[Discuss] RMS in the news

[Jack Bennett]

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 <richb at pioneer.ci.net> 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
> _______________________________________________
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-- 
Jack Bennett
ajbennett at gmail.com