Harry McCracken, for Technologizer:
If you think people who use Apple products are prisoners, you’re essentially accusing them of being too stupid to make their own decisions. At least Stallman explicitly calls them fools! [Eric S.] Raymond, with his pretty-window-treatment metaphor, apparently thinks Apple users are style-obsessed fetishists, too dim to make the right purchasing decisions. Which, oddly enough, is the same stance that Microsoft has been known to take.
Richard M. Stallman’s comments on Steve Jobs this past week infuriated me, and I’m grateful that the always-cogent Harry McCracken had the clarity of thought to articulate a very well-formed argument explaining why Stallman and another free software advocate, Eric Raymond, are so wrong in how they think about how people should interact with computers.
Nothing against McCracken, but calling a self-righteous ass a self-righteous ass is ten times more satisfying, than trying to find excuses for these stinkers. All his (well-chosen) points are lost on these cretins.
Mr. Stallman (in the very distant past) has created some important things. Not one of them was usable for an average user, most not even for the average geek. If people like Stallman had their way, we had a brain police that would test, if a person is worthy of operating a computer… and he would call it an “open” system. It is OK, if a technology locks 99%+ of humanity out, as long as nobody makes any money. Sure…
The thing that has angered me about Stallman since the 1980s (it really has been that long!) is how he keeps telling the world how software should be free, and that people should not be making money off it, but he lives cloistered in academia, and has never effectively had to *work* for a living. And the reason this has angered me for so long is that I have worked as a software engineer (etc.) since 1987.
Sure, he created some things a long long time ago, but since then, his ‘job’ seems to have been telling people that they should not be able to get paid for their hard work.
Who pays him? How does he live?
How does he live? On a diet of toe-jam, of course.