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by __s 1907 days ago
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
2 comments
happytoexplain 1907 days ago
>rms has the consistency to not bother rewording things for your benefit

This is a weirdly hostile way to phrase it.

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shadowgovt 1907 days ago
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.

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prepend 1907 days ago
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.

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rbanffy 1907 days ago
> 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.

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prepend 1907 days ago
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.

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