common theme: tiled layout, terminals, minimum fancy decorations.
replies(2):
(source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA )
After spending years with Arch/NixOS/Ubuntu/Sway Im quite happy with Fedora+GNOME now. It just works.
He seems to want as much stability as possible; while being as minimal as possible; with as little fuss to install and keep up to date as possible. Fedora meets those needs. Gnome is Fedora's main concentration.
> For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
It's probably not worth arguing whether this is the "best" when compared with vscode+LSP+Claude or whatever happens to be en vogue in the moment.
But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal. Those of us in the cult aren't observed to leave the compound except in extremely rare circumstances. I'll be doing the same stuff on my death bed, likely.
Edit: Probably the most visible change is better fonts and font rendering.
Edit 2: To expand on "all I want is code": let's say there is a menu bar with maybe 10 menus and 100 or so items, and a project navigator thingy, and a compiler output window. I would much rather these things not take up permanent space on my screen. Every one of them shows information/commands that I can access with a key combination and in some cases some fuzzy completion after hitting a key combination. Any decent editor can do this and you can learn it in an afternoon, and if you're going to spend the next couple of decades in front of it it's worth getting rid of the pixels permanently allocated to advertising "you can do this thing".
For instance, if you refuse to play around with LLMs out of some dogmatic reason that they're not "truly" open (note: I don't know what his true opinions are), then you risk completely missing the boat and can't meaningfully shape the space of modern discourse.
Update: Also on the bottom left here [3]
[1] https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_warren_toomey.gif
[3] https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_jordan_hubbard.jpg
Now, there's a separate build to download for KDE. It's likely because Gnome is default install for Red Hat Enterprise Workstation.
Well, he also created GCC and GNU Emacs.
Linux and the idea that developer tools should be free wouldn't exist without him.
Optimal for those users, at any rate. IMO using a terminal editor is so painful compared to a decent GUI (Sublime or even VSCode) that I have a difficult time understanding why anyone would choose such a tool. I just try to repeat the mantra of "everyone likes different things" and stop trying to understand something where I likely never will get it.
I use mostly IceWM these days. I can't use the leaner WMs such as ion or ratpoison and XFCE, mate-desktop, KDE and GNOME are too slow or too crap (KDE unfortunately also now; before that only GNOME was crap. KDE killing xorg-support also means it is one less thing I can use anyway.)
Milo Medin said "Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138
From: Milo S. Medin <medin@orion.arpa>
Date: Apr 6, 1987, 5:06 AM
Actually, Dennis Perry is the head of DARPA/IPTO, not a pencil pusher
in the IG's office. IPTO is the part of DARPA that deals with all
CS issues (including funding for ARPANET, BSD, MACH, SDINET, etc...).
Calling him part of the IG's office on the TCP/IP list probably didn't
win you any favors. Coincidentally I was at a meeting at the Pentagon
last Thursday that Dennis was at, along with Mike Corrigan (the man
at DoD/OSD responsible for all of DDN), and a couple other such types
discussing Internet management issues, when your little incident
came up. Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something
about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again. There were
also reports about the DCA management types really putting on the heat
about turning on Mailbridge filtering now and not after the buttergates
are deployed. I don't know if Mike St. Johns and company can hold them
off much longer. Sigh... Mike Corrigan mentioned that this was the sort
of thing that gets networks shut off. You really pissed off the wrong
people with this move!
Dennis also called up some VP at SUN and demanded this hole
be patched in the next release. People generally pay attention
to such people.
MiloBut that's also the kind of people we need. Companies are not going to compromise on their profits, we need someone to balance that and not compromise on software freedom. With these two extremes we can take an balanced position and that's how we got Linux and distros like Debian: it is free software, but it is also pragmatic. If we only had pure GNU (HURD), we wouldn't get far, but if we didn't have GNU at all, it would be even worse.
Richard Stallman didn't just talk. He actually wrote code, famously Emacs, and started the whole GNU project. I am not aware of recent technical contributions though.
Most newer popular distros (Bazzite, CachyOS, Zorin, Asahi, etc.) default to KDE now, and it's very nice that Fedora's not only keeping up, but also providing the basis for some of them.
I think you see that with a lot of other revolutionaries. They often take unreasonable positions and behave in unreasonable ways. RMS' tragedy is probably that his side more or less won, so now he's just a weirdo without a cause.
All of the screenshots strike me as "get things done". Little flourish, just windows and text mode apps where needed to finish the day's task. To me, an ideal to aspire to.
(I've also never had a window tiled in my life; every window maximized at all times to avoid noise)
Here is his fvwm rc. Given that it's fully documented, I will walk back my assumption that he can barely open a terminal. I researched it a bit and recalled an interview where he said something like "all I use X windows for is is to open a terminal in FVWM", so he clearly can customize it, but he prefers a minimalist setup.
Also in a terminal environment, all you enter are keyboard keys. If you know how to touch-type, your cognitive load can be greatly reduced (personal feeling). You can also navigate something like sublime with keyboard only. But it's way more tiresome.
‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'
I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and just said "so are you going to buy something?" and motioned toward the booklets. I didn't need a printed copy of the `sed` man page so I shrugged and he seemed quite annoyed, turned to his assistant with a notebook computer and started dictating something to them, as almost to make it clear that our interaction was over.
I'm not sure what the point of posting this is, but that's my RMS story - it was my first "never meet your heroes" moment, I guess.
If you scroll down to the bottom of https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html you can see his configurations for Emacs and fvwm and even macOS keyboard layouts; some of them were updated as recently as this year.
This 2020 profile has a photo of him standing at his desk: https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knu... and in the 2008 interview with Binstock (https://mmix.cs.hm.edu/other/knuth-interview.pdf = https://web.archive.org/web/20250408034153/http://www.inform...) he mentioned the set of tools he uses, which includes even “in rare cases, on a Mac with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator”. Overall he is very comfortable with his computer.
> I designed my own bitmap font for use with Emacs, because I hate the way the ASCII apostrophe and the left open quote […] I prefer rxvt to xterm for terminal input. Since last December, I’ve been using a file backup system called backupfs, which meets my need beautifully […] Incidentally, with Linux I much prefer the keyboard focus that I can get with classic FVWM to the GNOME and KDE environments that other people seem to like better. To each their own.
https://anders.unix.se/images/dmr_screenshot.gif
https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developer...
It’d be fun, as a side project, to build a pixel perfect replica of it (along with the core apps that make it useful) that runs on a modern Linux kernel and preserve it in amber forever.
He was willing to civilly discuss and listen to a different point of view. We never reached agreement, but I felt that so long as an interesting twist on something dear to him is being discussed, he is patient for discourse.
She was always planning social events, hyping the place so that it was full of interesting people, and more. It was the most social part of my life even though I was 30.
But she also was frantic and obsessive and short tempered which was off putting.
Other guests would often complain about her, and they would phrase it as if she’d be cool if only she could turn down that one aspect about her. I had the same reaction at first too.
But eventually it became painfully obvious to me that that’s not how people work. Because the quirk you’re complaining about is the same quirk that got her to start a successful hostel across the world that we’re all enjoying.
We aren’t a bunch of independent levers that we get to adjust. Yet for some reason we pretend like that’s the case.
But over the years I've come to appreciate the simplicity of Mac. Initially it didn't even have multiple screens but you could install (I forget the name) an application that simulated the multiple screens of Fvwm2. Right from the start I was glad for the simplicity of just having everything work or it wasn't supported - there was no in-between.
Today I'm using Spaces with iTerm2 and Emacs as core development tools. Not much different from my Fvwm2, xterm and Emacs in xterm solution from 25 years ago. Pity really that nothing has fundamentally changed in code development.
Yes, it's a form of signaling. It's like a milloinaire showing "I have so much money that I can dump 10k on a Rolex and not even think about it", or a billionaire showing "I have so much money I don't even need to dump 10k on a Rolex to show how much money I have". These guy's version is "I'm so technically accomplished, that I can tell you I don't know X basic thing and you'll interpret it as a sign of my genius".
That's ok. In our society we attribute too much importance on money, I don't mind if the likes of Stallman and Linus get a bit more fanhood from the wider society than they currently do.
By the way, I think RMS doesn't have a mobile phone even now. Somebody's else could have taken a picture for him. Phones with cameras were not common back then because what would you do with it on GSM?
I think Linus and Stallman don't have disdain for "civilians". I think Linus in particular has deep disdain for people who pretend to be competent and then are not up to scrutiny; but he doesn't have those blowouts with dumbasses that he doesn't work with.
On the other hand, someone who strikes me has having universal disdain is Carmack.
In addition you get those privacy aspects (website operators don't know where you are) and are blocked from "non-free JavaScript programs" and only deal with text with content, all else will not come through.
What seems like "obvious garbage" to you, might be a treasure to another person.
Under OpenBSD as the settngs are pretty much the same over releases, you can use ifconfig and /etc/hostname.if almost forever. That's it, upgrade and forget.
Well they are hardly going to send in screenshots showing them surfing porn sites or doomscrolling Facebook.
Most i3 setups there are for showoff; cwm has better defaults and conmuting between tags it's far more manageable than fighting with tiles where often the window resolutions are either useless or scramble your content.
Also most fluxbox or *box users will have far better setups than i3 ones because they use their actual setups to do actual stuff instead of posting screenshots.
RMS is a flawed person, a stubborn unreasonable man with questionable traits. But dismissing his life's work as "said some decent things" is just ignorant revisionist history. We can acknowledge his flaws while respecting the work he did and the overall message, which changed the world for the better.
So I walked up, I introduced myself and asked a question about the freedom of _data_ versus the freedom of _software_, and without looking up to me he said "I don't do smalltalk". So I got back to my seat and told my "story" to my immediate neighbors, who were keen to learn what he'd said.
(He is much more constructive by email.)
I searched for it and confirmed it was inspired by communist aesthetic https://www-archive.mozilla.org/party/2002/
I haven't picked up nearly as much as I'd like, but even basics (requiring zero config) are way beyond what I could easily do in any GUI editor I ever experienced. For example, in vim, if you are on a bracket or parenthesis (open or close) in edit mode, it is three keystrokes to delete the entire bracketed portion, precisely, regardless of size (even if the matching bracket is off screen). Finding the matching bracket with the mouse is often hell.
And it's not as hard to learn as you may expect, because those keystrokes are not magic codes; they're part of a consistent, thoughtfully designed command language. You choose a mode for selecting text (character based, with lowercase v), use "motions" to select the text in that mode (in this case, a single "go to the matching bracket" motion, which is the percent sign), and take an action with that selection (delete it, with d).
What good is it being a visionary if people ignore or actively reject the message because they are put off by the messenger? It’s not useful being a harbinger of doom if nothing changes anyway.
Stallman should be commended and recognised for starting the free software movement, but he should’ve stepped aside long long ago and let someone more charismatic be its figurehead.
¹ I’m sure someone reading this has had a different experience, but please do a cursory web search and recognise people’s negative interactions with Stallman are not rare.
But, RMS is known to be socially awkward, the same goes for many autistic individuals. It's just that he doesn't mask and comes out as “rude”. If send an e-mail, he will usually take his time to write down a succinct response.
3588 (10W) plays HL2 at 300 FPS and streams it at 60 FPS to twitch.
Turns out 2025 was the year of the ARM linux desktop after all!
TWM + emacs + irssi + mpv(ytdl)
Each person reading this might come up with some different in their search. Do you have a specific example to point to?
"I know a guy with a leg missing, and he can still run, so clearly someone who has lost their legs is able".
I have had the discussion a bunch of times, I'm beginning to think that nobody other than me has spent a significant amount of time with severely autistic people.
Yes, some autistic people can mask quite well, and, some are mild cases.
But the crucial issue that most autistic people have is: they don't even become aware that they're being rude unless they spend active effort in first identifying, then understanding, then trying to fix it.
I'll tell you something else too: most people are uncomfortable with criticism, it makes them defensive and clam up. If you make someone defensive, enough times, then the situation becomes infected and very emotionally charged.
Now, imagine you have an illness that prevents you from processing your emotions properly, and the whole world is unkind to you, and you can't really understand why, but people call you rude.
It takes a lot of bravery and integrity to really reflect on that soberly.
Please, I implore you all to stop pretending you understand autism because you know someone- or a bunch of self diagnosed people, I keep seeing it[0], autistic people have great difficulty controlling how they're perceived, that's the whole issue.
Even if I consider how my PC looked in 2002, the 2015 screenshots are far and away uglier than my desktop experience.
Yet... I produce... very little. At least when compared to these absolute titans, who have contributed much more to my computing experience than most - certainly more than myself, I find it somewhat unsettling.
This is how my laptop looked in 2015 (it's a screenshot from 2017, but the configs were the same): https://sh.drk.sc/~dijit/2017-11-19-003840_4480x1440_scrot.p...
My .emacs file gets updated regularly, sure, but it's thirty years old, and my basic flow hasn't changed.
When you do this, you get his "rider". Google it, it's real, it's infamous for the "don't buy me a parrot" section.
Anyway, in that, he makes clear that if people at dinner are not interested in talking about free software, he's going to pull out his laptop and get on with his work relating to free software.
He doesn't care about fancy food, drinks, etc. - he wants to raise money for free software, and work on free software. He did this in a restaurant when three others of us were chatting about something else, and we all just accepted that's what he does, and that's him. It was fine.
If you're not familiar with him or this, then it's going to be a weird experience.
He also struggles with social interactions in my limited experience, particularly when it's a "fan boy" interaction.
I've seen him not being super nice to other people who were trying to have a conversation with him, not because he's not a nice person (I found him quite personable one on one), but it seems to me that he struggles to know how to behave around people who don't know how to just talk to him about things he wants to talk about.
I once saw him in the audience of a conference with quite a notable set of speakers [0], and I can't remember who it was who he started hectoring in the Q&A (I mean, look at the speaker list, whoever it was, it's somebody you've probably heard of), but he just diverted it into a little lesson about free software for the speaker and everyone else listening. It's the only thing he cares about talking about. It's either a super-power focus, or really annoying. I personally think at this point you just either need to meet him where he is, or avoid him if you don't want to. He's not going to change.
I'm glad I met him, I'm glad he does what he does, I know he's a little spikier than others around him and I'm OK with that. I also know plenty of people who never want to speak to him ever again and think free software needs a new figurehead.
[0] https://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/Turing100/www.turing100...
I feel the same way. But small advantages compound to at least some extent (see e.g. https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/); and I find that noticing that it takes more time than I'd like to write/edit something, risks breaking my flow.
If anyone is going to support policy for our fellow humans spend an extra moment making sure to both have empathy and make sure we're comparing apples to apples.
Heck, Kernighan was one of the original developers of Unix. In 2015 he was already coding for more than 40-50 years, more time than most from Hacker News are alive. The only constant from that time is the terminal, so no wonder most people in the post gravitate towards that
I'd argue that while he may be nice, it's also generally considered impolite to be someone who "only talks to him about the things he wants to talk about". It's meant to be a two-way street, generally. Someone who only wants to talk about what -they- are interested in, not what their conversation partner is interested in is not being nice or polite.
I'm going to say that your definition of "severely autistic" is actually mild to moderate at worst.
The definition of "severely autistic" I know of and have seen in personal experience (family) and in my career has nothing to do with "masking" and such.
It's being a late teenager who is effectively non-verbal, who wore diapers until age 12, who has an "anchoring dog", a 150lb Newfoundland that was trained from birth with audio recordings of him screaming or tantrums, that acts both as an emotional support, but as a literal anchor - tethered to him so that when, as many severely autistic people do, he starts to wander based on internal stimuli - the dog can just sit down and tense up and say "Not unless you plan on dragging a very large dog with you that is trained to stay still when it notices you walking away from your family".
Things along those lines.
> they don't even become aware that they're being rude unless they spend active effort in first identifying, then understanding, then trying to fix it.
This is demonstrably not RMS. He is quite aware of this, and quite openly states he has no intention of apologizing for it, let alone "fixing it".
It just happens that I don't like hypocrisy.
I am not an antisocial and consider myself a very polite person and will often say hello and wish a good day to strangers when I am riding my bicycle in the trails or walking in a village / small town.
But of course there’s a whole range.
What concerns me though is that when I’m on the internet, people talk about autism like it’s a quirky character flaw that can be overridden with moderate effort.
Which feels criminally ignorant.
1. He was using a virtual console (ie. what you get when you press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and similar if using X), not an X terminal.
2. The virtual console was very likely not using a framebuffer (which would be a graphics mode), but was in fact just the Linux kernel's standard text mode output for virtual consoles, using the BIOS font.
Making a screenshot of such a text mode as a graphics file is actually not really something you can do. For the most part, the best you can do is to synthesize an equivalent image from scratch by rendering the text using another program.
That's likely what he meant when he said that he didn't know how to do a screenshot. Yes, it's overly specific, and the person who asked was probably just wanting to see what he was looking at on the monitor, which wouldnt require an exact pixel-for-pixel copy, but there you go.
I don't think the second answer even qualify as a screenshot nor why he should do that upon random request by strangers.
It seems like a diagnosis that would benefit from more distinguishing words so as not to conflate people at different ends of that spectrum.
It must be infuriating or Bewildering to see someone knowingly nodding along saying, “oh yeah. I’m autistic too,” when other autistic people you know literally aren’t capable of doing that.
My audio subsystem behaves exactly the same way!
Sometimes I'll send it a simple email politely asking to grab the block of samples it just sent to the soundcard and replace them with different samples that I've included as an attachment. It always makes this rude clicking noise at me which I do not appreciate at all.
I guess it's too much to ask to just take a little time to fashion a polite response while also hitting soft realtime deadlines. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Free software gives people part of the means of production. In the 1980s/early-1990s model where personal computers were common but most software was run locally, it was an effective challenge to corporate interests, but since the evolution of robust networks and remotely processed software, it has ceased to be nearly as effective.
However, it's important to note that if free software ever truly challenged industrial interests, they would just get the laws changed to prevent it from restricting them in any real way using some bizarre legal maneuver. As it is, it is tolerable and produces useful products corporations can use for free. That's what it means to live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
I moved from ctwm to kde because they accepted a patch that allowed me to maintain some modifier/mouse shortcuts I had configured in twm. Gnome rejected my patch
Moved to lxde because kde got too complex and hard to deal with
Still run tcsh with a .cshrc migrated from one i cloned from a friend at university
I’ve been on a bsd based workstation since the 80s with a few years on Mac and linux. Sunos->ultrix->osf/1 -> FreeBSD (on alpha) -> FreeBSD i386 -> macOS x -> Ubuntu-> FreeBSD/amd64
I can say I know computers and how they work pretty well, but these days I have much better things to do to learn the best way to themes my shell so that it matches my waybar, and that both switch colourscheme when dark mode activates. I could learn if I wanted, but I’m not a teenager anymore; I don’t care. Incidentally, when I had the time concern myself with GTK themes and wallpapers and Compiz, my knowledge in computers was a tenth of what it is now.
It would be like saying a car decorator is the most expert of mechanics.
Probably what he means is that a make install (or whatever the incantation, it’s been a while since I compiled a kernel) just works on Fedora and never has to deal with the rpm nonsense (I use Fedora too, but packaging is even more dreadful than deb, if you can believe it)
Yes, most people have not met someone with more than mild autism.
I think the other issue is that people are confused as to _what_ autism is (it doesn't help that its a massive fucking spectrum) For most people, meeting a dutch grandmother for the first time would assume that they count as autistic.
I run a "uniformed organisation" for kids, and as we make sure that we take _all_ kids regardless of who they are, I bump into a large amount of interesting diagnosed and undiagnosed conditions. Currently I look after siblings, one who is mostly mute and diagnosed, and the other who is very much lightly on the spectrum.
There is another kid who is both ADD and autistic(Diagnosed). He is prone to RMS-like behaviour. If you talk to him in the right way, he can understand why certain behaviours are to be not repeated. However, he is and remains a teenager.
I still produce little, but I have come to realize only pure, unadulterated silence free from any sort or distraction, however minimal, is worth anything. When I used IRC, not much was accomplished apart from chatting on IRC.
One explained me that they are bombarded non-stop by people for years and years and at the end they'd rather be mean than "waste" their time on the rare chance of having a meaningful interaction.
The overwhelming majority of their interaction ends up with people asking them for opinions about their projects, collaborations, etc, and it gets so tiring that they statistically prefer to lose the chance of having a nice meaningful interaction rather than take the chance of yet another waste of time.
I know it's mean, but I get it.
Not saying they are all like that, just saying it's quite common among famous developers, they are bombarded non stop by people wanting to chat.
Often I find that apps have features only because I see others using the application.
Make me do anything on applications banking/government/delivery-related and I have to ask family members.
You realize people are different, and your knowledge of tiny number of data points tells you very little about people who aren't those people you know?
I've used everything from DAWs, image editors, IDEs, terminal emulators, operating systems, dev tools, spreadsheets and I'm quite sure I've never went much in depth in any of them.
I'm not like that on the abstract level.
I know the ins and outs of functional programming concepts and their mathematical definitions, many deep details of programming languages or their compilers and many other things but I suck at tooling.
It's not just IT-related.
I can explain thoroughly the chemistry of dough making (which is far from simple), but I never got very good at making it, so friends of mine that know nothing about how it works still make better bread or pizza than I do.
Duh, obviously, he only lisps. /s
You could argue, in your description, the same about RMS - he might feel entitled to someone's time to talk about free software.
RMS set boundaries and that's perfectly reasonable.
Why am I am not good at excel, it is because I am the person who tends to fetch the data from the different systems and consolidates it for the analysts to analyse and some do use Excel to analyse the data.
But yeah, altruism is typically shared by both anarchists and communists. The only remaining question seems to be: who better embodies the ideal?
If at least he was actually doing what he preaches, one could be charitable. But actually he is just a goddamn activist, endlessly arguing about why the work of others should be free while he does zero work of value himself.
Every far-left friend I have had, who always touts some form of communism or sharing of resources, has been the one who systematically shares the least. And that is true both from a material point of view and effort/labor perspective as well. Hence my conclusion that they are assholes.
It seems to have hurt the sensibilities of his followers, but that was expected, and since they are assholes, you cannot expect them to be truthful.
By the way, political ideology is identifiable in genetics, so yes, it is absolutely certain that your political ideas correlate with how you interact with peoples.
Here is a paste of a previous reply.
I strongly disagree. I don't know whether he would identify himself as a communist politically, but it doesn't matter. Furthermore, I am entitled to analyze his ideas and classify them as I please. And as far as I'm concerned, he is arguing about fruits of labor being free in the typical “comrade” idealization from communism.
If at least he was actually doing what he preaches, one could be charitable. But actually he is just a goddamn activist, endlessly arguing about why the work of others should be free while he does zero work of value himself.
Every far-left friend I have had, who always touts some form of communism or sharing of resources, has been the one who systematically shares the least. And that is true both from a material point of view and effort/labor perspective as well. Hence my conclusion that they are assholes.
It seems to have hurt the sensibilities of his followers, but that was expected, and since they are assholes, you cannot expect them to be truthful.
By the way, political ideology is identifiable in genetics, so yes, it is absolutely certain that your political ideas correlate with how you interact with peoples.
The background?
xsetroot -solid gray20
The fact is that he is just one more type of asshole who spends most of his time arguing about other people needing to work for free or requiring utopian collectivization of the work (process, output, etc.). The details are not essential because the idea is still the same: preferring the nebulous idea of collective freedom against individual freedom (and this includes moral corporations).
There is no centralizing characteristic to capitalism. It is, in fact, exactly the contrary and the main reason that what we call “capitalism” is the de facto system of exchange ever since humans evolved past primitive needs. Capitalism relies on self-interest to function, and there is no central entity. One could argue about the government and the money supply control as a central entity, but it's actually not a requirement, just a convenience. If government money becomes untrustworthy, you just switch to using something else as a medium of exchange (often other moneys or precious metals). On the other hand, communism absolutely requires centralization and violence/coercion to force people to comply. I have no idea how you can jump to the conclusion that capitalism is centralizing when it's absolutely the reverse.
As for the free software and the parallel to possessing the means of production in communism, it is very interesting because it basically disproves the whole theory without much effort.
Software development is a field where the capital requirements to get started are extremely low, yet hardly any people with access to this capital have been able to produce value, both at the individual level and group/business level. Clearly it is not enough to be able to access the capital and all the tools for free.
What's more, all of this is only possible because there are some other people working on things that allow software development to even exist. Those things are entirely dependent on the capitalist system. Thinking you can build a “free utopia” on top of a capitalist system is delusional and extremely dumb.
I can't argue all day, but at this point I really don't understand how some people who are not very young anymore can still believe in the bullshit of communism and its derivatives. I don't really care per se, but the problem is the moral posturing and constant activism of those communists. If their stuff was any good, they wouldn't need to spend all day trying to convince productive people to buy into their utopia.
But the demagogues endlessly promoting communist ideologies definitely benefit from it by appearing morally superior and getting resources for no valuable work in exchange.
The GPL, shows that, actually, they are not really ok with the no reciprocity part.
There are very few truly altruistic individuals, and their defining characteristic is that they just do the good stuff instead of endlessly talking about it for brownie points. Basically the complete reverse of communists (and everyone far left in general).
2. There are psychological traits that can influence on a statistical level (very high numbers) political views. But this is just tendencies, it's not determinism.
Openness to new experiences correlates often with openness to change and experimentation on social matters. Neuroticism often correlates with sensitivity on safety matters. Agreeableness with tendencies towards egalitarian views. And all of that still matters way less than cultural background and many other things.
But extraversion or social skills, like in Stallman's case have 0 relationship with political views. In fact, by your logic and his traits, he should fall on the other end of the political spectrum.
I've noticed this too, and my pet theory is that it's yet another toxic side effect of pervasive consumerism. We get so used to being able to find that one product whose feature list is exactly what we want, that we end up carrying that same micro-managing expectation into other areas of life. We've lost the ability to appreciate things holistically.
You can of course synthesize a new image based on the contents of that text buffer (and that would almost certainly have been fine for the purposes of the question), but you can't dump a graphics buffer that doesn't exist.
He would absolutely have known about script(1).
The argument against appliances isn't any good. You are not entitled to getting access to the schematic and inner workings of things you buy. By this logic, everything should come with the full blueprint and documentation on the production process. You are free to choose to buy things that are more open, and it is indeed a desirable quality for the consumer, but definitely not a right. Without closed-source software, ubiquitous computing would not exist. When you buy a printer, it is working as is, as described with the limitations that are laid out. You are free to keep using it as long as it is functional with the computer/OS it was designed for. You are free to make your own printer or select a brand that offers full firmware access if this is important to you.
As for the psych thing, I never said it was full determinism, and I really don't want to argue about it with you. The point I am making has nothing to do with social skills. In the story of the OP, Stallman gave zero shits about him unless he wanted to buy some of his manuals. This is both hilarious and hypocritical for a dude who spends all day arguing about making “free” software. It maps perfectly to the experience of anyone who has to deal with people who are communist in spirit. They'll argue about sharing everything to never contribute anything or the minimum they can get away with. It is not a subtle effect, and the more communist they are, the worse it is.
In fact, the thing I get out of this is that my first statement was perfectly accurate. Predictably, you got worked up about it because Stallman is an idol, and you are some sort of Marxist-derived ideologue, and your feelings got hurt. It seems very likely that you are also yourself an asshole. Not that I wouldn't buy you a beer to listen to your comrade fantasies (they're very entertaining, like fantasy novels), I don't strongly discriminate against assholery, but if it walks like a duck, I call it a duck. In French the word I would use is “enfoiré", the literal translation is indeed “asshole” or “bastard,” but the meaning I'm trying to convey is "personne malfaisante, déloyale" which roughly translates to "deleterious and dishonest person." And this is a perfect description for Stallman's behavior as well as the vast majority of communists. It's not like there wasn't extensive literature/proofs on the subject…
1. Stallman is not my idol, I don't like the guy at all and I find him disgusting from many points of view, but I see his point of why access to information and software is important to humanity. I am surrounded by appliances I don't really own and control, from printers to TVs and it's disgusting, I absolutely understand his points. I should be able to modify and repair stuff I buy with my money, it's mine. This has been normal for 99.99% of human history by the way.
2. I don't really like left vs right labels, I find them asinine. Politics are complex, there's countless topics on which one could be leaning in one or another end. Moreover I don't like anything that ends with "ism" it's never brought anything good to the world. I'm more right-leaning if you care to know. Yet I know people and have family members that have the most diverse view, and I respect those. I judge people for how they behave and act to others and the ideals they fight for.
3. Since you keep judging me (wrongly, you miss on everything, like you did on Stallman), I'll judge you. You sound like a loser mixup between a 4chan incel on those boards like /pol/ and a 60 years old bigot on facebook.
4. Psychological and social studies demonstrate that the qualities you find in Stallman are more common among the people on the other end of the political spectrum.