I dislike the idea that every single leader in the world must only conduct themselves according to Dale Carnegie, as it were. There is an over-abundance of people doing just that, and judging from this post and many of the comments, a lot of people seem to want others to conform to that sort of uniform "persuasive" behavior. I'm not saying it isn't effective, but surely not everybody needs to do that. Isn't there room in this big world for a few genuine personalities?
Of course there is, but I think in some ways it hurts RMS, and it hurts the image of the FSF.
A good friend of mine (a fellow hacker, actually a much much better hacker than me) and I were talking about Richard Stallman the other day. The guy deserves an enormous amount of credit for his contributions to humanity.
Think about what happened as a result of GCC. Think of how many things were enabled because of that.
Right now I'm sitting in one of the design studios over at ASU borrowing some bandwidth and hanging out with one of my friends while she works on an architectural model. Something that I never realized until I spent some time talking with her was how unbelievably lucky we are as nerds.
I was talking to her about what an architect hopes for after college.
Spend tons of $$ on school->hope you get a good internship->Hope you get hired somewhere good->hope that you get the privilege of working on something cool->maybe get a good job doing something fun.
You have to spend other people's money, lots of it, in order to do cool things in architecture.
With open source software (and I understand that GCC isn't all of open source software, but it's important) this isn't true at all.
My passion is for building websites. My webservers run linux, I use python as a scripting language, I use apache as a webserver, I use mysql as a database. If I get really big, maybe I'll use nginx as a proxy cache.
The only limiting factor in how much stuff I can build on my computer is how fast I can input new information into my brain. I'm constrained by my ability to learn and that is pretty much it.
This is huge, and this is something that is pretty unique to computers.
And think about the ways in which this freedom to create has revolutionized the way that humans communicate with one another. Think about how equalizing this is across the economic spectrum.
(I'm sorry, I went kindof off topic there...)
You've got all of these absolutely wonderful things happening in OSS. If somebody wanted to give Dr. Stallman a Nobel Prize for contributions to humanity, I wouldn't bat an eye.
But to "the outside world" a lot of these things are hidden behind a personality that is incredibly off-putting, and that's a little bit tragic. I wish Stallman was a tiny bit more "normal" just because I want more people exposed to the things that he has done.
George Bernard Shaw put it very well many years ago, The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
If RMS were more reasonable, it would be easier to recognize him for his accomplishments. However he'd be less likely to have those accomplishments.
I'm constrained by my ability to learn and that is pretty much it.
Well, I think it is more subtle than that. You are relying on certain externalities - for example, you can't build a chip fab without spending an enormous amount of money, and you need all that power so you can work in Python and not ASM, you can't lay ubiquitous bandwidth without spending an enormous amount of money, etc.
What you are doing is equivalent to your friend creating whatever she can imagine in MicroStation (or whatever CAD architects use these days). It's just that she seems to be more aware of the commercial aspects of actually making it happen than you are.
You're right, but these externalities are accessibly cheap.
Last month, my website had ~150,000 visitors. People who I know and look up to in the tech community tweeted about it (it was for an article I wrote).
I was able to design something, implement it (the software the runs the site [on top of the OSS stack]), then release it to the world and watch people use it.
It wasn't just a demo, it was a real-life, functioning product.
I pay $20/mo for hosting on linode. $20/mo gets me the ability to compete with multi-billion dollar media publishers, and multi-billion-dollar software companies (faecbook, twitter, etc [obviously my $20/mo doesn't scale. The point is that I'm creating the same thing they are, just smaller).
I got "noticed" by a whole bunch of people who used my product.
This is not the case with architecture. You could make an really cool model, or design in CAD, and nobody outside of your social circle would likely see it.
I just paid $48 for a year of hosting on prgmr because I wanted to give some friends of mine a sandbox to play in while I teach them python.
Imagine an architecture teacher giving their student a plot of land, as well as a crew of builders, and a yard full of raw materials.
That's where OSS software is right now, and that is amazing.
Sure there's room, but the thesis is that rms' personality does disservice to his cause. He is willing to email documents around to collaborate using Free Software, but he's not willing to market effectively.
