"Re: Real men don't attack straw men"

Thus spake Theo unto RMS: "I may be unfriendly at times, but you are a power-misusing hypocritical liar who attacks projects that try harder than any others to only make free software available. Shame on you."

Richard Stallman is trying to do good work. Theo de Raadt is trying to do good work. They are going about it differently, but not as much as they might think.

My wholly uninformed and unneeded opinion on the matter is that RMS spoke before doing his homework on the OpenBSD ports tree. His original statements contained more "I am not sure"s and "I was told"s than I like to hear coming from the mouth of somebody who is wielding as formidable a sword as he has.

He doesn't know how much flak The OpenBSD Project goes through in order to secure open source driver documentation from vendors, nor how much argument they hear from Linux devs who sign NDAs to include proprietary drivers from hardware makers and say that since this undocumented batch of ones and zeros is GPL'd, then it is Good and Holy.

So Stallman can't recommend OpenBSD because he doesn't even know what it is or what the project's principles are. If he wanted he could even try to argue that an OpenBSD developer quote-unquote "stole" some GPL code for a wireless driver earlier this year. But in order to do that, he'd have to look at facts and figures, and honestly, who has time for that?

Who has time to do the minimal necessary amount of reading on a subject in which you're supposed to be an expert when you're busy growing a freaky long mountain man beard and stressing to people how any software that costs money is evil and how GPLv3 tastes like honey and how Nixon is a crook and bomb Vietnam and this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius?

It's not that RMS isn't trying to do the right thing. It's that he's so high up in his little ivory tower Castle GNU/thrax that he's stopped paying attention to what other people are doing. This probably explains what's taking GNU Hurd so long. Hey, Stallman: stop sniping at all the foot soldiers just because you can no longer make out their coat of arms.