[LUNI] RMS

[Roberto Serrano]

 I had the chance of "spending" six delightful one-to-one minutes with RMS
as I guided him to where he was suppose to go before the meeting with the
students.  A friend of mine and I found him, kind of lost, carrying three
bulky suitcases and I offered my help.   My friend introduced himself and
proceeded to introduce me "as the vice president of the Linux Uses's
Group"....   ufff!  what a first impression!! ....  "I don't want to be
associated with LUG's because the don't give credit....blah...blah...your
name should be GNU/LUG...."  Actually, we are officially named "UIC
GNU/LUG"...but my friend is new to the movement and did not know any
better.

I don't want to go too much into the details of the rest of the trip,
suffice to say that he was incredibly self-righteous, as it was already
pointed out, and that somehow he managed to correct/preach me four times in
that sort span of time.   My impression of him went from admiration to pure
indifference in just those few minutes.

Things did not get any better later.  I also happened to be the moderator
for the students Q&A Thursday, and Stallman had requested us to do something
with a different theme so that he would not have to repeat the stuff from
Friday.  We decided to do a Q&A format in which we could ask him to give us
advice on how to better prepare ourselves as future CS professionals that
might want to contribute to FLOSS .  We prepped the crowd to make sure
Stallman would stay on track:  Open source, Linux by itself, etc, became
"prohibited terms."  Non of that effort really matter, he did not want to
play along and he went back to his hobbyhorse and to ranting rather
quickly.  He was again rude to me and to others, and prominently displayed
his famous lack of decor as he "dug for gold" multiple times and apparently
almost stroke gold the last one (I hope my metaphor is understandable
enough).

As one of my teachers put it later:  he is very much "a one dimensional
being."  I personally think the FSF, and the Free software movement at large
deserve a more complete leader and public speaker.  I don't doubt RMS's
contribution to my own daily live, as free software is much more than just
software to me, but I'm actually rather sorry of my personal encounter with
him, and the negative impact he had in the people around me.  Maybe is time
to retire the "founder" and find a more suitable leader that might be able
to carry out his legacy and maybe even expand on it.

Roberto
Vice president of the UIC LUG  - "University of Illinois Chicago LUg is not
Gnu/lug"
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