I don't believe he uses only his netbook. I think he also uses the public CSAIL computers at Stata Center in MIT. They have a KDE Linux on them.
I have used them from time to time, and as before logging in, at the username prompt usually you can see the last user that was on the computer. Many times it was "rms".
Often it's the people that refuse to compromise that make the world a better place. Do you think Martin Luther King should have compromised on his vision of racial equality?
Whilst the civil rights movement is obviously far more important than the free software movement, the idea that ideals should not be compromised is at the core of both. Unlike, say, the BSD license, the GPL is a license that allows for no compromise. If you want to distribute modifications, you must also distribute the source. It's this ideology that made the more pragmatic open-source movement possible in the first place.
This is really strange. None of the browsers on my machine can access this URL. But
dig _why.usesthis.com
returns the correct info.
According to Wikipedia, the use of underscores in hostnames is illegal, but many implementations ignore this. Anyway, the interview is mirrored here: http://viewsourcecode.org/why/#7
Looks like underscores are valid in /domain names/ but not in /host names/.
You'll see underscores used many times for SPF records and in Microsoft's Active Directory.
Also, when you use dig I'm pretty sure it manually recurses the name server hierarchy while an application will just connect to your local name server which might have its own policies.
In 2007 at least, he opted to use a demon to email him pages rather than browse the web:
For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I
also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I
send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me.
It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
I hope it's a joke. I actually did this some 12 years ago. We only had email access at my high school, and I used to browse ftp sites by email. With emails being sent only twice a day. I leaned pretty quickly that all the good stuff is in /pub... saved me a full day of browsing.
Is it really? Don't you get sick of being "always on" sometimes?
Perhaps the averse reactions here have something to do with too many of us living in densely populated/over-populated or even over-stimulated environments; the short-attention-span generation?
Sure, but it doesn't mean I'm without a network connection. There is no situation that I'd want to be uncontactable by everyone. I've an IM client on my phone that a very few people know the account, that will always notify, even if I've chosen to ignore every other kind of message.
+1, that is an interesting article. I read he dropped the OLPC because it allowed running Windows on it. He expects the OLPC to turn millions of children into Windows users, and compares Windows to an addictive drug, and Microsoft to a drugs dealer supplying kids with a cheap first 'fix'. Also, Windows will not run on his Lemote laptop.
The reason for "No Derivatives" is that RMS doesn't want his words to be changed. Some text files inside Emacs are (c) RMS, but with a permission to copy and distribute the entire article verbatim.
Not especially, Stalman campaigns for free software and he has reasons why he thinks it's a very good idea. Those reasons don't really extend to interviews as far as I can see.
I don't understand the god like status given to this guy. He's clearly crazy and from a whole other world than the one real people live in.
Who really cares if their BIOS is open source or not? Why does it matter? Are the designs used to make his laptop case open source as well? I doubt it.
Seriously though, rms, is one of the principal founders of the free software philosophy, and creator of the GPL, upon which some significant software has been licensed. He's consistent in his vision, which is freedom, and can reliably be looked to for guidance on topics regarding those freedoms.
Can you identify even three people who have had as significant impact on free (as in speech) software?
[edit - I don't mean people like linus, who create great software, but people who develop/evangelize free software philosophies - Theo De Raadt comes to mind - there aren't too many others that I can think of right away]
Free software existed before the GPL. Pretty sure linux would still have happened without it.
People are moving to a web based architecture all the time. The amount of software people actually download and install is reducing, so to some extent the whole idea of OSS for most people (I believe) is becoming less important.
Meanwhile Richard Stallman doesn't even use the web.
I have a feeling it's only going to get more relevant, because now the software is moving toward the web, it is insanely convenient and easy to lock-in users and restrict freedoms.
There are of course a freaking huge number of problems with the idea of open-sourcing the entirety of many website backends. I think there can be great discussion though on various models. GitHub offering web hosting instead of just repo hosting seems like a possibility.
>> "it is insanely convenient and easy to lock-in users and restrict freedoms."
I agree, but is that really a bad thing? We all have to make money somehow. I'd rather website owners had real incentive to please their users, and being able to make money is a good incentive.
I don't see how open source can really be relevant on the web. If facebook want to do something to drive users away, or ristrict users freedom, that's up to them. If they do it enough, someone else will setup a rival website that pleases users better. How does open sourcing fit into this? I don't think it does. Most website is simple enough that you don't need free source code. Any one of us could clone facebook if we had enough time and determination.
Open sourcing is certainly a nice thing to do, and I'm sure we'd be lost without our own favorite open source tools, but I think it makes less sense on the web.
As I've said before, I don't use X because it's open source, I use it because it's free, and there are people behind it who care.
With the (welcome) move to web architecture, free software is not as important as free data, i.e. the freedom to move your data to another provider. We may all be slaves, but we should have the freedom to choose our master.
Like you, I would also rather that website owners had real incentives to please their users. I disagree on the solution: data lock-in _removes_ the website owner's incentive, instead they can just rely on the fact that you are stuck with them, rather than pleased with them.
Locking in users and their data removes incentive for developers to please their users. If you know that all your user could cancel their service contract and be set up with a competitor within an hour without losing anything, you have a damn fine incentive to keep those users happy. If on the other hand moving to a competitor means losing access to years of data and weeks or month of work just to get back to where they started then you have to suck pretty damn hard for people to leave you.
The (A)GPL is still very relevant. The whole point of free software (in the GNU sense) is that you should have complete access to the sources of a software system.
In the case of a web application, this includes server side
software. No matter what some vocal AGPL opponents here say, this opinion is not exclusively held by fundamentalists:
I think RMS is as close to certifiable as one can get, but the point of having source available for inspection is a very important one in certain contexts. A quick example, voting machines, for quite a while the electronic voting machine sources were completely closed and the companies fought in court from having to reveal the source. When the source was finally reviewed it was found to be a mess and could possibly turn an election one way or the other.
Oh don't be silly, "real people"? Richard Stallman is as real as it gets. He's a decent programmer from what I can tell from emacs.
Note that there is a distinction between open source and free software. I think it's important to not conflate the two, which I see a lot these days (in the real world :)
I predict 500 years from now people will remember him. They won't remember Bill Gates. Without googling try to recall who was the richest man in Rome?
"I predict 500 years from now people will remember him. They won't remember Bill Gates."
That future is going to spring from this present, where N people use Windows and Word and know who Bill Gates is, but M people use emacs and know who Richard Stallman is?
we've been to this future before, when mainframes ruled. We called them dumb terminals. Not as sexy as small thin web clients using comet and ajax and other cleansers but they worked.
kidding aside, I don't buy it. P2P with local datastores will have a place. There's no way my tax returns will reside on google docs.
Beat me to it. Maybe Trajan, depending on how your accounting systems attribute what belonged to the Republic and what to Trajan the man/military commander/later emperor.
If you go up to any person on the street today and ask who Bill Gates is, they'll more than likely know who. You average person would have no idea who Richard Stallman.
If your average person doesn't know who he is today, I doubt that'll change to being more noteworthy in 500 years.
The first part is true, but in general the second part is false; in general, there is a big difference between the people who are most famous in their lifetimes and those who are most famous later from that period.
This reminded me of the Don Dodge GOOG/MSFT transition post. Maybe it was the displays of platform loyalties, or their perceived backwardness of the technology habits?
I really am not familiar with this man, but comments about his unwillingness to compromise and questioning his sanity make me think of this quote:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
Pretty true indeed - as long as the mad man DOES something. As far as Stallman goes, he coded emacs (along with other people, afaik), gave a name to a movement - and lived ever after on complaining, criticizing other people and complaining some more. If we'd depend on this crazy dude for progress, we'd all be using "fully open-source" inferior hardware produced by kids in China. Oh, and most of us would be jobless too, since NO ONE PAYS A DIME FOR FREE SOFTWARE!
Talk about progress...
> I didn't know about the yeeloong, though. Interesting device.
It seems to be very slow, has a small RAM and just a couple gigabytes of storage. I would love the idea of a Windows-proof computer I could use, but this is still not it.
The RMS Waltz: That's one, two, three internet connections. Now here's one Emacs (Gnus is not responding), two Emacs (dired and the tramp), three Emacs (at this time, Count von Count can be heard laughing in the background).
I have used them from time to time, and as before logging in, at the username prompt usually you can see the last user that was on the computer. Many times it was "rms".