You see, that's the problem. His mission was to promote free software, instead of the mission the university hired him for: sending the graduates off on their next journey.
You don't hire a missionary with a vision to pat yourself or your audience on the back.
That's like expecting Sylvester Stallone to do higher mathematics or Mother Theresa to do an arms deal for you.
Some people are what they are and their environment/audience will have to accept them as they are.
The problem lies squarely with the person that hired him, the abstract of the speeches listed should have adequately explained what they were going to get. That's exactly what that rider exists for in the first place, to avoid misunderstandings like that.
I highly doubt if RMS could even tailor his speech to the occasion, he must know it by heart by now except for the Q&A part.
What I found interesting on reading the 'rider' is that he still refers to the GNU operating system as though it is in daily use. I've yet to see a HURD based system do anything useful in production but half the world wide web seems to run on Linux these days. Of course linux is 'merely a kernel'.
But if you write free software the you also give away the right to name that software, after all, a fork is under no obligation to be named after the parent. So RMS holding on to insisting to call Linux GNU/Linux looks to be against the self-imposed freedoms.
Just to offer a counter perspective, I'm sure that RMS honestly believes that the most important thing for your future is the use and advocacy of free software, and that being the case, there would be little point discussing anything else, no? Software increasingly pervades everything we depend on in life. The ownership and control of our futures rests to a large extent on who owns and controls the software we are using. The recent trend has been toward closed platforms behind opaque service interfaces, which is a problem of increasing difficulty for the free software movement.
joshaidan|14 years ago
0x12|14 years ago
That's like expecting Sylvester Stallone to do higher mathematics or Mother Theresa to do an arms deal for you.
Some people are what they are and their environment/audience will have to accept them as they are.
The problem lies squarely with the person that hired him, the abstract of the speeches listed should have adequately explained what they were going to get. That's exactly what that rider exists for in the first place, to avoid misunderstandings like that.
I highly doubt if RMS could even tailor his speech to the occasion, he must know it by heart by now except for the Q&A part.
What I found interesting on reading the 'rider' is that he still refers to the GNU operating system as though it is in daily use. I've yet to see a HURD based system do anything useful in production but half the world wide web seems to run on Linux these days. Of course linux is 'merely a kernel'.
But if you write free software the you also give away the right to name that software, after all, a fork is under no obligation to be named after the parent. So RMS holding on to insisting to call Linux GNU/Linux looks to be against the self-imposed freedoms.
flatline|14 years ago
That, and he does tend to be brusk.
gnubardt|14 years ago