I’ve tried using my incredible (british) brain using Google to see if these open source titans ever engaged in a battle of “friendly conversation” with one another.

I was always interested what Stallman thought of the angry but smart finnish man who gave us the robust penguin kernel that breathes life into older machines and powers supercomputers for the weather.

The same with Torvalds thoughts on Stallmans GNU involvement and him as a person.

This is because you sometimes had different organisations in the FOSS and OSS community that take on different meanings so I wanted a better idea if these chaps ever spoke in an interview together.

TLDR : Does finnish man like bearded GNU jesus man and the same vice versa

  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    6 months ago

    Thing is, do we believe his sudden change of heart? It only happened once his job was on the line. He U-turned on his views that sex with children is fine just 2 days before he was forced out of his role.

    To me, that reads as a last-ditch attempt to save his job, as opposed to a genuine sudden change in worldview for an opinion he held and championed for decades.

    You know, like when a questionable politician has racist twitter posts from 5 years ago brought up in an election campaign and they’re like *“Whaaaat? No no no I don’t believe that anymore. I’m a changed man! Vote for me pls.”

    But maybe he really did change his mind 2 days before he was forced out of the FSF/MIT, and I’m just being pessimistic.

    • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      6 months ago

      I think that it was a few months or so before the resignation, but I can’t find his post about it to really give the exact date.

      • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        Nope. 2 days.

        Announcement that having sex with children is bad, actually: 14th September 2019

        Resignation: 16th September 2019

        E: not really sure why you’d downvote a factual statement. Go look at his blog (stallman.org) for those dates.

        Please stop defending this. Raping children is a bad thing. He’s not a deity figure to be worshipped. He is human and he is fallible. Having excellent ideas when it comes to software does not mean he has excellent ideas in every aspect of his life. You don’t need to defend him on this.