[Discuss] RMS

[Rich Pieri]

On Thu, 19 Sep 2019 21:09:10 -0400
worley at alum.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley) wrote:

> Of course, RMS ran into trouble for speaking his mind plainly in a
> time when that is unsafe, and his personality makes him particularly
> vulnerable to that.  But I have been wondering whether his personality
> has robbed him of the connections and goodwill that can buffer one
> from problems.  That is, whether CSAIL may have been wanting to eject
> him for some time and this provided the opportunity.

Point: he didn't speak (write) his mind plainly. He tried to equivocate
around the meanings of two clearly defined, very serious criminal
charges. Which is typical of his rhetoric. And then when he apologized
he didn't apologize for what he did but for the press misrepresenting
him. Again, typical RMS: he doesn't discuss with you; he speaks to his
followers behind you.

He still has people who call him friend supporting him. I dunnow how
long that's going to last, though. CSAIL are figuring out what they're
going to do about email lists and civility right now, and him
expressing his opinions about civility hasn't gone over well.

> Which led me to wonder what he had been doing recently.  I hadn't been
> paying attention for decades; my last memory was the announcement of
> GCC, which was a huge step forward, probably the most massive single
> open-source system at the time, and a vital one for building
> independent systems.

The biggest thing about GCC he's done recently is, after the GCC core
development rejected Apple's LLVM merge patch after getting UI-C to
dual-license under the GPL, to complain that LLVM's debugger isn't
under a free (as in FSF) license. Didn't seem to matter that it would
have been if his people hadn't rejected it. And then Apple abandoned
GPL everything beause of the TiVo clause in GPLv3.

-- 
Rich Pieri