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Comment by kiloaper | Hacker News Reader

"Why is he so threatening?"

I used to think Stallman was an abrasive fanatic but now I think otherwise. The reason he makes me uncomfortable is because he highlights the compromises I have made. I think this is part of the reason why some people react so negatively and emotionally to him. He vocally refuses to use non-free software and this, in my humble opinion at least, makes him a constant reminder of how many of us sacrifice security and freedom (as he defines it) for usability and ease of use.

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I used to think he was an abrasive fanatic. Oh wait, I still do. I'm tired of being told my decisions are compromises, and wrong ones at that. I'm tired of being told I owe everything to someone by people who completely ignore history.

Imagine if someone told you "If it weren't for Abraham Lincoln, half the population would still be living in slavery today." You'd laugh in their face.

Because slaves would have magicked out of slavery due to the passage of time? I'm not sure why you would laugh in their face rather than suggest alternative scenarios where other processes might have eliminated slavery if Lincoln hadn't happened.

I'm not smart enough to understand your comment. Are you saying that free software would have inevitably come to exist with or without Stallman? If you are, I'd say the burden of proof is on you.

I'll just mention that the MIT license is not the GPL and leave it at that. (yes, that's proof enough for me.)

Um, free software was the way of the world before Bill Gates popularized the selling of the stuff.

Stallman rose to the occasion as the defender of the "old way". He did not "invent" free software, whatever that means. (He did invent the Copyleft license, but there are many other licenses of free software besides Copyleft.)

Might have been better for me to say "a free ecosystem of legally usable source code comparable to the one a large part of the industry depends on today."

Or maybe I should have just capitalized "free."

Free software in the domain of personal computers, which at the time were still hand assembled and didn't even have a functioning display, was the only way anyone knew how to do it until Bill Gates wanted money for BASIC.

IBM, of course, had been charging money for software for decades prior to that.

Given that someone already wrote something (scratching their own itch, hoped to make money but gave up, altruism), they may decide to jump from low adoption+recognition to potential ubiquity by releasing the software free for others to exploit. On the basis of individual incentive alone, this is inevitable.

>I used to think he was an abrasive fanatic. Oh wait, I still do. I'm tired of being told my decisions are compromises, and wrong ones at that. I'm tired of being told I owe everything to someone by people who completely ignore history.

Being tired of being told something and that something being untrue, are two completely different things.

>Imagine if someone told you "If it weren't for Abraham Lincoln, half the population would still be living in slavery today." You'd laugh in their face.

Only if I was one of those guys that are ignorant about the importance of the particular human subject in history.

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