While I find Stallman's vehemence somewhat off-putting, I also believe that his logic is very good, and he tends to do very fine analysis. People laugh at the whole "GNU/Linux" thing; in fact, there's a fairly sophisticated philosophical underpinning to that, and it goes beyond just "Linux is the Kernel, GNU is the rest of the operating system, and we want credit for that".

Stallman wrote a piece around the time that SCO started suing IBM for intellectual property violations. I wish that I could find the article, because it clarified for me what that philosophical distinction was, and although I don't remember the actual philosophical point, I remember realizing that I agree with Stallman more than I feel comfortable agreeing with Stallman, and I realized that there's a lot more going on in Stallman's head than appears at first blush. I think that I found at least one of the arguments that he used, albeit not the one about GNU/Linux:

Chew on that the next time that you hear 'Intellectual Property' or 'IP' thrown around in the news.

Stallman tends, in a metaphorical sense to yell and scream and jump up and down when people don't appreciate the subtle distinctions that he makes. The thing is, although the distinctions are subtle, they tend to be correct, and more often than not, more important than people give them credit for.

Smeezekitty:

in the statement

It's not the NULL that can't be understood. The statement, while perfectly functional C, doesn't map well to English:

"Richard_crazy_Stallmans_money" is a variable equal to a pointer that you shouldn't dereference?

or,

"Richard_crazy_Stallmans_money" is a generic pointer currently set to NULL.

It's a long way between there and "What does Richard Stallman live on?". I can't tell if "Richard_crazy_Stallmans_money" is trying to be a simile or a metaphor or a literary symbol, and I don't think that your use of NULL has the conotative power that you are implying.

It's nothing about Stallman's software views that I laugh at. It's not even his personality, which I can't learn much about because, as someone said, he's a man of mystery. It's his background and his current eccentric behavior. I don't respect the hacker subculture, and from what I have read of them, I suspect that they were too insular, and too full of themselves, to have any respect for the computing world outside their subculture. So companies wrote software, and decided they wanted to protect their profits by no longer sharing their source code. (Unless they actually didn't write it in the first place.) It was an outrage! Probably even "unethical" and "antisocial!" More recently, since I believe in free software (I'd better, if I use it), I'm hardly annoyed by what is sometimes perceived as intransigence from him; but I suspect that it's the college student/hacker subculture at work again, and am amused. He probably doesn't handle not getting his way very well. Because there's nothing wrong with being a middle-aged nerd, I find it barely worth mentioning that he sounds like one, but more of interest is that he also sounds like an overgrown college student who carries his hacker subculture bubble with him and tries his damnedest not to leave it.

Now, to be fair, here is what I like about him. While I suspect that the hackers were full of themselves, I have no evidence that Stallman is, because his being a man of mystery indicates he has no desire to exploit his notoriety, by either being a celebrity or by becoming an advocate for causes that are outside his field of expertise. I like his minimalism, although his acting like a vagrant went too far.

How often does Stallman give talks, if anyone knows? I looked on his website, but couldn't find any sort of calendar.

You don't necessarily need to be a (C) programmer to use Linux.

there still would have been free software without stallman.

Yeah, but you wouldn't have GCC, GDB, or Emacs...

or Linux ...

Yeah, everything (?) in our Linux distros is built with GCC. Whatever you think of Stallman, personality or philosophy wise, give him credit for what he's done. After all, none of us are perfect - no, not even me (99.999...% only).

I agree, as extreme as some of his ideas may be, and as much as some would disagree with them, he has done a lot for FLOSS. In fact, without him, things would be very different right now.

except the first linux kernel was built with CC on minix.
meaning CC would have developed further and there still would have been linux, just alot diferennt.

Easy: he's a trust-fund baby. California style.

I'm not quite so sure about this... sure, there are other people who can write compilers and gargantuan text editors, but it does take a fairly special kind of brain to turn software copyrights on their head. I would argue that the GPL is probably the most important thing that Stallman ever wrote.

Perhaps there would be a free software movement, but I suspect that it would not be as large, and would look a lot more like BSD, not least because the legal status of a lot of the source code would be much more in question.

Even if I'm able to understand the general meaning of a question like this one, reading replies got me confused: and now I can't really understand why a man is interested to know how Stallman get money to eat!! Is this a real question?

We are here not to judge people.. and even if most of these replies are playful, they can be offensive! Be careful, let God does what He must, if you believe in God.. If you don't, than believe in the man and trust and respect him .. just because I'm sure you want to be respected..

IMO.

Aha!--thank you, Sundialsvcs. That explains much.

Okay. ... I do not apologize for being curious about how Stallman makes a living, which appears to be what you are complaining about. I admit that I'm laughing at Stallman, but I would hardly say I'm morally judging him. I admit that I've morally judged the hacker subculture somewhat, but it's a set of values, not a person, so I'm not sure I've done anything un-Christian by judging it...