RMS, Free software and the Ubuntu CDs

[Daniel Carrera]

On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 09:39 -0400, ubuntu at rio.vg wrote:
> RMS is a bit of a nut.  To him, FSF is a religion.  Heck, I remember at
> one point he was wearing robes with an old hard drive platter on his
> head as a halo.

Uhmm... the hard disk platter thing was humour. Geez! If all you can do
is take a joke out of context and call him nuts because of that, then
you really have nothing. Look, the man has faults, but the worst thing I
can find against him is that he's picky with language. That's only a
minor fault, it's more annoying than anything else.

> In person, RMS is just like he is on-line.

On line he is polite and respectful, though a bit had to talk to because
he gets caught up on language ("GNU/Linux").

I have had disagreements with RMS on-line, because I'm not as purist as
he is. He was respectful and friendly, and said that he was happy to
work with people who have a more middle-ground position than he does. I
think he gets a lot of bad rep that he doesn't deserve.


> Honestly, I've never seen Linus Torvalds be a jerk.

I have, and ESR certainly thinks he is.

> He might very well post that he thinks the current
> path Gnome path of removing advanced options from the GUI entirely is a
> bad idea, but if you read it, it's an analysis, his opinion, and he
> isn't demanding it be changed.

You're quick to forgive Linus' human failings but at the same time look
for every reason to hang RMS.

> RMS, on the other hand, demands that anything that doesn't conform to
> his religious view be changed,

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man
tries to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on
unreasonable men."

I'm sorry, but I don't see this as a fault, I think it's a feature. I
also think that calling him religious is fair, because you are adding an
emotive word that doesn't need to be there. Just say that he wants
others (e.g. Ubuntu) to conform to his views. That would be a fair
statement, without any emotive language thrown in. To that I would say
that a lot of groups (Amnesty International, Green Pleace, etc) also
want others to change to conform to their views. And that all progress
in the world happens because of people like these.


> RMS would rather have pure software than working software.
> Torvalds would rather have working software than pure software.

These statements are mostly right, but "working software" is an
exaggeration, which is usually unfair. Instead, let's say that RMS will
compromise features for purity. Also consider that RMS *did* use
proprietary software when he was making GNU, so it's not like he would
never go hear proprietary.

> Maybe I'm biased because my thought process is much closer to Torvald's
> than RMS's.  Both, I think, are necessary for the open source movement.

This seems like a very fair thing to say. In my case, I don't really
subscribe to either Torvalds' or RMS' point of view. I have a different
POV that is fairly different from either of theirs'.

Cheers,
Daniel.
-- 
http://opendocumentfellowship.org
  "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the
  unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to himself.
  Therefore all progress depends on unreasonable men."
        -- George Bernard Shaw