It has everything to do with free software in the sense that it's just application of the principles of the free software movement. rms wants information to be free because of his moral principles, and these same principles also apply to the world outside software. It's a whole thing.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Part of the issue here is that rms has published his current views to great length. The issue at hand is over interpretation, which rms has the consistency to not bother rewording things for your benefit if asked to clarify
Indeed. The point of communication is, well, to communicate.
If someone has communicated ambiguously and one asks for clarification, that's just regular communication protocol. If what is meant is that they communicated unambiguously and they shouldn't need to repeat themselves, then, well, the receiver's interpretation of what was said stands as what was intended to be said.
It’s not RMS’ duty to educate you, me and others or to reword things for our benefit.
I think it would be worse if he submitted to some struggle session and changed his posts to whatever language is approved for discussing Epstein/Minsky.
> It’s not RMS’ duty to educate you, me and others or to reword things for our benefit.
Sorry, but it is. He's the front figure of the FSF. He appears in conferences and speaks about and for the Free Software Foundation and the more broad FLOSS community. Making things clear is pretty much his only job.
I disagree. He does what he wants, we listen or don’t. I think he’s trying to increase use of FLOSS and nothing else.
We can have preferences for what he should do, but he’s unlikely to do them. And I don’t get upset because he’s not doing what I want him to do.
Many technical thought leaders are “bad speakers” but that’s ok with me because tech concepts are hard and I’d rather have a bad speaker with a good idea than a good speaker with a bad idea.
I can always view source to figure it out.
I think it’s a false dichotomy that people must be perfect in every way to do something as simple as talk about how he wrote emacs at a conference. We take what we can get and the author of emacs is not very charismatic. That’s ok, I want to learn about emacs.
Trying to remember (a very long time passed), he was very kind and patiently told me that it's important to use the tool that works best for you. He added that for obvious reasons he uses emacs.
https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html
On society in general?
https://stallman.org/articles/necessary-changes.html
For anything else, there's a good chance he's written about it on his website.