually making
money off of free software. When I ask, I’m usually pointed to RedHat, which
makes money off of providing support. However, the money they’re getting is
usually coming from companies that sell non-free software. So I’m really
curious how the economy would work if _everyone_ sold free software, since
this doesn’t seem like something that would work.

Also, just a a final comment, I find it amusing that Stallman has these little
nicknames for all the non-free things he doesn’t like. It seems to me a bit
childish; I wonder if this actually helps him or it just makes other people
feel like I do.

~~~
paulddraper
> I think this is a mischaracterization, since these things apply to free
> software as well.

You think free (not in the sense of $0; in the sense of Stallman's usage: non-
propriatry, libre) software contains malware/spyware?

~~~
bitwize
There have been instances of open-source programs (including a certain code
editor Hackernews has a collective nerdgasm over every time a release drops)
shipping with telemetry or other spying features enabled. In some cases (like
that one popular browser), the vendor makes it difficult or impossible to
disable those features without modifying and recompiling the code.

~~~
Crontab
"There have been instances of open-source programs shipping with telemetry or
other spying features enabled."

Brew comes to mind.

------
nopepoper
Has anyone ever done an economic analysis of free software(GNU licensed
software) and how it plays out financially for all the actors involved?

As an example, how does a license like GNU play out for the average person
contributing to a successful GNU licensed game versus a closed source game?

And also, at a more macro level, wouldn't a GNU-like license foster innovation
and collaboration in the developing world and lead to greater profit for all
parties involved in the long run(except ofc mega-corps)?

*I might just open an Ask HN when I've thought this question through some more.

~~~
smcameron
For games, I'd expect GNU does not play out well at all financially (and I say
this as the author of a couple of GPL'ed games). Games are a bit of a strange
beast, and atypical, I'd say, and pretty much _nobody_ makes a GPL'ed game and
expects to make money on it, and those that do attempt it turn out to be
mistaken. If you look on [http://freegamedev.net](http://freegamedev.net) for
instance, it's pretty moribund lately, though, say five years ago it was more
lively. Unity pretty much killed open source games, there's no new blood in
open source games, all the young people flock to Unity. OTOH, more than half
my career has been spent working on open source stuff (linux drivers, mainly)
and in that, it's worked out pretty well financially. But an anecdote is not
data, of course.

~~~
esotericn
Well, generally (not always) monetization revolves around having a non-free
product at some stage, I think.

Think about the business model of, say, charging for support for an open
source library. Users don't pay that essentially _ever_. A business will pay,
and they'll pay because they produce a non-free product (maybe it's SaaS,
maybe they license proprietary software to other entities, whatever).

A game is the end of the line. If it's free software, (essentially) no-one
pays for it.

There are also various examples of companies like GitLab that have the nonfree
SaaS version and the free (MIT!) community version.

I'd be interested in seeing examples of a pure free software business model.

~~~
sytse
Thanks for mentioning GitLab. We would not have been able to grow as fast as
we did without adopting an open core model. In the beginning we sold only
support but companies tended to cancel their support contract after not
needing it for a year. The margins on out self-hosted product are much better
than on our SaaS product because of the hosting fees for free users.

An example of a pure free software business model is RedHat, they open source
everything they make and that is working out for them
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322772](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322772)

~~~
esotericn
Of course. I love what you guys are doing and I'm incredibly grateful for the
existence of CE!

------
jancsika
The fact that MITAI's system had no security and was accessible over ARPANET
is fascinating. What class of users could access ARPANET at that time?

~~~
gumby
In theory the arpanet was restricted to someone with connections to ARPA (now
DARPA): either the military, military contractors (typically being paid to
support the net, like BBN and SRI) or arpa-funded research institutions like
ISI, MIT, etc). However if you had a parent or friend with access they'd
sometimes give you the phone number of a local TIP (dialing point) -- then
pretty much the only place you could go was the machines at MIT tech square
(AI, MC, ML, DM) because they didn't have any restrictions.

Also various people who had accounts on other machines on the net would
connect to the MIT lab machines as tourists simply because it was fun.

Even once the lab caved and put in some login security it was only to access
the machine -- once you were connected you could change to another user or
whatever.

It was "the ARPANET" by the way -- ARPA's network rather than having a name.
ARPANET was also an adjective (e.g. ARPANET TIP). I know RMS would have said
that but the interviewer transcribed it without the article.

~~~
EvanAnderson
Back in the early 90's I remember reading a "Letter from a Famous Hacker" in
an e-zine talking about getting access to MIT systems. The sentiments
expressed in the text made it seem like the security posture of the MIT AI lab
was rather laid-back (and it sounded pretty cool).

I dug up the article[1] tonight (thanks, Jason Scott!). The the perspective I
have today (at the time I had no idea who RMS was) it seems pretty clear that
RMS wrote it. It's a neat little time capsule.

[1]
[http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/DFP/dfp-1-5.txt](http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/DFP/dfp-1-5.txt)

------
rdiddly
Are not free and open source exactly the same? Opening the source gives you
the four freedoms. It's both necessary and sufficient. The objection is that
it's not philosophically explicit enough, not enough about the user, watered-
down somehow? To me it seems like an only slightly different emphasis - on
openness rather than freedom - which are in fact the same concept, just looked
at from different angles. And the openness is obviously for the user just like
the freedom is. Seems like a weird place to have a sticking point. It's just
People's Front of Judea vs. Judean People's Front - an argument for jackoffs.

~~~
belorn
Remember when people presented an alternative to black lives matter and
started to call it human lives matter? Emphasis sometimes matters a lot and
people get upset when people intend to steer a movement away from the core
issue for why it was created. It might look like a People's Front of Judea vs.
Judean People's Front, but open source was created with the intention to steer
focus away from the freedom ideology, just like how people say that human
lives matter is just a name that people use to steer emphasis away from
African Americans that get killed.

~~~
rdiddly
Interesing & very "gettable" analogy. In fact it's so apt, that it captures
the feature most salient to me in all 3 examples: By insisting on things that,
in the eyes of their more powerful adversaries, are minor or insignificant
differences, they squander goodwill, make enemies out of allies, and make the
movement weaker (or fail to make it stronger). It's a political blunder. In
the case of the JPF/PFJ against the Romans it's obviously comic, but in the
other two cases it's kind of tragic. BLM alienates a certain number of white
people who aren't racists and want to work with them toward reform. Stallman
maybe alienates a certain number of "open sourcers" who actually share most of
his values & principles, certainly more than 1995 Bill Gates or 2001 Steve
Ballmer did, let's say!

So yeah I might do that part differently if I were Stallman or in charge of
BLM. Although I suppose in neither case is there really anybody truly "in
charge," which at least in my experience with FOSS I always thought was the
beauty of it. (That's another thing too, how can you "co-opt" something nobody
owns?)

At some point you have to get shit done. Granted I'm advancing a position
right now that leads to all sorts of compromise (in the one sense but also
unfortunately in the other sense) and slippery-slope-ism and lesser-of-two-
evils-ism. But somewhere I heard the saying, "There's nothing more useless
than an unelected liberal." In other words the purity of your ideas does
nobody any good if your hands aren't on the levers of power. Hi Hillary! (HRC
disclaimers apply; see store for details.) That saying comes from the
hierarchical model, obviously, but to translate it into a 'community movement'
paradigm, power is simply the number of people participating. If you chop that
in half, you chop everybody's power in half.

------
mitchtbaum
>> I’ve found GNU social close to a replacement for Twitter, whereas Diaspora
was more like Facebook.

> That’s what I gathered. I’m in favor of projects like these, because I know
> they’re useful for other people, but it wouldn’t fit my lifestyle. I just
> use email. You can call me the Mailman—as in True Names, Vernor Vinge’s
> science-fiction story.

I really don't get this. Computers are supposed to open the doors to
technological and social change, no? Why would anyone drag their feet like
this? There are so many things that have come out since email and even more
still coming.

~~~
esotericn
What do you mean by 'drag their feet'?

I'm something like half RMS' age, and for the most part I use e-mail, IRC, and
the odd board like HN (which I probably spend too much time on).

Social networks are simply not useful to me.

By contrast I have a coffee machine and barely anyone else I know does (UK).
Because I find it useful and they don't.

What's wrong with that? It's nothing to do with the age of the software and
all to do with the purpose it serves. My car is old because it works and I
don't need a new one, too.

~~~
mitchtbaum
you may not need another car

but you might benefit from a plane

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I used to love the stream of new technologies and was often an early adopter.
Eventually I realised most of the promises of these products were illusory.
There is very little benefit to them, sometimes even negative value.

------
randomsearch
Bit off topic but recently I have been reading/watching a lot from Jaron
Lanier.

Lanier used to be a FOSS advocate but has now taken the position that his
previous support, and the opinions of RMS, are wrong.

Whether you agree or not, Lanier is a smart guy and an eloquent speaker and
certainly worth listening to.

------
guy98238710
I think RMS' thinking is stuck in the 80s and 90s. This hinders the whole free
software movement. I can see three main points where he is behind the times:

1\. Permissive licensing actually helps the cause by spreading free software
more widely, saturating demand faster, and displacing all proprietary
software. It also avoids the contradiction when free software developers use
their power to spread software freedom by force.

2\. What RMS is afraid of is front-ending of free software with proprietary
facades. This is why free software must extend through the whole stack all the
way to the end user and it must be complemented with non-profits that deliver
complete services to users. Non-profits can also ensure de facto freedom
whilst licenses only barely protect de jure freedom.

3\. Internet is not about communication. It's about remote operation of
server-side software. Software freedoms must extend to teleoperated software,
for example through the above mentioned non-profits.

~~~
icebraining
I don't see how he is stuck at all; I see current events as validating his
fears. The problem with (1) is that it doesn't solve (2) at all; free software
_has_ spread on the backend thanks to permissive licenses, and yet proprietary
facades are rampant. A good example of this is Chrome (built on FOSS webkit)
displacing Firefox. And that's despite Mozilla being just that kind of non-
profit trying to ensure freedom.

Non-profits ensuring freedoms is a nice thought, but it's very hard to compete
with the abusive business models of large software corps, so unless you
somehow convince regular people that they are better off paying for the stuff
they use, licensing is the only real tool you have to avoid having your work
contribute to those proprietary facades.

~~~
guy98238710
RMS' thinking comes from the early days of free software when free software
was rare and viral licenses helped spread it. Free software is so commonplace
now that its sheer volume displaces proprietary software.

Proprietary software vendors are trying to adapt by replacing fees with ads
and spyware (like in the case of Chrome), but this business model will not
last. It is abusive and people feel it. They will eventually gravitate to free
software. Once they get used to free software, they wouldn't accept abuse
anymore.

------
jondubois
>> When I talk about capitalism, I mean private business.

It's interesting that what we call a 'public corporation' today isn't actually
public at all - I'm pretty sure that Richard Stallman considers public
corporations as being 'private business'.

A big problem with so-called public corporations is that there is not enough
fluidity in terms of ownership for them to be called 'public'. The majority of
shares move between a very small percentage of wealthy investors which
represent an even smaller percentage of the general public.

It would be good to see a capitalist system where there is more fluidity over
the ownership of shares of companies. Also, it would be nice to see public
companies release all their code in the public domain under the GPL license.

I think that cryptocurrencies could make these things possible because they
solve the financial incentive problem which has plagued free software. I think
that it's now possible to create free software in the public domain in such a
way that people can profit from it significantly but not in quite the same
permanent way as we're used to with shares of corporations.

------
jayliew
The world seems like a very binary and black-and-white place for RMS.
Everything non-free + proprietary == bad, whereas the opposite == good.

Is reality really so neatly categorized into binary outcomes with no shades of
gray, though?

~~~
frank_nitti
When it comes to source code, yes. Are you able to view the entirety of the
code running the systems that control your information and operations? The
answer to that question cannot be a shade of gray.

RMS has been proven more correct with each year that passes. More and more of
the technologists responsible for our most significant innovations have
expressed concerns about the control that large firms have gained over their
users. This control is only possible through "non-free" source code, and is a
guaranteed consequence when we allow the practice of distributing closed-
source systems.

~~~
millstone
rms and the GPL focus on distribution, yet the Internet has enabled large
firms to gain control without distributing their software, or even while
distributing FOSS software. Perhaps tomorrow Google open-sources the JS
executed by google.com in their open source browser, and it makes no
difference, because the important bits - what data they retain about users -
are not distributed.

Software we never run on our devices may yet control us.

~~~
cyphar
AGPL tries to solve some of these problems, but fundamentally any service
which controls and operates on your data on a server you don't own cannot
fundamentally be free. RMS calls such services SaaSS (Service as a Software
Substitute).

So while distributed systems under AGPL still protect your freedom, AGPL of a
SaaSS (like Google Docs) are non-free because you cannot change the software
running on the server (and of course you shouldn't be able to -- because that
would violate the freedom of the administrator). SaaSS is fundamentally
incompatible with software freedom.

(And this is something that RMS has made clear arguments about. He cares more
than just about distribution.)

------
EGreg
_Freedom and democracy are more important than advancing technology. If China
and the US are in a race for Orwellian tyranny, I hope the US loses. Indeed,
the US should drop out of the race as soon as possible. Our society has been
taught to overestimate the importance of ‘innovation’. Innovations may be
good, and they may be bad. If we let companies decide which innovations we
will use, they will choose the ones that give them more of an advantage over
us._

I liked this part the most as something new and insightful said by RMS.

I am not sure that democracy is better than innovation. I would choose Freedom
and Innovation over Freedom and Democracy. Just look at how much has been done
in the last few centuries. Nearly everyone can have things today that even
kings didn’t have. Democracy on the other hand is just a way of voting for
some policy that’s then enforced on everyone. In fact, China can be said to be
a democracy more than the US in some ways. I do think we need to safeguard
rights and freedoms but democracy isn’t the only way to do that.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
>In fact, China can be said to be a democracy more than the US in some ways.

None that I can think of, there is no political opposition allowed in China.

~~~
cyphar
I agree, though there are many other western countries that have much stronger
democracies than the US. Most of them in fact.

In the US, third parties aren't given equal placement on ballots (you need to
get "ballot rights"). Large parties get money from the government for
advertising, which small parties don't. The people don't actually vote for who
is in power (and votes aren't equal between people).

Doesn't seem like political opposition is a workable right in the US to me.
Not to mention everyone has guns, and guns are seen as an "break glass in case
of tyranny" tool -- meaning that culturally people are primed to see violence
as being a reasonable retort for political disagreements (obviously this is an
oversimplification -- but political rallies in the US are far more violent
than in many other western countries, despite many western countries having
their own problems).

~~~
jki275
You don’t need “ballot rights”, you simply need to prove your idea or
candidate is popular enough to make it worthwhile to add to the ballot.

Most political discourse in the US is not violent, regardless of what you see
in the news. Dissent happens plenty.

------
marknadal
Stallman is hypocritical. He says a lot of good sounding things that lure you
into ideas that subtly contradict the bait he catches you with.

Justification and examples of these claims here (
[https://github.com/amark/gun/pull/434#issuecomment-336536807](https://github.com/amark/gun/pull/434#issuecomment-336536807)
) on an old old old issue around a GPL code dependency we had to reject.

~~~
madez
On one hand, it is bad style to accuse someone with strong words while only
throwing with a link to give foundation to your judgement. This does not
create a constructive environment to debate and learn.

On the other hand, both claims in the linked comment are not reasonable. For
the first point in the link, software can be created and shared for money with
the GPL while not preventing libraries to collect the software and provide it
free of charge. For the second point, the given link does not give any
foundation to the claim the Richard Stallman is against cooperations.

~~~
marknadal
Many in this thread are quoting his "non-free" statement yet ignorant that
Stallman violates his own standard. That totally counts and proves the point.

Besides the fact he outright calls corporations evil?

~~~
madez
You once again gave no direct argument for your accusation. If you can't or
are unwilling to do so, please don't put out accusations.

