atai:I would continue to urge you to think
outside of the world of free software for a moment. I am
not one of those who claims that RMS is an egotist - I think
he is a very intelligent person, and I think he has done a
lot of good for free software. He has also been very
steadfast in his beliefs, which I would argue is why he has
both accomplished so much and caused people to see him as an
egotist. I also have written (I think here) on why I would
claim that RMS' and the FSF's ideals are basically direct
applications of the ideals of Western Liberalism, as
described by John Locke and "refined" by Jefferson. He's
pretty far from Marx, if we go back to the source materials
and compare them. However, I don't think that he's much of
a philosopher, nor does he try to be. ESR tries to assert
that he is some sort of guru of the free software
community's zeitgeist and tries to use philosophy to back
himself up, but I don't think he does a good job of it. RMS
doesn't try to do this - he just asserts a set of axioms for
the conditions of freedom for software. This is pretty far
from an ethical framework, if we want to get into real
philosophy. You might recall that a couple years ago
Advogato had a long discussion on trying to establish an
ethical framework to justify free software. It is no easy
task. So again, claiming (or even restating Lessig's claim)
that RMS may be the philosopher of our age because he has
more of a belief system than Linus Torvalds or Eric Raymond
is pretty weak - none of these individuals would be near
consideration for such a title. Expose yourself to some
"real" philosophy, and I think that you will quickly
understand what I am trying to say. Again, I think that RMS
is a really important part of the free software community,
and I have no trouble with GNU, and I gpl everything that I
write because I agree with the values of the gpl. RMS is
obviously extremely intelligent, otherwise he wouldn't have
received a MacArthur fellowship. But he is far more of a
mathematician than a philosopher, let alone the greatest
philosopher of our age. Feel free to read some of the books
by the authors that I mentioned in my previous diary
entry....I can also reccomend a number of others. In case
you haven't noticed, I take the field philosophy pretty
seriously. ;-) As much as I like free software, the world
beyond it is a whole lot more significant in our lives.