News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Richard Stallman steps down as as head of the GNU Project... by tptacek on Saturday September 28, 2019 @06:39PM (#21103446)
I didn't say you were. I'm responding to your remark about the work Stallman did "in defiance of the world". I rather think the opposite happened, that Stallman (like several other people) made a judgement about how the world wanted to operate, and was proved (at least for the time period we're in now) correct.
Re:Richard Stallman steps down as as head of the GNU Project... by DoreenMichele on Saturday September 28, 2019 @06:45PM (#21103498)
I used that phrase because his work did not get a lot of practical support (especially at first). It was quite a hard path to take. People were hardly throwing money at him and saying "You go!" or something.

I generally agree with what little I understand of the principles behind his work. But "selling out" for money (and locking up code to facilitate that) was the trend he was defying and it's a vastly easier path than the one he chose.

Re:Richard Stallman steps down as as head of the GNU Project... by hollerith on Sunday September 29, 2019 @02:11PM (#21108624)
>his work did not get a lot of practical support

In 1990 Stallman received a MacArthur grant, which comes with $500,000. During the late 1990s, many of the founding fathers of free software were granted stock during IPOs. Here for example is documentation that Eric Raymond got stock that ended up being worth $36 million (for a couple of years until the bust in 2001): https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/12/10/ipo_makes_va_linux_...

Now Eric Raymond got that stock for accepting a position on the Dot Com's board of directors, and I can well imagine Stallman refusing all such directorships on principle, but OTOH I would be surprised if none of the founders of successful Dot Coms during that period donated generously to Stallman directly or via the FSF.

In general, almost everybody with as much fame and public reputation for moral rectitude ("prestige"?) as Stallman has for as long as Stallman has had it is worth at least a million or 2 dollars (unless they're, you know, chronically mentally ill or some such). Fame and prestige for example get you much higher speaking fees, and public speaking has long been Stallman's favorite thing to do.

Re:Richard Stallman steps down as as head of the GNU Project... by DoreenMichele on Sunday September 29, 2019 @02:23PM (#21108711)
Stallman launched the GNU Project in September 1983.

So it took him seven years to get that money. Meanwhile, he was intermittently homeless and only succeeded in registering to vote while homeless due to his fame for his work. He submitted his voter application and listed himself as a "squatter" at his work address. The registrar of voters refused to accept this and changed their mind when an article about him came out in a national publication and said the same thing.

Meanwhile, I routinely hear that software engineers at FANG companies can make upwards of a quarter million annually in salary and he lives in Boston, not known for its low cost of living.

That should be common knowledge for the HN crowd, so I'm not going to try to back that up with a source.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

Re:Richard Stallman steps down as as head of the GNU Project... by hollerith on Sunday September 29, 2019 @05:20PM (#21109685)
IIRC in Steven Levy's book Hackers, published in 1984, he is described as renting a room in the house of a dentist or retired dentist.

I always thought the "squatter" description referred to his spending much of his time at MIT and keeping things at MIT without being employed by MIT. (Stallman quit his MIT job when he started GNU out of a worry that if he kept it then MIT might claim ownership of GNU; the legal ramification of the GPL weren't understood as well back then as they are today.) I don't think his use of the word implies that he had nowhere else to live.

I searched the page you linked for "home", "squatter", "vote" and "register" without finding any text the supports anything in your comment. I hope I don't come across as antagonistic to you; I am sincerely curious whether Stallman was ever homeless (i.e., ever lacked reliable access to private indoor space with a door that could be locked).

Re:Richard Stallman steps down as as head of the GNU Project... by DoreenMichele on Sunday September 29, 2019 @05:29PM (#21109726)
It was in a biography about him. (I read it a few years ago. No, I don't recall the name, author, etc.)

A quick search of the web also gives me nothing and I don't plan to spend a lot of time trying to prove this. Perhaps this will suffice as a source to satisfy your curiosity:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20991909

Re:Richard Stallman steps down as as head of the GNU Project... by hollerith on Sunday September 29, 2019 @08:50PM (#21110811)
That helps me. Thanks.

ADDED. "Until around 1998, my office at MIT was also my residence. I was even registered to vote from there. Nowadays I have a separate residence in Cambridge not far from MIT." https://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html

Re:Richard Stallman steps down as as head of the GNU Project... by tptacek on Saturday September 28, 2019 @06:50PM (#21103545)
Again, and not to perpetuate an unproductive argument, but the opposite is probably true; it appears in a lot of cases to be easier to make money not locking up your code, which is why open source software dominates so many markets today, and is integral to virtually every commercial product.
Re:Richard Stallman steps down as as head of the GNU Project... by DoreenMichele on Saturday September 28, 2019 @06:58PM (#21103599)
I'm not a software insider, but that's not my understanding of how that works. Free software seems to get used quite a lot to make money, but people actually working on free software seem to mostly not make (enough) money on it. It's a passion project and then it gets incorporated into things where parts are somehow locked up as a means to facilitate making money.

Not trying to argue with you. I just honestly don't understand it to work exactly like that, but some of your phrasing seems ambiguous and I'm wondering if I even understood you.

Re:Richard Stallman steps down as as head of the GNU Project... by maxerickson on Saturday September 28, 2019 @07:00PM (#21103610)
There's lots of huge companies doing Free Software.

IBM bought Redhat at a valuation of $34 billion.