On Wednesday 06 October 2021 17:20:43 you wrote: > On Wed, 6 Oct 2021, William Morder wrote: > > On Wednesday 06 October 2021 16:35:20 you wrote: > >>> RMS gets a bad rap these days, but he was right about one basic idea: > >>> that our data ought never be collected in the first place. Once it is > >>> collected, with or without our permission, whether it is legal or > >>> illegal, then *somebody* out there will want it, and will have the > >>> means to get it. > >> > >> Who is RMS? > > > > Oh, sorry for the shorthand. > > > > Richard Stallman, one of main persons behind GNU/Linux. (Or, he would > > probably say, the *only* one, the sole creator ... ) You can discover > > more for yourself, as there are a lot of pages out there either written > > by him or about him. The FOSS or Open Source movement is rather a > > watered-down version of his original idea. > > Oh, I know him. I went to a presentation he gave at the ETH Zürich a long > time ago. At the end of his presentation he put on a gown and introduced > us to the "Church of Emacs"! He was certainly an inspiration. Sorry to > hear he gave himself a bad rap. > > Gianluca > > > He annoying at best, a jerk or asshole most of the time, and nowadays has > > got himself a bad reputation, and some of it is deserved. He says a lot > > of things that are, um, politically incorrect or worse. But he was right > > about this one idea, which is that we must stop these problems at their > > root. > > > > Bill Yes, it is too bad. My sense of him is that he is one of those stuck-back-in-the-1960s hippies who never moved on. I mean, he was still living in student residence dormitories (I believe it was) at his university until a couple years ago (aged in his mid-60s, but still living like a university student). And, like many a crusty old hippie I know from the generation before myself, he doesn't recognize that what sounded cool and hep back in the 1960s sounds, to a younger generation, inappropriate or offensive. People don't talk like that any more, but he is tone-deaf. He is one of that original pantheon of MIT geeks and hackers (in the "pure" sense of the word), and created emacs (I think it was), and other stuff that is fundamental to our present technology. So I give him due respect, but I can also see how he upsets some people, because he irked me, too. Still, on this basic idea, he is right, and it's getting harder to evade that point. Users can own their data only if they own their machines, and if the software is free/libre; to protect our communications and data, and to preserve our privacy, we must use encryption. Otherwise, we will slip gradually into having no privacy at all, then attempts to preserve our privacy are criminalized. It really comes down to a choice between one or the other. Then he fell into trouble with the "cancel culture" and Me-Too movement, etc., because he said some things that were objectionable. In any case, if he had thought twice about his words, he might have saved himself much pain and suffering, as his indiscretions got him removed from some positions (though now semi-rehabilitated and reinstated?), and also he lost his student housing arrangements, and now is living who knows where; although according to his home page he is now giving talks in Europe. Bill ____________________________________________________ tde-users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Web mail archive available at https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
