zlacker

>>kotaKa+(OP)
The funny thing is Stallman started his fight like half a century ago and on regular days Hacker News shits on him eating something off of his foot and not being polished and diplomatic, and loves practical aspects of Corporate Open Source and gratis goodies and doesn't particularly care about Free Software.

On this day suddenly folks come out of the woodwork advocating for half baked measures to achieve what Stallman portrayed but they still hardly recognize this was EXACTLY his concern when he started the Free Software movement.

>>tgma+Rs1
Stallman actively hurts the cause with his behaviour. I'm not only talking about his eccentricities, but also the adversarial and combative language. Yes, Amazon is trying to swindle us, but few people will be convinced of that when you start your argument by calling the kindle an "Amazon swindle" every time, directly implying that anyone who has one is an idiot or even malicious.

Yes, it's unfair that someone can be 100% correct but people won't listen to them because of their appearance or mannerisms. But whining about that unfairness is unproductive. People will never listen to someone who can't stop themselves from eating stuff from their foot in public.

>>cedill+Kz1
I was always somewhat put off by his extreme vigilance over the word free. Stallmans usage of free software is exactly the same as the rest of the worlds open source. We also have “source available” for software that is license encumbered but distributes the source.

So much time and effort wasted on a fruitless effort to redefine words that already have well established meanings.

>>Gigach+yH1
Stallman is a "prophet": he needs to be extreme and rigid in his ideology so that the world shifts to a more moderate middle ground. For GNU to actually change the world, they need to be a pole of extreme that is opposite to our status quo of capitalist consumption. You are not supposed to emulate him.

You see this phenomenon in every movement for societal change. The more dogmatic they are, the larger their effect on public opinion.

The fact that the modern programming world defaults to releasing their code using corporate-friendly OSS licences like MIT is thanks to Stallman's and GNU's campaigns.