Re:Richard Stallman on the Failure of One Laptop Per Child &...
by allenbrunson on Monday November 03, 2008 @10:18PM
(#352920)
it's the outliers who wind up in the news, almost by definition.
and it's not just his beliefs that make rms admirable. he started the gcc project, for example. i think you could make a pretty good case that gcc is the most important software project of all time.
Re:Richard Stallman on the Failure of One Laptop Per Child &...
by wheels on Monday November 03, 2008 @10:29PM
(#352936)
RMS has written an enormous amount of code. Even if you ignore RMS the ideologue, RMS the hacker certainly gets a spot in the geek hall of fame for the mountain of code that he's written in a pretty wide variety of areas. Every single project that I've worked on in the last decade has in one way or another depended on tools that he did the first versions of.
Protest marches, animal testing lab attacks, anti-abortion marches, religious pilgrimages, cultish mass suicide so aliens can save you, contributing hours of work to open source software because you believe in it, charity/volunteer workers, the extra religious (nuns, monks, priests, rabbis, imams, and similar in every religion), people who started businesses because they believe in a product or lifestyle, people who blog to evangelise a lifestyle or dietary choice, bodybuilders and exercise fanatics, people who travel around the world to see one particular sports team play, people who travel to see The Sound of Music over and over again because they believe it's the best entertainment...