Good luck getting people to adopt to this behavior, when we are so massively leveraged by what we can look up on the web. It works to an extent for him because of where he's been situated since 1970, but try telling a kid who's not in The Athens of America (the Boston area) that he should cut himself off from most of the world's useful, and cheaply obtained info, and you're not likely to get many sales.

I can't criticize the general public, and kids, too harshly, because while I use Linux and Open Source software almost exclusively on my laptop and desktop, I also use gmail a lot, I have an Android phone (if I could find a decent Firefox phone in the US, I'd switch), I have an active facebook and Twitter account, etc. It's hard to treat these things as inherently dangerous, and thus something to actively avoid, when the world is so tied to them. And, replacing them is hard, because it takes millions of dollars and armies of engineers to build GMail or facebook at scale.

Which is kind of what I'm getting at. Without a mass movement of brilliant hackers, or at least very prolific ones, building open alternatives, we will eventually lose everything resembling privacy, developer freedom, and communities free of marketing. I'm not arguing things are worse or better than they were 20 years ago (that's an extremely complex and nuanced discussion to have, and for every stride forward, there have been dramatic losses), but there was an almost religious fervor behind the development of the Internet. Nearly everything that ran the Internet in the beginning was aggressively free or Open Source software: Apache, BIND, Sendmail, Postfix, QMail, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Perl, PHP, Linux, BSD, etc. Even the web browser, and all the other client software, started out free. It was based on a cultural belief that this thing we were building was meant to be free; a safe haven from state and corporate power, and a place where an individual had a meaningful contribution to make without needing permission.

So, while there's more Open Source and Free software than ever, and more developers building more code in public, I think that religious fervor has faded, and I think it's to our detriment.

I don't know what to do about it, and it may be that I miss the subtleties of what can be done about it (I grew up without the Internet, and learned it as a second language as an almost-adult; maybe there's something positive happening that I don't see or understand). But, I feel vaguely like we (anyone who cares and understands where we're from and where we're heading) should be doing something about it.

I read his biography, but I don't follow his work or life very closely. So I used a vague, hand-wavy term because I have a vague, hand-wavy understanding of it all. Therefore, I cannot clarify.

As for "being crapped on and disrespected", well, if you've spent enough time with him, you'll understand why that was a common reaction, he's ... a difficult person

Yeah, I get called "difficult" all the time. I have a life threatening, incurable medical condition. I am pretty laid back, inclined to go along, to get along, and a conflict avoider. But, unfortunately, in order to be socially acceptable, I would need to politely die a slow gruesome death. Failing to go along with that plan for me has caused me shitloads of social problems.

Thus, I am inclined to be sympathetic to rms. Many of his predictions have come true. There is no telling how much more problematic things would be had he not stuck to his guns.

"Difficult" sometimes just means you aren't going along with social norms. If you firmly believe those social norms to be a very serious problem, it is foolish to go along with them. In my experience, no matter how politely you decline to go along with them, and no matter how compelling your reasons for politely declining, simply declining will get you a fuck ton of backwash.

I didn't say other people were wrong to call him a hero. I said I would be unlikely to use the word and explained why. I think you have misread and mischaracterized my remark.

I already stated what makes a hero in my mind. My father fought in two wars. He got a purple heart. I am currently homeless, and literally out on the street. So I am experiencing things far harder than what rms endured. Hardship and heroism are not the same thing.

That's just my opinion. If you see him as a hero, you are entitled to your opinion. Having known people who did put themselves in harm's way and paid a real high price for it, I can't say that sleeping in a hacker space rates the same as what it takes to get a purple heart.

Anyway, I am not planning to argue this further. I already responded to a different reply making much the same point you made. So I am not sure why you are repeating what was basically already said to me.

What I meant by paranoid is that he refuses for the world to have access to information about himself for who knows what reasons.

In retrospect, I should have used "insane" or "selfish".