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by jraph 993 days ago
If the person with the t-shirt is both sympathetic to communism or the Che, and RMS, I can see how it can not be a provocation.

RMS was probably right not to sign it though. I also believe producing a t-shirt with RMS depicted as the Che is not quite right.
2 comments
rvnx 993 days ago
There is some soft irony that the t-shirt depicting Stallman supporting "revolution" is made in China and coming from Aliexpress.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005081587056.html

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DonHopkins 993 days ago
Wow, to add insult to injury, that t-shirt calls RMS an "OS Liberator" as in "Open Source Liberator", not "FS Liberator" as "Free Software Liberator". That would really piss RMS off: he HATES it when you refer to Free Software as Open Source!

On the other (left) hand, I'd definitely buy an ironic t-shirt of ESR as Che labeled "Free Software Liberator" and ask ESR to sign it, just to piss him off and provoke him to threaten to shoot me, like he did to Bruce Perens.

The irony of Eric S Raymond threatening someone else for behaving "like that kind of disruptive asshole in public" is rich -- very rich.

ESR's Death Threat Email to Bruce Perens:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html

Bruce Perens Dead:

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/10

Terrorismistic:

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/terrorismistic

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dralley 992 days ago
I assume "OS" in this context actually refers to "operating system"
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DonHopkins 992 days ago
Some people call Emacs an Operating System. And "FS" stands for "File System"?
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drt5b7j 993 days ago
Of course the person with T-shirt is sympathetic to communism and RMS, but their sympathy to RMS is very superficial. Otherwise they would know that RMS wouldn't approve. So it's option 2 I guess.
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jraph 993 days ago
Intent matters. It's only a provocation if it's meant to be a provocation.

Otherwise it's mere faux-pas, at worst.

What's more, you don't necessarily know everything about a person. I would not know anything about RMS's political opinions if I had not read his website a bit, I would only know him for his stance on free software.

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