Stallman reminds me of a king who has everything done by servants and knows only what his courtiers tell him. Being free of menial tasks like installing software leaves him more time to tackle serious issues. But it also insulates him from the problems that real people face.
It's not really something you can observe well from the outside, but in working with Richard on many things, I was surprised early on how much respect he gives to those he trusts, and how appreciative he is of help.
So "servants" is far from how he views volunteers. And after working closely with him for a few years within GNU, I don't feel at all like a servant---there is mutual respect, and we're not afraid to state our opinions or disagree with one-another. Much of the time he makes me feel like I work beside him, not below him. It's quite constructive.
This seems incompatible with what I read recently in an emacs discussion on HN, wherein they were unable to merge a popular package into emacs without Stallman's rubber stamp despite him being essentially uninvolved since 2008.
Are you referring to Magit? All code that is part of Emacs requires copyright assignment to the FSF; it's that simple. If Jonas Bernoulli can make that happen, then the issue is resolved.
He's intimately aware of the problems real people face and spends lots of his time discussing them. If he's a king with servants, he's one who knows the value he receives and thinks constantly about how to achieve a world in which everyone can easily get the results he has (e.g. not worry about installing their OS but still having fully-free/libre software)
My criticism of him is a separate, but similar, issue. I believe that he misses some of the social aspects of modern life, and that's why he views certain innocuous proprietary behaviors as totally damning. Based on his occasional emails to other members of the MIT community, he also seems to have a lack of empathy for people (not just organizations) who don't share his disdain for non-free things.
Not to mention that I find it difficult to see eye to eye with any man who would use a public urinal without shoes on.
This is just a practical thing afaik. fsf sysadmins are more knowledgeable about it and they do it for the rest of fsf computers already, so why not let them do it?
What does diminished mean? I mean, like as a person he's not impressive? When I remember I'm reading a comment that's hiding behind a pseudonym, they are also diminished in my eyes.
Fair point - perhaps it was his comment that everyday users could just go along to a user group to get Linux installed, and needn't worry about doing it themselves. This seemed painfully out of touch to me, as if he were talking about finding someone to solder your Altair together or something.
His programming and social acheivements in my opinion vastly outclass installing an OS by himself, though I wonder why he doesn't do it; I assume he knows how partitioning etc. works.
And to be honest, how often do most people need to reinstall their OS? I would be surprised if he has reinstalled more than 3 times in 5 years.
Probably because the process is at best dull and at worst, a massive PITA; either way it has little to no relevance to his actual work. If I had the chance, I'd avoid any kind of software installation/maintainence as well...
Non free software is too. Especially when you start dealing with licensing. Where I work we have people assigned to licensing & other people assigned to actual install. Of course the licensing goes through a third party provider... for which we're a third party provider to our clients
ALL software does this. If it works, I might as well have let someone else do the waiting.
If it doesn't, then It requires a few hours mindlessly running around until you find some stupid flag that was set. Which I might as well leave to somebody else to do.
That this is the state of software is a pretty damn good thing, that most of it has become busywork. But its still busywork and I don't why I'd ever want to do it more than a couple times (once I know the general process)
That's if the installer is designed well and all the questions are front-loaded. Unfortunately not all installers are... Heck, I think it took Microsoft until Windows Vista to do it for the OS.
RMS ought to try installing one of the easier free OS's listed on https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html such as Trisquel (based on Ubuntu), which I think even he will find is easy to install. You don't need to know anything about partitioning if you don't care about it and don't have anything you need on your harddrive or anything else (just accept all the default options).
I'm still struggling to understand, what exactly Stallman's social acheivements are. It's not like he is the reason people care about proprietary software and surveillance. No, the real reasons are these things themselves, because — I won't say "all people", but many people understand the dangers and inconveniences of it pretty damn well. I myself perfectly agree with Stallman on many (if not all) of his convictions, but so what? I still use Android phone and many other nasty things, because it's convenient and actually less harmful than making "normal people" around you too dismiss you as some "conspiracy freak". I hate it, but I use it. Not using Facebook alone is pretty troublesome in my social life.
And GNU project software (with a few important exceptions, of course) now feels more like a legacy, than a salvation. It has it's own statute of limitations, so to say.
So I don't see how complaining without actually making a difference helps someone.
RMS created the foundations for the existence of a fully-free OS, both technically and socially. He created the concept of copyleft and the GNU GPL, a fundamental feature of the free software movement. He founded GNU and FSF which remain important enough to be notable.
Even the Linux kernel started off with a weird non-free license until Torvalds decided the GPL was a good fit, changing his views on commercial-restrictions after hearing RMS talk.
RMS is a philosopher of sorts and is already seen historically as a fundamentally important figure in the philosophy and ethics of technology.
Sure, the ideas would be out there some way even if RMS wasn't around. Similarly, biological evolution was inherently an idea that was even being thought about by others at the time of Darwin, but we still acknowledge Darwin's major contributions even though we'd almost certainly at some point know everything we know now even if Darwin had never published anything.
"A beginner shouldn't be installing operating systems"?
If a moderately-intelligent, moderately-literate beginner can't install your operating system, then your operating system (or at least, its user interface) is crap.
Edit: Just to be clear, I'm responding to the quote, not calling Linux crap. I run a combination of Linux and Windows machines and VMs and they're both very straightforward to install, a complete beginner can just click next / next / next and still get it working.
There are hundreds of Linux distributions with install media for usb/dvd install. Installing a distro like Fedora is as easy as setting up windows and has about the same UI quality.
Distros like Slackware or Gentoo give you more complicated setups but they are designed for experienced users.
There are so many places online to get help with a Linux install now. If you stick with the main distros as most do for there first taste of Linux its really simple.
No one installs Windows, and frankly it isn't a ton easier than installing free operating systems. It's only easier because you rarely run into driver issues, the computer was probably built to run Windows, and you're rarely trying to install it as a second operating system.
My decade's worth of experiences having to transfer over wired (wired!) NIC drivers onto computers that are completely supported by the average Linux distro because Windows doesn't ship with them strongly suggests otherwise.
Windows has thankfully gotten better about this lately (e.g. in the Windows 10 era), but the continued lack of drivers in the default install is really annoying when said drivers are for devices that virtually every free operating system supports out of the box.
UEFI? It's nice that Windows automatically finds an ESP and tosses it's bootloader on there but I wish there was some user input on the issue. It does the same thing even if you give it a separate disk.
Makes sense to me. I'd assume that an org the size of the FSF would have pretty standard imaging procedures. If Stallman doesn't need or want to deviate from, say, the FSF-wide Trisquel image, then why should he?
