[vinceguidry]

I didn't realize just how crazy smart he was until I started reading Free as in Freedom and read the accounts of how other impressive early programmers viewed him. Even among these guys, he stood out.

Sometimes I think, "what a shame it is that he had to stop coding!" Then I think of how the world might have turned out without the FSF and the GNU project and I shudder.

Stallman was exactly what the world needed, exactly when the world needed him. Now that the glory days are gone, the GNU project has matured, and there are other competing mindsets and communities, Stallman's looked at as this crazy hack activist and that's a shame. Nobody can be all things to all people. And the things he says are still right, still prescient, and still timely, if a bit antiquated.

Anyone reading this, if you can donate to or join the FSF, please do. Everything you love about computing today ultimately rests on Stallman's hard work.

https://crm.fsf.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=1...

[zafiro17]

I agree with you. I just yesterday wrote this over at SoylentNews.org (the community spin-off of Slashdot that split when Slashdot imposed its new interface on us): http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=4458&cid=108238 Unfortunately, Stallman is going to have the supremely unsatisfactory pleasure of going to the grave after a lifetime of scorn and abuse at the hands of nerds - only to be proven right. It's pathetic that the nerd community never misses an opportunity on sites like this one to pick fun at his grooming habits, his relentlessly consistent stand on issues, and his fixation on purity of position even at the expense of convenience or ease of coding (or even talking). But the trends show the things he worried about are slowly becoming reality and despite having foreseen it, he will die having failed to prevent it. But the rest of us, we will go to the grave knowing we persecuted a guy who was actually right. Hopefully a lot of us will feel ashamed. More likely we will be "enjoying" life in our little walled gardens, trying to finish reading our books before they expire and are revoked, and sharing tips on software piracy sites that allow us to use our computers for limited purposes without the tracking authorities finding out. Hope he has a good laugh from the afterlife. Hopefully he'll be drinking a pint of stout with Dennis Ritchie and Alan Turing and watching us struggle.

He's a very clever guy; wish the majority of us would recognize it.

[daveloyall]

I didn't realize how crazy smart he is until I attended a couple of LibrePlanets (FSF annual conference).

I have a vivid memory of a young hacker's face, full of pain and confusion. Stallman was belittling him for taking too much time fiddling with his smart phone camera--you know, the kind that has only an onscreen shutter button... The kid had traveled across the country to snap a photo with the folk hero of his culture.

I watched the faces of his keepers/coworkers, too. Their lips were tight, they said nothing.

They are no slouches! They aren't socially inept. Yet, yet... they tolerate him, even while keeping him away from starry eyed kids as much as possible. For the greater good.

I heard again and again that he's a genius. That the little trick he pulled with that now famous software license has irrevocably changed the world for the better.

I get the impression that to this day, he protects the FSF from making mistakes that would eventually land it in history's dustbin. He's a strategist. (Or tactician? I'm not clear on the distinction. I'm no genius...) NB: I'm not talking about simple mistakes; I'm saying that what they are trying to achieve is really hard.

Stallman has a second sight for how systems plus inputs will unfold (oh, the parent post used the word prescient--good word!) and he saw something terrible in our future, so he has dedicated his life to changing it.

But he's still a world-class asshole.

Does anybody else have his talent? And maybe a little charisma? Or at least compassion?

[asgard1024]

I agree with most of what you said, although I wouldn't call Stallman a "strategist". He is an idealist who is unwilling to do moral compromises (which has positives and negatives).

As an aside, his "political notes" are a great news aggregator for anyone who cares about the world.

[Scuds]

> But he's still a world-class asshole. There's bits about him berating Tim O'Reilly for charging for the books his company publishes.

Here's the famous rider for his speeches: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developer...

He's a fine leader for the FSF, but not a frontman.

[daveloyall]

The leader and frontman can be a different person? Is the Free Software movement a 'grassroots' movement?

[bronson]

> Everything you love about computing today ultimately rests on Stallman's hard work.

Absolutely, demonstrably, false. Stallman has contributed greatly, yes, but please don't overstate it. It calls into question the other things you said.

[vinceguidry]

I don't think you quite understand just how important the ideological battle over software creation was back in the 80s and how that shaped the world we have today. There was no open source or free software movement and everybody seemed perfectly willing to let the business guys handle those difficult questions.

Without the GNU Public License, every single business making software would have had to re-invent the wheel from scratch. Imagine if every TV maker and router maker had to re-create busybox. It would have been way worse without GNU.

Even though most of the companies that use GNU software rarely contribute back, the world is infinitely better for having it, and it wouldn't have ever existed if it weren't for Stallman's prescience in creating a way for software to remain free legally. That way did not exist before Stallman invented it and would probably still not exist today if he hadn't done the monumental work of inventing and evangelizing it. All open source licenses owe their very existence to the GPL.

Without Stallman, the idea of free software would have likely taken another fifty years to coalesce, if not longer. I'm not overstating his contributions to the world, if anything I'm understating it.

[johan_larson]

"Without the GNU Public License, every single business making software would have had to re-invent the wheel from scratch. Imagine if every TV maker and router maker had to re-create busybox. It would have been way worse without GNU."

I think that's overstating the case.

Without the open source movement, there would still be components available for sale that people could build on. For example, over in relational database land, we would still have Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server -- the big high-end offerings. What we wouldn't have are PostgreSQL and MySQL, the free low-end offerings. MS Access, or something like it, just might be your best bet if your needs were modest but your wallet was light.

It would be a world where the components you use to build your system cost real money, and of course there would be fewer options overall.

[dragonwriter]

> There was no open source or free software movement and everybody seemed perfectly willing to let the business guys handle those difficult questions.

As I recall, fairly serious sharing of significant software as public domain, with people building on others public domain software, predates the Free Software movement, and the public domain software movement was, for some time, growing in parallel to the restrictive-license-based Free Software movement; in addition, non-GPL, non-PD permissively licensed software existed before the FSF and also was spreading, with various license variations, at the same time the Free Software movement is growing.

[belorn]

I would very much like to see whatever sources you have for a "public domain software movement" that predates the Free Software movement. I have looked through books, interviews and online searches back when I tried to improve the wikipedia article on the subject. What I could find was basically RMS statements and bill gates.

As such, in the early days people did not think software was copyrightable, or patentable for that matter. It wasn't really until 1980 when United States Congress added the definition of "computer program" to 17 U.S.C. § 101 and amended 17 U.S.C. § 117 to allow the owner of the program to make another copy or adaptation for use on a computer.

This is the exact same year RMS has his problem with the proprietary laser printer, and 3 years before GNU was started as a result. While it is theoretical possible that a "public domain software movement" around that time, I have not seen any evidence that such movement was created. Before 1980, copyright status of software was such a greyzone of legal theory that I seriously doubt a movement was created in contrast to proprietary software that did not exist.

[dragonwriter]

> I would very much like to see whatever sources you have for a "public domain software movement"

My "sources" are my personal experience with the public domain software in the 1980s. But what I claimed wasn't a movement that predates the Free Software movement, it was a practice that predates the Free Software Foundation (founded 1985), and that grew as a movement (though that term may be ill chosen -- I specifically didn't mean it in the ideological sense so much as a community and shared practice) alongside the growing popularity of the Free Software movement.

> As such, in the early days people did not think software was copyrightable, or patentable for that matter.

Certainly not the case with copyright. Well, at least not if by "the early days" you mean (as you imply) up until 1980.

> It wasn't really until 1980 when United States Congress added the definition of "computer program" to 17 U.S.C. § 101

Computer programs were understood to be copyrightable previously -- the Copyright Office accepting registrations of computer programs at least as early as 1963 -- and computer software was expressly addressed in the 1976 Copyright Act -- the 1980 revisions you refer to were not the first express inclusion of software in the Act, they were the result of recommendations of the commission created by the 1976 to advise on additional revisions related to what special provisions copyright law should make with regard to new technology.

[belorn]

The 1976 Copyright Act did not address how copyright were to protect software. Congress didn’t want to further delay the passage of the Act and appointed the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) to report back about computer programs and other new technologies and placed a placeholder provision in the Act. It was about a far from current copyright law that you can make it. You could register a copyright, but if it had any practical effect was up to congress to solidify in 1980.

Anyhow, I agree with jefurii comment. Public domain software, that is software that did not get copyright licenses added to them, was the norm before proprietary software. The free software movement was thus an reaction to the change of adding proprietary licenses to software and would not exist if that change had not happened. If people continued to not license software after 1980, along side the proprietary movement and the free software movement, is an interesting question to ask, and would be interesting to know if there is historical data about it.

[jefurii]

I think you're both right. There may not have been a public domain movement in the early days, but that's because something very like that was just how software waa done. The free software movement is an attempt to preserve something of that old way in the face of the proprietary software movement.