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Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

I might be wrong, but I think I've sometimes seen it here; in any case it definitely happens in many "programmer" online circles (say, programmers.stackexchange: search for questions about the GPL or GNU or open source software): RMS is sometimes disparaged as a loon and an extremist. The Free Software movement as a whole is often disparaged as impractical and out of touch with reality. I cannot say these people self-describe as hackers but... I dunno... they are asking and answering questions in a stackexchange community about programmers...

I do remember this also happened in Slashdot occasionally. People using free software criticizing RMS as an extremist.

Which is pretty disappointing, given that many of the people doing the disparaging are using software borne out of the efforts of said free software / hacker movements.

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> RMS is sometimes disparaged as a loon and an extremist. The Free Software movement as a whole is often disparaged as impractical and out of touch with reality.

> People using free software criticizing RMS as an extremist.

I agree with these views, but it doesn't mean that I don't respect him.

Same.

I don't know about you, but I consider it pretty hard to hold both views simultaneously: to respect someone and consider him/her an extremist loon who is out of touch with reality.

"I respect this lunatic whose views are divorced from reality"... isn't this damning him with faint praise, and therefore confirming user _RPM's first sentence?

I think it's a matter of scope. You can respect Stallmans contributions to technology and "no thank you" his views on politics and society.

I don't think you can. Some (most?) of those contributions were made exactly to promote those views on politics and society. To separate those contributions from that is disrespect in and of itself, almost by definition.

It's quite possible to comprehend, admire, and appreciate the labor and discoveries of renowned scientists and technologists, without sharing in the motivations and beliefs they possessed.

Science is intertwined with the accomplished legacies of hated figures whose beliefs were shaped by prejudice, yet whose works became recognized and included in established theory.

Computing fields tend to venerate their idols with a religious-like fervor, unfortunately.

I dont dispute that. Comprehend, admire and appreciate are all words that would fit in the paragraph I objected to. It was precisely the word respect I objected to.

So you're saying it's impossible to respect a person you don't agree with? Be careful; saying that disagreement and disrespect are the same thing takes you on a very very slippery slope. Plenty of tyrants around the world justify illiberal laws and cruel policies citing such assumptions.

No no, I respect a lot of people I do not agree with.

What I'm saying is that even if you disagree you can respect only if you recognize the motivations behind someones labor.

To say that GNU is good technology but don't agree with its premise is disrespectful because, by definition the design has failed if you don't agree with the agenda.

So you could say that you respect the effort but think it has failed, or you can say that you like the result but don't really respect its origins.

> To separate those contributions from that is disrespect in and of itself, almost by definition.

Uhm, no. People do great things for strange motives all the time. Stallman may have written Emacs for some ideological crusade which I don't care about (and consider counter-productive to the world at large), but I can not pretend that it's a great technological achievement.

He's out of touch with economical and political realities of modern society, and his views on these matters are complete lunacy - however, I still respect him for strength and sincerity of his convictions. He's also a great programmer and software systems designer.

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