Rchard Stallman vs Darl McBride

[Bryan Sant]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 10:04 AM, Levi Pearson <levipearson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I know very well who he is and how cool of a hacker he used to be.  He
> created lots of cool stuff, and I'm really glad he did.  But sometimes
> guys who created cool stuff decide they have another calling in life
> and move on.  That's what RMS did.  I'm not really interested in what
> he moved on to, and I don't think anything he's likely to say to a
> group is going to touch on the technical aspects of using Linux today.
>  I'm sure he still uses it, but that's because it's what he knows and
> it's what fits his philosophy and social agenda.  Linux would exist
> just fine without GNU, and if it didn't, we'd all be using
> BSD-derivatives instead.  I was using Linux when it first took off,
> and the world was primed for something like it to take off.  The only
> reason BSD didn't take the popularity surge that Linux did was a small
> and short-lived licensing issue that existed right at the cusp of
> things.  I would be fine if BSD had taken off instead of Linux + GNU,
> really.  We'd be largely in the same place, except maybe we'd have
> fewer Free Software zealots and religious wars over licenses.
>
> I'd love to hear him talk about his MIT AI Lab days and how the Lisp
> Machines there worked.  I'd love to hear him talk about the
> development of emacs and how he uses it today.  I'd love to hear about
> how he was involved in developing gcc and the technical details about
> how it's put together (I've actually had to fix a bad port of gcc to
> an embedded platform I was using, so something like that would have
> been very useful to me at one point).  I'd love to hear him talk about
> any of the cool things he might have done if he hadn't dedicated his
> life to lecturing and advocating about Free Software.  I really doubt
> he'd talk to a group about any of that stuff.  He'd talk about Free
> Software and why he believes it's so important.  That's fine that he's
> passionate about that now, but I don't really care and I don't think
> it's particularly relevant to helping people get stuff done with Linux
> or their computers in general.
>
>        --Levi

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