A small address of respect toward Richard Stallman

I find Richard Stallman charming and endearing. He is the eminent founder of the free software movement, where free software is what some people refer to as open source, to Stallman's dislike, and is to be contrasted to mere freeware. The term libre software is sometimes used to drive the point home. A combined term is free/open source software (FOSS).

His having started the GNU project was key. It was then so much easier for Linus Torvalds of the Linux fame to add kernel, and by combining it with GNU tools (and gcc), have a complete, if minimal, system. Even if Torvalds dislikes Stallman, he would have to admit to have benefited from Stallman's GNU GPL, the quintessential copyleft license. Wikipedia started with Stallman's GNU GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License), I think, before it switched to CC-BY-SA (Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike). From what I recall, Stallman cooperated with them by making changes to GFDL to make the switch easy or even possible.

I was appalled when I saw Stallman unfairly attacked in 2019. I think he would even have had a case to sue for libel: untrue statements were made that harmed his reputation. I am not a lawyer, let alone a lawyer of American law (I am a Czech located in Czechia). The mindless quotation of the untrue statements by various media demonstrates what kind of bad/stupid people too many journalists are (it is quite possible that the stupidity is faux). There are also honorable journalists, e.g. Robert Whitaker.

All people who use their Android phones indirectly owe at least a little to Stallman; Android uses the Linux kernel. Linux, using Stallman's GNU GPL license and combined with GNU tools, is sitting on Google servers and elsewhere, doing the work not directly visible to the end users. (There are now some attempts to replace the GNU tools with Rust-based ones. I saw a report of a bug thereby introduced, but I cannot find neutral media reporting on it.)

Unlike e.g. Elon Musk, Stallman did not play the make-copies-of-the-genes game, the implied purpose/quasi-purpose of a biological body. The idea that he is some kind of woman-molester seems bizarre, if not impossible. Testimonies of women put that idea in doubt[1]. Instead, he contributed efforts from which many of us benefit, at relatively modest compensation. In return, he got notoriety, not always positive one (consider e.g. the Wired's title "Richard Stallman and the Fall of the Clueless Nerd"). He may have had a fairly leisure life, travel around the world, etc. He has not earned the huge money earned e.g. by Microsoft's Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Google, Apple and Facebook executives, etc.

Some people seem to find Stallman difficult to work with, e.g. in relation to GCC (GNU compiler suite) and Emacs (extensible text editor using then-AI language Lisp for scripting), both having been forked as part of their history, where the forks seemed to have to do with Stallman. At the end of the day, it does not really matter all that much. If the only thing that Stallman did was create GNU GPL and GNU Manifesto, he would be a hero or would be properly credited as one. He did much more.

(I may have first taken note of Stallman when I downloaded Geek Gadgets for the Amiga, a port of GNU tools. It could have been in 1997 or 1998. From what I recall, they would not run on the plain Amiga 1200, which I originally had; a turbo card was required. They could have been one of the reasons for me having bought a turbo card.)

Further reading:

• Richard Stallman, wikipedia.org
• Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams, 2nd edition changes by Richard Stallman, fedorapeople.org
• Free Software, Free Society by Richard Stallman, gnu.org (essays)
• stallmansupport.org