image transcription:
big collage of people captioned, “the only people I wouldn’t have minded being billionaires”
names(and a bit of info, which is not included in the collage) of people in collage(from top left, row-wise):
- Alexandra Elbakyan, creator of Sci-Hub. perhaps the single-most important person in the scientific community regarding access to research papers.
- Linus Torvalds, creator of linux kernel and git, courtesy of which we have GNU/Linux.
- David Revoy, french artist famous for his pepper&carrot, a libre webcomic. inspiration for artists who are into free software movement
- Richard Stallman, arch-hacker who started it all. founded the GNU project, free software movement, Emacs, GCC, GPL, concept of copyleft, among many other things. champions for free software to this day(is undergoing treatment for cancer at the moment).
- Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VLC media player for 2 decades now
- Ian Murdock, founder of Debian GNU/Linux and Debian manifesto. died too soon.
- Alexis Kauffmann, creator of framasoft, a French nonprofit organisation that champions free software. known for providing alternatives to centralised services, notable one being framapad and peertube.
- Aaron Swartz, a brilliant programmer who created RSS, markdown, creative commons, and is known for his involvement in creation of reddit. he also died too soon.
- Bram Moolenaar, creator of vim, a charityware.
on the bottom right is the text reading, “plus the thousands of free software enthusiasts working tirelessly.”
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I understand your point, but those weren’t the words he said. though I don’t think that’s going to make a difference.
I like RMS for what he did(and is doing) for the free software community. I can also talk about some uncanny things about Gandhi, but that doesn’t make his contribution to the independence movement and his views on nonviolence any less relevant.
to me, a person should be seen in his entirety. because only fictional characters are without flaws.
People should indeed be seen in their entirety, the failure of this is why so many people get upset about Stallman.
The guy is routinely portrayed as a bastion of righteous good will, championing the little guy against the evil corporations. The hero worship is real.
Some of us see Stallman as a misogynistic asshole who routinely belittles people on mailing lists when they don’t agree with him and publicly defends people who sexually abuse children.
For some of us, it feels like we need to go out of our way to point this out because we don’t want a guy like that as the public face of something we care about.
I agree with your point in spirit, but again, he didn’t say any such thing. I haven’t talked to him in person, so, I can only rely on internet to validate/refute those claims.
he is the public face of free software because others have their own terminologies(e.g.: open source championed by bruce perens and eric raymond), with which the GNU project disagrees.
Here you go, someone has done me the service of clearly laying out the case against Stallman here so that I don’t need to l: https://drewdevault.com/2023/11/25/2023-11-26-RMS-on-sex.html
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what did
ithe say about women that makes him a misogynist?I once heard him described as “The smartest man to ever throw a tantrum like a 4 year old”
wha?
you can read everything in great detail and with citations here if you have the bandwidth.
but I’m not sure if the commenter is mixing two unrelated accusations towards him.
stallman is known for his fixation on certain choice of words, which is the reason most people get him wrong. that’s why I shared the link to read his exact words and make up your mind by yourself.
He did not. Go find his exact words if you don’t believe me.
Why don’t you link his exact words, then?