[aledthemathguy]

when I dug into the doing of Stallman I could not help but conclude that he is one of the most important humans who ever lived in terms of our current lives.

This is mostly seemed to escape our notion. Perhaps one must die in order to be understood or recognize.

Or perhaps we need to look at things which happened a long time ago (history) to fully grasp their importance.

[jedimastert]

My problem with Stallman is not the the work he's done. He's absolutely a genius and has been right too many times to count. My problem is he's been consistently undermining the FOSS movement by alienating anyone not already in the know. His inability and down right refusal to draw any sort of connection between the average computer user and his point of view makes the idea that he's working towards free software "for everyone" a hard pill to swallow.

Case and point: http://alexeymk.com/dear-dr-stallman-the-aftermath/

[enriquto]

> alienating anyone not already in the know.

I'm not sure what do you mean here. I was a totally average computer user when I found Stallman's writings (especially, "The Right to Read", and the story of the printer drivers) extremely seductive and compelling. A big part of me being genuinely interested in computers is thanks to him (and also to my father, who tried in vain to teach me to draw the mandelbrot set in gwbasic).

Honestly, has anyone ever been "alienated" by RMS? He's a very good communicator and makes funny talks with a deep message. In all venues that I have seen in person, he attracted a huge crowd that did not fit in whatever auditorium was reserved for the talk.

[simonh]

He's certainly achieved a lot, but I think that's overstating it. BSD and pcc started 10 years before GNU, and if it wasn't for the failed law suit against it by AT&T there wouldn't have been any need for Linux either. Free and open source software has deep roots, GNU has been a great champion for the movement, but it doesn't represent all of open source and it didn't create the concept.

[Mediterraneo10]

If BSD was all there was, would there have been such a movement pushing back against tivoization, binary blobs in devices, etc.? Perhaps only the great idealism of Stallman could produce the GPL and FSF, the BSD license on its own wouldn’t have done it.

[zokula]

> BSD and pcc started 10 years before GNU, and if it wasn't for the failed law suit against it by AT&T there wouldn't have been any need for Linux either.

People still believe this myth? 30 years on and still sour grapes from the BSD folk who were too slow and to elitist to adapt.

[simonh]

I haven’t used BSD in 25 years, and even then only briefly, so I wouldn’t consider myself BSD folks. I’m Linux folks by any measure. If you’ve got a point, what is it?

[nine_k]

I still think that GPL was instrumental at getting linux everywhere, while *BSD, technically superior in 1990s, never attracted as many contributions, especially corporation-backed. GPL serves as a sort of mutual-assured-destruction setup that prevents making proprietary forks and thus incentivizing big players to contribute to the common, free cause.

I think that making the very forces of copyright and profit-seeking work successfully for the benefit of free, universally available software is a feat of rare ingenuity and understanding how humans think and act.

[mistrial9]

agree

source: software developer late 1980s California, in the room with some of these people including Stallman in Palo Alto, discussing and presenting on this topic