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.

Unsure why this is a reply to the OP, the only thing common is RMS and nothing else.

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.

I know a few autistic people including one of my nephews. They are different in some ways particularly when they are very young and are still struggling with expressing their emotions. But none of them are arrogant and disrespectful. I think you can be autistic and also a jerk, one doesn’t justify the other.