Richard Stallman Speaking Rider

Fun and interesting read. I can see the need for being very specific on tons of stuff when your life essentially becomes traveling the world going from talk to talk likely always organised by someone new and inexperienced at hosting important speakers. Some of these sound sadly like they are direct results of bad experiences such as:

If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be very very glad. If you can find someone who has a friendly parrot I can visit with, that will be nice too.

DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many decades feeling frightened and unhappy. If you buy a captured wild parrot, you will promote a cruel and devastating practice, and the parrot will be emotionally scarred before you get it. Meeting that sad animal is not an agreeable surprise.

I know Stallman is a topic of controversy at the moment, but I don't get the point of doing this. It feels a bit creepy, to be honest. (I'm talking about this repo as a whole – https://github.com/ddol/rre-rms )

I don't think there is anything out of the ordinary with a speaker having some requests if you want them to come and give a talk.

(It does of course depend on how well-known the speaker is. Some nobody whom you are offering a platform, they aren't really in a position to ask for much if anything. If they are someone well-known, and there is a lot of demand for them to talk, they are more in a position to ask for things.)

I agree that Stallman's is going a bit overboard in length and detail and precision. But, at the end of the day, you want him to come speak at your event, you meet his requirements, and if you consider them too onerous, you just don't invite him.

If everyone found his requirements so onerous that nobody invited him any more, he'd probably compromise by relaxing some of them. The fact that he was still getting invites (at least until the recent controversy erupted) suggests that hasn't been the case.

This has been linked to and commented on endlessly for years now, on many sites, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3159210

And I've never really understood why; most conference organizers like this kind of detail.

I esp. don't understand the link now -- it has no relevance to the recent news (at least that I can see?) But maybe I'm missing something?

I don't understand, what's the significance of this in light of what happened to Richard Stallman this week?

I'd say his speeches and appearances are fairly worthless now.

Maybe there's a lesson here: Don't blindly defend pedo friends.... hell, I'll be even bolder... don't associate with kid-diddlers. And don't trivialize age of consent laws.

There's a reason why we don't want adults fucking children. This stuff isn't difficult to understand. It boggles my mind that someone as smart as RMS essentially performed an act of self-immolation.