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Comment by asuffield | Hacker News Reader

Neither of the above. It's no secret what RMS is doing here, and he's fully aware of the context and way in which he is perceived. Some people like to think that he doesn't care, and they have it almost exactly backwards.

The most extreme person on any issue is always ridiculed and disregarded by a large chunk of any community, regardless of whether this is correct or not. People like middle things. RMS's objective is to be the most extreme person, and to drag that position so far over that no other free software effort can be ridiculed or ignored in this fashion.

You haven't chosen to be the middle ground here. RMS has chosen to make you the middle ground, because that's where he wanted it to be, so he hiked all the way over there to plant his flag in order to move the middle. A few decades later, it looks like that worked.

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> You haven't chosen to be the middle ground here. RMS has chosen to make you the middle ground, because that's where he wanted it to be, so he hiked all the way over there to plant his flag in order to move the middle.

I'm sorry: that's a good strategy, but I have known RMS since the late '70s (since back when he still had short hair!) and that is not has strategy. He is earnest, even when it is to his detriment.

Funny anecdote in this regard: I had never really met anyone quite so dogmatic, passionate, principled and resolute as RMS (you can say that whether you agree with him or not -- though roughly, I of course do agree with him). I used to consider him to be a uniquely polarizing figure. Anyway, in the 80s I had a girlfriend who wasn't in computing and had never heard of him. He came out to visit me in California. When she met him, she just commented, "oh, one of those guys."

WTF? Turned out the two of them had grown up in the same neighborhood in the Bronx. She said the 'hood was "full of guys just like him" (although presumably they were obcessed about some other topics). Sadly her family had since moved elsewhere so I never collected empirical confirmation.

I have no idea what your then-girlfriend meant by one of those guys. Or whether the Bronx hood was full of obsessed guys in the '70s?? I am genuinely curious, though.

FWIW I doubt she meant anything judgmental by her remark (approval or disapproval or whatever).

I think she just meant that she saw lots of RMSs growing up: a guy, perhaps a product of his time, who had a certain intensive attitude on a position, a taste for the extremist polemic, strongly held beliefs anchored in moral fervor etc. Also accent, body language, dress, etc. Surely similar people can be found everywhere, but in her case she meant that in the 60s, 70s and 80s Bronx you could get off the train and see bunch of guys that would look to her just like him. She grew up in the same cultural broth, even if it manifested itself differently -- but yes she was and is intense.

I haven't forgotten that simple sentence because it changed something for me: RMS sure can come off as being completely sui generis but really he (like everyone, whether a lowly ant like me or an Issac Newton or Barbara McClintock) is a product not only of self creation but also of his context and upbringing. And realizing that has helped me grow and change (or accept that some things are harder to change than others) over the past few decades.

I've never before heard the theory that Richard Stallman is consciously trying to move the Overton Window. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

The Occam's Razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor explanation is that Stallman genuinely believes his positions are correct.

The FSF as an window moving org is a view I heard expressly presented at their annual members conference a number of years ago. At the time the discussion, I believe, was in the context of the very active "defective by design" campaign, and in response to some views that a more moderate response to DRM (like that taken by other groups like the EFF) might be more effective.

This isn't incompatible with earnestly believing the views. All of us hold principles that exist on a spectrum and can pragmatically decide how we apply them without necessarily compromising them, in order to optimize for progress of certain kinds on certain time-frames with certain costs.

An example of this, RMS's positions have become stronger as free software as matured: IIRC GNU was originally developed on Sun boxes; but RMS would never use an outright proprietary OS today. Early free software system he used had non-free firmware or other blobs, but he advocates strongly against that today. There are a set of strong ideals, sure, but the amount of compromise someone holding them should optimally take depends on the overall state of the world and their position to influence it.

The notion of software freedom as a human rights issue can be quite foreign to people and without someone taking it very seriously some, especially those who have mostly regarded technology as a black box, can too easily dismiss it.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. - Hanlon's Razor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

It is not that his doing didn't turn out to be intelligent, but his intent almost certainly wasn't.

> IIRC GNU was originally developed on Sun boxes

Actually it was an unused small Vax (730?) running BSD. It was unused because it was in the AI lab, where we all used lispms or the PDP-10s upstairs (don't get me wrong -- some of the non-AI folks in computer science used unix).

I don't even remember why that machine was there in the first place -- it seemed so peculiar to have a machine like that in the first place. 8-bit bytes and the small, 32-bit word didn't feel like the future at the time (hah!). It was stuck in a small machine room.

While the 730 and the Sun-1 were available by the time the GNU project was started, I strongly suspect that an 11/750 was the original machine.

(I wasn't running GNU (emacs) until 1984, and didn't contribute to GCC until 1987.)

Indeed, now you mention it it was a 750.

Good thing for my self image I put that question mark in there.

Yeah, I suspected so.

DEC had a problem with selling MIT and other non-profits hardware at a discount, the US Federal government demands Most Favored Customer prices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most-Favoured-Customer_Clause), so I heard they came up with a not so desirable configuration of a Vax 11-750, a RK07 disk drive, and a VAXstation 100 display, which was a 68000 with a megabyte or so of memory and a very fast connection to the VAX.

Which I was also told had an outsized influence on the X architecture, its assumptions of a fast connection to a relatively dumb display, very much the opposite of what developed in longer term.

Which was a motivation for Sun's NeWS, which sent interactive PostScript to the display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS We aren't using it/you've never heard of it because of the "MIT License" vs. Sun wanting $100K to even give you a taste of NeWS.

> [RMS is] fully aware of the context and way in which he is perceived. RMS's objective is to be the most extreme person, and to drag that position so far over that no other free software effort can be ridiculed or ignored in this fashion.

This is an intriguing theory. But I find it difficult to believe that RMS is playing such a deep game when so much of his communication unrelated to free software principals -- e.g. his contract rider [1] -- comes across to so many people as tone-deaf.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/#!msg/mysoci...

Urgh, that should be "principles".

The problem is that, at this point, the FLOSS community increasingly treats RMS as damage and routes around him.

Agreed completely and having met the man, can confirm that every cause needs an extremist and he is better at it than any one i can imagine. At some point in your life you have to decide to refuse compromise.

I was sat beside the venerable and lovely Bruce Perens at a conference at which RMS was talking and we had this chat. Bruce is too pragmatic to hold people to account.

People who know politics will tell you the same for being dragged to the middle by opposing parties.

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