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his "rantings" ? | 188 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
his "rantings" ?
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 06:05 PM EDT
I've been watching Stallman do his thing for almost 20 years now. For all of
that time, I've been watching lots of people (many of them hired astroturfers
for Microsoft, many of them just clueless idiots) accuse him of being a fanatic,
ranting dirty-smelly-hippie.

You know what? Stallman is RIGHT. He has ALWAYS been right. Occasionally his
fervor is a little too strong and rubs people the wrong way, but every single
thing he has warned us about, has either come true, or threatened to come true,
or been narrowly avoided due to the efforts of the FLOSS communities to build
alternatives.

It always amuses me (or depresses me, depending on my mood) to see people cast
stones at Stallman when all he does is present the truth of things to them in
language that makes them uncomfortable. They'd rather believe that proprietary
companies like Microsoft are there to help them, that Canonical has not gone to
the dark side and completely sold out its users to advertisers (the very spawn
of Evil if ever there were such a thing). They'd rather have binary blob video
drivers from ATI and NVidia and just ignore the consequent loss of their own
freedoms that results from that.

Some people don't mind living in chains, but they apparently don't like to be
_reminded_ that they are living in chains. They want to continue to use
convenient proprietary software even when it takes away their freedom, but they
don't want to _notice_ that process happening, so they turn their resentment
against Stallman when he points out to them what they have lost.

Honestly, it bothers me. I use Microsoft Windows, both at home and at work. I
use lots of non-free software. I accept the loss of my own freedom that results
from that, and I'm fine with it for now at least. But it bothers me to see
people cast stones at Stallman when he points out how shortsighted their
behaviour is.

Stallman has ALWAYS seen more clearly on these issues, for decades, than 99% of
the people who decry his opinions and try to ignore or marginalize his message
(or the messenger). Stallman has only your best interests (and EVERYONE's best
interests) at heart. No proprietary software vendor can honestly say the same.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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