[shipit]

Richard Stallman and Steve Jobs is the same personality. Stallman's belief is around intellectual expression as free software and Jobs' was design for culture. In the pursuit of their ideals, both have demonstrated similar zeal and reputation for offending people. We overlook Steve Jobs' quirks because we cherish the beautiful products from Cupertino and we seek to absorb that into our own process. As a culture, very few actually care for emacs or gcc. In an alternate universe, Stallman's Lisp-ness would be worshipped and aesthetics would be relegated to vanity.

[eropple]

Jobs had a well-known positive and beneficial side to him. Bad Steve did certainly exist, but Bad Steve doesn't give that commencement address at Stanford.

Stallman is at his core inhumane. It is not contemptible, but merely sad.

[shipit]

This is a late response, however, to Stallman's credit he acted on his convictions of free software, invented GPL, gave away gcc, bash, emacs, libc, binutils, hurd and hundreds other pieces that enabled a kid in Finland to cook Linux. Stallman's core is exposed which cannot be said about the man who estranged his own daughter (and he did rectify it after two years of denial) and maintained secrecy around all aspects of his life and work.