Richard Stallman is an idiot

I swear, every time I read an interview with Richard Stallman, I get more pissed at him.

Both the acronym "GNU" and the labelling of his "4 freedoms" from "0 to 3" are so telling of the way he looks at the world. Both are computer science jokes: "GNU" because it is a recursive definition (GNU = GNU is Not UNIX...what does the G stand for? GNU. What does GNU stand for? GNU is Not Unix...etc. Yes, this is funny if you do computer programming. Or rather, it was the very first time someone thought of it 20 years ago. Today it's obnoxious and annoying), and the "4 freedoms" because they are numbered the way programmers would number things, namely as indices into arrays (...and arrays used to be pointers into memory, and the indices were offsets to the base of the array, so to get to the first element, you had to use offset 0, hence computer scientists count starting at 0...see? Haha. So funny. I know.)

Anyway, point being, Stallman is a hopeless nerd that finds it impossible to view the world from the point of view of a normal person. So Richie, grow the fuck up. No one has ever "subjugated" anyone using a computer program, okay? Made their lives annoying? Sure. But let's not get hyperbolic here. Talk to someone who was in a japanese internment camp about subjugation. Then explain to them how their experience is like having to use a proprietary operating system. With any luck, you'll be punched in the face. Maybe it will knock some sense into you.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: there are actual benefits to not being able to tinker with a computer you own. The Xbox is a fantastic example of this principle. The Xbox creators went to a fantastic amount of trouble to make it difficult (if not downright impossible...that remains to be seen) to hack the xbox, going even so far as to design special, encrypted hardware. Why? To protect the IP rights and revenue streams of big evil video game developers, sure, but also to prevent cheating, pure and simple. The future of video games is online, and a small number of people hell-bent on cheating can absolutely ruin an online game. Ask Evercrack whores.

See, bits aren't just bits any more. The higher-level structure imposed on those bits is increasingly important. A video game structures bits into a game with arbitrary rules that are important to the game. Being able to futz with the lower-level bit structures is equivalent to breaking the rules of the game, and hence it is cheating. Thus, to maintain the integrity of the game, it's important that end-users not be able to fuck with their machines. And if you ask players, I think they'd be perfectly willing to give up the ability to fuck with their software if it meant guaranteeing a level playing field in an online game.

So Stallman...seriously...shut up. I'm tired of hearing you. There are benefits of open source that I think need to be better integrated into proprietary systems, certainly. But so long as you're waddling around spewing ideological nonsense, we're not going to get anywhere. At least as long as people listen to you.