Sure, since you asked, I kept the receipts:
I've known RMS since the early 80's, crashed in his house when visiting the MIT AI Lab, had him crash in my hotel room at science fiction conventions, and I'm friends with numerous people who have worked and lived with him, one of whom he let stay in the largest bedroom of his house because it had a menacing tree outside the window that he was afraid of.
And I know Star Simpson personally (the freshman who quoted the MIT upperclassman who said female CSAIL professors kept plants in their offices to repel RMS), and we have discussed RMS's antics.
And RMS has personally asked me to hold the branches of bushes that were leaning into a sidewalk out of the way so that he could pass by.
So yes, I'm pretty sure first hand that RMS is afraid of trees and bushes and foliage, among other quirks, and it's pretty widely knows around the people who have lived and worked and hung out with him.
Here's a photo I took of RMS holding a gerbil wrapped in duct tape, just before he asked, "I don't know, why do you wrap a gerbil in duct tape?" (Google it!)
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/jsol-rms-gerb...
And here are a couple photo of my brave friend Devon, who was his housemate for many years, fearlessly climbing up to the roof of his house on the evil tree that RMS was afraid of, so you can judge for yourself how menacing it was:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/devon-climbin...
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/devon-landing...
And here's a true story about a funny joke that RMS made about my other friend Mike and I burning down his house, the one in that photo:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192
>I worked at UniPress on the Emacs display driver for the NeWS window system (the PostScript based window system that James Gosling also wrote), with Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" Gallaher, who was charge of Emacs development at UniPress. One day during the 80's Mike and I were wandering around an East coast science fiction convention, and ran into RMS, who's a regular fixture at such events.
>Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?"
>RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance."
>Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!
Yes, his house actually did burn down, but we didn't set it on fire, hire someone else to do it, or even know about it in advance.
And here's an excerpt from a September 1986 email from my eloquent friend who he let stay in the biggest room of the house with a menacing tree outside the window:
>RMS as God (or, why isn't the world made out of decayed slugs?)
>What can I say? All three of us moved out of [address redacted] because there was no way in hell to get him to move. This is a man who has created an operating system people worship slavishly as a "perfect environment", but who claims he must continue to use everyone else's towel because he doesn't know where to buy one himself. This is a man who talks about immorality and considerate-ness, and claimed it was a "special favor" to take his boots off at the top of the stairs like the rest of us and not track mud through the living room where we all roamed barefoot. This is a man who let me have the best bedroom in the house because there were trees outside the window and he was afraid of them. He has mentioned to a few people that he thinks it would be neat to have a daughter by some willing female and raise her up so that he could have sex with her when she was old enough. This man says he will never be happy until there is no more purchased software, until copyright laws are totally trashed. He will accept no lesser events as conditionals, and disqualifies any other good things/feelings that happen to him as "false happiness" or simply things that don't count.
>Yet I still hear people I love and respect talk about him as if he were some kind of deity, as if his Free Software Foundation were the noblest effort in the world. It is admirable, yes. But to glorify the thoroughly sick human being behind it into some sort of whole-life messianic figure is unconscionable. Meeting RMS groupies was yet another contributing factor to my punting of the computer world for the time being. So many of the "hackers" out there (hackers, not crackers/urchins/destructoids) seem to have their external values totally fukt. Sure, we're all entitled to different values. Fine. But it grieves me to see good people withering away behind a self-imposed wall of lonely techno-perfection, their frantic efforts to acquire friends and lovers made all the more poignant by the desperation in their eyes, voice, manner. Most of them know that they are lacking something important, but don't know what it is, or how to get it, or who to ask for it. Many can see themselves alienating people or spurning offers of friendship and affection, but don't know how or why they're doing so. They just look impassive and bored and in control, and damn themselves silently in their minds, self-inflicting the rejection and pain that they feared from the outside.
[She goes on, but I'll stop quoting here... And you can decide for yourself if what she wrote about RMS in September 1986 is accurate and authentic, and aligns with other stories you've heard about him in the intervening 35 years.]
And here's a transcript of a bunch of people telling RMS to fuck off because they didn't appreciate his pointed joke about the Evils Natalism, which I then fed to Doctor in Emacs to psychoanalyze him:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/rms-vs-doctor.h...
Thanks for the details. Peculiar (as usual with RMS).
> I'm pretty sure first hand that RMS is afraid of trees and bushes and foliage
Have you seriously consider that he could be worried by something that could be in that foliage, like ticks for example?
> fearlessly climbing up to the roof of his house on the evil tree that RMS was afraid of
again, have you consider that he could be worried by how easy would be for a stranger to break into the room climbing the tree and maybe steal his computer? Most people like to have a sense of security and private space when sleeping.
I believe the women, and my own eyes and ears.
Edit: A science fiction convention is not a workplace, and as the butts of his joke about burning down his house, Mike and I (who he also calls "Evil Software Hoarders" because we worked for UniPress on his enemy Gosling Emacs) are in the unique position of deciding whether it's offensive to us or not, not you. And we both thought it was hilarious, as he meant us to take it, especially his without-missing-a-beat dead-pan delivery.
Also we weren't co-workers, we fought on opposite sides of the Emacs Wars, but we hung out at science fiction conventions and at each other's homes, and were friendly and civil in person (at least enough to know if he accused us of burning down his house, he was only joking, and that if he asked me to hold a bush out of his way, he really meant it).
And I was taking photos of the guy you rudely accuse of being a creepy spoiled brat while you lectured me about making fun of people, because he is my friend, and we were having a fun time climbing the trees at his house, not mocking RMS or even thinking about him at the time. It just so happens that was the roof of the same house that burnt down later, and the same tree that RMS was afraid of, and somebody asked for proof, so I gave what I had. Do you need more proof? (Gumby: I'm sure you have some stories! ;) )
Just come out and say you don't believe the women, and stop lecturing me on civility while baselessly calling my friend a creepy spoiled brat, m'kay? ;)
What I see in your previous posts is somebody taking a lot of effort and time to made fun of the "weirdo" in the room.
Making jokes in the workplace about burning the home of somebody is funny and acceptable activity to you? Seriously?
And what was the purpose of taking the photo of the creepy guy climbing the tree, except to mock RMS? Your friend looks like a spoiled brat in that photos.
I had seen before this pattern of coworkers teaming against the smart, different guy in the room, releasing rumors about people, and all the stuff that I see in your post... all while pretending to be friendly. And I think that they are really disgusting people, to be honest.
Please be aware that you are going out of your way to construct a scenario where Don is being insincere and even malicious; there is hipocrisy in your demands for specific evidence in your first comment and your assumptions in this one. There are other ways to bring your interpretations to the table, ways that allow thoughtful discussion and so won't see your comments categorically rejected.
> there is hipocrisy in your demands for specific evidence in your first comment
You must refer to the post written by CameronNemo. Those aren't neither "my demands" nor my comment.
Yep, I believe totally in those hypothetical women putting plants in their room because "Stallman can't stand being in the same room as plants". The trick is working great it seems.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fb/Eg...
http://blogs.laprensagrafica.com/litoibarra/wp-content/uploa...
Is also obvious that the man is afraid of trees and nature in general
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stallman_Jadwisin_9....
Real phobias are serious medical problems causing a lot of anxiety and pain in people that just can't avoid being afraid. Is not funny stuff to gossip about it. I think that spread the rumor of somebody having a phobia is, if not malicious, at least of very bad taste. Specially when several documents show the opposite behavior.
And if you say that this wrapped thing is a gerbil, well... Solid evidence. All packages with that shape contain a live gerbil inside. The more expensive Tesla cars even have four squirrel units inside for feeding the battery.
That's true, those weren't your demands, but you're the guy who doesn't believe the women, and called my friend a creepy spoiled brat while lecturing me about civility.
Defending RMS's love of trees isn't the hill I'd choose to die on. If you really don't believe her, re-read what that wise woman wrote 35 years ago about RMS groupies, and tell me that it doesn't apply to you today:
>Yet I still hear people I love and respect talk about him as if he were some kind of deity, as if his Free Software Foundation were the noblest effort in the world. It is admirable, yes. But to glorify the thoroughly sick human being behind it into some sort of whole-life messianic figure is unconscionable. Meeting RMS groupies was yet another contributing factor to my punting of the computer world for the time being. So many of the "hackers" out there (hackers, not crackers/urchins/destructoids) seem to have their external values totally fukt. Sure, we're all entitled to different values. Fine. But it grieves me to see good people withering away behind a self-imposed wall of lonely techno-perfection, their frantic efforts to acquire friends and lovers made all the more poignant by the desperation in their eyes, voice, manner. Most of them know that they are lacking something important, but don't know what it is, or how to get it, or who to ask for it. Many can see themselves alienating people or spurning offers of friendship and affection, but don't know how or why they're doing so. They just look impassive and bored and in control, and damn themselves silently in their minds, self-inflicting the rejection and pain that they feared from the outside.
> you're the guy who doesn't believe the women
Nobody should believe "the" women. Not more that we should believe "the" men. Everybody can have hidden agendas. Being a woman is not a proof that somebody is not lying. Moreover. In fact, nobody should believe "me", or "you". Specially when there are a pattern of dissonances between what somebody claims, the quality of the proofs shown and the easy to find facts that don't match what is claimed.
> re-read what that wise woman wrote 35 years ago about RMS groupies
To start, she seems to have a poor and 'holier-than-thou' opinion about all [male] hackers that describes as "fu*d people", and this is not a good sign in my book.
I doubt also that RMS would have a lot of "groupies" or fame in 1986, five years before the first Linux. If something was proven with time is that he was right, and that the "such smart woman" was clueless as a blind chicken about the future impact of the FSF. Your example would be like talking about how disappointing was the impact to Bill Gates to our society at 8 years old.
> called my friend a creepy spoiled brat
Maybe is a great guy, but in this two photos it surely looks like one. You are not doing him any favor showing them here.
You're strangely obsessed with your mistaken belief that RMS loves trees, based on never having met him, and your Dendrophobia Deniel conspiracy theory that I and all the women I've quoted and my friend Devon are liars, based on never having met any of us or even RMS himself.
Devon just created an account and replied above. It turns out I was mistaken about the particular tree: it was actually the tree around the corner of the house that was outside the bedroom window. But Devon confirms that people of all genders at the AI/LCS lab hung ferns in their offices to keep RMS away.
You probably want to interrogate and insult him directly if you still believe he's a "lying" "creepy" "spoiled brat" (although I have no idea how you so "surely" inferred those specific labels from the photographs -- did you use Facebook's computer vision AI?), at the risk of being banned from HN for antisocial behavior, but I suggest you remain civil, since you're the one who's hypocritically defending RMS's behavior while lecturing other people about civility while incorrectly labeling and insulting them and their friends, based on your imagination and no evidence or first hand experience whatsoever.
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-apologizes-artifici...
And yes, RMS did have many groupies in 1986 and long before, and he was quite well known even in the 70's, in certain circles. He started working at the MIT AI Lab in 1971, with Gerald Sussman in 1975, and he and Sussman published an early widely cited paper on AI truth maintenance and dependency-directed backtracking in 1977. It was openly known by many people on the ARPANET that his password was "rms", and he welcomed people to log in and use his account. And the ARPANET was a very small tightly knit circle, were everybody knew each other, back in the days of NCP, when host numbers were only 8 bits, so there could be no more than 256 hosts, and homosocketuality was prohibited, before "Flag Day" in 1983 when they switched to TCP/IP with its 32 bit addresses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Control_Program
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178653
So it's supremely ironic, ignorant, and insulting that you would mistakenly short measure the temporal extent of RMS's fame by the young age of "Linux", instead of saying "Gnu/Linux". Obviously you have never met him personally and triggered him by saying "Linux" instead of "Gnu/Linux" in his presence, and that shows you know very little about the history of FSF or the personality of RMS. He'd probably be furious with you for what you said about his fame following the success of the first "Linux".
Richard Stallman when you call it Linux instead of GNU/Linux:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8VgjZUel6M&ab_channel=DullB...
I'm very specifically referring in my post to the creation of Linux, the kernel. Sorry if it was ambiguous to you. I'm aware that GNU predates Linux but a GNU without Linux never would had the same popularity as it has. HURD never has been widely adopted.
> You could trigger Stallman! is a bad man!
I'm not worried by that possibility. Maybe Stallman should be worried by my answers. Dunno.
If is a problem to you, can I suggest to call it LiGNUx as a compromise solution and end this old war? Feel free to also use Stallmanix, or Stallpple if you use Hurd. As long as it works, I don't care about the name.
That doesn't make any sense, or align with what you actually said, but whatever. Stallman's fame long predates GNU. I think you owe Devon an apology for calling him a "creepy" "spoiled brat" "liar". He correctly confirmed what you wrongly denied without any evidence and by calling other people with direct experience liars, and he knows first hand, having shared a house with RMS for many years, and having known him well for many decades.
By the way, "Sorry it was ambiguous to you" is a classic non-apology apology, blaming somebody else for their mistake of misunderstanding you, without admitting you were wrong, which you were. I understood you just fine. You owe Devon a much more specific and sincere apology than that for calling him names, directly stating what you did that was wrong, showing your remorse, acknowledging that you were wrong, and promising that it won't happen again. Here's some help with that:
https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/how-to-apologize.htm
Sorry Devon. Don't feel bad, we all have photos like those. I have worse photos than yours for sure. Welcome to HN.
> You should apologize to everybody by your flagrant misconduct, and promise that you will not do it again, blah, blah, the fires of hell, blah, blah, cancel culture, blah, blah...
Hem, nope. That would feel like being in a cult. I'm free, adult and able to stand my own ground, not a ticktoddler easy to impress to follow the brilliant lights. "Promise that would not do it again [something that you opinate but has annoyed me]" looks totally like returning to witch hunt, public humiliations of dissidents, and totalitarism. Is not acceptable.
[By the way, I kindly suggest you not to use the passive aggressive mode with me. I don't have a lot of patience anymore with this people and those that tried the trick before felt my burnt to the root. Be happy].
> And yes, RMS did have many groupies in 1986 and long before, and he was quite well known even in the 70's
I stand corrected, then. Thanks.
You're welcome, but that's hardly the only mistake you made, and your apology to Devon was another passive aggressive attack in which you misquoted and mischaracterized what I said, and reinforced your baseless insults, so you're a huge hypocrite for trying to play the victim of what you're dishing out yourself, and still owe him an apology. Not just that, but all of your other arguments are invalid and accusations are hypocritical because you made up so many imaginary falsehoods without having any idea what you were talking about, that you don't have a leg to stand on, corrected or not.
You're an RMS groupie and apologist for his bad behavior that you emulate without any of his positive attributes, skills, humor, or intelligence, and my friend's analysis of RMS groupies that she wrote 35 years ago describes you perfectly to a tee:
>Most of them know that they are lacking something important, but don't know what it is, or how to get it, or who to ask for it. Many can see themselves alienating people or spurning offers of friendship and affection, but don't know how or why they're doing so. They just look impassive and bored and in control, and damn themselves silently in their minds, self-inflicting the rejection and pain that they feared from the outside.
For completeness sake: I was referring to your first comment where you demand proof for all possible interpretations.
That said, it now seems both of you have gone massively off the deep end becoming very involved and abusing the edit function to further arguments where you talk past each other, so I both regret saying and reading anything.