Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)

RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.

I met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. He had printed copies of man pages printed and stapled together with covers laid out in front of him.

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.

For what it's worth, I've never met the guy but I wrote to him once regarding the image of free software that people who are selling unsupported LibreOffice CDs are causing.

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.