On Thursday 02 September 2010 08:10 AM, Raj Mathur (राज माथुर) wrote:
On Thursday 02 Sep 2010, Naveen Dhanuka wrote:
My take from his speech is that I see him as the silent soldier who has been defeated in the battle and the war and has not given up and is telling at every possible and permissible place what ETHICS and SACRIFICE and BLOOD& SWEAT that has gone into make solid engineering and given for free as free speech and not free bear.
The word is free beer not free bear. A bear is a huge grizzly growly animal that is not fun to have around even if given free of cost.
That's a pretty sweeping statement to make, isn't it?
In my opinion, RMS is one of the most important figures in the field of computing, right up there with Turing and Tim Berners-Lee. If it weren't for him computing as we know it wouldn't have existed. And the Internet would have remained a small academic network connecting a few thousand universities. In fact, we wouldn't have been having this conversation at all.
With due respect to his efforts, from the evolution point of view, if he had not done it, someone else would have done it. Computers have not depended on one person to evolve. Having said that, I feel it is wrong to call him a defeated soldier as Naveen put it. He is the Amitabh Bachan of the software world and he had his glory days of innovation and development. Now he's old so cannot be expected to churn out code every day. People do retire. The new generation will now take over from him. Those who have met Amitabh and heard him speak may not be keen on meeting him again but there are many who would like to see him, meet him, talk to him so the announcement is for those individuals.