Talk:Richard Stallman/Archive 12

This is an archive of past discussions about Richard Stallman. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 5

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Archive 10

He's Jewish, right?

After having checked a couple of sources I'm quite confident Stallman is a Jew, can anyone confirm that for sure before I add it to the article? Thanks,Shalom11111 (talk) 10:01, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Please see the archive, and in particularly, this one. Basically, there seems to be implied that a interview with Stallman has him self-identified himself as having Jewish ancestry, and as being an atheist. However, some wikipedia editors has raised the issue that Jewish descent is not relevant/interesting enough to warrant a place in the article. However, the article is already tagged with American people of Jewish descent so I don't see adding the fact about Jewish descent to the article text itself would be wrong. Please don't forget the "descent" part, as "is a Jew" is ambiguous in this case.

If it gets added, it should be only a very minor mention. It's not something he promotes and it's not something that he or others use as a defining characteristic. Atheism, on the other hand, is something he promotes and it's something he mentions often (without being asked), so atheism could be used as a yardstick: mentions of his jewishness should be much more minor than whatever mentions the article has of atheism. Gronky (talk) 21:29, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the feedback guys. Sorry I should have checked the archives before asking, next time I'll do it. I added it here. Shalom11111 (talk) 03:32, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

I am one of a number of editors who are perplexed by the tendency to apply labels like "Jewish" to people, where there is no clear indication that the label has some significance to the life of the subject. I have reverted the text ("Despite the fact that Stallman is of a Jewish descent") because there is no reason why being of Jewish descent should preclude someone from being an atheist, so "despite" is wrong; also, is there a source and a reason to include such a factoid?. Johnuniq (talk) 03:59, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure how significant this is but here we see Stallman drawing upon a clearly Jewish reference to Hillel the Elder. Bus stop (talk) 09:16, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

It's not significant. If Stallman made a habit of drawing inspiration from Jewish sources we'd have a reliable source stating so. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 13:43, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

If what American_Jews#Religious_beliefs says is true, that "atheist despite Jewish" detail you've added is absurd. --AVRS (talk) 09:33, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

It's absurd regardless. Free As In Freedom provides more than enough context to evaluate Stallman's ethnoreligious background, which makes it plain that there is nothing particularly notable about the union in question. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 13:43, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

We may be justified in saying "Stallman is of Jewish ancestry and he is an atheist" because in this source Stallman says, when prompted by an interviewer, "I am an atheist but of Jewish ancestry." Bus stop (talk) 14:41, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

IMO, that is a very insignificant mention. I guess those who care can infer it from the last names mentioned in the article. --AVRS (talk) 18:58, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

I took a stronger word at first, but replaced it with a neutral one. --AVRS (talk) 19:20, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Bus stop, thanks for the helpful links, I'm not sure why and what this big of a deal is all about. To users: Johnuniq, AVRS, and Thumperward - what makes you so determined to make sure that any reference of him being culturally/with Jewish ancestry is removed? I'm sure there're a lot of "insignificant mentions" (as you said) in this article, why continually pick on that one? Besides, I and other people find it important and significant, and it sure adds to the article. Since reliable sources isn't the issue here, I edited it again, you may see the minor changes I made. Shalom11111 (talk) 00:23, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Putting it in the article makes it seem consequential, but there's nothing to show that being Jewish is a defining characteristic of Stallman. (Maybe it's comparable to adding a sentence "Stallman's grandparents had brown hair" ?) We could flesh out that sentence with another one explaining that there's no indication that he's "culturally Jewish", doesn't promote the Jewish community and only mentions his Jewishness when asked, but that might be giving undue weight to a minor issue.

The article is already in the Jewish-Americans category. Maybe that's enough. Anyone who's interested can find the information. But I'm not going to remove it. I'm actually undecided.

And there is one aspect of Stallman that might be influenced by his Jewishness: in his political notes, he's very critical of Israel. I wonder if he feels that as (someone who could be called) a Jew, he has a particular duty to denounce wrong-doings which could be seen as being done in the name of Jews. He's been publishing his political notes on a daily basis for more than ten years, so they are without doubt a defining part of who he is. Gronky (talk) 02:53, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Gronky, thanks for improving the article and bringing out these interesting points here - I greatly appreciate your NPOV attitude. Shalom11111 (talk) 05:52, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Not any reference, but the assumption that being a Jewish, he should be religious or anything. The Russian article contained a short "born in a Jewish family" in the bio section; it has been removed, but it was neutral as to what that might mean to anybody. --AVRS (talk) 06:56, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

No he shouldn't be religious or anything, since it's a tiny mention that does no harm to the article but only makes it more informative (you may see "Who is a Jew?" if you will). As a side note - the Hebrew article as well as some other ones in different wikis do say that He's Jewish. The fact that the Russian article about Stallman contained this and then it got removed means nothing but that someone didn't want it mentioned in the article just as much as someone else did. Shalom11111 (talk) 19:21, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

That was just an example of a neutral mention. It was not about the fact that it was added/removed or whether it was notable. --AVRS (talk) 08:11, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Ok I see. Please let me quote what an anonymous user said on this talk page a few years ago when a similar argument came up: "...What's the difference between a person born in a Black/Asian/Irish family and so forth? Yet every notable person articled on Wikipedia has a blurb about their ethnicity regardless of its impact on their lives. People want to know." Shalom11111 (talk) 15:10, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

That claim seems to be false. I just quickly checked the 14 biography articles currently linked from Main Page and very few have ethnicity details. Examples of ethnicity being mentioned with clear reasoning are Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands (because that's why he's king) and Romeo Santos (because he makes the music of his parents region). John Draper Perrin is a rare example of ethnicity details without comment on why they're important. And at the other end of the spectrum, the Jason Collins article doesn't even mention that he's black. Of course, 14 articles is a small sample, and I'd guess that ethnicity is more relevant for articles about North Americans since for most other regions, things are simpler: Italians are generally of italian origin, and Britons of british, but even the North Americans in the 14 articles I checked don't show a trend for mentioning ethnicity. Gronky (talk) 03:15, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Hi and thanks for taking the time to do this short research, we all know this argument can go on forever and therefore I see no point in continuing it. But I hope we both agree on the fact that in many cases, and particularly this one, there's no such thing as "the right answer/solution". Shalom11111 (talk) 23:06, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Under Personal life, switch link of "Made for you"

I think the link for "Made for You" should be switch to his article on his personal home page, "http://stallman.org/articles/made-for-you.html", from the current link. - OnesimusUnbound (talk) 19:40, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Good idea. Go for it! Gronky (talk) 21:58, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Decline of MIT hacker culture 4th Paragraph

What does the fourth paragraph of Decline of MIT hacker culture contribute to the article? I am in favor of removing it due to irrelevance. --Jackson Peebles (talk) 08:28, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

It could certainly be shorter but I think his work in that period, mentioned at the end of the paragraph, is important. It was his last big project before launching GNU.

His community was falling apart and defusing Symbolics' work was his first attempt to defend his way of life. When he saw the long term weakness of this strategy he stopped trying to defend or bring back his old community, with its inherent vulnerabilities, and instead launched the GNU project and a movement to create a new community which would be more resiliant and would help society at large rather than just the few who were in his small community.

Cloning Symbolics' software was two years of full time and was clearly a formative part of his life's work and his thinking.

As well as shortening that paragraph, we should probably make it clearer why this is important.

If you do remove some parts, it would be best to move them to some other article. Is there an article about MIT hacker culture or about the community that formed alongside the official activities of the AI lab? I can't find one. I only found an article with a section about the official activities of the AI lab: MIT_Computer_Science_and_Artificial_Intelligence_Laboratory#LCS_and_AI_Lab. Gronky (talk) 09:23, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

The content of the MIT-subsection is crucial to understanding why RMS did what he did. He was planning to be a physicist (his undergrad major), or maybe a biologist (his summer job before college), but during his employment at MIT he switched careers from physicist to programmer, and then from programmer to freedom-activist slash programmer by the end of his work at MIT. As Gronky says, the MIT-subsection covers RMS's formative years. By 1985, he was much the same as he is nowadays, but in 1975 his vision had yet to crystallize. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 18:21, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Where should we document the decline of the AI lab?

I started trying to review the section "Decline of MIT hacker culture" (after the discussion above), but I don't want to delete anything without being sure it's documented somewhere on Wikipedia.

It looks like it should go in another article. This article should say how it affected Stallman, and the general info should go in another article which isn't about any single person.

I'm not sure the hacker-culture-of-the-MIT-AI-Lab-of-the-1970s, involving less than 100 individuals, is sufficiently Notable to deserve an article all by itself -- the offspring of that culture, namely the LISP programming language, the various Lisp Machine efforts, and the free-as-in-freedom culture of the FSF all have their own individual articles. (Not to mention AI itself.) Only in the case of RMS, however, was the *preservation* of the old culture a primary goal. The primary goal of LISP folks is to have a powerful language for expressing programs, and running them on computers. The primary goal of LispM efforts was to build computers optimized for LISP. Plenty of hacker-culture folks were involved with both types of work. However, the FSF is fundamentally *about* creating a culture (or sustaining a culture -- or creating a sustainable variant of the old culture). In short, I disagree that the info should be moved elsewhere; there was no outward 'decline' by any objective measure at all. RMS is talking about a *moral* decline, not a numerical one. p.s. The main hacker-as-a-good-thing article already covers what is necessary to that broader topic, including mention of RMS and MIT AI. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 18:21, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

The article can't be called "Decline of MIT hacker culture", because many would argue that MIT hacker culture is alive and well: Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

That is the incorrect article; it is Yet Another Variation On The Meaning Of Hack. Just at MIT, there are the following types of hackers/hacks: the hacker-as-a-ethical-programmer subculture, of which RMS is a key example. The mischievous-and-technically-complex prank subculture, which you mention. Note that the wikipedia article on prank-hacks does not have a very clear idea of the Hack Value criterion, outlined under the programmer-subculture article -- the Simmons Smiley, which was done tediously and manually, has a low hack value. Contrast with the Green Building Voxmeter Hack, in which the banks of lights automatically went on and off, in response to roars of the crowd across the river at the fireworks display, which has a medium-high hack value (it took more technical skill to pull off). In the middle of those two is the idea of the hack-adjective applied to a particular piece of software or a particular sort of software project, which can be somewhat disparaging (that code is a totally inelegant hack), or have a qualified positive aspect (what a great hack it would be if...), and sometimes both simultaneously; this is a subtle area. Seemingly unrelated at first, there is also the phenomenon of exploring basements and crawlspaces which comes under the 'hacking' rubric -- partly because, it often takes hacker-like technical skills to get access to such areas in the first place, e.g. bypassing security systems, and such access is often a prerequisite for the prank-hacks mentioned earlier. Roof and tunnel hackers are the opposite of computer-crackers (and burglars for that matter -- compare the Tolkien scene where the dwarf mentions that some of them call themselves Expert Treasure Hunters methinks), since they are exploring/climbing for fun, and without malice. But you can see the small toe-hold the modern definition of 'hacker' as evil-genius-programmer-who-breaks-into-computers originally stemmed from: something to do with computers, and something to do with bypassing security. See also Script_kiddie, someone who is not a hacker (in any sense). See also the disambiguation page. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 18:21, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

For the purposes of the RMS article, his concern was solely with the hacker-as-a-programmer culture, not mischievous pranks, not crawlspace exploration, and certainly not script-kiddies. In some ways, RMS has redefined the meaning of hacker: from what I can tell (original research sorry!) in the early days it purely meant skill, but nowadays, there is also an ethical connotation. Even in days of yore, however, often the same person would satisfy many senses simultaneously: technical skill at programming, ethical stance on sharing knowledge, enjoyment of pranks requiring both ethics and technical skill to pull off, enjoyment of exploring, resistance to authoritarian security mechanisms (and technical skill to overcome them). Cf the RMS incident in 1977 where he decrypted the passwd file; don't know whether he ever explored rooftops, but it's not pertinent to the article in any case. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 18:21, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Update, RMS did personally perform[1] some roof-and-tunnel style hacking, or at least, 'ceiling tile' hacking, for the purpose of getting access to computer time on the big iron of the 1970s -- unclear from this source whether it was for himself, or for other hackers, or a combination thereof. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 23:14, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

"MIT AI Lab" wouldn't be good either since that existed from 1973-2003 years (and after as CSAIL) and I'd only planning on documenting one aspect which ended in the mid-80s.

Unofficially the AI Lab existed since 1956, at the Dartmouth conference; cf Marvin Minsky and over at Stanford John McCarthy. By the time RMS showed up in 1971 as a Harvard undergrad, and then in 1974 as a 'physics' grad student, the AI Lab was running full speed. The official name was recognition of the *existing* R&D program, not the other way around. The RMS paper with Sussman in 1977 was on backtracking, and AI technique, nothing to do with physics. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 18:21, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Correction, he showed up in fall 1970 at harvard, age 17, due to skipping a grade[2] somewhere in the K-12 range. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 23:14, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Maybe "MIT AI Lab's hacker community"? But I don't know, does everyone agree that this community did disappear? I mean, what's the post-Stallman history of that hacker community? And can we even call it a "community" when most people there (including RMS) were employees?

Touching your last point first -- just because people are employees (or students -- or in the case of many folks in this particular historical situation both) does not mean culture cannot form. That is what is meant by corporate culture, school spirit, et cetera. But to RMS, methinks the culture was not tied to the physical location of the AI Lab, it was tied to the joy of programming, and using the internet to build a community of the mind: MIT AI + MIT LCS + MIT Physics + Stanford + Berkeley + CMU and beyond. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 18:21, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

I think this is the key to understanding the situation: there was an implicit hacker-as-a-good-thing community, at MIT/Stanford&Berkeley/CMU, during the 1960s, and probably earlier (telephony & ham radio & so on). The big change was the Internet and email, in 1972, which hooked these together for the first time. RMS enjoyed his time in that community from 1971 through 1977, when password-systems started cropping up, but he found a way around that. By 1979 or 1980, though, commercialization of software-as-a-product was accelerating, as evidenced by scribe/xerox7900/symbolics (not to mention Bill Gates and his open letter to hobbyists). Until that point, the software was never a product: only the hardware. If you owned the hardware, you always had access to the software, including the source, because it was necessary. Applications in those days needed to treasure every byte of RAM, and maximize every CPU cycle. This meant full access to the OS, driver, and any other source code. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 18:21, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Anyways, the 'community' did not disappear. There were still plenty of hacker-programmers at MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/CMU/etc. They still emailed each other. They still wrote software. But what changed is -- from RMS's perspective dramatically for the worse -- they no longer felt free (as in freedom) to share code with each other. They had signed non-disclosure-agreements, and were often working on proprietary software products. Software-as-a-product was now commercialized. RMS was not against commercialization itself, as evidenced by his statements and documents: he was against keeping secrets, withholding information, stifling education, and such. There was still a community of technically-skilled hackers, and is to this day, but RMS wanted them also to be *sharing* technically-skilled hackers, rather than *secretive* technically-skilled hackers. Before about 1979, sharing had been the default behavior, but external changes caused the community to choose sides later. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 18:21, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps the best description of the 'decline' of the community is to say there was a three-way fork: RMS promoting the idea that software should remain free-as-in-freedom, Richard Greenblatt promoting the idea that commercialization of software-as-a-bundled-product should proceed without severing ties to the university and without bringing in venture capital, and a large group of people (notably Guy Steele @ Sun Microsystems + Earl Killian @ MIPS + David Moon @ Symbolics + Dan Weinreb @ Symbolics + Bernie Greenberg @ Symbolics + John Kulp @ Symbolics + prolly others) joining various corporations which used venture capital money to commercialize software-as-a-bundled-product. Later, there was Lucid, which was trying to commercialize pure-software-as-a-product (cf Microsoft). The interesting thing about RMS is that he not only worked toward the idea of free-as-in-freedom (his 1982 to 1983 LispM clones and his 1984 to present UNIX clones), he also came up with a mechanism for protecting and propagating his idea: copyleft, and the GPL. That was his key Original Contribution to humanity. :-) Other folks at the time did not even necessarily disagree with RMS; they were pursuing the options they saw as available, and in 1980 there was no such thing as the GPL, or even a precursor thereof. That's not to say that everybody mentioned above is now a cheerleader for the GPL and for RMS -- they are not -- but to put the historical events in their proper historical context. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 18:21, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

I guess I should just get started working on it and we can change the title and scope as our knowledge accumulates. Gronky (talk) 22:17, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm not going to do it this month, so I'll just note a few pages here that could give ideas:

.Gronky (talk) 08:36, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Some summary-commentary on those links, to wrap up my inline comments in your paragraphs above.

Hacker_(programmer_subculture) This is the core idea of hacker-as-a-good-thing, meaning high technical skill used productively, but is subtly distinct from the hacker-ethic (below).
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution This book covers the hacker-ethic, see below.
Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology This concept is historically intertwined, but basically unrelated to what RMS is about.
Hacker ethic RMS basically *invented* this. Prior to 1984, hacker-as-good was mostly or entirely referring to skill, not ethics.
Lisp Machines Computer hardware, first prototyped in 1974. RMS contributed to the OS; the LispM editor EINE ("eine is not emacs") was written in 1976 or 1977 by Dan Weinreb & Mike McMahon, with Daniel Moon & Guy Steele, at about the same time as RMS, again with Daniel Moon & Guy Steele plus John Kulp, were working on the transition from TECMACS to ?MACS (actual name) to EMACS. RMS spent a couple years cloning the commercialized versions of EINE, plus a lot of other LispM software, in 1982 and 1983. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 18:21, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
Symbolics One of the primary LispM corporations, but not the only one: see also LMI, Xerox PARC, Texas Instruments. Other important workstation-trends were BSD on Suns, and SYSV. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 18:21, 10 September 2013 (UTC)