Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nathanpc 4932 days ago
My opinion about RMS is very simple. He did a incredible job by creating the GPL license and funding the GNU project, but in the modern world he needs to get out of his cavern and at least try the things he rant about, after he tried and realized that it really isn't good he can say anything about it.

I can't hear a person that wants anarchism for the open source community and reads sites by wget'ing them. After he tries things for himself instead of just hearing about them I'll start to hear him again.

1 comments

From what I've seen, his reasons for disliking things shouldn't be affected by whether he's tried them or not. He's not criticizing Ubuntu for having a bad UI, or insufficient features; he's criticizing it for (what he sees as) spying on its users. What relevant information would he gain from trying it? He already knows that it sends all of the user's searches to a server, and he already has reasons why he believes that's an unacceptable thing to do.
The problem with his article isn't that he tried Ubuntu the problem is the language that he used. He sounded like he wanted internet riots that would boycott Canonical.

Canonical made extremely great things for the open source community and because of one single thing he makes it sound like Canonical was a tumor inside the community that should be exterminated.