Re: [Discuss] rms

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 10:52:53 -0700 

Shirley's Story provokes me to tell, my "It's all my fault," story.
At one time, my friends Jonathan Solomon (whom many of you know as jsol -- of Telecom Digest fame), and Rich Braun shared an apartment in Central Square with RMS.  I would visit my friends Rich and JSOL, and would, in the process occasionally happen across RMS.
One day we were partying, and I was QUITE tipsy on some Almaden Rose. RMS wandered into the room, and emboldened by the drink I said, "Stop wasting your time on this feature-for-feature match of [MIT Lisp] system 99. Take on a real monopoly. Write a public domain version of UNIX!"
With the caveat that others might have similar stories and with the caveat that my understanding of the approach saying "public domain" was off the mark with regards to what has evolved over time to be  our understanding of the legal underpinnings of Free and Open software, I'm concerned that indeed... 

It's ALL my fault.

-Bill Cattey

Shirley Márquez Dúlcey wrote on 9/19/19 6:09 PM:

I doubt that RMS has ever been officially diagnosed. I can't imagine him
willingly sitting down in front of a psychiatrist. But I have no doubt
whatsoever that he is somewhere on the autism spectrum.

My first significant encounters with RMS were back in the days of Lisp
Machines. A bunch of people had recently left the MIT AI Lab to start a
company, Symbolics, and had also made the Symbolics hardware and software
proprietary. RMS was busily replicating all the new capabilities of the
Symbolics software and adding them to MIT's version of the Lisp Machine
code, which was still open, and sharing it with competing company Lisp
Machine Inc. RMS's genius as a coder was evident, as he managed to keep up
with Symbolics nearly single-handedly. LMI's Lambda design was also more
openly disclosed than the Symbolics 3600 line and the microcode was
provided with the systems, though it still was not an open hardware
platform in the sense that we have now. (The full source distribution was a
no-cost option with LMI systems, and was provided so long as the customer
had bought a large enough hard drive to hold it along with the binary
builds. Before the Lambda was ready, LMI sold a commercial version of MIT's
CADR, the second generation Lisp Machine; those came with either 80 or 300
megabyte hard drives, big for the day but unimaginably small now,
especially for a computer with a full graphic user interface. Lambdas
normally came with a Fujitsu Eagle drive that held about 400 megabytes, so
they always had room for the source code.)

After fighting that battle for a while, RMS got disillusioned with the Lisp
Machine scene. Some of LMI's actions didn't help; the company released a
non-free (in either sense; it cost extra, source code was not provided, and
symbol information was stripped from the binaries) circuit design program
for its Lisp Machines, started work on a new architecture (the K machine)
that was not planned to be open in the same way as the Lambda (prototypes
were built but the company ran out of money before it reached production),
and licensed its intellectual property to Texas Instruments, which did not
share code with MIT as freely as LMI did.

The battles over Lisp and Lisp Machines inspired RMS to start the Free
Software movement, its eponymous foundation, and the GNU (Gnu's Not Unix)
project. GNU's own kernel, Hurd, still has not reached version 1.0 after
more than 30 years of development, but the dream of an open replacement for
Unix became a reality when people coupled GNU's other work (Emacs, GCC,
bash, Bison, gawk, etc) with the Linux kernel. RMS correctly observed that
a complete Linux distribution contained more code from the FSF than from
Linus Torvalds and the other kernel contributors, but his heavyhanded
attempt to get people to refer to the software as Lignux and later
GNU/Linux failed to take hold. The awkwardness of his proposed names was
one reason, but the fact that some potential Linux contributors found RMS
off-putting was surely another factor.

RMS has always been a challenging person to interact with. His sheer genius
as a coder, especially back when his hands had not yet been damaged by
repetitive stress injuries and he could still type, was intimidating to
mere programming mortals. His insistence on ideological purity for the free
software movement, and especially on licenses that prohibited many mixtures
of free and commercial software, alienated potential allies and led to the
emergence of the competing open source movement. He is socially awkward,
quick to anger, and generally insensitive to social cues. He is
particularly awkward in interactions with women, sometimes engaging in
behavior that borders on harassment and stalking, though I believe it's
because of his general unawareness of and contempt for social norms.

RMS hasn't been actively involved in software design for a number of years.
At this point his contributions are limited to evangelism and a bit of
overall guidance to the cause; he is best known now as a public speaker.
His retirement from the FSF and CSAIL is symbolic and will have little
impact on either organization. It may lead to him getting fewer or no
speaking gigs but his involvement in that scene was likely winding down
anyway, with or without the recent incident.

RMS's impact on the world of computing is undeniable. The internet would be
a very different thing without free software and would probably not have
allowed so many flowers to bloom. Sadly, the ISPs, the big data companies,
and the big media companies, which are often one and the same, are busily
closing the doors again.

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 5:11 PM Stuart Conner <[email protected]>
wrote:


I wonder if he is an undiagnosed autism spectrum case and his “stubborn”
and “antisocial” behaviors are something he really can’t just “knock off”.
Having said that even if one has autism it doesn’t mean behaviors are
always excused there is therapy and training to get them selves under
control and more capable of interaction in public.

SMC


On Sep 19, 2019, at 12:00 PM, [email protected] wrote:

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: RMS in the news (Derek Martin)
   2. Re: RMS in the news (Rich Pieri)
   3. Re: RMS in the news (Randy Cole)
   4. Re: RMS in the news (Kent Borg)
   5. Re: RMS in the news (John Abreau)
   6. Re: RMS in the news (Rich Pieri)
   7. Re: RMS in the news (Bill Horne)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 12:38:48 -0500
From: Derek Martin <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Discuss] RMS in the news
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8


On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 06:40:31AM -0400, Jack Bennett wrote:
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.

I've interacted with RMS on a few occasions, and my impression has
always been he would not hesitate to confront anyone, regardness of
any of their identifying characteristics, for any reason he deemed
suitable.  I tend to think this is as it should be, except that his
threshold for when it's OK to confront people needs some rather
heavy-handed tuning.

Despite that I mostly agree with his message, I would characterize
100% of those interactions as negative.  He is coarse sand paper, and
a taste I would prefer not to acquire, much like every other SJW type
I'm aware of having encountered (since such awareness has generally
been imparted via similar behavior).

--
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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This message is posted from an invalid address.  Replying to it will

result in

undeliverable mail due to spam prevention.  Sorry for the inconvenience.



------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 14:03:01 -0400
From: Rich Pieri <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Discuss] RMS in the news
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

On Wed, 18 Sep 2019 11:34:44 -0400
Dan Ritter <[email protected]> wrote:


And then we do.

RMS hasn't stopped in at least 30 years.

Don't use Asperger's as an excuse for RMS acting like an asshole.
It's rude to all of the rest of us.

This.

I would like to add that I'm sick and tired of RMS' friends telling me
I need to be tolerant of whatever his damage might be. I'm a difficult
person to deal with. I know it. I'm not always good at handling it but
I try and when someone tells me to knock it off I knock it off.

RMS has somehow leveraged *not* knocking it off into a career.
Now it's over.

Instead of telling us that we should be tolerant of RMS who "thinks
differently" from most of us, maybe those of you who call him friend
should have been telling him to knock it off. If you had done this 30
years ago instead of making excuses for him and encouraging his
assholery then maybe this whole situation could have been avoided.

--
Rich Pieri


------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 15:05:07 -0400
From: Randy Cole <[email protected]>
To: blug <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Discuss] RMS in the news
Message-ID:
    <CAHyaXi0aYsghc+kQJkoix=nyg83xvrmz9h48pc2updlbauh...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

It's interesting that the media yesterday was talking about the SNL
comedian first, then eventually RMS.
* * *
When my brother was in high school he got a guest account at the AI
lab.  Something happened & that person couldn't sponsor guests
anymore, so he got one sponsored by RMS, which led to a summer job
working there.


------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 17:28:13 -0400
From: Kent Borg <[email protected]>
To: Rich Braun <[email protected]>, "[email protected]"
    <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Discuss] RMS in the news
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed


On 9/18/19 1:53 AM, Rich Braun wrote:
I?d love to hear more RMS stories. -rich

Many, many years ago...

I was once introduced to Stallman, but I had met him before, so I
reminded him of the party, and of the conversation we had had.

He remembered me: "Oh, your *that* asshole."

One of my proudest moments, I retell it every chance I get. Kinda feel
like now people will think I'm just heaping on because it is cool to dis
Stallman. No, he's been worth it a long time.

I'm glad his vision of open source software is out there, he had a lot
of influence over where we are...and I am also very glad he didn't get
his way as to all his utopian details--because utopia is a perfect
place, and one man's perfection and absolute utopia is another man's

hell.

-kb



------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 19:10:13 -0400
From: John Abreau <[email protected]>
To: Kent Borg <[email protected]>
Cc: Rich Braun <[email protected]>, "[email protected]"
    <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Discuss] RMS in the news
Message-ID:
    <CAFv2jcYc6vLpR6L_ddQG_i7w=km_ECGErawJo=ryxspx_+q...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

I first heard of RMS at the Boston Computer Society in 1985. My friend
Glenn Hoffman gave me a BCS membership for Christmas in 1984, and we both
attended the BCS/Mac meeting in January 1985, where Bernard Aboba handed
out printed copies of the GNU Manifesto. I was duly impressed by his

ideas.

Many years later, after I founded the BCS Linux/UNIX SIG, we had a

meeting

where the speaker cancelled a few days before the meeting, and the
alternate speaker we found at the last minute gave a talk on booting
diskless Sun workstations from a Linux server, but his entire talk lasted
about 10 minutes. RMS was in the audience, and during the Q&A after the
talk, someone asked about running WordPerfect on Linux. RMS immediately
responded to this by loudly asking, "Why bind yourselves in the chains of
commercial software when you can be *FREE* !!!".

Since we had another 90 minutes to fill, I turned the meeting over to

him.

His impromptu talk was lively and entertaining.

A few months later I invited him to give a talk on software patents, to
which he responded that he won't speak at any of our meetings until we
rename our group to the BCS GNU/Linux SIG. Needless to say, I found this
demand unreasonable and unacceptable, so the meeting never happened.





On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 5:29 PM Kent Borg <[email protected]> wrote:


On 9/18/19 1:53 AM, Rich Braun wrote:
I?d love to hear more RMS stories. -rich

Many, many years ago...

I was once introduced to Stallman, but I had met him before, so I
reminded him of the party, and of the conversation we had had.

He remembered me: "Oh, your *that* asshole."

One of my proudest moments, I retell it every chance I get. Kinda feel
like now people will think I'm just heaping on because it is cool to dis
Stallman. No, he's been worth it a long time.

I'm glad his vision of open source software is out there, he had a lot
of influence over where we are...and I am also very glad he didn't get
his way as to all his utopian details--because utopia is a perfect
place, and one man's perfection and absolute utopia is another man's

hell.

-kb

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------------------------------

Message: 6
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 20:39:58 -0400
From: Rich Pieri <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Discuss] RMS in the news
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

On Wed, 18 Sep 2019 17:28:13 -0400
Kent Borg <[email protected]> wrote:


I was once introduced to Stallman, but I had met him before, so I
reminded him of the party, and of the conversation we had had.

He remembered me: "Oh, your *that* asshole."

You win the Internet this week. :)

--
Rich Pieri


------------------------------

Message: 7
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2019 11:13:33 -0400
From: Bill Horne <[email protected]>
To: BLU Discussions <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Discuss] RMS in the news
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed


On 9/18/2019 7:10 PM, John Abreau wrote:
I first heard of RMS at the Boston Computer Society in 1985.

I first met RMS in a room adjoining the workstations aisles in the AI
lab at M.I.T.? I was a High-school student who liked computers, and I
had the good fortune to know another Amateur Radio operator who worked
there. RMS was sitting at a small table with a terminal on it, dictating
code into a tape recorder. The only other item in the room was a cot at
the other end, and when we shook hands, he said "Happy hacking!" My
friend later told me that RMS lived there, but I didn't quite believe it
until years later, when I learned that RMS' apartment had been burned
out and that he hadn't known about it for about a week.

The next time I saw him, RMS was standing in the center strip of
Memorial drive, holding a sign that read "Software should be free." I
stopped and asked him why, but I didn't understand his explanation.

The last time we met, I was swiping groceries at a supermarket in
Cambridge. RMS came by and told me that I shouldn't use the self-service
section, because I was putting people out of work.

RMS has left us the FSF, the GNU organization, and Emacs (which I use
every day): we owe him a lot, both as a society and as a group, and I
hope we can keep in mind the immense weight of his achievements on the
balance of his life.

The problem with genius, it has been said, is that there's no way to go
but down.

Bill Horne




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