Richard Stallman's Dissenting View of Steve Jobs 1452
Garabito writes "Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, has posted his not-so-fond memories of Steve Jobs on his personal site, saying, 'As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.' His statement has spurred reaction from the community; some even asking to the Free Software movement to find a new voice."
for those who are interested (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd mod you up, had I the points. I even saw a somewhat disturbing piece on one of those Sunday shows asserting that Steve Jobs was indeed the FOUR most important people to influence technology in the past half century, since calling him the single most important person was apparently already too low a tribute. Steve was clearly very influential but to blindly say that he was "The most influential in history" is a huge reach. Just because there are certain groups of people who rely entirely on his company's products (not even a majority of those who use technology on a daily basis) that group (almost all of those in national media, it would seem) feel justified in glorifying him to no apparent end.
And hey, at least RMS won't need to worry about his funeral being picketed by the Westboro folks.
Re:Thank god (Score:1, Interesting)
When you die, no one's going to give a shit. Millions did this time. Who are you to decide how MUCH they should care. Oer-the-top from the perspective of some douchebag with a slashdot account, a stupid nonsensical sig file, and a chip on his shoulder may be perfectly appropriate for someone who chose a career path in interaction design, inspired by the ease of use of a macintosh.
Don't judge others feelings dude. They're no more or less valid than yours. They're personal.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Interesting)
Now if Justin Bieber gets run over by a concrete mixer, you bet your ass you the media will get "WAY WAY WAY" out of hand.
The nice thing about the media is that it is opt in. You don't have to watch/read crap.
* sure the is a lot of buzz on tech based web sites etc, but that is hardly mainstream.
Faux outrage (Score:2, Interesting)
LA Times says "some critics" but really only link to one guy, former Slashdot editor, Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier. Another one of Stallman's critics who doesn't have the balls to actually state what really bothers him about Stallman, but sleazily uses any fake controversy as an excuse to launch a discrediting smear against RMS. If you really want to know why RMS gets attacked by some of these so-called FOSS advocates, just examine RMS's other political postings on his website. It'll become apparent.
Re:Dear Mr Stallman (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't have to have liked him, but you could have at least shown some respect rather than making the GNU (And by association, Linux, even though we hate you) community look like tools, instead of just yourself as you usually do.
Except that RMS is absolutely 100% spot on correct in his assessment. Some people (like you) just don't want to hear it. Nothing new here, really. For the record I am an ex Apple fanboy from roughly the Apple IIe days through OS8 when I finally gave up and moved to Linux on account of it being friendlier to software development.
Re:Thank god (Score:5, Interesting)
Stallman should remember that he isn't just any random character fighting for software freedom. He's the self-appointed publicity figure for open source movement ...
Agreed. To paraphrase Stallman, once Stallman is dead, I'll be sorry that he is dead, but glad that he is gone.
The gay movement had their Stallman in the form of ACT-UP -- people doing outlandish, socially unacceptable acts for publicity (such as throwing blood on people they disagreed with). Stallman fits the same mold. Once the gay movement grew up and ACT-UP faded away, the gay movement became far more accepted.
What was cause? What was effect? I don't care. ACT-UP and Stallman may have been needed at one point, but ultimately do more harm to their own cause then they realize.
Just to make sure I insult everyone equally, Operation Rescue -- the anti-abortion group -- also did more harm than help to their cause with their Planned Parenthood blockades.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:3, Interesting)
Is a walled garden better than a wide open desert? I think Stallman doesn't realize not everyone is a camel herder.
Re:Ah yes, bring on the bad moderation. (Score:2, Interesting)
Abusing one's moderation power to cover up someone's opinion on the other hand is an act of violence.
No, Gaza shooting rockets at my house all this year is an act of violence. You seem to live in a nice, peaceful bubble where the worst that happens in your life is someone censoring your slashdot comment. If censoring a slashdot comment equates to violence for you, then thank your lucky stars that you don't live downwind of Islamic fundamentalists who sacrifice their own people in order to kill infidels like me and my children.
Re:Comment by S. LeBeau Kpadenou (Score:1, Interesting)
Did RMS put computers into the hands of the public? No. That alone outshines anything RMS has done. Steve Jobs wasn't a super hero, but RMS is just some lonely crackpot that should probably be in a mental institution. RMS isn't anywhere near a genius. The guy's a raving lunatic.
There are plenty of C compilers that are nicer than GCC. In fact, GCC is pretty awful. Writing a front-end is a nightmare, and writing a backend is the definition of hell. The machine code it outputs tends to be very much godawful as well. I use LLVM / clang for all my needs. GCC isn't even installed on any of my computers. In fact, not a single piece of GNU software is, because I despise the GPL, which is actually the most restrictive open source license in existence.
I'm prepared to be modded into oblivion because the people here on Slashdot are mostly groupthink monkies. I came to this article thinking that perhaps some of the smart people here on Slashdot would chew into RMS for being such a self-important asshole, but instead everyone just agrees with him because Steve Jobs had the audacity to create easily usable products that everyone, except nerds that insist on controlling every single aspect of everything they own, wants. Get real, no one in the real world cares about that shit. They just want things that work. Apple delivers.
I'm by every definition a geek that likes to poke and prod at everything, and having spent a significant amount of time with Android, webOS, and iOS devices, there's absolutely no way I'd ever choose an Android device for a normal person. WebOS was great, but it's sadly mostly dead now. Every non-geek I know that bought an Android phone did it because they didn't want to switch to AT&T. As soon as the iPhone came to Verizon, they swapped those babies in as fast as they could. Now that it's also coming to Sprint, I'm seeing it happen all over again.
Claiming that RMS has the vision to accomplish anything that Steve Jobs did is ridiculous. He's just a crotchety old man that's stuck in his ways and for whom nothing is good enough. The crazy son of a bitch browsers web sites with an email script that strips out everything but text just to make sure he absolutely doesn't download anything that might be considered IP. Visionary? Please.
Re:Stallman and FOSS (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed. Steve Jobs used to make blue boxes to steal from the phone company. Not 'steal' in quotes, actual theft of service. Using actual long distance lines without paying for them.
A lot of people did it for fun, which is somewhat reasonable, I guess. It's one thing to hack on the phone system for fun. I can shrug at that.
But Jobs actually manufactured blue boxes and sold them to others, people less interested in 'phone hacking' and more interested in 'free long distance calls'. Well, Woz built them and Jobs packaged and sold them. That was his first 'user interface', making blue boxes usable and affordable for random non-hacker people. Probably with nice curved corners and a shuffle version that didn't allow you to pick the number to dial. ;)
I.e., he was the equivalent of a hacker selling script kiddie tools.
And, years later, Steve Jobs also sold fucking phones that people couldn't install whatever software they wanted on them. Not even something illegal, not something harmful, just people who wanted to play ScummVM games or whatever on their phone.
I don't know exactly what happened in the years between those two Steve Jobs, but I'd also be glad he was gone from Apple if I suspected he was the cause of the walled garden in iPhones. (However, I have actually no evidence this is the case, and I'm not sure why RMS thinks it is. And he was pretty much 'gone from Apple' already from what I understand.)
This was my eulogy of Steve Jobs (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:No kidding (Score:1, Interesting)