Richard Stallman represents everything that’s wrong with IT’s image in the larger business world. The things he says are often insightful and informative, but his legendary lack of anything resembling people skills makes me want to plug my ears and denounce him as a crazy old nerd–and I’m not the only one.
As a result, he does more harm than good. Need an example? How about his condemnation of cloud computing, which he says will lead to “loss of control of data.” He has a perfectly valid point: as the linked article points out, users of Amazon’s cloud service had Wikileaks information deleted without warning or recourse because the provider decided it violated their terms of service. Believe me, the ownership of cloud-hosted content and the associated legal issues are going to be hot-button topics in the coming months and years, and businesses concerned with proprietary material are going to be watching and waiting with bated breath…to say nothing of journalists, musicians, artists and regular folks concerned with Google using their photos of Aunt Jane as advertising fodder.
But Stallman takes those legitimate concerns and wraps them in a layer of long-haired anti-social neo-hippie crazy that makes the rest of us shrug him off as just another loon. You want to take up a contrarian position simply because you don’t want to be associated with the guy.
I mean, he’s discouraging people from using the LOIC program against companies suppressing the Wikileaks info–but not because it’s illegal, immoral and does damage to the case of those supporting free speech online. No. He doesn’t like it because “it’s not open-source.”
Stallman just needs to stop.