7 Oct
2021
7 Oct
'21
12:57 a.m.
On Wednesday 06 October 2021 17:20:43 you wrote:
On Wed, 6 Oct 2021, William Morder wrote:
Yes, it is too bad. My sense of him is that he is one of those
stuck-back-in-the-1960s hippies who never moved on. I mean, he was still
living in student residence dormitories (I believe it was) at his university
until a couple years ago (aged in his mid-60s, but still living like a
university student). And, like many a crusty old hippie I know from the
generation before myself, he doesn't recognize that what sounded cool and hep
back in the 1960s sounds, to a younger generation, inappropriate or
offensive. People don't talk like that any more, but he is tone-deaf.
He is one of that original pantheon of MIT geeks and hackers (in the "pure"
sense of the word), and created emacs (I think it was), and other stuff that
is fundamental to our present technology. So I give him due respect, but I
can also see how he upsets some people, because he irked me, too. Still, on
this basic idea, he is right, and it's getting harder to evade that point.
Users can own their data only if they own their machines, and if the software
is free/libre; to protect our communications and data, and to preserve our
privacy, we must use encryption. Otherwise, we will slip gradually into
having no privacy at all, then attempts to preserve our privacy are
criminalized. It really comes down to a choice between one or the other.
Then he fell into trouble with the "cancel culture" and Me-Too movement, etc.,
because he said some things that were objectionable. In any case, if he had
thought twice about his words, he might have saved himself much pain and
suffering, as his indiscretions got him removed from some positions (though
now semi-rehabilitated and reinstated?), and also he lost his student housing
arrangements, and now is living who knows where; although according to his
home page he is now giving talks in Europe.
Bill
On Wednesday 06 October 2021 16:35:20 you wrote:
Oh, sorry for the shorthand.
Richard Stallman, one of main persons behind GNU/Linux. (Or, he would
probably say, the *only* one, the sole creator ... ) You can discover
more for yourself, as there are a lot of pages out there either written
by him or about him. The FOSS or Open Source movement is rather a
watered-down version of his original idea.
Oh, I know him. I went to a presentation he gave at the ETH Zürich a long
time ago. At the end of his presentation he put on a gown and introduced
us to the "Church of Emacs"! He was certainly an inspiration. Sorry to
hear he gave himself a bad rap.
Gianluca
> He annoying at best, a jerk or asshole most of the time, and nowadays has
> got himself a bad reputation, and some of it is deserved. He says a lot
> of things that are, um, politically incorrect or worse. But he was right
> about this one idea, which is that we must stop these problems at their
> root.
>
> Bill RMS gets
a bad rap these days, but he was right about one basic idea:
that our data ought never be collected in the first place. Once it is
collected, with or without our permission, whether it is legal or
illegal, then *somebody* out there will want it, and will have the
means to get it.
Who is RMS?