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458 points turrini | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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Almondsetat ◴[] No.46177961[source]
RMS to me is really a curious case. He doesn't know how to install GNU+Linux and relies on others to do it. He doesn't know how to take a screenshot, and I remember reading other snippets from him about not knowing how to perform other basic tasks.
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venturecruelty ◴[] No.46178109[source]
I don't know why people take him so seriously. He said some decent things about software freedom, and the rest of his entire existence seems to be him being deliberately obtuse and generally off-putting. I find it bizarre that there's this strange carve-out here for him, especially considering that he would absolutely loathe 99% of the software that gets discussed here.
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chemotaxis ◴[] No.46178478[source]
I think that sort of goes hand-in-hand. "Normal", well-rounded people don't decide that software licensing is the most important thing in the world and don't devote their entire life to that. A normal person would be content with a 9-to-5 software engineering job at Sun, IBM, or Microsoft.

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.

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1. MassPikeMike ◴[] No.46178853[source]
This puts me in mind of the words of George Bernard Shaw:

‘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.'

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2. lioeters ◴[] No.46180818[source]
And the world, people as a mob, will try its best to punish that person for daring to be different. The nail that sticks out gets beaten.

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.