You are confused

[Tsuroerusu]

''Live cheaply,'' he said, offering some free advice. ''Don't buy a house, a car or have children. The problem is they're expensive and you have to spend all your time making money to pay for them.''

That has to be one of most idiotic statements I've ever heard. Maybe it was better I wasn't at the talk because I think I would of burst out laughing.

Well, Richard's point is that pretty much every human being is greedy, we want more and more and more, and aren't happy with what we got. There's millions of people dying from starvation, you and I can get a stomachache from eating too much.

I agree that it is a little weird when it comes to like not having a child, but I think his point is valid, we really are very fortunate, despite how shitty our computers are!

Oh a whole different note Pat, I'm sure that you and another guy who shall remain semi-nameless (Right, chuck? ), took offense in Richard saying you were confused. Mind you, I think Richard could have put it a bit nicer, during that interview with him back in November, but I don't get why you guys don't let it go already.

We can't joke about things? To be honest I was not offended. I was simply repeating a listener's question regarding compatibility between GPLv2 & GPLv3 code. Was that listener(who shall remain semi-nameless) offended?

Of course you can joke about it, it just wasn't clear to me whether you guys were offended, and I was more referring to the semi-civil war Linc's conversation with RMS turned into

I have been told that I was a mongol child, abnormal (Referring to my skin and hair color) or actual dirt because I didn't do XY and Z....

That's awful that someone would say that to you. ASSHOLES ARE EVERYWHERE. You think humanity would get past racism by now.

, Like I often joke, when we have spaceships fast enough to get to a planet outside our solar system within 5 years, the first thing we as a civilization is gonna do is go find a planet with a similar civilization, kill all the inhabitants and take over the planet.
If you want this kind of thing demonstrated in a cartoon, watch Dragon Ball Z

Also, if you wanted to have a more insightful discussion with Richard with regards to "proprietary hardware" all you had to do was mention a single four letter word, that has been around since the early 1980'. The word is "BIOS". Richard Stallman's laptop I think is still an old ThinkPad, it uses a proprietary BIOS, because IBM don't tell people how to get LinuxBIOS working on ThinkPads.

That might me a good discussion topic if he ever comes back on. I would be willing to have him on again but I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. If he does come back on the show I will not hesitate in calling bullshit at his idiotic statements.

"Wow wow woooow, why all the hostility!"

If you don't recognize this statement, watch this video: http://media.libsyn.com/media/askaninja/AANQ16.mov
(Yeah I know, this video is in QuickTime format, but you can easily watch it with no proprietary software at all).

I just consider that he has done things like protest ATI at media gatherings because they only give linux users a blob instead of a FOSS driver. It just seems like he will never understand that being a dickhead to a company that is probably barely willing to do what it's already doing for linux is not the best way to get them on his side. We need someone like Steve Jobs on our side - someone who is pushy but charismatic, and can speak the language. We do *not* need to demonstrate to companies that cooperating with linux in any way but complete submission is a recipe for an idealistic (and bizarrely at that) weird beard showing up at your publicity gigs with picket signs in hand.At this point, I claim that people like RMS are doing harm to FOSS as a whole.

Well, this is why there's two primary "camps" in this whole thing we do. There's the free software guys, and the open source guys.

If you consider the fact that ATi violates the GPL by distributing binaries of their driver, I don't see a reason why what RMS is doing is so ridiculous. And honestly RMS really doesn't care how many people use GNU/Linux or free software in general, at least that's my understanding, what he cares about is that the people that want software freedom can have it. That was his idea from day one, he didn't go to AT&T and yelled at them for not licensing UNIX as free software, he sat down and said "I'm gonna write a system like UNIX, and as the author encourage everyone to share it!".
So if you used the "people like RMS are doing harm to FOSS as a whole" kind of argument when talking to RMS, he would just shake his head, because he doesn't really care all that much about how many people use free software, especially if it involves accepting proprietary, or non-free, software, such as proprietary drivers.

Telling companies that a Linux kernel driver MUST be GPLed is not telling them to go into "submission", it's just telling them that they must abide by the license (The GPL). Like Greg K-H said on the show "If you're gonna use my code, abide by the license!". I honestly don't see what's wrong about that.
Sure you can give a rats ass about whether a driver is proprietary or not, but that doesn't change the fact that proprietary drivers violate the GPL, and are thereby illegal (I have no idea why the kernel developers don't enforce this, the FSF can't do it because they don't the copyrights for the Linux kernel), until the kernel developers relicense Linux kernel under the LGPL or a BSD license, and at that point I think it's a million times more likely that they'll go to GPLv3.

I agree that RMS doesn't present a great "image" for Linux. He's unkempt, eccentric, and difficult to relate to. Obviously most of us respect him for many of his ideas and his devotion to users' freedom, but it would probably be more helpful if he presented it as "This is how computing ought to be, this is the ideal, and it works better than anything else out there" as opposed to "Proprietary software is immoral."

"and it works better than anything else out there"

See you will never get RMS to add that, because that's a practical convenience, and RMS couldn't care less about that. The OpenBSD developers take a similar stance in another area, if there's a BSD-licensed replacement of a GPL component that may have some bugs or misses some features, they'll use it in a heartbeat, why? Because they just fix it and then problem solved!
OpenSSH is a pretty good example of this, they're also doing OpenCVS.

Also, remember RMS' background, he came from an environment where, at least in the beginning, proprietary software really was immoral!! Even after almost 30 years he still maintains this opinion, so he just states it. People sometimes argue that what the FSF does is "new", and that "open source is new", but it's actually the idea of proprietary software that is the real new thing, do I have to mention that Microsoft were one of the pioneers of it?

When you say "it would probably be more helpful", I assume you mean like getting more hardware support, and frankly I think you mean even if it was not free software driver support. Guess what, RMS DOESN'T CARE, in fact, he's directly against that!!

Chew on this thought for a moment. Anyone that violates the GPL actually has their license terminated. What does this mean? It means that you're not allowed to use the software in any way at all! So they have to ask the authors of the software if they can use it under the GPL again.
It's something that hardly anyone notices, a good example is Linksys, they were violating the GPL by not releasing source code until they were forced to. I doubt they asked for "reactivation" of a GPL licensing of the Linux kernel and like busybox and stuff.
So in theory ANY GNU/Linux distribution that includes a binary kernel module object file of say the Madwifi Atheros wireless driver or NVIDIA's and ATi's graphics drivers, is not allowed to distribute the Linux kernel.
Since nobody is enforcing this against say Ubuntu, they can just "get away with it", but if even one kernel developer enforces it, they have to either stop distributing the Linux kernel completely, or remove the code owned by that kernel developer, which would be a problem if his code is like the entire networking stack or something in that range.

This is not a theory, this is fact, believe me I've read the GPL about five times.

I understand his view on proprietary software, though his bluntness and lact of tact can result in conversations that are more combative than constructive.

Well, at least he's not like Theo de Raadt when commenting on signing NDAs in a very organized fashion: "This is a fucking farce!"
RMS is not like that all the time, he just states his opinion, without a single swear-word, and then that's the end of it.

(Note that I agree with what Theo says about signing NDAs, although the tone I think could be nicer, although I can see him being upset when writing that on the mailinglists, I have been guilty of that myself, as Allix will attest to! )