[Gllug] MS grumbles

[Nix]

On 6 Nov 2009, Peter Corlett verbalised:

> On 6 Nov 2009, at 07:02, John Hearns wrote:
> [...]
>> Ah well. You stand against RMS on that one too.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
>
> Great minds who have great idea and achieve great things are often  
> crackpots too. The line between madness and genius may not actually  
> exist...

Remember his rant against the wheel group in the GNU coreutils manual:

,----
| 23.6.1 Why GNU `su' does not support the `wheel' group
| ------------------------------------------------------
| 
| (This section is by Richard Stallman.)
| 
|    Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the
| rest.  For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to
| seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and
| keeping it secret from everyone else.  (I was able to thwart this coup
| and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't
| know how to do that in Unix.)
| 
|    However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone.  Under the usual
| `su' mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes
| with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest.  The "wheel
| group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of
| the rulers.
| 
|    I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers.  If you are
| used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you
| might find this idea strange at first.
`----

Amusing, but somewhat loony. I get pissed at overmighty sysadmins who
make it impossible to get my job done, sometimes, too, but in most
environments other than the MIT AI Lab, 'he or she can tell the rest'
would be followed by 'and then the password is changed and the snitch
summarily fired'. Technical solutions are not enough.

> Hans Reiser's antics are infamous in the Linux community, for example.

'Antics'? An interesting way of putting it.

> Or how about Isaac Newton, discoverer (not inventor!) of gravity and  
> thus classical mechanics, so a clear-thinking scientist, no? Well, he  
> was deeply religious and wrote much more about the Bible than physics.  
> He was also heavily into alchemy. Discovering gravity was really just  
> a lucky strike in a mind full of all sorts of bizarre ideas.

He also did it when young, a good sign. You forgot his long stint
running the Royal Mint, his loss of a fortune in the South Sea Bubble,
and his ridiculously OTT grudge-matching (lasting decades if need be)
and misogyny.

He was quite a character (i.e. the sort of person it is best to run a
very long distance to avoid).
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