And I agree that it would be helpful to have a moderate voice in Free Software. I use a Mac - sorry, it's really nice to use and I code a lot. I like my Kindle - sorry, it's better than the others and I read a lot. I live and work with proprietary software, but I believe in Free Software too. WebKit is popular because of Apple and Google. OS X is the most popular BSD, and the most popular consumer Unix. Non-free and free can and have worked together to mutual benefit. Is there anyone out there who can help me walk that line? If Larry is proposing to make that organisation, I would welcome it with open arms.
But what of this Jobs nonsense? Are we so timid and flammable that we can't handle a complex opinion that we don't agree with? Can you not accept that Jobs was a great leader who didn't deserve to die, but that he left a scary, proprietary footprint all over the mobile and tablet space? "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." is an opinion I don't agree with, but I don't think it's ludicrous, tactless and heartless.
Not everyone has to respect the things I respect, and feelings don't suddenly trump debate because of death. Jobs is one of the hacker community's sacred cows, and we wouldn't accept this level of sanctification on any other topic. I'm sure when Bill Gates or the Dalai Lama dies, there will be posts saying "let's not forget that Windows Vista was awful and religion is the other opiate of Tibet" Will they cause the same outcry?
"My heart goes out to Steve Jobs' family in their time of grief. And my heart also goes to the millions of people who looked up to him as an icon and inspiration. But we need to not get so carried away honoring the dead that we forget the damage that Jobs' work had on the Free Software movement.
His pioneered the software walled garden, which destroys freedom and choice. And he targeted it at people who would not understand what they were sacrificing by giving up their freedoms.
We can only hope that his successors make Apple a more free company, or failing that, are not as effective at spreading it as he was."
Wasn't that better? And it communicated substantively the same thing, but without all the name calling and the seeming glee over the death of another human.
Disclaimer: I typed this on my Macbook Air.
Edit: One more thing to add. Saying "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone" is tripe. Being gone is a euphemism for being dead. The reason we mourn when a loved one dies is precisely because that means they are gone.
Maybe RMS sees a subtle distinction between death and gone-ness in his head. But I promise you that people in grief see absolutely no distinction between the death and the loss of the person they mourn.
It is not legitimate for the mass of HN to be "in grief" because of Steve Jobs's death. You may be sad, but certainly no grieving period should be necessary for strangers.
Stallman was not overtly disrespectful imo, and there's a solid distinction between "gone" and "dead". "Gone" can mean retired just as well as it could mean dead -- the point is that that person is no longer influential in the circles they were affecting.
Disclaimer: Actively avoids Apple products
And?
It's rms. He's the biggest nerd in the world. Nerds are expected to be horrendously, gratuitously crass, offensive and insensitive of people's emotions.
This is like being mad that the sky is blue. Pointless outrage.
>The reason we mourn when a loved one dies is precisely because that means they are gone.
Not true! If I knew my close friend or family member was moving to a remote location such that I'd never see or hear from them again, I'd be sad but it would be a lot less sad than if they died. When someone dies, we don't just mourn the loss of their interactions we us (wouldn't that be a bit selfish?), we mourn the fact that they are aren't experiencing life anymore.
By completely failing to acknowledge what Jobs did that was positive (even within his own value system) Stallman shows just how clueless he is. To put it another way, Stallman is fine with people being imprisoned in the walled garden of a computer priesthood, so long as the software they don't know how to use is "free".
This is a very bold generalization grounded on nothing. Once we had rational discussions here.
Wasn't that better? And it communicated
substantively the same thing
No, that isn't better and it does not communicate the same thing.
This is probably true but when they become an embarrassment and a liability it's better to distance yourself from them as much as possible. His latest comments are particularly insensitive but it goes a lot deeper than that. Most of the stuff he writes leaves me with a more negative view of free software. He basically wants people to reject most modern software/technology/services and devote their lives to being as spiritually pure as himself. Never-mind. I'll just use the closed software instead because that's not a commitment I'm willing to make. If everyone in his organization feels that way then it's doomed. He's now an intensely negative force.
No. If he wants anything from the average person, instead of for them, it's that they pay attention to the value of their freedom (to keep using your software when the key server goes offline, for instance) now instead of later when it's too late.
> Most of the stuff he writes leaves me with a more negative view of free software.
Of course. You resent what you see as his spiritual purity in rejecting Trojan horse DRMed products that lock you in because you know you aren't capable of going without something you want now for greater gain in the future.
You realize that going with the locked-down answer is as smart as selling your house for the short-term gain, but unlike Stallman, are unable to control your urges. Thus you hate him, and those who can.
Now, we both could be reading more into it than there is, but this is how your over-the-top hatred of a free software programmer comes across.
> This is probably true but when they become an embarrassment and a liability it's better to distance yourself from them as much as possible.
I'm sure you don't put 1/100th of the effort into actually attacking real evil people as you do in knocking down the other teams' supposedly sacred cows.
Or are you on the streets/otherwise fighting for freedom in Bahrain, Egypt, etc, freeing Bradley Manning, stopping censorship, women/children/men/the elderly's rights and all the other good fights, and this is just what's left for Stallman?
How is it that someone on such a high horse lacks perspective?
There are perhaps exceptions in those who are essentially disgraces to the human race, but in general... Death is the one thing that binds us all. We all share the same destination. Have a little class. Even Gates had something nice to say, and I'm sure if Gates passed first, Jobs would have had something as well.
Death is not a time for bitterness.
loon
n 1: a worthless lazy fellow
I've felt this way a long time about RMS; his comment about Steve Jobs's death was uncalled for--but it really was well-within character. Just like Phelps and Westboro are expected to show up at soldier's funerals to protest, we've come to expect this type of shit from RMS--and I agree with the OP that it's time to stop just accepting it.
[Edit] I want to state that RMS, like everyone, is fully entitled to his opinion and that opinion carries no more or less weight than my own. Moreover, you're completely entitled to agree with him. What I do have a problem with is what the OP described: he doesn't belong at the head of a major organization, nor does he belong at the apex of the free software movement. Beyond my earlier described "inner circle," in the past several years, he's done more to tarnish the image of the free software community than to help it.
I don't think the same of Fred Phelps. I long ago reached the conclusion that he tries to say the most inflammatory thing possible wether he really believes it or not. I have no idea why, but I believe he has some other agenda than just the condemnation of homosexuality.
I've even almost seriously entertained the idea that he is a closet extreme atheist out to discredit theists.
It's hard to understand the internal reality that either is basing their actions on anymore, but it doesn't change the fact that they both see the world through their own singular vision which they're no longer able to coherently share with others and convince others of - they've taken their premises as axioms and just go around preaching hate to a shrinking choir and offending the rest of us with their actions
If Larry Ellison had just died after his company purposely screwed up MySQL, OpenOffice, Java, Hudson, OpenSolaris ... RMSs comment would still be tasteless and inappropriate
1. http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/gro...
Looks like it equates to fairly decent take-home pay given that he probably works far less than the 2080 full time hours a year for it.
And remember, it's a church, so it's all tax free.
I'm sick of the conspiracy theories that he must be some kind of secret agent. Bigotry and hatred is typical in religion, especially for homosexuals. Theists need to call him an atheist or a con man to make them feel better about being theists and following the philosophy of 1st century madmen.
EDIT: With that being said, RMS and Phelps are nothing at all alike. RMS truly believes what he says and that his beliefs are right. Phelps is just an ass trying to elicit violent responses to get money out of people already dealing with horrible tragedies.
I think (granted to a lesser extent) we gotta hand it to RMS
I'm honestly curious because from my outsider's perspective (being affiliated with neither Apple nor FSF), RMS is vastly more admirable than CEO of a for-profit company.
The ability to cater to customers and sell them expensive products is precious and certainly good for the shareholders. And, to a lesser degree, even for the customers I guess... but why this worship and e-drama? How can turning huge profits be comparable to FSF's mission -- lofty even if you don't identify with it -- and why are non-shareholders so ecstatic about it? (leaving Job's death aside now, R.I.P. man)
You posted my exact feelings in a more intelligent way than I ever could have.
RMS and people like him in the free software community is why I have never 100% committed to a free software way of doing things. I do a lot of development in Linux but I do just as much in Windows. Even though I contribute to the open source world in my own small way and see the importance of it, I find myself caring less and less about the philosophy behind it, At least when it comes to the zealots that are involved.
We all know that both Apple and Microsoft have pulled asshole moves before. But I can't help thinking that zealots like RMS would do the same thing if the FSF was in control.
Your level of support is not that great, then.
Trouble is, RMS is the guy who defined free software in the first place. If you want to do something else than what he intends, it's probably better to pick a different term.
You have to remember that Stallman was around before Jobs' day -- he was performing real work at MIT when Apple was initially conceptualized. Stallman therefore is apparently less vulnerable to the reality distortion field and does not unduly offer oblations to a guy who was obsessed with shininess at the expense of hacker culture. Jobs went to lengths on many products to prevent tinkering in an age when computing was still very open and very academic, because Jobs didn't want any little peons messing up his perfect devices. Hence Stallman's quip that Jobs made computers as a jail cool.
If you think about this statement from Stallman's perspective it really makes a lot of sense, and I think it is ridiculous that the Steve Jobs hero worship pervades so deeply as to not recognize that Jobs was a control freak even after Apple products were sold and in the possession of customers, and that some people, particular contemporaries of Stallman's stripe, may not have been fond of that. I doubt that the release of the iPhone really did much to persuade that set of people.
That's the mark of a self-inflated ass.
People totally go overboard wrt Steve Jobs, as they do his company, Apple. RMS comes from a time when computers were generally open for tinkering, and Apple strove to make its products impenetrable lest Jobs' pain-stakingly "perfected" designs be gaudied up by consumers. From the original Mac which didn't have expansion slots to today's iDevices that don't allow the consumer to do so much as change the battery, Apple has a long history of tight lock down.
Do you not see how an old-school hacker could be disgruntled by that philosophy? The beliefs and experience of that group runs deep enough that they are not hoodwinked into deifying Steve Jobs because the iMac is the sleekest desktop computer around.
Which is clearly not the case. Stallman specifically says that Jobs did not deserve to die and he's not glad that Jobs died.
The OP could have just said that Stallman is not the right person to be the leader FSF because he's often politically incorrect. That's debatable, but understandable.
This hypocrite Job Mania is making me sick and your opinions expresses pretty well parts of my resentment..
Will you travel the world tirelessly promoting free software, speaking at universities and other events for very little money?
Will you maintain a job board, mailing list, hardware database, software directory, year after year?
Will you find lawyers to donate hundreds of hours to write and revise licenses?
Will you hire lobbyists to fight software patents?
Will you tirelessly fight the RIAA, day after day?
When you've done all these things, sign me up.
The sinister anti-Stallman/GNU sentiment on HN is reaching incredibly high levels. Luckily it's mostly nobodies like this big mouth bozo.
Calling someone a "nobody" and a "big mouth bozo" is uncalled for.
It's not the mission, it's the man we have a problem with. Yes, he's done a lot for Free Software and software in general, most of it good. He has taught us a lot and probably learned a few things.
The next thing he needs to learn is when to keep some of his thoughts to himself. His statement, in no way, advances the cause of Free Software.
He didn't post to aggregators or tweet to ask for upvotes (technically it was posted on his Identi.ca account which is linked to his political notes feed, but it got no special treatment).
If some major sites hadn't picked up on it and provided the publicity, most readers would never know. So RMS wrote a politically incorrect opinion on his personal page. Can we move on now?
The reason people say Microsoft had no taste is that they never said no, they bolted any old thing onto the side of Windows, there never really has been a sense that Windows is this and this but not that.
Stallman has an extremel sharp sense of what free software is and isn't, I'd call that taste with a capital T. Now, if someone were to say it isn't GOOD taste, well, that's a worthwhile conversation to entertain.
Windows, on the other hand... No idea how it is today, but up to XT it absolutely lacked any sense of taste, it wasn't even bad taste, it simply was stuff higgledy piggledy, some things for experts who use the command line, some chrome for newbies, all next together, but never as powerful and flexible as Unix nor as easy as Macintosh, but not even designed for the middle of the road user.
In other words, no taste.
(I'm not saying that there isn't a ton of FOSS out there in lots of hands -- but RMS isn't responsible for its being there in the same way Jobs is responsible. Jobs is responsible for the iPhone. RMS isn't responsible for Android.)
You do realize that Apple has been dependent on GCC to build its products for most of Jobs' second tenure, don't you? Some of that is code that RMS personally wrote.
The GPL license that, again, RMS personally wrote covers the kernel of the Android system. "Great software" that's in "more hands" than Jobs' devices.
Jobs was a slick businessman like Gates. RMS wrote fucking GCC.
Guess who's contribution I value more.
If Stallman had to make a statement emphasizing his dislike of Jobs' influence, he could still have done so respectfully. Consider this; "I didn't share Steve Jobs' vision of computing, and I wish he'd chosen to embrace free software. I'm very sorry that he's gone and we've lost the opportunity to have that conversation. My sympathies are with his family at this time." There's no need to pretend that Stallman liked Jobs, but his post is contemptible.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/10/why-fsf-found...
As can be seen from the Update to that linked article, I think a big part of the problem is that these Web 2.0 "journalists" don't read, so in a game of telephone it's been turned into "FSF head Richard Stallman issues press release saying Jobs sux". If we're going to do that, you could manufacture about 300 scandals from his blog; "FSF head Richard Stallman equates U.S. President to Saddam Hussein!", etc.
Maybe it's still contemptible as it stands, but I think people are either missing or deliberately ignoring the context when evaluating it. I take his "politics" ticker as closer to an IRC chat than a place for carefully thought out statements (that's what his Essays are for). I like that in geek culture we don't have this weird demand for people to be 24/7 ensconced in a professional PR-oriented persona, like a CEO or politician, but allow people like RMS, ESR, and Theo de Raadt to have crazy personal opinions. (Heck, Jobs had some pretty offensive and harmful opinions about science and alternative medicine, and we allowed that.)
Honestly I'm more offended by this level of shameless profiteering with Steve-Jobs-death linkbait. Huffington Post, for example, shat out 188 separate Steve-Jobs-death posts within 24 hours: http://exploreto.tumblr.com/post/11114571981/huffingtonpost-...
> he could still have done so respectfully
and the rest of bloggers respectfully chace self-promotion and ad revenue by reposting stuff that has already been said. well, RMS gave them the occasion to continue this nonsense, but at least his view is original.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/jobs-looked-to-the...
But he was also basically respectful.
Wow! Easily the best Steve Jobs article I've read this week!
For me, this paragraph captures it all:
I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, “It’s a kind of magic.”
Now, I don't think Stallman's lines were gratuitously offensive. He was merely clear and concise. He spent no word on niceness, but he spent no word on rudeness either. And by the way, he is factually correct: Jobs was "the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed [among other things] to sever fools from their freedom" (or, if not the pioneer, at least the most effective apologist).
Now should he have just shut up? Probably not. Every one now is praising Jobs, and that may trigger even more sales for the iPhone and the iPad. Praise Jobs, and soon you will praise Apple's most locked down products. At least a word of caution is needed.
Now I do understand that Stallman knows next to nothing about how not to trigger bad feelings. I do understand that he should work on that. But please, don't be offended by something that most probably wasn't intended to be offensive.
They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world - are the ones who do!
RMS has done some admirable things, but he's in dire need of some mental help. Seriously.
1) I don't like when people die.
2) But this happened to Steve Jobs, unfortunately.
3) However from my point of view he was doing so much damage to the world of software that this is a good thing. Not the fact he died but the fact that we no longer have his influence.
Note: I don't agree. But I don't think it should be a problem to say the above.
It is like if you are the leader of a movement against the practice of killing whales, and there is one guy that kills 100,000 whales every year. If he dies you can legitimately say: "I'm sorry he died, but this is a good thing for whales".
He used the wrong words, the wrong time, and so forth, but the concept is nothing of extraordinary from his point of view. It is important to have the freedom of saying what we want.
I can't see how mentioning human life and software licensing in the same sentence is ever a good idea if there is a chance that interested non-nerds are reading up on your ideals.
Off the top of my head: Apache Software Foundation, OSI, GNOME Foundation, Linux Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Python Software Foundation, Open Knowledge Foundation, Software Freedom Law Center, Software in the Public Interest, Wikimedia Foundation.
If you feel like you want to throw money, power or sexual favours to the open source community, there are plenty of ways to do it that don't involve RMS or the FSF. Or you could just find some free/open source script or app or library you use and like and chuck the creator $20 and a nice email saying "I really like your code, go buy yourself a pizza and a beer on me".
RMS is a fanatic about free software, like ultra religious people are to their religion.
For instance, for me, being free, means, at first and above all, being free to choose. Being able to install proprietary nVidia driver which does not crash my linux box every half a day, and have this driver built and available for me in my linux distro repository.
Years ago, RMS was a guest of honor in IBM Tel Aviv. These were the days, Linux was something left-field, obscure, that no one wanted to know or hear about it. There were hundreds of developers in the hall who came to hear about the "Gnu/Linux thing" from the Freedom Guru.
All of a sudden, in the middle of his lecture, out of any imaginable context, RMS took of his left shoe, and then the sack, and start rubbing his toes with his fingers while preaching about free software.
Yes, imagine that, a man is playing with his barefoot on a stage, would you remember anything he said? Would you listen to anything he has to say? Or would your brain being busy understanding and categorizing the extraordinary show you are in?
(Those were not the days of youtube and smartphone, I bet if that would have been happening these days, this was the most viewed video on youtube amongst hackers.)
It is sad, but successful open source project does not seemed to get along with RMS at all, see Ubuntu/Canonical as a good example.
To those saying you agree with what RMS wrote: that’s fine, but irrelevant. As a spokesman for FSF he shouldn’t be pandering to his already devout followers, he should be trying to convince others that the ideals of the FSF are worth pursuing, and he’s been doing an absolutely TERRIBLE job of that lately.
Silly campaigns of immature puns, lashing out at people who don’t say “GNU/Linux”, insulting a recently deceased man who much of the world admires, and making otherwise inappropriate remarks on a regular basis is an excellent way to alienate the people you’re trying to win over.
How have these tactics been working out for FSF? I don’t have stats, but anecdotally most new open source projects I come across have rejected the GPL licenses for BSD, MIT, Apache, etc.
Now imagine what FSF could accomplish if they had a spokesman with the skills of Steve Jobs
"I'm glad he's gone" is only a complaint towards Jobs' influence on personal computing. You may disagree with RMS (I certainly do), and it is certainly an inappropriate comment to make at this time, but this is nothing to make a drama of RMS' comment... Geez people!
Software is at a point where its basically impossible to make anything useful without opensource software. Proprietary code is a minority in my stack both as a developer and as a user. Proprietary software is often good before opensource software is good, but consistently opensource implementations eventually outpace their proprietary counterparts. We saw this trend first with UNIX -> Linux. Today, just reading this webpage I'm using Chrome (Chromium + WebKit) which communicates via POSIX to the BSD network stack in my kernel (Darwin). The browser has been compiled with either GCC or LLVM. Hackernews is probably hosted on nginx / apache behind varnish or something, running on linux.
In short, I feel like the opensource movement has already won. Aside from RMS's crusade against software patents, how is the FSF still relevant?
We have a really long way to go, still.
The most popular computer platforms in the world are iOS and Android, and their users don't have the practical ability or, in some countries, the legal right to modify the software on them.
Many people communicate with their friends and colleagues through Facebook and Gmail — proprietary software applications that send copies of their most private data to advertising-funded companies in foreign countries. (Unless they live in the US.) Their right to continue communicating with their friends through these media is subject to arbitrary revocation at any moment.
Every day, I run into web sites that don't work unless I install Flash.
And my friend David tells me his startup has just received a patent lawsuit from Lodsys.
I understand that you're happy with this situation (except the patent part), but I'm not.
I want to live in a world where people's communication with their friends, family, and colleagues, and the public, is subject to approval from nobody except the communicating parties.
I want to live in a world where Apple can't surreptitiously log everywhere I go on my own phone, and where I'm not committing a crime if I reprogram the phone to stop anyone who is.
I want to live in a world where I can buy any random piece of hardware at the computer store and plug it in with happy anticipation that it will work with Linux, not dread that I'll have to search all over the web for half-assed reverse-engineered drivers.
I want to never read another fucking EULA, and to never again have to click through without reading it and wonder what rights I've just signed away.
We've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.
I think you're right; if open source hasn't won, it's doing pretty well. But as far as the FSF is concerned that's doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. The FSF isn't going to declare victory until they bring everybody around to their moral point of view.
The idea should be to encourage people to use open licenses, and to promote the good of open licenses, not declare war on everything and become some bitter asshole neckbeard when you see guys like Jobs doing well with a slightly different approach.
The FSF doesn't do much. They're little more than negative campaigners "Windows 7 Sins" etc. I'm not sure what its purpose or real world effect is other than to scare middle management from FOSS as much as possible. Stick vs Carrot. FSF is all stick and people have noticed.
> In short, I feel like the opensource movement has already
> won. Aside from RMS's crusade against software patents,
> how is the FSF still relevant?
RMS would say that you booted your machine with an evil closed EFI / BIOS; that there's a bunch of evil non-free drivers; that there's a bunch of evil non-free gui stuff, etc etc.
Chrome was not, to RMS, a valid solution. Note his approach to "browsing the www" - (http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/)
>To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me.
RMS would say that there is still plenty of work to do to work toward 'free' software. (Mobile phones is something he's keen to open up.)
If they haven't upgraded, FreeBSD 7.1 (not sure on the particulars of RELEASE version).
news.arc does not need Apache or NGiNX, but I'm not sure whether HN uses varnish cache.
"Well, we just beat the tuberculosis into remission, so now all we have to deal with is this metastasising cancer."
Frankly, software patents have the potential to be a lot scarier than copyright ever could be. Anyone working to end them is doing good work.
That seems oddly similar to my tl;dr from the article: "Although I agree with his concern overall, Stallman didn't use a great deal of tact in his statement".
You can take it in a non-emotional way. A is, in your opinion, a bad thing. If A stops, you're glad. If A stops because of a sad B event, you can be both glad for A to end, and sad for B to occur.
RMS might not be the best possible Free Software advocate, but I'm glad someone's doing it, and nobody else seems to be volunteering for the job.
Is that so horrible a thing? It seems to me groups like the Humane Society have done a lot more for animal welfare than PETA.
> 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.
To clarify: I know that my preferred model ignores the scummy/greedy tendencies of people to leech off work that others have done. However, I'd like for people to think of open source software as a gift given with no strings attached.
Go on Richard, I dare you to.
How is this not overreacting in the first place...
Let me tell you something, free software or not, it was Steve Jobs, who told us what forward direction for software actually means, first by making GUI mainstream, then by making capacitive touch mainstream, and lastly by defining what a tablet form factor should and should not be.
If you think Steve's products hamper your freedom, I can argue the exact opposite, it was Steve who taught us ways to make technology more accessible by making groundbreaking innovations in user interfaces, which enables the non geeks of the world to use computers in the first place, I am pretty sure those users will feel more trapped in the command line interface that you envisioned for them, than they feel by not having access to the source of the painting app they have fun playing with on their ipad.
So if you cannot come out the frog hole that you have created for yourself, and give credit where it's due, then maybe you should shut the fuck up.
Try and explain how to boot a MacBookPro from USB stick to someone, and compare that to booting almost any other computer.
Or explain how to dual boot a Mac with OSX and Linux, vs anything else with Windows and Linux.
I did that. It took two minutes. It worked flawlessly.
Sometimes to gain more command over your technology you have to give up some theoretical freedom, but that's freedom you'd never have been able to exercise.
An F-16 pilot would find the controls in a typical car so disappointing. Where's the lever to adjust the fuel/air mixture? The GPS waypoints? The brake bias dial? The air pressure indicator? The temperature of the tires? All of these things are theoretically important to driving, but they're not of any concern to someone simply trying to get from point A to point B.
That's all most people using computers are trying to do.
You hold down the Option key while booting.
> Or explain how to dual boot a Mac with OSX and Linux
Install rEFIt (comes in a nice, standard OS X installer package), use the nice GUI Bootcamp or Disk Utility apps to make a partition, insert the Linux CD, reboot while holding down C.
If you're incapable of following these instructions, I seriously doubt you can manage to boot from a USB stick or dual-boot Windows and Linux on any typical PC.
And before you protest — have you met the man in person? If you haven't, you won't understand.
He is an outspoken & tireless champion of an incredibly worthy cause he believes is greater than himself (and c'mon, the guys hacking skills are legendary).
Steve Jobs was a uniquely amazing entrepreneur & visionary leader. His impact on the way people everywhere use technology is both profound & undeniable.
Both men are worthy of the deepest respect IMHO, even if their goals were in conflict.
I respect Jobs for `the inspiration` while I respect RMS for what `he offered to the world`.
There is IMHO, an interesting litmus test where people who share his monomaniacal obsession, or think it 'reasonable', probably have the same issue.
Although some of the people behind that are almost as embarrassing to be associated with as RMS.
He's a joke.
http://www.theonion.com/video/autistic-reporter-train-thankf...
The net effect is the people talking about RMS, about FSF and GNU. More people get to know about this stuff, more people get involved.
Just a little trolling replaces zillions of bucks spent on advertising, PR etc. Commies don't have money to pay, so they must troll.
---
Just don't spread this hype and don't feed the troll.
Bingo, you've just made some tasteless, insulting passing remark. Some sort of reverse-Godwin point. So much for not feeding the trolls.