He may have a high IQ but I wouldn't call him smart. If he was that smart people would be using his system instead of Gates and Jobs system. Gates and Jobs are smart, he's a loud mouth with a PhD. Listening to RMS talk about Windows and iOS is like listening to Tenenbaum lecture Torvalds on how monolithic kernels are a thing of the past.
His system fails to fundamentally solve problems people actually have. I'm sure RMS's systems perfectly solve RMSs problems, and that's great if you're a self-centered pretentious asshole focused solely on your own needs. Unfortunately, if you're a regular joe with average needs his system doesn't solve very many of your problems. Gates and Jobs wisely recognized that catering to the needs of others is actually better for society than focusing solely on one's own needs.
Software freedom for the vast majority of people is having their spreadsheet save them hours of manual calculations so they can catch their kids ballet recital.
Freedom is a tradeoff, that's why we don't live in a society ruled by natural law.
>His system fails to fundamentally solve problems people actually have.
RMS has spent most of his life trying to solve problems which I have, fundamentally. Problems which most all of us have.
There is of course something to be said for usability and the "regular joe," as you say, but Stallman's intentions have always been entirely moral. He really does believe he is acting in your best interest. (Which most people aren't. I'm certainly not.)
I don't know, GNU is fantastic, and one of my main issues with Linux is that it has so many binary blobs and non-free software that are required for it to run on most machines.
And as far as what "most people need", "most people" would do fine with a copy of LibreOffice and Firefox running on Ubuntu or whatnot.
Yeah thats most of my issues with Linux mostly binary blobs and not the fact that my laptop won't wake up from sleep, I have to screw around everytime I plug in a projector. LibreOffice works great as long as I don't have to open any Word docs that use change tracking, or spreadsheets that involve calculations, or god forbid a powerpoint with anything but rudimentary graphics.
It's a panacea I don't know why anyone would waste 2 billable hours on paying money to avoid the embarrassment of having to fuck around with your operating system for 15 minutes while you attempt to make a presentation. It's not 1994 anymore, people expect computers to work and it reflects poorly when they don't. And what am I saving this $300 for? For the privilege of being able add the code that should have been there in the first place.
Stallman's GNU quest began in response to a binary blob printer driver that he had no option but to suffer under, because it was closed source.
The issues you describe are attributable to what's between the keyboard and the chair. Try getting a standard mac to work with the majority of projectors, without any adapters. The LibreOffice issues you are having are due to an arms race where Microsoft break compatibility with their previous formats each release. You have to learn to use the computer you have properly or you will embarrass yourself with it. This is true for all operating systems. Not everything is going to work exactly as you suspect, at least you're in a position to do something about it on your own linux machine. That's never going to be the case with the competition.
Give it another 100 years, whose software is still going to be around, Stallman's, Jobs' or Gates'? It's not as feature complete, but it has greater longevity.
fglrx's xrandr support kind of works, but is shaky with the virtual size set to a minimum and if not set high manually needs to restart X every time one wants to set a higher resolution on a secondary screen.
The open source radeon driver on the other hand has beautifully working xrandr support.
Nvidia's blob... Well, the proprietary twinview doesn't support rotating single screens and when I watch videos of presentations I see mostly people trying to get nvidia-settings to set the correct resolution on the projector.
The microsoft documents you speak of, are these in the proprietary, undocumented, closed formats or the new, questionably standardized, overly complex, formats?
I personally think that it is microsoft's intention that you need to buy their product to be fully "compatible" with their document format and that's what they get.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_...
I don't know about you but the presentations I see around here in the university are mostly with open source intel drivers (which I have not seen failing in that regard yet) and a PDF viewer showing the presentation made with the latex beamer class. I fortunately don't have to give many presentations but for some I do have used LibreOffice Impress and I was quite satisfied. Sure, it was quite buggy some time ago but it has improved much.
I fail to imagine how I would spend 15 minutes "fucking around with my operating system".
I simply "ctrl+r" the relevant xrandr command from my shell history (something like "xrandr --output LVDS --preferred --output HDMI-0 --preferred --right-of LVDS --rotate normal") - if you don't like the command line, just use a simple gui like arandr - and start the presentation. That takes a few seconds... Maybe you can elaborate?
What are you saving $300 for? Try listening to a presentation from Richard Stallman. You may have heard of him... He speaks about that topic.
I do not understand your need to call him an self-centered pretentious asshole. I think these kind of needless qualifications only reflect back on you and add nothing whatsoever to the discussion. If the very mentioning of RMS put you so much in rage that you cannot even spell Tanenbaum correctly, what exactly do you want to communicate? fleitz is lecturing RMS exactly on what?
Without the efforts of the GNU people the world would be a place of much less choice and freedom in computing. That the majority of people is served better by a spreadsheet is a non-sequitur. The world is probably even served better by something else than software.
His system fails to fundamentally solve problems people actually have. I'm sure RMS's systems perfectly solve RMSs problems, and that's great if you're a self-centered pretentious asshole focused solely on your own needs. Unfortunately, if you're a regular joe with average needs his system doesn't solve very many of your problems. Gates and Jobs wisely recognized that catering to the needs of others is actually better for society than focusing solely on one's own needs.
Software freedom for the vast majority of people is having their spreadsheet save them hours of manual calculations so they can catch their kids ballet recital.
Freedom is a tradeoff, that's why we don't live in a society ruled by natural law.