[saryant]

He's pretty nuts. I met him when he spoke at my university a few years ago, the CS department invited him and had a reception with RMS for CS faculty and students only. At one point, a retired faculty member asked if he had any suggestions for convincing his bank to make their website Firefox-friendly since his wife didn't want to switch.

His suggestion was to lie to his wife and switch anyways...

Half the students at the speech got up and left (not kidding) when he put on a halo, proclaimed himself the Jesus Christ of Software and started auctioning off a stuffed gnu.

Add in his tirade about how evil the university IT department was for requiring authentication to access the network and you had a very pissed off administration the next day.

[nicholassmith]

"Half the students at the speech got up and left (not kidding) when he put on a halo, proclaimed himself the Jesus Christ of Software and started auctioning off a stuffed gnu."

Wait, what?! I can only imagine that's like a car crash where you don't want to look, but you just can't tear yourself away from it.

[lewispollard]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S76pHIYx3ik

[saryant]

It was bad. Literally no one responded to his auction, the room was dead silent. After a minute one guy offered ten bucks out of pity and that was the end of the auction.

[berntb]

I've seen a real nerd (the guy that got the big companies to do tcp/ip in Sweden, I'm not going to write Googleable names) do an ass of himself in a similar way.

I happen to know that he considered that "funny". I'm willing to suffer his sense of humour; he is a national treasure, imnsho. The same goes for rms, I guess.