Which focuses on his sexual creepiness, and not his toe jam eating, horrific political views, conspiracy theories, and the lasting damage he's done to computer science with his aggressively anti-freedom "public license", and the promotion of emacs, which is most accurately classified as a mental disorder or an invasive fungus. If you want to edit text, use ed or vi or any nice editor, not a bad LISP interpreter with half an editor bolted on. And seriously, if you want to share your software, put it under actually-free BSD or MIT license and stop being a stallman.
Going back to 2001, there was his hostile takeover of glibc:
- glibc 2.2.4: page down to "And now for some not so nice things."
And more recently a long-standing offensive joke in glibc being removed and then "restored" by the petty tyrant:
He demonized Miguel de Icaza of the Mono project (not my favorite software, but hardly objectionable):
Miguel de Icaza “is basically a traitor to the Free Software community” This was in response to my question about the new Microsoft “Open Source” labs. He went on to say that Miguel’s involvement in the project doesn’t give much confidence as he is a Microsoft apologist. The project looks to be concerned with permitting “Open Source” programs to work on the Windows platform and thus divert valuable developer time away from free platforms such as Gnu/Linux.
Mono framework is not so much of a problem, but C# shouldn’t be used in core apps as legal problems would be hard to work around. Recommends uninstalling any apps using C#.
— http://doctormo.wordpress.com/2009/09/19/software-freedom-day-in-boston/
So now he's finally reaped some personal consequences, after decades of this shit:
- FSF's very brief statement on Stallman's resignation
- Slashdot characterizes this as "unfortunate news that famed free software advocate and computer scientist Richard Stallman has resigned from MIT."
It's not unfortunate, it's 40 years overdue. The correct epithet is "the infamous Richard Stallman", just like "the infamous Unabomber Ted Kaczynski".
I remember RMS from back when he still had short hair. He was pretty awful then, and he has kept getting worse. The last time I saw him, he threatened me with "physical violence" after dinner at a Czech restaurant. We had been discussing how arithmetic precision should work in computer languages. With FSF and GNU, when he was right, he was usually right for the wrong reasons. I can't imagine him not having collected a lot of enemies over the years.
That said, please cut some of us old EMACS users a bit of slack. We got hooked back when VI was not a good alternative, and some of us have legacy EMACS software. Whenever I am forced to use C++, less and less often these days, I crank up my creaky old EMACS based C++ class browser. It makes awful noises, but it still works on most platforms. I haven't used my antique FORTRAN code analyzer in decades though. If you have ever had a pile of FORTRAN code with arithmetic IF statements and non-standard DO syntax, this package could save your mind. I wrote it to help an airline figure out what their thirty year old flight planning software did. Every time a plane crashed, they'd kludge in a new line of code to keep it from happening again. Always use full power in a cross wind on the left runway out of Hong Kong and that sort of crap. Some of those airports aren't airports anymore and some of those aircraft types haven't flown anywhere outside of an airshow in ages. This kind of code really builds up, and let's not forget the one offs like flight test mode that seemed to assume you were interacting on an IBM 027 keypunch. I don't use EMACS all that much anymore, but I suppose if I am ever forced to use C++ or some ancient FORTRAN crawls out of its pit, I'll probably wind up using it again. Think of it as fighting abominations with an abomination.