Richard Stallman Falls Ill At Conference 460
itwbennett writes "Stallman, 59, was speaking at the North Campus of the Polytechnic University of Cataluna when he started to feel ill and called for a doctor. It was originally reported in the Spanish press that Stallman was hypertensive, but it is not yet known what his eventual health status was, just that he left the building later under his own power." He is apparently okay and any significant confirmed updates will be posted here.
Re:Putting his money where his mouth is (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Putting his money where his mouth is (Score:0, Insightful)
If you think reprinting ideas from his own blog is insulting the man, then you must hate him and everything he stands for.
technology isn't that good for your health (Score:5, Insightful)
Shame it can be a fun and healthy career.
Re:Putting his money where his mouth is (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Putting his money where his mouth is (Score:2, Insightful)
RMS has aspergers, and so, has dificulties on empathy.
He uses the Logic all times, without understanding emotional reactions from people around.
And, unless you are a hipocryte yourself, you must acknowledge that from a pure logic point of view, he's right.
For every one of the "crimes" he sustained should be legal, there was a anciant civilization (or more), that endure more time than our punny one, that allowed it.
You would be astonished if you had, in fact, paid attention on college. The Greeks worth special mention here.
Re:Putting his money where his mouth is (Score:2, Insightful)
Stallman's view is that proprietary software is bad for the user, not that it has some amorphous badness to it that infects everyone in the world. Stallman presumably owns neither the ambulance nor the hospital, so he is not the user. If the people who do own them are using proprietary software, that's their own problem. It'll be they who will be forced to pay thousands of dollars for security updates [slashdot.org] or whatever, not Stallman.
Re:Putting his money where his mouth is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Putting his money where his mouth is (Score:5, Insightful)
There are 3 ways of doing it, all legitimate. You can subscribe and see the posts early. You can see the posts on firehose and guess which stories will make the front page. Or you can just be aware of the tech news stories of the day, and predict what will come up that way.
Write your opinion.
Then you need to wait for the story to come up. Possibly using a webpage change monitoring app with built in search. Or maybe just by lurking.
Or course you'd only go to that effort if you're either very keen to get moderated up on slashdot and get lots of replies. Or if you really care about the topic really strongly.
And Slashdot is full or both of those kinds of people. Although the specific topic they obsess about varies.
Everyone here that posts has an agenda to put forward.
Re:technology isn't that good for your health (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I do spend a lot of time on my butt-tocks, but I make up for it by doing other things outside of work. Having said that, my younger brother falls more in line with the stereotype: he's fat, can't run 20 meters without stopping, and thinks walking over to the vending machine to get some Cheetos is exercise.
In between those poles, you'll find other people involved in technology. In my office, we have all kinds. It depends on your mindset: you either want to stay active and healthy, or you don't. That goes for any segment of the populace regardless of career.
Sad that /. is nothing but trolls. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Gosh, is the Slashdot audience really that cree (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone on /. is like that. Many of us quiet readers idolize folks like RMS and you, Bruce.
-brian
Just to stir the pot... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which compiler does BSD use for everything? And who wrote that initially? Who wrote a number of utilities that went along with it? Who wrote the GPL? Sure, RMS hasn't done any cool GUI apps or really any notable apps in 20 years. He moved on to running FSF and advocating his philosophy. He built the foundation for something big. It was actually the Open Source "movement" that freeloaded on the idea with a shitload of "approved" licenses.
I do agree that he should stick to his free software philosophy and perhaps anti-DRM stance (tech freedom?) and stay out of more social and political issues.
Re:Let's have some perspective. (Score:4, Insightful)
No. But you don't cut off a hearse or piss on people's graves do you?
Sure, if he didn't build GCC, emacs or the gpl, no one would give a shit. But he did. So people care.
Show some goddamned decency.
RMS has been a hinderance (Score:2, Insightful)
RMS has spent his life fighting for your rights.
No. Richard Stallman has spent most of his adult life:
He shares a disturbing number of qualities with your average cult leader.
It was only until many other more reasonable voices and non-FSF software appeared that the open source movement gained traction. And what was his response? Continual bitterness, which has shown up in him demanding Linux be called GNU/Linux.
While revered by some geeks, he's almost completely ignored by government, academia, and industry and not taken seriously by anyone with power in any of them. He is a sociopathic egomaniac, and while I wish to hell he'd retire to a small corner of the world - I don't want it to be because of poor health, and I hope he's better soon.
Re:Sad that /. is nothing but trolls. (Score:5, Insightful)
You must be really new here.
This is par for the course. In fact, it's better than usual. Had this exact same story appeared a few years ago, there would've already been beard jokes, free as in beer jokes, GPL v3 jokes, and a whole conversation consisting of nothing but puns.
Re:Putting his money where his mouth is (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm posting this on an iPad for god's sake.
And of course the iPad is running iOS and apps build with XCode wich uses gcc as the compiler backend. No GNU, no iPad.
Re:Putting his money where his mouth is (Score:5, Insightful)
So do I. To a large part I think he's lost touch with reality and is busy tilting at windmills that nobody else can see. Yes, I use Linux on my computers because I don't see any reason to pay for an OS, pay for applications and then pay a different company for more applications to keep my computer free of malware, especially when I can get an equally good OS and applications for free. But unlike some people, I'm not a fanatic about it. I'm not going to try to push anybody else into Linux unless they're already interested in it. If asked, I'll tell them that whatever OS does what they want the way they like it is the best one for them. I can't imagine RMS doing that, and that's one of the things I don't like about him.
Having said that, I was saddened to hear that he's sick and I hope that it's nothing serious. 59 is much too young for us to lose him, because even though I don't agree with him, he keeps saying things that need to be said and bringing up ideas that need to be discussed.