Fabulous stuff. I wonder how often he has/gets to hang out with random parrots since this document became widely known. In my mind he is surrounded constantly by sandal-wearing acolytes wielding exotic birds of every variety.
I'm hardly a fan of RMS, but if you want him to speak, it's on you to meet these rules. It's what I call "autistic-friendly": print up this list, check off each and every item, and you don't have to worry about anything else.
He has codified his behavior expectations. If someone didn't know RMS was particular, they weren't paying attention.
I think it's more brutal honesty, than anything. As an engineer and a disliker-of-politicians, I appreciate it, even though I agree it can easily be seen as egotistical or eccentric. When I have hosted guests, I have really wished I had such a clear "opeating manual" (as others in this thread have called it) for them, so I know how I can make them feel comfortable and make their trip most effective.
> The RMS rider is full of lecturing and childish demands.
They are no more demands than a request for him to speak somewhere is a demand.
Someone asks if he is willing to travel and speak to their audience, he says "yes though only if these conditions are met", and the someone then has a free choice of whether to continue or not.
A childish demand would be "we can't agree to X, but we expect you to come and talk anyway".
If you have previously done streaming using some streaming service and you can't immediately name the format it uses, chances are it is unacceptable and I won't let you use it for my speech.
..This might seem unfair--if a ticket is lost, it could be my fault. But my income is not large, and I cannot afford to assume this risk myself if the event offers me no income. The frustration I feel when I suffer such a loss is excruciating. It is better for me to decline to travel to a certain place than to take such a risk.
..DON'T make a hotel reservation until we have fully explored other options. If there is anyone who wants to offer a spare couch, I would much rather stay there than in a hotel (provided I have a door I can close, in order to have some privacy)... ... If you have found a person for me to stay with, please forward this section and the two following sections to that person.
..find out what temperature it can actually lower a room to, during the relevant
dates ..I like cats if they are friendly. ..Dogs that bark angrily and/or jump up on me frighten me .. .. find a host for me that has a friendly parrot.. ..DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many decades feeling..
I do NOT use browsers, I use the SSH protocol.. .. If a hotel says "We have internet access.. .. What parameters does the user need to specify in order to talk with it?… … Don't rely on information from such a person--talk to someone who knows! .. their phone switchboard may not recognize the tones produced by modems..
When you need to tell me about a problem in a plan, please do not start with a long apology. That is unbearably boring. …If I am typing on my computer and it is time to do something else, please tell me. Don't wait for me to "finish working" first, because you would wait forever. I have to squeeze in answering mail at every possible opportunity, which includes whenever I have to wait. I wait by working. If instead of telling me there is no more need for me to wait, you wait for me to stop waiting for you, we will both wait forever -- or until I figure out what's happening. … Please don't try to pressure me to "relax" instead, and fall behind on
my work
I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about ..what I will do breakfast. ..Please just do not bring it up .. If there is a chance to see folk dancing… … If you want to give me data about airplane tickets, please send that info as plain ASCII text
You know, I just read this again. I first read it in a ridiculing context (“Parrots? Really?”) and didn’t think much to put it out of that context, but looking at it now I have to say my view on it has changed.
I think it’s pretty alright, actually.
Some of his demands have to do with his strong ethical views on software, and while I don’t agree completely with him on this, I certainly can respect him for being uncompromising on that.
He frequently emphasises the need to communicate. Decisions that affect both him and the host have to be decided together. He also shows quite some willingness to find alternate solutions if his preferred solution is somehow not possible, but emphasises the need to communicate about those changes.
All the rest may be slightly quirky, but it’s all not especially hard to do with some care and attention. Hey, he doesn’t even want super-accomodating hospitality.
(Also, hotel internet is the worst. Good on him for insisting that be properly checked. He needs it to work, after all.)
Some of his demands have to do with his strong ethical views on software, and while I don’t agree completely with him on this, I certainly can respect him for being uncompromising on that.
If you're going to host a talk from RMS, I'd presume you'd be aware that he has strong ethical views. I mean, that's one of the main reasons to get him to talk!
Agreed. It might be quirky, but I many of the things he lists here must be things he has experienced (like people buying parrots because they heard he likes parrots) and doesn't want happening again.
It feels to me that you can't account for someone who would do something as ill considered as buying a parrot just because someone coming to stay with them for a couple of nights likes parrots.
The eccentricity or outlandishness is not in the actual content of the requests. He doesn't request anything expensive or difficult.
It's in expecting everyone involved to thoroughly read the 10,000 man page and make sure they follow everything. So, instead of calling up the hotel you always use, Lucy from event planning is presumably expected to test SSH on the hotel network and question the staff about air conditioning systems.
I think we have to differentiate between two things: structure and writing on the one hand, demands and requirements on the other hand.
You probably won’t find many people who wouldn’t agree that the writing could be significantly tidied up (mostly to remove all the explanations and reasons – it’s ok to just have a list of demands and requirements without always explaining why something is this way or that way) and the document could be better structured.
However, the demands, while quirky, don’t seem to unreasonable to me.
(Easily) arguably brilliant, important and (undeniably) quirky symbol of an interesting cultural and technological movement stays at your house for a day or two. Sends your wife a 14 page instruction manual for hosting him (enjoys parrots). Wears a hippy robe. Gets philosophically cranky at your kid's gameboy. Teaches your 9 year old daughter to emacs for email. Pulls out a creaky old laptop out at the dinner table. Your daughter now uses the web by emailing some program that fetches the relevant pages and emails them back. She installs GNU/Linux on her brother's gameboy. He cries.
Sounds like good story potential. Sheets are cheap.
Please don't be surprised if I pull out my computer at dinner and begin handling some of my email. I have difficulty hearing when there is noise; at dinner, when people are speaking to each other, I usually cannot hear their words. Rather than feel bored, or impose on everyone by asking them to speak slowly at me, I do some work.
Wow, I would find that really weird. I hope everyone at his dinners get to read that notice beforehand.
I have a similar problem with distinguishing speech from background noise - makes pubs / clubs / places with background music a nightmare for having conversations (and hence I tend towards the solitary these days since people tend towards those places for meeting.)
This happens to me as well. I've wondered for years if there is actually something wrong, or if I'm somehow just worse than most people at picking one stream of words from high background noise environments.
FWIW, my hearing is excellent, and I have a headphone hobby. I definitely notice small details in music. I almost always wear earplugs at clubs / loud environments, and in general loud sounds seem to bother me a bit more than others, while my tolerance for extremely loud sounds is low (permanent hearing damage etc).
I have the same problem. My hearing is also excellent. I have worked out what the problem is, though. The truth is, nobody can hear everything in a place like that. But other people can fill in gaps in speech, possibly from other signals like watching the face, but I think mainly from a conversation model in their brain. For some reason I either lack the model, or it's just not trained properly (more likely tbh), so I have to hear everything to understand.
Oh, my hearing is definitely not excellent after many years of gigs/clubs without earplugs. It's not bad - I can hear a ticking clock from many rooms away if I'm trying to sleep - I just think it's been confused and now doesn't really cope with extracting human speech frequencies from the melange of a noisy environment.
These don't seem crazy at all in the context of someone with particular tastes arranging their life in their own home.
RMS has been travelling and giving talks for decades, and is most likely thoroughly fed up with it. If he's making the effort to travel to give an unpaid talk, he wants the organisers to make sure the experience is not much more frustrating than just staying at home.
I've said it before and will say it again, this is not a crazy rider. I've been organizing fairly large bands and their riders have been similar in "craziness" if you will.
It would be interesting to read the stories or incidents that caused all these clauses to be added. Imagine the parrot clause, what tripped this off to be added?
"A supply of tea with milk and sugar would be nice. If it is tea I
really like, I like it without milk and sugar. With milk and sugar,
any kind of tea is fine. I always bring tea bags with me, so if we
use my tea bags, I will certainly like that tea without milk or sugar.
If I am quite sleepy, I would like two cans or small bottles of
non-diet Pepsi. (I dislike the taste of coke, and of all diet soda;
also, there is an international boycott of the Coca Cola company for
killing union organizers in Colombia and Guatemala; see
killercoke.org.) However, if I am not very sleepy, I won't want
Pepsi, because it is better if I don't drink so much sugar."
This isn't eccentric, it's poor communications though.
It could basically be summarised as:
"Please provide tea making facilities: tea bags, milk, sugar and hot water. If possible a couple of cans of Pepsi (not diet or other brands please) would be appreciated."
Really, the person organising the speech doesn't really care how someone takes their tea or why they don't like Pepsi or what the conditions (which are totally out of their hands) are which will mean you do or don't choose to drink one drink over another. Given that he says he carries his own tea bags (and if he's using them he wouldn't want milk or sugar) the request could be: "Hot water and a cup for making tea - don't worry about providing tea bags, milk or sugar."
It's all quite sweet but really, the excess guff and explanations make it more likely someone will miss something.
I would wager that you'd end up being handed a can of Coke at good proportion of the time.
"Oh sorry, they don't serve Pepsi here."
Richard Stallman's way makes it clear that he does not want to support Coke. He does not want you to hand him a Coke by mistake. Since I assume that is his goal, he communicated it well.
His story helps you to notice, and remember, this seemingly trivial detail.
I'm confused why you think him saying "I only want Pepsi" is in any way clearer than my saying "I only want Pepsi".
EDIT: Make it clearer by saying "Pepsi (absolutely not Coke or any other brand)" by all means but the person buying the drink wants to make sure you get what you want and then get on with their lives, they're really not interested in the why.
It feels to me that Stallman wants to use this - as with most of what he does - as something of a polemic about what he believes. That's fine but it does make the whole document less clear about the actual detail of what he wants.
Stallman's "I want pepsi" reads more like "I specifically don't want Coke, and Pepsi is the most common alternative". With that information in hand, I'd probably suggest he try some of the more boutique cola brands that are available. Your "I only want Pepsi" reads like "I specifically want Pepsi", without accounting for regional flavour differences, etc.
I wouldn't supply anything other than Pepsi for fear of needing to know the history and practices of the local company that makes the soda I thought would be a fun surprise for rms.
You know that an instruction can be short, unambiguous, accompanied by best designed clear easy to understand diagram / logo, and that someone will ignore it and do something terrible.
"A few cans of Pepsi (NOT COCA COLA (http://example.com) and not any diet product please)" does have the advantage of being more check-list like, allowing people to hghlight / crossout the items they've done or not done yet.
The post-mortem of a kickstarter posted to HN yesterday, where someone managed to print and deliver a poster with a misspelling of the word "BROOKLYN" as "BROOKLYIN" has made me think about how people find and prevent errors.
HN isn't a good audience to ask that question because there are different ways to write code. There is only one way to write BROOKLYN.
While semantically your suggestion may seem equivalent to his, there's a big difference between saying "My cola of choice is Pepsi" and "I equate Coca Cola with murder".
I totally agree. Look at his bit about parrots (part of a larger bit about pets):
>DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many decades feeling..
This right here is why I can't stand RMS. He's putting together a rider for all his (borderline unreasonable) demands when he speaks. And even when he's adding irrelevant things, he still manages to be a condescending know-it-all who has to tell you why your decisions are wrong, and why the way he thinks is the correct way to see things.
I don't know why you have to read that clause that way. I thought it was amusing, (though it appears he wasn't amused) the only reason he would have put that clause in there is because someone actually bought a parrot because they thought he would like it. I imagine it probably didn't happen in the US, but in a country where parrots don't cost as much as a month's wages.
Tea needs to be made with _boiling_ not boiled water. The amount of places that present you with a cup of warm water and expect you to put a tea-bag into it, is upsetting*.
To be fair to him an apology and an explanation are different things.
He's basically giving his reasoning which under some circumstances is fine but on matters of beverages feels to me at least to be something you should file under unnecessary detail.
I guess it depends what he's trying to achieve with the document. As an aid to hosting Richard Stallman, it's too wordy. As a combination pollemic / Richard Stallman FAQ (though with some of these things frequently would seem to be stretching it) it's probably fine.
So you have to buy him pepsi but might be stuck with some undrunk pepsi afterward. Also, does he really want cans or small bottles over the more economical large bottle and a glass?
(Yes, I'm currently imagining wat it'd be like to have him over. I think we'd get along fine on the tea thing, but I hate unnecessary waste.)
Less economical — paying $2 for a small pepsi fully drunk is better value than paying $3 for one twice the size, if half is left undrunk (wasted). I like it almost as much as, "anyone who wants to offer a spare couch, I would much rather stay there than in a hotel" — keep it simple, don't waste, operate efficiently and without friction.
Yeah, but it's two pepsis. Then I think a single large one becomes more economical. Less bottle too. And I can return the large bottle but not the small ones.
https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developer...
Fabulous stuff. I wonder how often he has/gets to hang out with random parrots since this document became widely known. In my mind he is surrounded constantly by sandal-wearing acolytes wielding exotic birds of every variety.