[ILUG-BOM] RMS in Mumbai

[Baishampayan Ghose]

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On 08/14/2006 09:58 PM, Mrugesh Karnik cobbled together some glyphs to say:

Note - I am not waging a flame war here. I am only trying to clear some
confusions.

>> Ask yourself this small question ---
>> ``What is the minimum amount of knowledge you can expect from a
>> member of a GNU/Linux Users' Group mailing list?''
> Lack of knowledge is not a crime. He at least asked the question. Asking 
> questions and having them answered is the most basic way of getting 
> knowledge. For someone who's a newbie in the FOSS world and from an 
> Electronics background, RMS could simply mean Root Mean Square.

I agree, it's not a _crime_, and that's why there was no trial, and he
was not banned from this list. Tell me what would you tell somebody who
asks something extremely fundamental like ``what is a computer?'' here
on this list? Not relevant you say? I say it _is_ relevant here. rms is
not just some foobar bearded fellow. If you are doing FLOSS, you are
supposed to know about him. Remember, I didn't flame that person, I
didn't call him an idiot or something similar, I just gently indicated
that he was expected to either know that already or should've searched
the Internet for `rms', that's it.

>> It's not really about losing or winning a war. It's about knowing
>> _why_ we are here today. No more, no less.
>> Let me paraphrase Eben Moglen in this --- ``People who don't know the
>> _why_ will hardly ever understand the _how_''. That's exactly what I
>> can see happening. People just _love_ to shout about ``Linux'' and
>> the greatness of ``Open Source'' but fail to understand something as
>> fundamental as ``Freedom''. Trust me, it's not just about the
>> software, it's about the whole society. No matter how many ``Linux''
>> users are there in this world or how many companies support ``Open
>> Source'', the whole Free Software revolution will remain a failure as
>> long as we don't understand what Freedom is.
> 
> OK, fair enough. Only, I fail to see the relevance. For all we know, he 
> might understand all that, but he may not know how it started. Does it 
> really matter? Again, he asked the question, which is a good thing. It 
> isn't a dumb question. I got confused the first time I heard 'RMS' 
> simply because I didn't know his middle name starts from M. I still 
> don't know what M stands for. Should I know? After all, it /could/ be 
> his father's name and maybe its essential that we learn the background 
> to RMS before we really can understand what he's doing/saying...
> 
> I could get much more philosophical and hypothetical about this, but it 
> isn't needed.

And why isn't it relevant here? How can somebody understand Newton's
Laws of Motion without ever hearing about Sir Isaac Newton? rms is
arguably one of the most famous and oldest surviving on-line handles a
person has ever had. It started in the age of the Arpanet with
RMS at MIT-MC.ARPA and is now rms at gnu.org. If you are even remotely
interested in GNU/Linux, you _should_ know about GNU, the GNU Project
and rms! I don't say that you need to know that the `m' in `rms' is
Matthew, but you should at least have heard about Richard Stallman.
After all, it's not everyday that we get to know a person like him isn't it?

Regards,
BG

- --
Baishampayan Ghose <b.ghose at ubuntu.com>
Ubuntu -- Linux for Human Beings
http://www.ubuntu.com/

1024D/86361B74
BB2C E244 15AD 05C5 523A  90E7 4249 3494 8636 1B74


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