It’s not just the free software song, but that every interaction with the man is like playing Simon Says with a malicious 6 year old.
I remember once, many years ago, a friend of mine logged in to RMS’s account to show me some funny things (RMS used to be anti-password, and so when they forced him to use a password, he chose an easy one and told everyone about it, so I don’t think he’d view this as illicit). The thing that impressed me the most was his huge collection of emacs abbrevs.
I guess RMS got a lot of mail from people wanting to discuss things with him. So he had this gargantuan list of abbreviations to use in his email responses. So, for example — and I’m making up the exact words here, but I’m keeping the spirit true — someone might send him mail saying “But shouldn’t developers be compensated for their efforts?” and he could reply by typing “compensation” and that would insert into the email the paragraph “If we eliminate copyright as a means of encouraging people to develop software, at first less software will be developed, but that software will be more useful. It is not clear whether the overall delivered user satisfaction will be less; but if it is, or if we wish to increase it anyway, there are other ways to encourage development, just as there are ways besides toll booths to raise money for streets.”
My friend showed me an email message RMS had sent him. Sure enough, it was nearly all straight out of his abbrevs file.
I guess one could view this as a clever time-saving device by someone who received hundreds of email messages daily and who wanted to answer them all. And yet, over the years, I’ve grown to view it as somehow disrespectful, as a sign of someone for whom communication was a one way street, facing outward.
I was reminded of this topic by jvm’s recent news item about RMS’s views on console games over at Curmudgeon Gamer. Be sure to read the comments. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.
Actually, I wrote that piece. I’m jvm (Matt) and Jeremy is a commenter on CG. :^)
Whoops! I erroneously expanded the “j” in jvm to Jeremy in my head. Thanks for the correction. I’ve updated the reference accordingly.
I think that there’s a distinct possibility that RMS has crafted something akin to Eliza for replying to the vast majority of his email. ISTR that somewhere he stated he was unable to continue being the lead programmer on Emacs et al. due to wrist injuries that made it painful to type, but on the whole I would say that the possibility of RMS being replaced by a few thousand lines of elisp just reinforces your hypothesis.
Plus we can now say that he would fail a Turing Test.
http://www.43folders.com/2005/02/15/five-fast-email-productivity-tips/
While using mail templates sounds impersonal, there’s no reason for it to be such. Having mail templates is a great way to handle similar requests. It’s worth noting that just because you use a template doesn’t mean you hit send without customizing it.
That’s the worst game of Simon Says I’ve ever seen!
The issue is not that he uses some kind of template to reply-it’s that his use of them makes you feel that he didn’t even bother to read your message. I’ve interacted with RMS before, and believe me that the snippet above is *not* an exaggeration (the “nowin” bit.) And the real trouble is that you might send email in which there is some trivial not-at-all-relevant side-mention of Windows, get that as part of the reply, get the “Emacs, not GNU Emacs” rant as another part of it, and get no answer to the question you were actually asking. (In fact, you’d get the distinct impression that the question hadn’t ever been read.)
Around the fourth or fifth email, you start to feel like the important point is being intentionally evaded. Surely, nobody could engage in an exchange of such email without understanding them. Therefore, he must be intentionally dodging the issue.
Except that, well, as far as I can tell, he never was intentionally avoiding answering my question. He was just either failing to read a thing that I’d said except for a few keywords that would set him off, or he was completely incapable of reading the English language.
Personally, I’d rather get an obviously canned blow-off response of “I’m too busy to exchange email with people personally” than receive that kind of crap.
It all makes more sense once you take into account the key insight: hexapodia.
No, wait. The key insight is that _Stallman died in 1993_.
I can tell you from experience, communicating with Steve Forbes about the flat tax in comparison with Sweden’s two-bracket (0%/57%, cut-off at 10% above the median wage) system is no better. The only difference is that Steve Forbes doesn’t customize his entire book before sending it off.