The problem is that people are shooting the messenger and focus on a guy living by his words which is quite unusual.
The same happened here where most comments discuss stallman and not the actual matter of the post.
This is a nice list of sourced documentation about facebook dangers, I happen to maintain one myself for future reference and it is quite useful to have.
to actually focus on the linked article however - this isn't just an opinion but an actual reason why Facebook has lost its huge earlier momentum of use and user signups. though there's quite a big social network inertia, over time its going to be hard to justify the high-profit 'all your personal information is ours to sell and market' model.
That doesn't save time, it works directly against this by reducing it to a bunch of superficial funny bullets, it's an attack on preserving privacy, as usual. Let's talk about the article at least a little bit if we're going to talk.
Just wanting something that works is the same as having nothing to hide is the same as not understanding or caring about privacy.
He's pretty nuts. I met him when he spoke at my university a few years ago, the CS department invited him and had a reception with RMS for CS faculty and students only. At one point, a retired faculty member asked if he had any suggestions for convincing his bank to make their website Firefox-friendly since his wife didn't want to switch.
His suggestion was to lie to his wife and switch anyways...
Half the students at the speech got up and left (not kidding) when he put on a halo, proclaimed himself the Jesus Christ of Software and started auctioning off a stuffed gnu.
Add in his tirade about how evil the university IT department was for requiring authentication to access the network and you had a very pissed off administration the next day.
"Half the students at the speech got up and left (not kidding) when he put on a halo, proclaimed himself the Jesus Christ of Software and started auctioning off a stuffed gnu."
Wait, what?! I can only imagine that's like a car crash where you don't want to look, but you just can't tear yourself away from it.
It was bad. Literally no one responded to his auction, the room was dead silent. After a minute one guy offered ten bucks out of pity and that was the end of the auction.
I've seen a real nerd (the guy that got the big companies to do tcp/ip in Sweden, I'm not going to write Googleable names) do an ass of himself in a similar way.
I happen to know that he considered that "funny". I'm willing to suffer his sense of humour; he is a national treasure, imnsho. The same goes for rms, I guess.
Everyone everywhere buys stuff based on how it has been sold to them. Not the individual or company selling the thing, but more the way the story of the thing has been told. Call them "foolish buyers" if you want, but this is how the majority of people make decisions. I suspect Stallman protests it by increasing his extremism as a response to it. That causes many people to dismiss him. The end result is that it is a disservice to his causes.
Many people do lots of foolish things, but that doesn't justify doing foolish things. Making snap judgements about people based on irrelevant criteria has been a failing point of humanity since well before you and I were born; thankfully, we've come a long way in civil liberties and in making progress on abolishing slavery, women's suffrage, gay rights, etc. The problem there was clearly more widespread than here, but the symptom is the same -- humans aren't very good at being open minded.
Yes, I understand that it's a fault in humanity, that people's decision-making skills are compromised by completely irrelevant factors. I'm sure I'm just as guilty of it as anybody else.
The point, for what it's worth, wasn't to call the parent foolish, but to point out that disregarding a good idea because the messenger isn't your favorite is, plainly put, silly. As individuals, we should be mindful of the needlessly silly things that we do, and try to be better than that.
I get the feeling that you might be talking about Stallman's appearance, whereas I am talking about his behaviour. I think more people can see past appearance than can see past unsociable/rude behaviour. Pedantically insisting that people call Linux "GNU/Linux" for example. If you were running a business, you wouldn't do that to your customers, right?
add to the above quote that the guy literally sneezes and he is front-page on HN and some hundred thousand linux/OS related forums... Which means that he is the exact opposite of a nobody in the tech community and you have a good bargain reading what he says.
I don't mind Stallman, but to decry all boycotts and competition-of-personal-values is itself foolish. We should care about who gets our money and our attention.
I can see your point about vendor discretion, but that's not really the same thing. I try to avoid companies whose values do not align with my own wherever possible. In many cases, I even consider my opinions to be well founded, or even informed.
That said, I still understand them to be value judgements, and while I'm happy to discuss those values to whomever, it isn't my place to push my values onto another, and it would be silly of me to ignore the good aspects of somebody because they also possess aspects I consider to be negative.
Moreover though, it is foolish to discount good advice because you don't like the source. It is, I believe, the height of pettiness, and should be avoided at all costs by pragmatists.
I don't mean the projects. I mean the ideas he is trying to convince people of. Take for example his stance on DRM. What does success look like, or rather, what does it not look like? You might be able to argue moderate success in music (iTunes switching to DRM-free, but Spotify having DRM), yet in books the wide acceptance and love of Amazon's Kindle indicates a lost battle.
But you might also say the same about convenience. It doesn't make sense to completely ignore either of convenience or freedom in pursuit of the other. Most people are pragmatic about it. They compromise some freedom for convenience, and compromise some convenience for greater freedom.
Most reasonably informed people should agree that the [software] world is a better place because rms is in it. And not only for gcc, emacs, etc.
The rest is just a question of how many years before today he is, this time. (And yes, sometimes the world he is years before isn't our planet. But his hit statistics isn't bad.)
It is. His contributions have been immeasurable. He is a classic representation of how one's presentation doesn't equate to one's contribution. Something we all battle with at one time or another in the software industry. As rough around the edges as he can be his underlying message should be undoubtedly considered.
- He's crazy!
- But he's right!
- Right? He's just been stating the obvious all this time!
- NSA surveillance!
- Hadn't anyone heard about Echelon?
- He stands for freedom of users!
- But users don't care about those freedoms, they just want something that works!
- He's antisocial and extremely rude!
- Autism spectrum.
- But he's not diplomatic at all, we don't want him as a spokesperson for Open Source!
- It's GNU/Linux, not Linux.
- See? It's nitpicking things like GNU/Linux that make even open source enthusiasts hate him!
- Only the userland is GNU anyway.
- GPL!
- Emacs!
- GCC!
- HURD!
- Toejam.