Slashdot Mirror
Richard Stallman's Dissenting View of Steve Jobs
Garabito writes "Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, has posted his not-so-fond memories of Steve Jobs on his personal site, saying, 'As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.' His statement has spurred reaction from the community; some even asking to the Free Software movement to find a new voice."
my account of Stallman's appearance at the Yorktown HS computer club.
I'd mod you up, had I the points. I even saw a somewhat disturbing piece on one of those Sunday shows asserting that Steve Jobs was indeed the FOUR most important people to influence technology in the past half century, since calling him the single most important person was apparently already too low a tribute. Steve was clearly very influential but to blindly say that he was "The most influential in history" is a huge reach. Just because there are certain groups of people who rely entirely on his company's products (not even a majority of those who use technology on a daily basis) that group (almost all of those in national media, it would seem) feel justified in glorifying him to no apparent end.
And hey, at least RMS won't need to worry about his funeral being picketed by the Westboro folks.
You know what my daughter said when told about Steve Jobs death? "Who is Steve Jobs?". Lets face reality, there was a few segments here and there about "wow this guy died and he invented technology man"*, admittedly by the odd "famous" person. But most people don't know and don't care who he was or what he did. /. is not really a typical slice of the general public in this regard.
Now if Justin Bieber gets run over by a concrete mixer, you bet your ass you the media will get "WAY WAY WAY" out of hand.
The nice thing about the media is that it is opt in. You don't have to watch/read crap.
* sure the is a lot of buzz on tech based web sites etc, but that is hardly mainstream.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
LA Times says "some critics" but really only link to one guy, former Slashdot editor, Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier. Another one of Stallman's critics who doesn't have the balls to actually state what really bothers him about Stallman, but sleazily uses any fake controversy as an excuse to launch a discrediting smear against RMS. If you really want to know why RMS gets attacked by some of these so-called FOSS advocates, just examine RMS's other political postings on his website. It'll become apparent.
You don't have to have liked him, but you could have at least shown some respect rather than making the GNU (And by association, Linux, even though we hate you) community look like tools, instead of just yourself as you usually do.
Except that RMS is absolutely 100% spot on correct in his assessment. Some people (like you) just don't want to hear it. Nothing new here, really. For the record I am an ex Apple fanboy from roughly the Apple IIe days through OS8 when I finally gave up and moved to Linux on account of it being friendlier to software development.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Stallman should remember that he isn't just any random character fighting for software freedom. He's the self-appointed publicity figure for open source movement ...
Agreed. To paraphrase Stallman, once Stallman is dead, I'll be sorry that he is dead, but glad that he is gone.
The gay movement had their Stallman in the form of ACT-UP -- people doing outlandish, socially unacceptable acts for publicity (such as throwing blood on people they disagreed with). Stallman fits the same mold. Once the gay movement grew up and ACT-UP faded away, the gay movement became far more accepted.
What was cause? What was effect? I don't care. ACT-UP and Stallman may have been needed at one point, but ultimately do more harm to their own cause then they realize.
Just to make sure I insult everyone equally, Operation Rescue -- the anti-abortion group -- also did more harm than help to their cause with their Planned Parenthood blockades.
Is a walled garden better than a wide open desert? I think Stallman doesn't realize not everyone is a camel herder.
Indeed. Steve Jobs used to make blue boxes to steal from the phone company. Not 'steal' in quotes, actual theft of service. Using actual long distance lines without paying for them.
A lot of people did it for fun, which is somewhat reasonable, I guess. It's one thing to hack on the phone system for fun. I can shrug at that.
But Jobs actually manufactured blue boxes and sold them to others, people less interested in 'phone hacking' and more interested in 'free long distance calls'. Well, Woz built them and Jobs packaged and sold them. That was his first 'user interface', making blue boxes usable and affordable for random non-hacker people. Probably with nice curved corners and a shuffle version that didn't allow you to pick the number to dial. ;)
I.e., he was the equivalent of a hacker selling script kiddie tools.
And, years later, Steve Jobs also sold fucking phones that people couldn't install whatever software they wanted on them. Not even something illegal, not something harmful, just people who wanted to play ScummVM games or whatever on their phone.
I don't know exactly what happened in the years between those two Steve Jobs, but I'd also be glad he was gone from Apple if I suspected he was the cause of the walled garden in iPhones. (However, I have actually no evidence this is the case, and I'm not sure why RMS thinks it is. And he was pretty much 'gone from Apple' already from what I understand.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?