[crackmonkey] The Stallman Awards

[Seth David Schoen]

Rick Moen writes:

> Seth David Schoen (schoen at uclink4.berkeley.edu) replied to Nick Moffitt:
> 
> >> Seth David Schoen -- Most reserved Stallman conversation.
> >> Despite all his slights against libertarianism, you held strong and
> >> didn't get riled up.  That, and your beard is far mightier than his.
> > 
> > Um, thanks.  Don't you think that you should get a similar award?
> 
> Really?  How _is_ Nick's beard doing, these days?

Oh, not that part.  The "didn't get riled up" part, I mean.  I heard Nick
mumbling when Richard said something about "what Christianity teaches" --
but Nick kept the dB level of his mumbling very low.

For what it's worth, I think Nick's beard is fairly impoverished, but I
bet he could change that pretty easily.

Some of the people at the dinner table seemed shocked that "libertarians
believe that the proper function of government is only to protect property
rights!", as though this were a dirty secret of some sort, while in fact
this claim appears in the published _promotional literature_ of even fairly
moderate libertarian entities.

> > But regardless, I think you win an award for your subterfuges in giving
> > Richard M. Stallman two t-shirts from a PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE COMPANY!
> 
> I'm the unindicted co-conspirator on that one.  (Somebody want to explain
> that phrase's context to the young'uns?  Last night, some of our Berkeley
> contingent failed to get a reference to Ernestine the Telephone Operator.
> O tempora, o mores!

I know I was one of those.

Nick showed RMS some SuSE t-shirts, which he wanted to give to RMS as a
peace-offering (to show SuSE's goodwill toward the free software movement).
On seeing them, RMS told Nick to "burn them", and explained that SuSE was
distributing proprietary software and failing to distinguish between free
and proprietary software.

Nick put up a pretty valiant effort to persuade RMS that things were
changing and free software consciousness at SuSE improving, but RMS didn't
appear to want the shirts, so Nick held onto them.  Then, on the way out
to Rick's car, Nick managed to put the shirts into Stallman's box, which
Rick was holding.  So Stallman might be surprised to find that he was the
unwitting beneficiary of those shirts after all.

-- 
   Seth David Schoen L&S '01 (undeclared) / schoen at uclink4.berkeley.edu
He said, "This is what the king who will reign over you will do."  And they
said, "Nay, but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the
nations." (1 Sam 8)  http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/   http://www.loyalty.org/
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