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RMS Running For GNOME Board Of Directors
An anonymous reader points to this story at Newsforge which says that "RMS is throwing his hat in the ring as a candidate for the GNOME foundation board of directors. Speculation is that he's pissed because the GNOME summary keeps mentioning non-free software; now he's going to (try to) do something about it."
the recent Microsoft stockholder meeting. Maybe he could have made board of directors there.
I bet he secretly has thousands of shares of MS stock, so he could have been a good candidate.
And you know what's sad? That's probably all he'll pull for. Stallman could be doing -great- things for the free software movement, very great things. All he's really done is spawned the important acronyms..GNU, GPL, under which actual contributors of work have made thousands of worthwhile and creative contributions. If all he's going to do is fight for a name change because he's too arrogant to admit that his "GNU" OS still doesn't exist yet, and that he's only trying to stamp his name on other projects in an attempt to pretend that it does, I'd rather he gave up applying.
Gnome has a very poor system for bug tracking and quality control. Any crack smoking fool can make CVS commits that fuck things up. It is a real mess.
Yes, it is total bullshit, as most of RMS's attempts to extend his responsibility for the current state of affairs beyond emacs and the FSF are.
RMS is a control freak just as much as Billy Boy Gates, just with a lot less money.
The Open Source movement should succeed, because it will be better for us all, but if it succeeds and RMS becomes some sort of autocrat, Lord help us all.
The key behind Open Source is really distributed authority and responsibility. RMS holds to himself the right to declare who fits, and who doesn't, engineers and lawyers be damned.
While I hate the RMS==Communist comparisons, in reality he does have the same emotional need for autocratic control held by Lenin and Stalin. Both of whom were autocrats (Stalin, much more so, though Lenin dies young an who know?) and not beholden to the democratic principles of Marxism...
How about accusing RMS of what he's done, instead of what you think he's done? Quote anything where RMS says you shouldn't "even be TOLD" about software which is not GPL?
The world is a better place because of him, but RMS is too fanatical for a job like this. Such a position requires a politician- not a guy who might cut off his organization's nose to spite its face.
Thank you. I was looking for a real quote; you say there isn't one.
Given that RMS has frequently been abused over hearsay evidence in the past, one might think you would have learned to hold your fire until you have an actual target.
Yes, RMS doesn't have any experience in developing GUI's. Sure, he hasn't contributed to GNOME development in any way, shape, manner or form.
But he did stay at a Holiday Inn last night.
Ok the guy wrote or worked on most of the utilities that make up unix. He helped release the most used and best compiler suite in the GNU collection. I'll give him that... hes a brilliant programmer. But, i'm getting just a little sick of him trying to dictate what software the world should use and who should own it. Gnome is in for a fight now with kde, they don't need rms screwing it up. Again, this is not a flame its just my venting because i'm getting sick of rms's attitude. For free software views... I'd take O'Reilly or hell... Linus's (Linux is free... i don't care what anything else is). RMS, i'm scared to admitt gives Open Source a bad name. Its the fanantics like that that lead to us being declared zealot communist, etc... insert latest FUD here. I'm not saying he should disappear, I'm just saying maybe we can give him some kind of figure head job in Gnome where we just nod and say "Thats nice Mr. Stallman, will you please put down mouse". Haha... that would be funny... theres a question, when do CS people retire? I mean RMS has been around awhile... can't we roast him and send him to flordia? Oh well...
can't sleep slashdot will eat me