[Discuss] RMS in the news

[abreauj at gmail.com (John Abreau)]

I first heard of RMS at the Boston Computer Society in 1985. My friend
Glenn Hoffman gave me a BCS membership for Christmas in 1984, and we both
attended the BCS/Mac meeting in January 1985, where Bernard Aboba handed
out printed copies of the GNU Manifesto. I was duly impressed by his ideas.

Many years later, after I founded the BCS Linux/UNIX SIG, we had a meeting
where the speaker cancelled a few days before the meeting, and the
alternate speaker we found at the last minute gave a talk on booting
diskless Sun workstations from a Linux server, but his entire talk lasted
about 10 minutes. RMS was in the audience, and during the Q&A after the
talk, someone asked about running WordPerfect on Linux. RMS immediately
responded to this by loudly asking, "Why bind yourselves in the chains of
commercial software when you can be *FREE* !!!".

Since we had another 90 minutes to fill, I turned the meeting over to him.
His impromptu talk was lively and entertaining.

A few months later I invited him to give a talk on software patents, to
which he responded that he won't speak at any of our meetings until we
rename our group to the BCS GNU/Linux SIG. Needless to say, I found this
demand unreasonable and unacceptable, so the meeting never happened.




On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 5:29 PM Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:

> On 9/18/19 1:53 AM, Rich Braun wrote:
> > I?d love to hear more RMS stories. -rich
>
> Many, many years ago...
>
> I was once introduced to Stallman, but I had met him before, so I
> reminded him of the party, and of the conversation we had had.
>
> He remembered me: "Oh, your *that* asshole."
>
> One of my proudest moments, I retell it every chance I get. Kinda feel
> like now people will think I'm just heaping on because it is cool to dis
> Stallman. No, he's been worth it a long time.
>
> I'm glad his vision of open source software is out there, he had a lot
> of influence over where we are...and I am also very glad he didn't get
> his way as to all his utopian details--because utopia is a perfect
> place, and one man's perfection and absolute utopia is another man's hell.
>
> -kb
>
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>


-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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