[Gllug] Talk by Richard Stallman in London, 12 Feb

[Nick Mailer]

On Sat, 2002-01-26 at 17:14, Timothy Coggins wrote:
> On Sat, 2002-01-26 at 16:24, Richard Cottrill wrote:
> 
> > eventually settled. Actually he [RMS] got himself sufficiently worked up to
> > endorse piracy of software in no uncertain terms. Considering the audience I
> 
> That's a bit of a bombshell. RMS has no respect for the copyright laws
> that he says keeps his software free (most of us would say open).
> Anyway.. I'm off to re-badge and sell binaries of gcc under the name
> tc-cc:)
> 

RMS is very easy to parody. Fortunately, I was with a friend who sat
with him for a three hour interview for a Linux (sorry - GNU/Linux ;-)
magazine. This gives you a deeper view of the basis of his philosophy.
Firstly, he would never use the term "piracy", as you have in that
propaganda phrase certain implicit axioms which make rational discussion
about information sharing across a community virtually impossible - the
moment you call aspects of the Intellectual Property propaganda
hierarchy into question, you are equated with someone who rapes,
pillages and plank-walks their way across the oceans!

RMS is irrascible, he is unreasonable, he is extreme and he doesn't
realise the totality of conflicting human motivation. But he is also a
genius and - yes - a prophet who has put his money where his mouth is.
He hasn't just talked the talk - he walked the walk, and it is thanks to
him in no small part that we have what we have today. This is what we
mean by respect. Calling him a prophet holds me open to some ridicule,
I'm sure. I do not mean a literal biblical prophet; I am an atheist.
What I mean is that he fulfills the necessary conditions of being in a
very similar position to the biblical prophets like Jeremiah: He is
intelligent, out of synch with many of his society's norms, he is highly
critical of many aspects of the community in which he finds himself and
is generally seen as a crank or even dangerous for his apparently
ludicrous proclimations. Twenty years later, he is vindicated.

RMS does deserve respect. Even in these post-modern, cynical, even
nihilistic times, there are certain individuals whose very passion and
idealism deserve some sort of recognition, at least as representing that
one aspect of the human character that consumerism is usually so good at
crushing, only to leak out in the less than benign fanaticism that leads
people to fly aeroplanes into buildings. Thank heavens there are some
people who use their passion to more constructive ends.


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