Why Richard Stallman Was Right All Along

jrepin sends this excerpt from an opinion piece at OSNews: "Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia — but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality."

Comments

Free software wouldn't have helped

[bonch]

The whole article is a complete non sequitar. Free software wouldn't prevent Obama from signing an indefinite detention bill, nor it would it stop government intrusion on ISPs. There's no relationship between government overstepping the mark and buying a proprietary product from a company you respect because you want to use the product and are willing to sacrifice unrestricted access to its innards.

Richard Stallman also thinks necrophilia and "voluntary pedophilia" should be legal, including possession of child pornography. He doesn't visit web sites--instead, he sends email to a daemon that wgets the page and emails it back to him. Perhaps most infamously, he eats toe jam in public.

Perhaps not the best spokesperson to get behind.

A broken clock can be right some of the time. Claiming Stallman was right all along is like claiming the paranoid street preacher predicting natural disasters as God's judgement was right all along after a hurricane hits. He may have predicted something that ended up occurring, but that doesn't mean his approach to solving the issue nor his philosophy are in the same bucket.

The author of this piece, Thom Holwerda at OSNews, is becoming known over there as a pandering, flamebait author in the vein of Dvorak. His essays come off as if they're specifically designed to get posted on Slashdot. Because of that, I suspect there will be more submissions from him in the future, unfortunately.

Re:Occupy != Terrorists

[msobkow]

I didn't say you can't protest; I said you can't squat.

Feel free to come every day with your placards and your megaphones to speak to the public, as long as you're polite about it and sharing information and ideas, not ranting incoherencies.

To me, that's ALL "Freedom of Speech" guarantees. Most jurisdictions are very generous in allowing camps at all.

The right to speak does not mean you have the right to protest in any way you see fit, otherwise you could claim you were arrested for "Freedom of Speech" violations when you firebombed a consulate.