the idea was that you had to take a 5x pay cut to do interesting work in a good environment with smart people. it's interesting that it has reduced to a 2x paycut.
im skeptical that any amount of damage bill gates might have done to technology is outweighed by millions of vaccines and thousands of schools in developing countries.
> Paul Graham has a philosophy degree and most of his wealth came from people skills: convincing Blackwell and Morris to hack for him, and later convincing young engineers to hack for him.
id think having a deep enough knowledge on lisp to fill two books probably had something to do with it as well.
you cant call someone like RMS extreme just because his views are REALLY DIFFERENT. there is a lot of room on the spectrum between expressing your views non violently and actually forcing them onto people.
I can't read your mind so I don't know if this applies to you, omlette, but I read a lot of similar comments and they come off as trying to be politically correct. Yes, very different views and extremism are different but there's a fine line. Should we say terrorists (even excluding the suicide bombing types and leaving only the hostage taking ones) aren't extremist but just expressing very different views? No.
RMS can be called an extremist because he refuses to accept that the opposing views have any merit when they clearly do (see some of my other comments on this post for examples, my apologies for hanging around this thread so long haha).
Just because the guy isn't holding college auditoriums full of undergrads hostage in exchange for GNU/Linux being installed on all campus computers doesn't mean he isn't an extremist. The FOSS movement, while stirring up a fair amount of debate and heated views, doesn't lend itself very well to suicide bombing, hostage taking, or any other type of violence. Maybe a little protesting but that's all. Even so, it doesn't mean he's not an extremist.
It's all about that fine line between strongly held belief and extremism. Peaceful protest doesn't equal not being an extremist.
Please don't pull out dictionary definitions of extremism to counter my point. I'm not saying black is white and white is red, I think I'm being pretty reasonable here.
There's also a lot of people on the "well, x idea used to be considered extreme" bandwagon. I'd say to you that different isn't always better. Communism, socialism, feudalism, and others used to be considered extreme... And different too. Turns out all the naysayers were right! Those things unfortunately were tried and they all bombed out with everyone involved surely wishing they'd never been tried to start with. I'm not saying, at least not in this sentence and the next, that Stallman is wrong. What I'm saying is consider the possibility - really think about it. If you can do that then at least people like me can't call you am extremist.
ok, maybe he fits some form of extremism, but labeling him as such still isn't enough to dismiss him. William Lloyd Garrison was called that, and so was Joeseph McCarthy. it doesnt really mean anything and it clouds the discussion.
