Slashdot Mirror
Richard Stallman on OLPC
memshankar writes "In an interview while he was in Hyderabad, India RMS praises for the One Laptop Per Child Project. He is even contemplating making a switch to XO, the flagship machine of the project, from his "old thinkpad". Stallman went on to say that the OLPC laptop has given people a way to use the free BIOS.
He is, however dissatisfied with the wireless networking system used in the XO."
Two issues:
(1) I know what the message was, and posted what the message was in the post you replied to.
(2) You got the message wrong, and you didn't even have to RTFA to find out you got the message wrong: in the Slashdot summary, it says Stallman doesn't like how the WiFi drivers are not free.
Again, let's look at the title of the post: "Richard Stallman on OLPC". You claim that the message isn't about RMS, but about what he believes. And yet, the title gives no indication what this "belief" might be, and if the title mentioned an arbitrary name other than RMS, it would have never made it to Slashdot. You won't see an article called "Fred Nguyen on OLPC" on Slashdot, for example.
Let's read the article summary. It says RMS says he's going to switch from his Thinkpad to the OLPC. Now assuming I had no idea who the hell RMS is, why would I give a damn what laptop some guy is going to switch to? Why haven't you asked ME what laptop I'm switching to? The reason is you don't care at all.
This has nothing to do with the message, which is "I like OLPC better than Thinkpad". This has everything to do with the messenger, which is RMS. If you actually cared about the message, how come your posts keeps rambling on and on about RMS, and never bothers to ask people what laptops they are using? Surely, if you cared about the message of "OLPC is better than Thinkpad" and did not care about the messenger at all, then any other Slashdot reader's feelings about OLPC vs Thinkpad is just as valuable as RMS's feelings.
But you didn't perform this informal survey. Because you don't care what other Slashdot readers think. You only care when it's RMS, or possibly Linus, or Bill Gates, or some other "important" person speaking. You care about the messenger, not the message.
Exactly, you care about what RMS believes, not because of what the belief is itself, but because RMS fascinates you, and you wish to learn more about his beliefs, even before knowing what those beliefs will be. I don't know how to make it any more clear to you that you are placing more value to his beliefs simply because of who he is, not because of what he is saying.
The way you phrased your assertion, you're saying that anything RMS believes, you will care about. If you really didn't care about the messenger and only cared about the message, then you would say something along the lines of "we care about beliefs which are insightful, regardless of who spoke them, and we abhor inane comments, even if they were made by RMS". But of course, you think can't imagine RMS saying anything inane, because he has such a "freaky world view".
Yes, exactly. It's the "RMS" part that's important, not the "I like OLPC more than Thinkpads" which is important. Hence the messenger is more important than the message. The more you talk about RMS (the messenger), and less you talk about what people's feelings are towards various laptops (the messenger), the more you're supporting my argument that in this case, everyone is paying more attention to the messenger than the message.
I understand every point you're trying to make, and I agree with most of them. The only issue where we differ is that you seem to believe that {the fact that the only reason we care when someone says "I like OLPC better than Thinkpads" is when that someone is RMS, or someone equally important} is not evidence for {We care who it is who is actually saying "I like OLPC better than Thinkpads"}.