[Discuss] Stallman stubborn

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

> RMS hasn't made much money but it was never his goal. He has probably done as much to change the world as Jobs, Gates, or Bezos has, so he is a success in his own way.

I knew him as a housemate & archrival to a coworker who happened to do some work for Unipress "back in the day" i.e. just before Stallman's MacArthur grant gave FSF its first big push.

At the time I was an entry-level software engineer making $21K; my housemate was an academic staffer making about $4K less, though already well-known as author of emacs, gcc and ld (the latter more complex than the other 2). I asked why he didn't ask for a raise; oh naive me. He'd already decided that software should be free, and explained that programmers shouldn't be in it for the money.

Yes, he's stubborn. Yes, he's hard to get along with. And indeed his Gnu Hurd project didn't go the way he wanted, Linux happened, the software industry and the Internet exploded into the all-encompassing industry that it has.

But I think back those 3 decades and see that RMS really meant those words he said to me. And I agree with those who say he changed the world, in a fundamental way. The software and hardware industry that we see now would be a lot more like the old IBM / Bell Labs than like the Linux / Android / Google / MySQL that came along after that fateful fortune that befell an ambitious RMS a third of a century ago.

Picture a world without FSF/LPF. Who else could have done it? And consider how small the team and the funding was, compared to today's turbocharged VC craziness. A $200M investment in the likes of Docker will have virtually nil impact on The World As We Know it compared to those earlier halcyon days.

-rich