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On 08/14/2006 09:58 PM, Mrugesh Karnik cobbled together some glyphs to say:
Note - I am not waging a flame war here. I am only trying to clear some confusions.
Ask yourself this small question --- ``What is the minimum amount of knowledge you can expect from a member of a GNU/Linux Users' Group mailing list?''
Lack of knowledge is not a crime. He at least asked the question. Asking questions and having them answered is the most basic way of getting knowledge. For someone who's a newbie in the FOSS world and from an Electronics background, RMS could simply mean Root Mean Square.
I agree, it's not a _crime_, and that's why there was no trial, and he was not banned from this list. Tell me what would you tell somebody who asks something extremely fundamental like ``what is a computer?'' here on this list? Not relevant you say? I say it _is_ relevant here. rms is not just some foobar bearded fellow. If you are doing FLOSS, you are supposed to know about him. Remember, I didn't flame that person, I didn't call him an idiot or something similar, I just gently indicated that he was expected to either know that already or should've searched the Internet for `rms', that's it.
It's not really about losing or winning a war. It's about knowing _why_ we are here today. No more, no less. Let me paraphrase Eben Moglen in this --- ``People who don't know the _why_ will hardly ever understand the _how_''. That's exactly what I can see happening. People just _love_ to shout about ``Linux'' and the greatness of ``Open Source'' but fail to understand something as fundamental as ``Freedom''. Trust me, it's not just about the software, it's about the whole society. No matter how many ``Linux'' users are there in this world or how many companies support ``Open Source'', the whole Free Software revolution will remain a failure as long as we don't understand what Freedom is.
OK, fair enough. Only, I fail to see the relevance. For all we know, he might understand all that, but he may not know how it started. Does it really matter? Again, he asked the question, which is a good thing. It isn't a dumb question. I got confused the first time I heard 'RMS' simply because I didn't know his middle name starts from M. I still don't know what M stands for. Should I know? After all, it /could/ be his father's name and maybe its essential that we learn the background to RMS before we really can understand what he's doing/saying...
I could get much more philosophical and hypothetical about this, but it isn't needed.
And why isn't it relevant here? How can somebody understand Newton's Laws of Motion without ever hearing about Sir Isaac Newton? rms is arguably one of the most famous and oldest surviving on-line handles a person has ever had. It started in the age of the Arpanet with RMS@MIT-MC.ARPA and is now rms@gnu.org. If you are even remotely interested in GNU/Linux, you _should_ know about GNU, the GNU Project and rms! I don't say that you need to know that the `m' in `rms' is Matthew, but you should at least have heard about Richard Stallman. After all, it's not everyday that we get to know a person like him isn't it?
Regards, BG
- -- Baishampayan Ghose b.ghose@ubuntu.com Ubuntu -- Linux for Human Beings http://www.ubuntu.com/
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