He most definitely got started down his path for emotional reasons, he had a sweet gig at MIT and he wanted to ride that train forever. When people at the lab he worked in left to join Symbolics, he was left behind and he has borne that grudge ever since. He has certainly backed up his philosophy since that time with much reasoning and writing, but even his most rational writings seem trapped under the weight of emotions IMO. It’s all good vs. evil, fire and brimstone stuff, he never assumes good faith on the part of those who disagree with him, and has never seen a bridge he didn’t want to burn.
This post gives the impression to the reader that RMS had put his ego first and then rationalized it with fsf philosophy.From what i had read online he was pissed off when the printer manufacturer at MIT stopped sharing the source code to modify the software and he has formed(or thought about it and discovered) his philosophical leanings at that time. Very soon symbolics was formed developing closed source software and he was invited to it. But he believed strongly in his philosophy and was working hard to keep the free software up to date which symbolics was developing. Also the symbolics engineer had told in one of the interviews they were 5 people and RMS single handedly was keeping up with them. So the conclusion i had was he was 5x capable to the symbolics engineers (who are very smart people) and if he was that capable he could have become rich easily, but due to his strong philosophical belief he sacrificed his life for the greater good. If you have the links to the contrary please share.
Based on mailing lists I read, some of those 5 people who RMS single handedly was keeping up with were kind of pissed off about that framing a long after. Kind of ... disagreed. He did not done the same amount of work as them, meaning work on other projects, prototyping, design work etc, through it is true that he could more or less copy functionality of the thing plus minus bugs. Designing it and trying out various ways how to do the thing takes more time then copying the project. I am fully confident in that, because I was porting a couple of projects in the past so I know how much time is saved.
Aside everything else, self-glorifying stories about heroic saviors who are single so much better then second smartest person in a room should be treated with suspicion - and it is completely puzzling to me that some people are believed them so easily. Because really, for me to believe in that much of an unusual hero, I would like to have confirmations from other primary sources then just said hero and people who worship him. (That is not to say that he is incapable on the other extreme, absolutely not. But you can be extremely good and still not the god this story is about.)
> I would like to have confirmations from other primary sources then just said hero and people who worship him.
Sure, I'll bite. This is a passage about Stallman's performance in Harvard's Math 55, which has a reputation as the hardest single undergraduate math course in the US:
To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess, and the other SHP alumni had to get through Math 55. Promising four years worth of math in two semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. "It was an amazing class," says David Harbater, a former "math mafia" member and now a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the differential geometry of Banach manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug out, because most people don't start talking about Banach manifolds until their second year of graduate school."
Starting with 75 students, the class quickly melted down to 20 by the end of the second semester. Of that 20, says Harbater, "only 10 really knew what they were doing." Of that 10, 8 would go on to become future mathematics professors, 1 would go on to teach physics.
"The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman."
Seth Breidbart, a fellow Math 55 classmate, remembers Stallman distinguishing himself from his peers even then.
"He was a stickler in some very strange ways," says Breidbart. There is a standard technique in math which everybody does wrong. It's an abuse of notation where you have to define a function for something and what you do is you define a function and then you prove that it's well defined. Except the first time he did and presented it, he defined a relation and proved that it's a function. It's the exact same proof, but he used the correct terminology, which no one else did. That's just the way he was."
It was in Math 55 that Richard Stallman began to cultivate a reputation for brilliance. Breidbart agrees, but Chess, whose competitive streak refused to yield, says the realization that Stallman might be the best mathematician in the class didn't set in until the next year. "It was during a class on Real Analysis, which I took with Richard the next year," says Chess, now a math professor at Hunter College. "I actually remember in a proof about complex valued measures that Richard came up with an idea that was basically a metaphor from the calculus of variations. It was the first time I ever saw somebody solve a problem in a brilliantly original way."
Chess makes no bones about it: watching Stallman's solution unfold on the chalkboard was a devastating blow. As a kid who'd always taken pride in being the smartest mathematician the room, it was like catching a glimpse of his own mortality. Years later, as Chess slowly came to accept the professional rank of a good-but-not-great mathematician, he had Stallman's sophomore-year proof to look back on as a taunting early indicator.
"That's the thing about mathematics," says Chess. "You don't have to be a first-rank mathematician to recognize first-rate mathematical talent. I could tell I was up there, but I could also tell I wasn't at the first rank. If Richard had chosen to be a mathematician, he would have been a first-rank mathematician."
None of it proves that he did the work of five people nor that those people were unfairly stolen from his lab. It shows he is great at math through. The original claim is that he single handedly did work of those 5 "very smart" people. Especially when main point in dispute is whether what he did was equivalent amount of work and which software had more bugs.
This does not even directly implies he is a good programmer (he is actually good programmer in reality, but high level math skills don't prove it).
The following exert is from the https://archive.org/stream/faif-2.0/faif-2.0_djvu.txt. If you read above this paragraph its clear stallman did not for the purpose of his ego choose the ideology. Its the other way.
<BEGIN>
Already renowned for his work with Emacs, Stallman's
ability to match the output of an entire team of Symbolics program-
mers - a team that included more than a few legendary hackers itself
- still stands as one of the major human accomplishments of the In-
formation Age, or of any age for that matter. Dubbing it a "master
hack" and Stallman himself a "virtual John Henry of computer code,"
author Steven Levy notes that many of his Symbolics-employed rivals
had no choice but to pay their idealistic former comrade grudging re-
spect. Levy quotes Bill Gosper, a hacker who eventually went to work
for Symbolics in the company's Palo Alto office, expressing amazement
over Stallman's output during this period:
I can see something Stallman wrote, and I might decide it
was bad (probably not, but somebody could convince me
it was bad), and I would still say, "But wait a minute -
Stallman doesn't have anybody to argue with all night over
there. He's working alone! It's incredible anyone could do
this alone!" 16
<END>
It doesn't, of course. But the "point" of the GP is Hero Worship: to mark someone as so brilliant, so beyond the common man, in one singular dimension that all other dimensions are rendered absolutely irrelevant.
"This person is a hero! This person can do no wrong!" is the common cry of those who'd rather live in fantasy than reality.
"The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" is a book that's good at explaining that. It has changed how I observe other people's strongly held opinions online.
