He came to give a public talk at Brown which was very well attended because he was quite well known among the CS, science, and engineering world.
He gave a pretty typical rms talk - software freedom is important, open source is not good enough, closed systems are bad since you don't know what they are doing to your personal information. All the usual messages that he's been an uncompromising pitbull about for 35+ years. Almost offhandedly, he mentioned that people shouldn't procreate because having kids takes away from the time that you could otherwise be spending on REALLY important things, like working on free software and/or activism for software freedom. That was a new one that I hadn't heard. It kind of underscored his single-minded obsession to me. Here he is talking to a pretty diverse audience and he's saying that his "thing" is more important than literally any other important thing in any other person's life. Later on, one professor in the department, a member of my dissertation committee, was quietly leaving the talk a little bit early. rms noticed and called her out directly for leaving early so she retorted, "well, you know, I gotta pick up the KIDS". I thought it was a mildly funny exchange at the time, but I hadn't known of his reputation for singling out women in the audience and making them uncomfortable. I wonder if he would have done the same call out with a male professor in the same situation. On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 1:55 AM Rich Braun <[email protected]> wrote: > I have a fond memory of RMS crashing one of our BLU meetings to hammer at > the point that our organization’s name included the word Linux and that we > should amend it to include the word Gnu. With rumors of his death not quite > entirely exaggerated—departure from FSF is tantamount to interment, it’s > been his whole life—I’d love to hear more RMS stories. -rich > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss > -- Jack Bennett [email protected] _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
