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Stallman Attacked by Ninjas
vivIsel writes "When RMS took the stage to address the Yale Political Union, Yale's venerable parliamentary debate society, it was already an unusual speech: instead of the jacket and tie customary there, he sported a T shirt, and no shoes. But then he was attacked by ninjas. Apparently some students took it into their head to duplicate an XKCD webcomic before a live audience — luckily, though, Stallman didn't resort to violence. Instead, he delivered an excellent speech about DRM."
Nobody's saying he should put on a suit and tie or anything. Jeans and a t-shirt would be perfectly acceptable. However if he wants to be taken seriously, he needs to do a couple things:
Would you say the same thing if he showed up to a presentation naked, or covered in feces? If you're incapable of managing your own persona hygiene, how in the hell are you going to manage something global? RMS can be as much of a hippy as he likes, but unless he cleans himself up at least a little bit nobody's going to take him seriously besides other hippies. There's a reason why RMS is a laughing stock, and it's partly due to his insistence on "Free Software" above anything else. For every one person who is actually interested in hearing RMS speak at a presentation like this, there are 50 who are there to laugh at the smelly, delusional hippy.
That's nice, and 20+ years old. What has he done lately to keep himself relevant? His personal web page is full of political propaganda and tripe (figures RMS would support the Green Party). It doesn't even have a section on software he's written, outside of the "Serious Bio" portion. His blog is nothing more than a listing of speaking engagements. And doesn't he have some sort of RSI that prevents him from actually typing (using speech commands instead)? As a developer, he's notoriously difficult to work with (why emacs has forked so much, for example). He's pretty much marginalized when it comes to code, and is nothing more than a figurehead for the FSF. A statue of a hippy would work just about as well.
Neither has Osama bin Laden.
Forgive me if I continue to be skeptical of RMS's extremism...
You can't simply assume that once information is made available, it will always be available. If not maintained and copied and actively disseminated, information dies; it fades away, for a myriad of reasons.
I'll just call this the "GNU zealot paranoid outlook." How typical. The Church of Stallman creed.
The same argument could be made wrt GPLed software if you think about it, e.g., unless some replicates GPL code it dies too. For instance, AFAIK, I'm the only one to keep a public TISL (Tokohoku ISLisp) GPLed code around.
This isn't DNA, dude. This is computer code. Computer code is not free. Freedom is a category that belongs to people. You get that wrong every time.
Once the code is out there, it's out there. Nobody can take that away.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Once again, your flaming fanboyism blinds you to the fact that what caught your eye was a flippant remark and the least important part of the sentence. Your reading comprehension skills are handicapped, at best.