Comment on Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever

• interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Richard Stallman fits into this like a ghost no one wants to admit is still haunting the room. He’s the ideological father of the free software movement, the one who laid the philosophical foundation Torvalds built Linux on, even if Linus never invited him to the party. Stallman didn’t want better software; he wanted freedom, moral clarity, and a digital commons free from the grasp of corporate overlords. While Torvalds was writing C, Stallman was writing manifestos, and now, with Gates and Torvalds grinning like co-conspirators at Redmond, Stallman is the angry prophet shouting from the parking lot of a surveillance palace, still clutching his GNU banner and a half-eaten sandwich.

  But the tech world, especially the sanitized, investor-friendly version of it, has no time for prophets anymore. Stallman is inconvenient: brilliant, uncompromising, abrasive, and stubbornly allergic to PR. So while Linus gets photo ops and Gates gets legacy-polishing TED talks, Stallman gets quietly airbrushed out of the narrative like toe-cheese in the Matrix. Yet in many ways, he’s the conscience neither of them can fully erase. He’s not in the room, but the room still trembles when someone whispers “GPL.”

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  • Ironfist79@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Stallman was right. Too bad nobody listens.

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  • GeneralVincent@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Richard ‘I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it’ Stallman?

    That Richard Stallman?

    (I know he has since changed his views, the ‘allergic to PR’ part just seemed to be a bit of an understatement. Not trying to start an argument, just thought that was funny)

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    • sturmblast@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Stallman is certainly crazy I think… and creepy.

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    • mad_lentil@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Randomly reminds me of some of the freakier social scifi to come out of Asimov’s typewriter. I remember one Robot story where the audience insert protagonist goes to an outer world colony where the incest taboo is not only missing, but it’s considered a faux pas to avoid sex with your family. One of the characters is in deep consternation because he doesn’t want to have sex with his daughter. Anyway, the protagonist and audience are naturally disgusted, but clearly it stuck in my head.

      Academically… I don’t know. Because of my upbringing, I just can’t see it is as anything other than a severe moral crime. But I guess I could imagine a very very different world from our own where it wouldn’t be the weirdest fucking thing imaginable to even talk about it.

      But that’s me bending over backwards to get inside the head of someone I think I like, like our buddy Stallman here.

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      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Thinking freely and imagining freely in our world is considered harmful.

        The guy you’re answering is literally blaming Stallman for opinions in the domain of philosophy expressed in words.

        There are so many fucking worse things happening very close to them every day by people far less intelligent than Stallman, yet that’s fine. But if a guy who created the FOSS movement says something gross, then they and everything they stand for should apparently be shunned.

        It’s an excuse.

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    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      When have you stopped beating your wife ?

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      • GeneralVincent@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        ???

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  • mad_lentil@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Do you have like a blog or something? Good bit of writing, this.

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    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I am flattered, however no, I just shitpost here on lemmy and have no other social media presence. Also I use AI tools to help me write like this. I like to twist context into funny things like this but it’s more of an experiment than anything serious.

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      • mad_lentil@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Well it’s very evocative, you should be proud.

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