Colin Watson wrote: > On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 07:00:13AM -0700, Paul Johnson wrote: > > What do folks have against RMS? I like his goal of a free world, and > > respect the fact he's got the balls to act on it. > > He does have a tendency to rub people up the wrong way from time to > time. I've only met him once, at a conference: at first, he gave a very > powerful speech about the history of copyright and the importance of > freedom from its abuse, and won over a substantial group of people from > quite a range of academic disciplines. Unfortunately, he then came in > part-way through a talk from a patent lawyer who was actually on his > side but was in the process of satirizing the whole business of software > patents, and got completely the wrong end of the stick (loudly). That > managed to put off quite a lot of people who'd been nodding vehemently > during his earlier talk. I found the whole affair to be an interesting > one-day microcosm of the politics of free software. I met RMS once at a Thanksgiving or Christmas party in Berkeley, California back about 1993. Most of the time he was civil and his opinions were well thought out. Then somehow he and I got into a debate about gun control and he went completely off the rails. He ended up embarrassing himself (whether he knew it or not) by denying the existence of Handgun Control Inc. (which at that time was the premier pro-gun-control activist group in the USA), and then bailed out of the conversation by saying that since he didn't know me, I therefore had no credibility with him. (Incidentally, in case anyone is curious, he was, at that time, in favor of gun control.) Despite this, I have great respect for his work in the Free Software arena, and I strongly believe in Free Software as an economically and morally superior alternative to proprietary software. I originally chose Debian over other Linux distributions largely because of this. Craig
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