A piece of social networking software that gets popular does bring a certain audience/reach to its creator. So "The software is good but I don't want the views of its creator to reach a broader audience" is a valid stance as far as I'm concerned.
The name didn't seem to be prominently reported until the Twitter exodus lately. I was surprised he's my countryman, I think I would have remembered had he come up in the earlier Mastodon discussions on HN. I always assumed it's a mostly American thing.
> The name didn't seem to be prominently reported until the Twitter exodus lately
But that kind of proves my point now doesn't it? When "his" platform became popular he got featured on the national press. I can totally see that some people do not want to offer that kind of platform to someone with whom they disagree politically.
GNU is a doomed project, and you've correctly identified on of the reasons. The number of people using Emacs rounds to zero, and is trending in the wrong direction.
Emacs is still getting periodic releases and it's getting better every time. I can not think of any other project that is over 40 years old and that could be around 40 years from now. It has become an institution. It will outlive RMS.
Anyone rejecting Emacs because of RMS but ends up using (e.g) VS Code is either ignorant, hypocrite or simply trying to find a post-hoc rationalization for their choice of tool.
My remark was about social networking software.
Besides that, and luckily, any journalist worth its salt can instantly classify rms as someone you don't want to feature on mainstream media. With new folks it's not as easy.
That is still a senseless distinction. His code is licensed AGPL3. Anyone is free to use it and modify it as they see fit. I don't need to agree with Alex on anything to recognize that his software is better than any of the current alternatives. I could set up a Soapbox instance to make a "BBQ pit masters and meat-eaters community" instance, and Alex (vegan activist) would have absolute zero recourse against it.
> instantly classify rms as someone you don't want to feature on mainstream media.
Why? RMS may be an idiot on a huge number of topics, that does not invalidate what he has to say about the issues of closed software, or how Big Tech has co-opted Free Software by using "the cloud" to exploit users, and so on. If anything, any decent journalist should be able to bring to mainstream media and should be able to make the distinction about which part of RMS is important to listen.
