Easy, Mr. Stallman!

Before I begin, let me explain - I love open source software. I have contributed to open source software, I have absolutely no Windows software anywhere on my laptop at home or on my workstation, and I don't remember the last time I worked with software that I didn't have access to the sources of (or maybe I do, but that's besides the point).

Richard Stallman showed up at CERN today. The talk was on the Ethics and Practice of Free Software. Mr. Stallman has often publicly lamented the apparent lack of knowledge that Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel alone do not comprise a Linux distribution, and justifiably so. There's no denying that the Kernel alone wouldn't be much fun in the absence of gcc, binutils, emacs (I worship vi vi vi, but I'm religiously tolerant), and countless other tools that we don't even notice when we use a GNU/Linux distribution. Credit be given where due, Richard Stallman is a highly respected man in these circles - not only for his technical contributions, but for spearheading the cause of open source software, and ensuring that thousands of people all over the world can use open source software without fear of being sued. With this background, I went to listen to _the_ man.

He's not a particularly charismatic speaker. The hippie-nerd look does him a world of good, but not nearly enough. Several times, justifications in his talk were given by statements such as "it is inherently evil", or "it is bad", or "it is your fundamental right". He said in today's talk, and I quote, "Never buy a DRM-enabled media that you are incapable of cracking yourself." Of course, he hates everything from gaming consoles to TiVo, and thinks we should not buy any of those things.

The worst line of his talk was somewhere around the 40-minute mark. "Why should you not use Windows?" Of course, he said the standard stuff, about it being "inherently evil", spying on you, and sending all searches to Microsoft.com (apparently, the fact that google.com does this as well is not a problem). Here comes the best one - "A couple of years ago, in India, two people from the Al Qaeda were working at Microsoft, and they were caught attempting to insert trojans and viruses into Windows. Fortunately, they were apprehended. Who knows how many such attempts go unnoticed?"

Mr. Stallman, this is a piece of tabloid news. No respectable paper ever carried it in the form that you mentioned it. The company has denied it (well, that's obvious, I take it back). And the word was that the Al Qaeda claimed to have programmers working for them, not that anyone was apprehended. And to think, you quoted this specimen of cheap sensationalism as a reference in your talk, which you delivered at a prestigous location where many Nobel Laureates have addressed the same audience of distinguished physicists as you had the opportunity to. While I respect you and your contributions to open software, statements like these will only hurt your credibility.

Oh, and I'm sorry I walked out at that point.