[ILUG] Something to look forward to after Christmas

[Fergal Daly]

I probably shouldn't say anything but...

On Wed, Dec 13, 2000 at 01:18:30PM +0000, hmoreau at digiserve.ie wrote:
> When are people going to realise that RMS is a nutter and a zealot?

There's nothing wrong with nutters! Zealots can be pretty useful, the open
source movement just wouldn't exist without the zealots it has.

> I think he gives the Open Source Community a poor image in a corporate
> world. As does ESR with his association between Open Source and NRA. And
> if one argues for a purer open source world, free from corporatism then
> it would be poorer too. After all most of the open source software being
> written today is being paid for by someone.  
> 
> We can't all live in a box room on MIT's campus and live off grants and
> stipends, bumming beds and food when we travel etc.

Very true but this is not what RMS argues for, lots of people claim that
this is what he wants but that's not true. He has said on many many
occasions that he has no problem with people making money from free
software. It's just a popular misconception, mostly propogated by people who
have an interest in making him look silly (or sillier!).

I'm not a huge RMS fan, I disagree with some of his stuff but it bugs me
that he gets slammed for a lot of things he doesn't stand for or never
actually said, a prime recent example being the KDE "forgiveness" incident -
he rightly pointed out that KDE had broken the GPL with kghostview and
needed to talk to the author, whereas the anti-RMS crowd who proclaimed that
RMS wanted them to beg his for forgiveness from RMS which was simply not the
case,

Fergal