On Monday 14 August 2006 21:16, Baishampayan Ghose wrote:
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.
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.
Cheers.