Slashdot Mirror

Picketing in the street can be annoying. An old man shouting "nonsense" can be annoying. And when the powerful believe they need not suffer such annoyance, when they create laws to suppress it, they become tyrants. Thus we need not search painstakingly for evidence that Blair has lied to the public or to Parliament. Every time a minister uses the term "anti-terrorist powers", he is lying. These are anti-dissent powers--the powers of tyranny.

RMS, has never claimed to be a God, only a saint.

Saint IGNUcius.

Seriously though, GNU's overwhelming wave of puns defeats asshat anti-FSF whining any day.

RMS, has never claimed to be a God, only a saint.

Saint IGNUcius.

Seriously though, GNU's overwhelming wave of puns defeats asshat anti-FSF whining any day.

I use the word in this context. Got it?

As an atheist, I'd like to stick to a language created by an atheist.

You are narrowing your options considering who who developed the initial versions of GCC.

Well, that's pretty hard to refute.

It could have been worse...

> the RMS type "OSS is religion"

Religion? Would you really claim Saint IGNUcius considers free software a religion?

(He certainly don't consider "OSS" anything but a detraction.)

Dude why would you suggest such a horrid thing, have you actually seen some of them? Heck, I think the HAZARD suites would-be/are a great improvement.

Now I am going to have a hard time geting images of them NAKED out of my mind.

>>"By the same standards the USA is clearly a repressive regime."

>So apparently 'insightful' on /. means 'completely lacking perspective regarding history, politics, and social theory'. Good to know for future reference.

Here are some other references:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11 488.htm
Barbed wire for demonstrators
Notice especially the one about churches

History? The US has an exemplary past when it comes to human rights, even counting the crimes against Native Americans and blacks. History also shows that human rights standards can evaporate when a government scares its people enough.

On RMS' page he links to a petition in favor of network neutrality.

Did anybody click on the article (yeah, yeah, I know) and actually look at that guy? I respect him, really I do - and the first thing I thought was, "Buddy, you really need to shave."

He's got to do something about the scrag before someone misidentifies him and his hoary mug ends up on Coast-to-Coast AM's web site. Or worse, someone mistakes him for Saint IGNUcious.

Seems that it's me too ... from the Apple site:

We cannot detect your computer's operating system (most likely because you have JavaScript disabled). Please select your download from the choices below:

• Mac OS X v10.3.9 or later
• Windows 2000 or XP

I guess I thunk a little too different ? Maybe things have changed since they advertised with these words:

Here's to the crazy ones.

The misfits.

The rebels.

The troublemakers.

[...]

While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

?

Linus certainly created many jobs. He, however, would not be able to do it without the foundation built by Richard Stallman and the efforts of many thousands of OSS developers and supporters.

Stallman's Personal Home Page

Another great essay by Richard Stallman in which he discusses the many dangers of DRM (aka. Treacherous Computing and Handcuffware) is:

Can you trust your computer?

Here.

Also, Stallman has a pretty relevant little article.

Without Jobs there would be no Apple, Woz would have stuck at HP and written printer drivers.

Even writing printer drivers can lead to great things. After all, it was a printer problem that spurred Richard Stallman towards development of GNU, which of course became the foundation for the later flourishing of Free Software and the open source development model. (Sam William's biography Free as in Freedom published by O'Reilly gives the whole story of the printer problem.) You don't need to hook up with a charismatic individual with a reality distortion field to change the world. If a controversial eccentric like Stallman can do great things from a hermit-like AI lab, then Woz would have had opportunities even without Jobs.

To become a saint in the church of Emacs does not require celibacy
Inseert standard joke abut geeks not having gf's here

Jokes aside, maybe it's true. RMS's personal ad is still on his websit. Still single after all these years?

Stallman is a big supporter of attacking companies that do biopiracy.
If you goto his Home Page he has an article right next to the Boycott Harry Potter books article.

Stallman's name is a big draw. He knows it's a business audience and he'll adapt to that.

Does that mean he won't show up looking like this?

The article says Oracle compares its US$15G/yr revenue to MySQL's US$30M/yr. But as Paul Graham says, it is OK to shrink a US$30G/yr industry to US$30M/yr, if your absolute share of the new US$30M is bigger than the one on US$30G was. Or in other words, MySQL will laugh to the bank on growing from US$30M, while Oracle will strive to keep their US$15G.

Also, IBM, Oracle and Intel did not make Linux. Richard Stallman created GNU, Linus used GNU and complemented it with Linux, and now IBM, Oracle and Intel help Linus with Linux and RMS with GNU.

I wonder how long will IBM and Oracle continue think they can sell proprietary servers on free platforms, without facing significant competition from free servers too. And how long Intel think they can sell proprietary machines to run free software without facing competition from free (think 'open') hardware? Now they are winning, IBM and Oracle using GNU/Linux to face competition from Microsoft, and Intel to crush proprietary RISC (think they ignoring OpenFirmware); but how long before we are running PostgreSQL (or better yet, Rel) on some OpenCores system booting with OpenFirmware or something the like? Not on the short term, for sure, but eventually maybe it is inevitable, unless DRM forces us into a police state.

That's his FSF blog, dealing only with FSF and GNU related activities. Go to his homepage instead, and see what kind of person he is outside of the software realm.

Translation: RMS believes in Free Software. ESR believes in Open Source.

If you've never read it, I recommend The Right to Read, written by RMS in 1997. I read it when it was published and thought he was being his usual extremist self, and that stuff like he describes would never happen. Unfortunately, it looks like he was being prophetic.

Wow, you didn't get that I was pointing out exactly that about your post.

I am not the one that did not "get" it. I think you have a personality issue: it's called being an asshole.

There are many things people happen to enjoy or to hate, this is no reason to make laws about it, particulary not draconical overreaching laws.

see: GNU

and on that note, the only people I see using the word "draconian" or any form of it usually don't know what the fuck they are talking about.

I am talking about copyrights in general being a good thing.

Having a 9-17 living off of your work (as are many other methods), receiving royalties is not, but there is no doubt that people enjoy receiving money while others do the actual work.

if I did the work, I get the royalties. Think of it like this: let's say I invest $1,000,000 into research and development for product X. it's sold for $19.95. I, the original creator, am protected, because another company can't come along and take my product and re-sell it for $9.95 (without having to do any R&D). It may take no effort to copy something such as art,books, software, movies, or music, but it can take months and even years to create it.

With no copyright, each copy would cost whoever bought it the amount of hours it took to develop/research it, which would be very expensive.

As a former 16-year-old Internet loudmouth, I would hope that we can disconnect Dylan's age from his opinions. It is in fact possible to be mature and communicate well at that age, but unfortunately this article is not very mature at all. To be fair, though, there are significantly older people with similarly narrow world views who get a ton of press on Slashdot.

Odds are the overlap is probably on purpose. Here's a sample:

• C++ vs (MS) C++
• C++ vs (MS) C#
• RMS vs (MS) RMS
• Vista vs (MS) Vista
• ... and so on ...

Someone familiar with the special terms MS uses could probably dig up plenty more.

Want to mess with the search results? Simply put links on some of your pages to the non-MS definition.

Tracing the linage of memes is tricky business. My guess would be one part Dudley 'Booger' Dawson played by Curtis Armstrong in Revenge of the Nerds, and one part derived from the archetypal nerd, R.M. Stallman. IIRC RMS use to partake in folk dancing, but injured an ankle, had to quit dancing and acquired a paunch, where RMS is concerned the hairy part is apparent.

Best guess on my part.

Then the poster, here on Slashdot, points out that despite many people donating a lot of money and time into XEMacs, the product has been disappointing. What guarantee is there that GNU programmers can get the work done?

But XEmacs is not part of GNU:

http://stallman.org/articles/xemacs.origin/

You are mistaking the hacker ethic. Think of it this way. Since I bought it, it belongs to me and I can use it anyway I see fit.

I own several things which now serve a totally different purpose from which the manufacturer intended. His intentions are not an issue now that it is no longer his.

Paraphrasing RMS, a hacker is someone who uses tools for a purpose other than normally intended.
Might be best to let him speak for himself.

It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".

Yet when I say I am a hacker, people often think I am making a naughty admission, presenting myself specifically as a security breaker. How did this confusion develop?

Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated on one narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some hackers occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and took the term to mean breaking security, no more and no less. The media have since spread that definition, disregarding our attempts to correct them. As a result, most people have a mistaken idea of what we hackers actually do and what we think.

You can help correct the misunderstanding simply by making a distinction between security breaking and hacking--by using the term "cracking" for security breaking. The people who do it are "crackers". Some of them may also be hackers, just as some of them may be chess players or golfers; most of them are not.

Source http://www.stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

Might also Check Out Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic In modern parlance, the hacker ethic is either:

* the belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and computing resources wherever possible; and/or
* the belief that system hacking for fun and exploration is ethically acceptable as long as the hacker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality.

Both of these normative ethical principles are widely, but by no means universally, accepted among hackers.

There, now don't we all feel a little more informed.

The law is merely a temporal instrument of Man, but St. IGNUcius is ordained by $DEITY.

Free But Shackled - The Java Trap by Richard Stallman

Agree or not, but that's the gist of the argument. :)

Yeah, I'm sure all of the diplomats in the room stood up and applauded RMS and then they all got together to sing "war war what is it good for" and then they sat down for a bit of transcendental meditation. Then they all started blogs, donated to the eff and got some stupid flute to play in honor of a butterfly sitting on an HP server.

Umm,
http://www.stallman.org/RMS_13_bendicindo.jpg
http://www.gnu.org/award/1998/RichardStallman-3.jp g
THAT met heads of state. Quite the image to be projecting.

Have you seen his personal webpage? I suppose CSS is too "new"

Being stuck in your ways no matter what isn't a good trait.

I'm not from the US, so I may be ill-informed. It does seem that there are issues with travelling in the US, Even if you're american. Additionally, there are some (admittedly crack-pot looking) sites keeping a a list of government endorsed breaches of the first amendment.

Then of course, there's what appears to be the FBI acting as thought police.

A similar situation recently occurred with the release of the latest Harry Potter book. Not surprisingly, the lawyers interviewed took a similar view to what you're expressing (including one statement saying the public has "no right to read") and RMS did not. Again, I find RMS' logic simply more compelling because it doesn't substitute market value or contract law as the measure of all things; his measure is human freedom to live life in a cooperative society instead of a dog-eat-dog jungle. Should we apply the view you express consistently we would inevitably apply it to something more socially important than either a Star Wars movie or a Harry Potter book:

"The right to read information in text that a company published "by mistake" can be very important. Suppose it's not a work of fiction, but about the health effects of some of their products, or how to make a program that will interoperate with theirs. Suppose it gives information about corruption or government lies. The right to read is a right worth defending, and no exceptions can be tolerated."

I'm not familiar with the Half-Life 2 example you refer to, so I have no comment on that. However, I refer you to http://stallman.org/harry-potter.html to read RMS' essays on this (don't forget the linked essays for more explication).

Bravo, Richard M Stallman! After GPL3 comes out, I will be the first to include the command "download source code" in my Web-based software, so with GPL3 corporations should never remove this command, and this is a good thing. To the folks that say that GPL is about control and not freedom: GPL is about the freedom of the user, and the user wants to have the source code, even on a Web-based application.

He may not have written a whole lot of code, but I'd say the community has benefitted a lot from his essays.

Though he's far from "normal", he has enough social skills not to start talking about having nasal sex with dead flowers with people he's trying to convert. The best coders often don't make the best spokesmen.

Methinks that over-reaches just a little. Apart from the fact that "propaganda" is a poor choice of word - although it may describe ESR's output - open source pioneers were working effectively in principle long before ESR was out of diapers.

Despite ESR's strenuous self-promotion, the fact is that RMS was of course principally responsible for what we know as open source philosophy and its legal framework. ESR is only one of the slightly loopy hangers-on... valuable, but as is usually the case, in inverse proportion to his ego.

And then there is the Second Act, in which he plans to take credit for the inevitable disintegration of M$. Sorry Eric, that's going to take the whole community to achieve, unless you plan to take your arsenal to Redmond...

I really wish ESR would stop claiming to speak for the Open Source community if he is going to behave in this fashion.

RMS, while a bit self-admittedly silly at times, at least conducts himself in a more courteous and polite fashion.

This is but one of the many non-idealogical reasons that I prefer to think of myself in the Free Software Community, rather than the Open Source Community.

The moral of the story: NEVER underestimate a marxist's capacity for self-immolation.

PS: If you are at all interested in this sort of thing, I cannot recommend highly enough the work of the pseudonymous author "Spengler", at the Asia Times:

The Complete Spengler

Just get an ACME Generator

Well i'm not saying they have to work in our interest, but at least respect us and maintain normal diplomatic relationships, not instigating coups, or openly funding radical non democratic groups.

As an US citizen, you would be very suprised at the amount of money the US administration spends in illegal activities in Venezuela.

In the links i provided you can read some of the details.

Regional integration is one of the long term goals, and one of the main foreign policies for Venezuela. It is a type of integration that goes beyond trade agreements, in fact it gives priority to social, political and cultural aspects as well.

Its not exactly that we are standing up to the states, its more like the US administration wants their rules imposed on us, without us having any chance to discuss anything. They pretend we go to Washington d.c. and sign without reading whatever they wish. Any objection, is good enough for Bush to declare us part of the "axis of evil, communists, etc".

For example, they would love to see PDVSA, the state oil company, sold to private interests. Well who do you think PDVSA is competing with in the international market? Exactly, the multinational oil companies, which the Bush administration is closely related with. Im sure they would love to buy it all, but our current constitution, discussed and approved by the majority of the people in the referendum of 1999, forbids this.

Here are some more links:
http://www.embavenez-us.org/constitution/intro.htm
http://www.handsoffvenezuela.org/
http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/v enezuela/
http://www.veninfo.org/
http://www.embavenez-us.org/
http://www.vicuk.org/

Richard Stallman has many comments about Venezuela (he has been here many times) http://www.stallman.org/
In fact, he is calling to "Protest Bush by buying gas from Citgo." by citing an article made by Jeff Cohen: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-25.htm

Citgo belongs to PDVSA, which means us:
http://www.citgo.com/

We ship daily 1500000 barrels of oil to the United States. of these, 660000 go to Citgo.

Here are some interesting oil facts:

- An oil tanker from Venezuela takes from 4 to 5 days to reach the south coast in USA. The same oil tanker coming from the middle east, takes about 40 days.
- Venezuelan oil is heavier than average (requires more refining), and it has a lower international price (about 10US$ less per barrel).
- Because its not so profitable and enviromentally friendly, there have been no new refineries built in the United States in the past 25 years.
- Refining capacity in the States has peaked at 100% capacity for many years already, getting more oil to the market won't lower prices anymore, and the global demand of oil has already reached maximun production ("Peak Oil" levels).
- Citgo owns 8 of those not so profitable refineries...
- USA with 7% population of the world consumes 27% of total oil production. Please guys, support energy efficiency usage and alternative methods.
- China and India are demanding more and more fuel, we have already established good relationships with them.

A couple of documentaries i recommend you to watch:

http://endofsuburbia.com/
http://www.chavezthefilm.com/

Dr. Ioannidis (who is Greek, like me) is right: I read daily public announcements from universities, as well as some scientific papers, and I have found that most of them are unimportant, wrong or simply motivated by financial reasons (some universities must use all their expenses allowance in order to continue receiving government money). Not only scientific papers are wrong (often the result of vanity), but students dislike studying science and technology. Recently RPI President Jackson called for a national strategy to overcome this problem. USA must invest more in science, otherwise rival nations. How would you feel to see a communist Chinese flag on Mars? You can prevent this by persuading your representatives to invest more in science and technology. The first step would be to enact more reasonable copyright and patent laws. Science, like free software benefits from openess, which is now hindered by copyright and patents. Richard M. Stallman has published an article in Nature about this, and you can read it here.

Oh, no. There's lots of prior art out there.

Yes, but why would they bother when they're already readily available for both major (win and macosx) and atleast one minor (linux) OS.

Oh wait. You want the source to look cool, because let's be honest, you're not actually going to be modifying it or even looking at.

All hail St Ignucius and sing the hymn.

Okay, here is a good example.

For those who don't want to read the link, basically he was at the airport, and didn't take his shoes off. Even though it was 'recommended'. He was brought to the side, and they had to do an entire search. Then he wanted to get into a philosophical debate with the security guy, who was just doing his job.

I fly for work too, Mr. Stallman. Maybe I was the guy in the line behind you who had to wait an extra 10 minutes, while you decided to cry out about your rights...and about the use of the word 'recommend.'

Why the hell can't you just take off your shoes, and go through the detector like everyone else? Anyone who has flown in the past few years knows the drill. The security checkpoint wasn't put there to violate our rights, it was put there because people want to bring bombs and guns onto airplanes. It is unfortunately a necessity.

But of course Stallman just has to see this as another chance to challenge the status quo...to make his point.

The hundred people behind him don't give a shit about his point...they just want to get through the damn security check. So they can get on with their lives.

That is just ONE example of why I think he is a big idiot.

I could point out hundreds of others from his blog. It's easy, because he is the most self-rightous person I have ever 'met' through their blog.

No, I haven't him in person. I can only form my opinion on the information he makes available.

If he (or anyone else) would like to investigate my life, and make his opinion known, I would welcome them.

Oh, and that guy has one of the ugliest websites I have ever seen...and he has no idea in the world how to crop pictures. (Seriously, this is not flamebait...go look at his website.) Oh, and I also think he is a big hairy dirt-bag.

There- that's about it for now.

I've never met Stallman (have you?) and I'll admit that his persona, as portrayed in the press, comes across as somewaht annoying. But this is true for most most iconoclasts. But his bio certainly doesn't make his life sound like a "train wreck".

How about this: You post your bio here and let us compare your accomplishments with his and decide whose life is a train wreck. Who the fuck were you again?

It would also be better if you made the effort to try to point out the errors or inconsistencies in his "crybaby" positions instead of engaging in simple-minded ad hominem attacks.

Does anyone really care about his opinion anymore?

Yes. Has anyone ever cared about yours (except me?)

JM