"Revolution OS" (The Movie).

[Nikolai]

Derek Broughton wrote:

> His appearance is a real problem.  To the business people who need to get a
> clue about OSS, he just screams "deadbeat".

He might look deadbeat but it took him a few minutes to *clearly* 
outline why free software should be embraced and proprietary rejected. 
Two other speakers were pale in comparison and having suits on didn't 
help their speech (in one case reading) at all. If I had no clue about 
free software, I would have left that meeting with a very clear idea of 
what free software is about thanks to Dr Stallman in a green t-shirt. If 
he wasn't there, I'm not sure other speeches would have helped me that 
much (although they would still have been helpful).

If you didn't notice, he spoke primarily about freedom than about 
anything else. Incredibly, this aspect of his vision is what gets 
overlooked most often. His concern, IMU, is mostly with our certain 
rights being usurped by proprietary software. How business community 
reacts to all of this, is secondary although it should eventually 
embrace free software assuming the market stays free (and this is 
questionable in itself, hence his fight for free software becomes even 
more important).


> Richard Stallman's idea of Free software is light-years beyond
> what most of the rest of us are willing to put up with.


Without him, or someone like him, it would have been unreachable 
altogether but here we are, running thousands of free programs and 
handful of free operating systems. Perhaps people like him need more 
support to reduce those light years to simply years instead of babbling 
about his beard and lack of business suits.

Nikolai