[Nottingham] [OxLUG] Richard Stallman talks at LSE London, Dec 2nd/3rd. (fwd)

[Steve Caddy]

> Subject: [Fsfe-uk] Richard Stallman talks at LSE London, Dec 2nd/3rd.
> Date: 21 Nov 2002 19:53:05 +0000
>
> Exactly what it says on the tin.
>
> http://is.lse.ac.uk/Events/ESRCseminars/seminar2.htm

Richard Stallman gave a similar seminar in Aberystwyth back in June. As a
graduate of the UWA I'm still on the West Wales LUG, and got to hear quite a
lot about it, although I couldn't trek across to be there myself. The
general feeling was he didn't present his views particularly coherently.

Typical of the comments was this email from Tim Muller:

"Personally, I was rather disappointed, to be honest."

"Although I'm probably sharing most of RMS' causes, I found that the talk
was
rather poor as a talk. IMHO it totally lacked any coherence. It was more a
collection of very interesting examples that weren't connected properly to a
whole. Maybe that was because he didn't have enough time, I don't know."

"Also, it seemed to be highly redundant/repetitive at times. Possibly the
talk
was aimed at a different kind of audience (ie. an audience of computer
laymen)."

"If I weren't already convinced that his ideas about copyright and software
patents are more or less right, I'd probably have thought that he was
confused and constantly beating around the bush, delivering in a 3-hour talk
what could easily have been said more stringently in 1 hour."

"Yeah well, maybe I just went in there with the wrong expectations :-)"

...this isn't to say it won't be worth going to listen and ask your own
questions at the end - he does make some interesting points.

Steve

--
Steven M Caddy, MEng -----------------------------------------------------
"Hardware - the part of the computer you kick when the software fails"
Email: dyn@m0ng.com