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gsivil | 13 years ago

I am not so sure that rms cannot afford a laptop. He is in need of more free models to choose from than a few bucks

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ginko|13 years ago

According to http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com RMS would like to have a real laptop with an open BIOS.

Shouldn't a laptop like the Thinkpad X60 or T60 with Coreboot installed fulfill that requirement? They are supported according to the coreboot site.

Are there any other potential problems I'm not thinking of? Possibly a firmware issue with the Intel chipset?

TazeTSchnitzel|13 years ago

Well, there's probably graphics (?) or something else with proprietary firmware on it...

makmanalp|13 years ago

Okay, maybe we should wait until we're certain. I'd always assumed that life as a travelling philantropist doesn't exactly lead to a decent sum of money. I thought it'd be cool unanticipated thank-you coming at a shitty time for him though.

swa14|13 years ago

rms received the MacArthur Genius grant at some point, which comes with a decent sum of money.

Now before some might get the wrong idea (that it would be easy to be an rms if financial worries were taken care of), rms had a job teaching before he got the award and was already doing these speeches.

As an aside, in my opinion it makes his dedication even more admirable. It would be easy for him to decide that he's done enough for Free Software, gets himself a nice seaside property to retire on and tend to his RSI, instead of speaking around the world, getting mocked and willfully misrepresented in the press, and apparently get his stuff stolen. But he doesn't, because his work is important. He's quite the character, warts and all, but he does have character.

vladd|13 years ago

It's not a matter of cash affordability, rather cash accessibility (considering his cards and IDs got stolen).