No mention of brown M&Ms, or of spider-plants.I think this must be a quite helpful document, because anyone who reads even the first quarter of it will know exactly what they're in for.
Don't stop reading before you've gotten to the part about codecs! And parrots. And crossing the street.
And, this already exists: The Stallman Dialogs. Oh, Internet. Is there nothing you cannot provide?
Friendly conference organizer: Mr. Stallman, I'm so sorry, we're running about 15 minutes behind schedule.
Stallman: When you need to tell me about a problem in a plan, please do not start with a long apology.
Friendly conference organizer: Oh. Well, it's just that, I know your time is very important and I...Sorry.
Stallman: That is unbearably boring, and unnecessary -- conveying useful information is helpful and good, and why apologize for that?
Friendly conference organizer: ...
Stallman: If it is night, and the stars are beautiful, I hesitate to say so, lest my hosts feel obligated to try to get one for me.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
I am used to managing life on my own.
One situation where I do not need help, let alone supervision, is in crossing streets.
Is it strange that I find the line about stars rather poetically beautiful?
He sounds busy.
He might have more time in his day if he used web browsers, instead of using SSH to connect to the ports and parse web pages by hand.
Using other peoples accounts.
He uses a bot to fetch the page, parse it, tar it up, and email him the result which he reads later. He is an odd man that time has left behind.
That is... epic.
I don't think even the Rolling Stones' concert waiver is that complicated and thorough.
I hadn't seen him call himself Dr before. Anyone know where he would have gotten an actual doctorate in addition to his zillion honoraries?
For the troll answer, it's quite obvious that rms thinks that spam offering genuine university degrees are about freedom and uses his hard earned speaking monies to buy several a month.
For the non-troll answer, who the fuck knows. Maya Angelou does the same thing (it's been said she gets real pissy when people don't use it). Perhaps, he too, knows why the caged bird sings.
That is Judge Troll, or Your Honor, to you.
I duncare if you're the Grand High Poobah of Uppah Buttcrack, your excellency.
He holds at least four honorary doctorates. Can't get on an ex-boyfriends list though. I guess emails sent to him aren't private?
I'd like to see him speak at an open source linux event at the DNA Lounge.
This document is a work of beauty.
Imagine, for a moment, that every one of those detailed rules relates to trying to head off some sort of actual problem that's happened in the past. Someone probably did buy a parrot. Perhaps he's spent a month telling different people that he has heard of your "breakfast", he has no use for it.
Honestly, reading this, I feel a certain sympathy. Teaching graduate students online, I've seen one of my courses explode into a flurry of nearly 50 handouts as I try to head off every single dumbassed thing they can possibly do in terms of misunderstanding directions, cutting corners, violating academic honesty policies, and haring off in entirely the wrong direction, without being able to just stand in front of a class and say "is anybody confused about anything right now? Anyone? Bueller?" And my interaction with people's quirks is probably several orders of magnitude less than his.
And yet, a lot of people -- even people who travel around giving tech talks for a living -- manage to muddle through with somewhat under 22 pages. So there's that.
Well, those people are forced to deal with unwanted breakfasts and parrots! Who's laughing now?
While I don't feel like trying to force rank Stallman amongst people like Nikola Tesla and Howard Hughes (on the Greatness or Oddness axes), I do think it's worthwhile to remember how curious some of their habits and needs were as well.
The rider is fascinating, but it is a statement of what Stallman needs to make his life work expressed in his detail-obsessed, incredibly thorough, and very particular style.
If you can't feel sympathetic to him, then I think the problem lies with you, not him.
I feel your pain, I lead peer reviews and fact-checking for role-playing books. The maddening part is when you ask if everyone is clear on the posting rules like quote-trimming and bottom-posting, and half of them send back the one word "yes" at the top of each other's replies. Oy!
You know, I'm tempted to excerpt that part and send it to my Mom before I go visit next time.
At least the famous "no brown M&Ms" requirement in the Van Halen tour rider had a useful purpose, as kind of a "parity check" or "bozo bit check" of the tour rider information.
This is exactly why you have to set the microcode options to match your political philosophy.
RMS has a parroty check as well. Perhaps you missed it?
Weird, but still more pleasant than http://catb.org/~esr/travelrules.html
esr is also fairly nutty, but that's not really an example of it! * It was kind of long, though a marvel of terseness compared to rms's, and there wasn't really anything goofy in it except the credit card thing.
* But this is.
For nutty you need to go track down his anti-gay and anti-Muslim rants.
God DAMN it. I'd managed to purge that horror from my memory the last time I accidentally clicked on it 4-5 years ago. Now I have to break out the power drill AGAIN.
Don't forget to distribute recordings of him and his speeches using only Open Source format files, otherwise his message is contradicted by the message being implied by the file format.
Good then that he wants to preserve his overall message of "this has no relevance to 99% of the computer using world" then.
He comes across as a terribly busy person that finds the whole idea of speaking a hassle. Almost like he doesn't want to, but has to out of irritation because nobody else can be trusted with his vision.
I think you mean "free software" format files, there.
I do? I lost track of what the PC police want their religious order calling these days.
Most of this really has the organic, "when I first wrote this file in the eighties it was less than a page, but I've had to add a paragraph every other month" feeling to it.
Host: We've set up our spare room for you. It's quite nice!
rms: Thanks. I hope that wasn't too much trouble.
Host: Oh, it's no trouble at all! The only ones who use it are our six cats. They like to hump on the pillows.
It is interesting to me that he is willing to fly in the US but not take trains because of their ID policy.
Brilliance:
This, buried in the middle of a demands list that'd make Mariah Carey blush.
- Chris
This will be my counterexample every time someone accuses RMS of having no sense of humour.
I arranged a talk with him at my school in 1992 or 1993, and I can verify that at this time, the document was only about a page long.
It does look like every thing on here is something that probably happened to him at an appearance. I think I'm personally responsible for the "no breaks in the middle of a talk", because he talked about an hour past his scheduled time, and we had to break and switch rooms, and he threw a fit.
I can only imagine the horrors that ensued when some poor fucker bought him a parrot.
About 30 years ago, I saw the similarly long Public Image Ltd rider - you could probably write half of a history of the Sex Pistols from it, because yes, I bet everything covered in it did happen to Mr Lydon.
My favorite bit: "I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about what I will do breakfast. Please just do not bring it up." This raises so many questions that I do not want answered.
Try asking a guy in a wheelchair sometime if he'd like you to push him where he's going.
There’s nothing in there about him picking his hair and making a little pile on the table while he eats in a nice restaurant. Perhaps he should include that to warn those of us who don’t expect that sort of behaviour from such an august personage.
this first time i met him, in his office/bedroom in the ai lab in about '87 or so, to discuss some work i was going to do for him he did this with his toes.
"That is unbearably boring, and unnecessary -- conveying useful information is helpful and good, and why apologize
for that? So please be practical and go straight to the point."
That's rms-speak for "Don't mention it. May I help you?"
This is genius. I was wondering when Sacha Baron-Cohen was going to come up with a new character.
Also, how the hell do you pronounce "GNU" as one syllable if the G is hard. I've tried, and I can't do it. Nor can my dear wife.
I hope he ends the speech with "As for Jamie Zawinski, I had to beat him to death with his own shoe.".