That said, we need new voices and more voices, on that end of the spectrum. RMS has never been the ideal spokesperson for a movement, though his passion is beyond question, and his technical achievements impressive. The world of computing RMS represents is old-fashioned to the current generation. I fall in between the old generation and this new generation that has never known a time without the Internet dominating everything, and I can see where the language of RMS can seem to miss the point to a lot of younger folks. While he has always been prescient on these fronts, and I think he understands the world we live in better than most, I don't think he can be the voice of the current generation of hackers, the way he was the voice of prior generations.
The GNU project as a whole has the feel of a relic, and I worry every time I go to gnu.org and see the state of it. A few years ago, there were GNU projects for all sorts of modern things; there was Savannah to address the problems inherent in SourceForge (again, prescient...SF.net turned evil just as RMS assumed they would). But, GNU has nothing for github (there are Open Source github alternatives, but GNU is nowhere in the story).
Anyway, I don't know what needs to happen, but I know a few things: GNU is so much less relevant than when I started using Linux 20+ years ago. RMS speaks to an older generation of hackers; even though he should be heeded by the young, I doubt he is. And, I can't think of any other voices for software freedom that are as consistent or as effective as RMS and GNU was 20 years ago.
How can you get a kid to say no to an iPhone, when what you're asking him to do is extrapolate a vague and possibly non-existent threat of privacy loss? It's incredibly difficult and honestly without some real-world event to bring it home for these children I fear it can't really be done. Without an event, you'd be reliant on a cultural tidal shift -- it would have to be "cool" to be anti-Apple, or anti-tracking devices. It would have be cooler for kids to own burners than smartphones because they don't track you.
There will always be a subset of people who truly understand what Stallman is saying and will probably adopt his behaviors. But to actually appeal to younger audiences and disseminate that message effectively to a mass amount of them seems to be too difficult.
Good luck getting people to adopt to this behavior, when we are so massively leveraged by what we can look up on the web. It works to an extent for him because of where he's been situated since 1970, but try telling a kid who's not in The Athens of America (the Boston area) that he should cut himself off from most of the world's useful, and cheaply obtained info, and you're not likely to get many sales.
I can't criticize the general public, and kids, too harshly, because while I use Linux and Open Source software almost exclusively on my laptop and desktop, I also use gmail a lot, I have an Android phone (if I could find a decent Firefox phone in the US, I'd switch), I have an active facebook and Twitter account, etc. It's hard to treat these things as inherently dangerous, and thus something to actively avoid, when the world is so tied to them. And, replacing them is hard, because it takes millions of dollars and armies of engineers to build GMail or facebook at scale.
Which is kind of what I'm getting at. Without a mass movement of brilliant hackers, or at least very prolific ones, building open alternatives, we will eventually lose everything resembling privacy, developer freedom, and communities free of marketing. I'm not arguing things are worse or better than they were 20 years ago (that's an extremely complex and nuanced discussion to have, and for every stride forward, there have been dramatic losses), but there was an almost religious fervor behind the development of the Internet. Nearly everything that ran the Internet in the beginning was aggressively free or Open Source software: Apache, BIND, Sendmail, Postfix, QMail, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Perl, PHP, Linux, BSD, etc. Even the web browser, and all the other client software, started out free. It was based on a cultural belief that this thing we were building was meant to be free; a safe haven from state and corporate power, and a place where an individual had a meaningful contribution to make without needing permission.
So, while there's more Open Source and Free software than ever, and more developers building more code in public, I think that religious fervor has faded, and I think it's to our detriment.
I don't know what to do about it, and it may be that I miss the subtleties of what can be done about it (I grew up without the Internet, and learned it as a second language as an almost-adult; maybe there's something positive happening that I don't see or understand). But, I feel vaguely like we (anyone who cares and understands where we're from and where we're heading) should be doing something about it.
I'm part of an older generation, and I view RMS largely as a crank. Yes, some of his ideas are valid and some of his warning seem almost prescient. But even way back when he wasn't the only person railing against injustice. I'd say that Stallman's effect has been net positive, but he's definitely not always on the right side of things.
We need not only new voices, but different voices coming from a different sensibility. We don't need an updated, modern Stallman. We need someone else, who shares Stallman's passion and commitment but not his off-kilter perspective.
RMS's response was:
> These MIT professors ought to know better than to smear us hackers by using the word "hacker" as synonymous with "security breaker".
It doesn't detract from his authority on the subject, not in the least, but is he a hero? I don't think so.
He would likely scoff at being called a hero too.
In any event, the vast majority of people will know no privacy other than from each-other's affairs. Frankly I think the advent of cheap home delivery will push the privacy issue higher into the general consciousness, and people will be alarmed that all of their purchases are now tracked and indexed.
The gap between online and offline purchasing will disappear over the next 18-36 months, and those on the forefront of this will be in a significant position of power. The synthesis of Big Data(TM) between related firms will reach new heights, and that will actually scare people.
Greenblatt noted that he was out-hacking the whole bunch of them. Gosper called it incredible.
When Stallman finally couldn't keep up, he set a new goal that he hoped would solve the problem permanently. GNU.
There is, of course, the other side of the story, although I find the dismissal of the complexity of the features RMS was matching a little disingenuous - how complex they were seems irrelevant compared to the fact that he was doing it alone and Symbolics was doing it with a bunch of world-class hackers: https://web.archive.org/web/20080112153822/http://dlweinreb....
[1] Some people on HN define "hacker" as "person who can code". The definition in use here is older.
Out of curiosity, whom do you consider to actually be a hero in the modern day?
So he certainly made significant sacrifices for what he believed in. I would not call him a hero because I think that cheapens the word. We typically apply that word to people who put themselves in harm's way for the greater good and my father, my ex, my ex's father and grandfather all served in the military. So I would not personally write a piece describing him with that term
But he did make personal sacrifices for a cause he believed in and to which he devoted himself while being crapped on and disrespected and managed to make a real difference in the world in spite of how much hostility he was met with. Props to him.
Do you mean the FSF, or the preceding GNU project? Because we were roommates when he founded the latter, and he most assuredly wan't homeless then. His willingness to be "homeless" later might in part be an artifact of a couple of kids playing with matches and kerosene burning that building down (in a not so good part of Cambridge, MA) and his losing his worldly possessions. Not that he was, to my observation, very materialistic.
As for "being crapped on and disrespected", well, if you've spent enough time with him, you'll understand why that was a common reaction, he's ... a difficult person, and is proud of ignoring a number of social norms, including ones that tend to keep a person and their friends alive.
But a lot of it after the GNU/FSF started was due to his extreme abrasiveness towards many people who didn't entirely buy into his mission. We were, for example, called "Software Hoarders" (this, while working for for Unipress, the legal licensee of the version of Emacs he stole to start Gnu Emacs, and we ran on a "gated open source" model, if the licencor of a piece of software agreed, you got a copy of the source, you just couldn't distribute it, but you could share patches with other customers). His regular imputation of ill will when there is none (well, to start with), his gross distortions of the historical record (especially as seen in Levy's Hackers, but also see GNU/Linux) ... they lose him a lot of support he might otherwise get.
I read his biography, but I don't follow his work or life very closely. So I used a vague, hand-wavy term because I have a vague, hand-wavy understanding of it all. Therefore, I cannot clarify.
As for "being crapped on and disrespected", well, if you've spent enough time with him, you'll understand why that was a common reaction, he's ... a difficult person
Yeah, I get called "difficult" all the time. I have a life threatening, incurable medical condition. I am pretty laid back, inclined to go along, to get along, and a conflict avoider. But, unfortunately, in order to be socially acceptable, I would need to politely die a slow gruesome death. Failing to go along with that plan for me has caused me shitloads of social problems.
Thus, I am inclined to be sympathetic to rms. Many of his predictions have come true. There is no telling how much more problematic things would be had he not stuck to his guns.
"Difficult" sometimes just means you aren't going along with social norms. If you firmly believe those social norms to be a very serious problem, it is foolish to go along with them. In my experience, no matter how politely you decline to go along with them, and no matter how compelling your reasons for politely declining, simply declining will get you a fuck ton of backwash.
Weirdly, the US has become a place where anyone joining the military is now a 'hero' (and military opponents are never described so graciously). It used to be that you had to show uncommon valour in the military to be called a hero; now it's just signing up that gets you the appellation.
This is a blaming statement and is judgemental. The point here is that someone else thinks he's a hero. Heroism implies bravery, which is an emotion. You don't get to speak for other's feelings or emotional responses (like mine) in that regard just because he was homeless and your relatives fought in a war. Those arguments are biases and ad hominem in nature. I would note that you will be unable to present an equivalent valid logical argument without the introduction of biases. The biases are the 'tell' for the misapplied logic.
Heros don't need to be well spoken, socially normal or face danger. All they need is to display the characteristics of a hero, which includes someone who, from a position of weakness, displays courage. This describes RMS perfectly given the guy has stood by what he believed (courage) while being homeless (a position of weakness).
I didn't say other people were wrong to call him a hero. I said I would be unlikely to use the word and explained why. I think you have misread and mischaracterized my remark.
And if rms is not a hero, then who is?
I already stated what makes a hero in my mind. My father fought in two wars. He got a purple heart. I am currently homeless, and literally out on the street. So I am experiencing things far harder than what rms endured. Hardship and heroism are not the same thing.
That's just my opinion. If you see him as a hero, you are entitled to your opinion. Having known people who did put themselves in harm's way and paid a real high price for it, I can't say that sleeping in a hacker space rates the same as what it takes to get a purple heart.
Anyway, I am not planning to argue this further. I already responded to a different reply making much the same point you made. So I am not sure why you are repeating what was basically already said to me.
I very much respect him and I think he has done enormous service with the FSF and arguing for privacy. I also like using the cloud and think a lot about this: secure and private personal and small group clouds. Not too difficult to set up for storage, email, web apps - but conveniences like Google Now are an imposibility unless a very large developer community contributed.
I don't know in what world he lives, but it's not real. Like most people here, he values privacy way too much and doesn't seem to realize that we need as much information as possible about everything (including people) to make educated decisions as a society.
He's socially inept, and in no way a hero.
What I meant by paranoid is that he refuses for the world to have access to information about himself for who knows what reasons.
In retrospect, I should have used "insane" or "selfish".
Well, not in my view. There are political views in which the efficiency of society trumps all.
