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Dave Winer made a mistake:
I was so shaken to see Kottke ridicule Stallman on his blog for, of all things, liking parrots!
Raganwald compounded it:
This is bigger than Mr. Stallman, and it's bigger than me. It's about who WE are and what kind of world we want our children to live in.
It sure as hell isn't.
Anil Dash corrected them:
I do agree that parts of some online communities can act like bullies, but I think the document everyone's responded to *is* the document of a bully. It's someone who has an enormous amount of power, and many devoted followers, using that power to cow conference organizers and academics into submission to an arbitrary set of whims
That's in the comments on Winer's post. Winer closed the comments soon after, saying:
Update: This piece is getting a lot of traffic and the comments have turned ugly, so I turned them off.
Mine was one of the ugly comments that Winer moderated into oblivion. I'll paraphrase it here:
Nobody is going after Richard Stallman solely because his rider is the document of an extremely weird, eccentric dude. People are going after Richard Stallman's weirdness and eccentricities because he earned an epic shit-ton of public hatred with his equally hateful screed against Steve Jobs, published on the day Steve Jobs left the world. Everybody in the world of open source (which, unlike GNU/FSF, is worth a damn) already knew that Stallman had absolutely disgusting personal habits:
What people learned when Steve Jobs passed away was that Richard Stallman's personal ethics are every bit as disgusting as his personal habits. That's not a good thing in a guy who mostly does talks on how to be ethical. Pissing on the memory of a great man who just died a sad, premature, and very probably painful death is also not a good way to cultivate good will, and the developer community had tolerated Stallman's utterly bizarre personal issues because of his elder statesman status in the open source world.
"Utterly bizarre personal issues" is, if anything, wildly generous. The man eats shit that he finds between his own toes. I just hope it was a Cheeto he had stepped on earlier, and not an edible foot fungus of some kind. That is not just eccentric; that is a seriously fucked up thing to do which easily qualifies as a serious mental health issue.
Stallman doesn't just deserve the ridicule he's getting; he desperately needs it. A man that fucked up should be getting psychiatric care. He earned some measure of respect from the open source community, but he pissed it away by pissing on the memory of the greatest creator of technology products the world has ever seen -- or, at the very least, the greatest we've seen since Edison and Tesla. Even if you disagree with my praise for Steve Jobs, and I'm absolutely willing to concede it's a matter of taste and opinion, showing respect for the dead is a simple matter of common human decency.
Stallman is at best suffering from serious mental illness and at worst a zealot with no respect for basic human decency. Either way, he is very, very overdue for a loss in public status. Fuck that piece of shit.
I was so shaken to see Kottke ridicule Stallman on his blog for, of all things, liking parrots!
Raganwald compounded it:
This is bigger than Mr. Stallman, and it's bigger than me. It's about who WE are and what kind of world we want our children to live in.
It sure as hell isn't.
Anil Dash corrected them:
I do agree that parts of some online communities can act like bullies, but I think the document everyone's responded to *is* the document of a bully. It's someone who has an enormous amount of power, and many devoted followers, using that power to cow conference organizers and academics into submission to an arbitrary set of whims
That's in the comments on Winer's post. Winer closed the comments soon after, saying:
Update: This piece is getting a lot of traffic and the comments have turned ugly, so I turned them off.
Mine was one of the ugly comments that Winer moderated into oblivion. I'll paraphrase it here:
Nobody is going after Richard Stallman solely because his rider is the document of an extremely weird, eccentric dude. People are going after Richard Stallman's weirdness and eccentricities because he earned an epic shit-ton of public hatred with his equally hateful screed against Steve Jobs, published on the day Steve Jobs left the world. Everybody in the world of open source (which, unlike GNU/FSF, is worth a damn) already knew that Stallman had absolutely disgusting personal habits:
What people learned when Steve Jobs passed away was that Richard Stallman's personal ethics are every bit as disgusting as his personal habits. That's not a good thing in a guy who mostly does talks on how to be ethical. Pissing on the memory of a great man who just died a sad, premature, and very probably painful death is also not a good way to cultivate good will, and the developer community had tolerated Stallman's utterly bizarre personal issues because of his elder statesman status in the open source world.
"Utterly bizarre personal issues" is, if anything, wildly generous. The man eats shit that he finds between his own toes. I just hope it was a Cheeto he had stepped on earlier, and not an edible foot fungus of some kind. That is not just eccentric; that is a seriously fucked up thing to do which easily qualifies as a serious mental health issue.
Stallman doesn't just deserve the ridicule he's getting; he desperately needs it. A man that fucked up should be getting psychiatric care. He earned some measure of respect from the open source community, but he pissed it away by pissing on the memory of the greatest creator of technology products the world has ever seen -- or, at the very least, the greatest we've seen since Edison and Tesla. Even if you disagree with my praise for Steve Jobs, and I'm absolutely willing to concede it's a matter of taste and opinion, showing respect for the dead is a simple matter of common human decency.
Stallman is at best suffering from serious mental illness and at worst a zealot with no respect for basic human decency. Either way, he is very, very overdue for a loss in public status. Fuck that piece of shit.
