A PhD doesn't mean that you worked hard. It means that you have worked on research in a certain field, judged by the standards of that field. Believe me, those "standards" can be arbitrary, and they often involve a lot of red tape, politics, and insanity. But they exist, whether we like it or not.

I think that Stallman could easily get a PhD in any of several disciplines, if he wanted to. One or more universities could (and should) have offered this option to him.

But he has decided not to finish, and no university has decided to give him a PhD. Rather, they gave him an honorary PhD. There is a difference, and he should have the decency to recognize it as such.

Life is about choices, including where you choose to put your time and money. Stallman has decided to put his time and money into free software. That's his choice, and it's a good one overall. But that doesn't automatically mean that he deserves to be praised as a PhD, or given the title "Doctor."

Stallman deserves a real doctorate no doubt about that. He shouldn't be seen as the same as someone who happened to donate enough or be famous enough, he's done so much more. He shouldn't pretend he has an honour he hasn't earned either, that's just sad.

This gets back to the OP's original point, the need for a differentiation between PhDs between "My accomplishment is name recognition" and "I have done the work, I just didn't fill out out an application form first".

I'm guessing that if Stallman were to approach most universities, and say that he wants to turn his life's work into a PhD dissertation, they would welcome him with open arms. Within months, at most, he would have the PhD.

He has decided not to do this. Thus, he shouldn't claim the title.

I don't think Stallman would submit his work for a PhD, mainly because one's PhD work becomes the property of the university. It's against everything he stands for.

That's the default, but usually can be negotiated with the university.

For specific examples, here's MIT's policy, from http://libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=176367&p=1159444#13351783 :

> Who holds ownership of the copyright to my thesis?

> In most cases the Institute will hold ownership of the copyright to a thesis. In general, students may retain ownership of thesis copyrights when the only form of support is from (1) teaching assistantships (the duties of which do not include research activities) and (2) NSF and NIH traineeships and fellowships (although the trainee or fellow may be required to grant certain publishing rights to NSF or NIH). See the current Specifications for Thesis Preparation for more details.

> Students may request a waiver of the Institute’s copyrights by written application to the Institute’s Technology Licensing Office (NE25-230).

Here's information about the copyright for a Harvard PhD, from https://www.physics.harvard.edu/uploads/files/grads/forms/um... :

> You may choose either open access or traditional publishing. If you choose Open Access Publishing, the published version of your dissertation or thesis will always be available for free download to anyone who has access to the Internet. The Traditional Publishing option works on a standard copy-sales and royalty-payments model. We sell copies of your work (in any format) and pay royalties as described in the Publishing Agreement. Either option gets your graduate research out where other scholars can find and use it through the ProQuest® Dissertations and Theses (PQDT) database, subscribed to by more than 3000 libraries worldwide.

Or to pick a non-Boston-area school, here are open access PhD these from Florida State - http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/etd/ .

Stallman has an honorary degree from the University of Glasgow. Pulling up the first PhD thesis from http://theses.gla.ac.uk/cgi/latest I see "Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author." The same is true from the couple of other theses I looked at.

He also has an honorary degree from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology. I pulled up three PhD thesis from http://www.kth.se/en/ict/forskning/ickretsar/publikationer/r... . Two of them had a copyright statement by the PhD candidate, one had no explicit statement.

So it's not the case that thesis copyright transfer is a major issue preventing Stallman from getting a PhD.

So what you're saying is that Stallman doesn't like the way in which universities work -- so he gets to make his own rules, and claim that he's equivalent to someone who did play by the rules?

I defended my dissertation, and then spent another six weeks editing and revising it in order to be accepted by my advisor and committee. If I hadn't spent those six weeks editing, and declared that their rules were unfair, and stopped right there, then it would be dishonest to say that I had finished my PhD. (And I should note that six weeks of editing is very little compared to what I've heard other people do.)

If you say that you have a PhD, you're saying that you followed the rules at an institution. Stallman is an impressive person by any measure, but he hasn't followed those rules, and is thus being disingenuous to use the title.

The second paragraph of the Wikipeda[1] article on honorary degrees covers this:

With regard to the use of this honorific, the policies of institutions of higher education generally ask that recipients "refrain from adopting the misleading title" and that a recipient of an honorary doctorate's use of the title "Dr" before their name should be restricted to engagement with the institution of higher education in question and not within the broader community.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_degree

"more about elbow-grease than intellect, but Stallman has that in spades"

Technically a lot of it is sebum.