I'm not sure this really stands up. If a person is lacking an understanding of basic principles whose comprehension is vital to the comprehension of the principle you are trying to teach, you have to first instill within them an understanding of the lacking basic principles. Of course a person must find some merit in your advice if you expect them to follow it in any meaningful way -- sometimes this merit can come from credentials, but when the advisor is some guy you just met, or worse, a stranger on the internet, an appeal to credentials or authority isn't very effective. You must convince them by pure argument.

I recognize that there are times this can be very difficult or impossible if the advised individual is unwilling to "take a leap of faith" and just try a different way for a while, but if you don't have the authority that makes an individual believe your advice is worth following even if that individual can't personally see its benefits, then all you can do is hope to plant a seed.

I think it's a bit much to ask someone to follow your advice just because, which is essentially what you seem to be asking here.

Your reply doesn't actually contradict fingerprinter's. I agree with you that sometimes people just won't listen to anything they don't want to hear, and if you wish to have them consider your idea you have to let them come to the same conclusions you did organicly- that is, by planting a seed.

However, it's that personality type that fingerprinter was talking about. I don't think we should feel obligated to suffer through their pathology if we can reasonably avoid it. You can point out to people like this that they are as they are, and how it is holding them back (say, by costing them business or whatever), but in my experience they are dismissive of such discussions.

I think the open letter was a quite good attempt, and Stallman's response is quite telling. Note: I've never met Stallman.

> Note: I've never met Stallman.

I have, and he is one of the kindest, smartest, most reasonable people I have ever met. He's also funny and brutally honest.

I asked him (this was about 6 years ago at a LUG) if Microsoft had ever attempted to intimidate him, whether through lawsuits or other means, whether subtle or overt.

He paused for a second, and then simply said, "No. No intimidation of any kind."

This man is just an honest, straightforward Socratic kind of guy, not a point-scoring spin-meister.

I for one am overjoyed that he's remained a principled shaggy uber-hacker, resisting the never-ending suggestions that he become a palatable, bridge-building difference-splitter serving up a friendlier, diluted version of his message. Screw everything about that.

Perhaps "pathology" is too strong a word... But to your point, meeting someone isn't the same as knowing them. Did you get the chance to discuss, say, why the GPL license was too "contagious?" Let me say again I've neither met nor gotten to know Stallman, but let me share my experiences with this personality type, just for future reference.

I've gotten to know a few people who have the type of personality I describe. In particular, I have the infrequent occasion to enjoy the company of someone who also charming, funny, intelligent- all of the things that make for a great lunch or evening. However, you'll never change his mind about anything. When he makes up his mind he is absolutely convinced he is right and there is nothing he has overlooked.

And sometimes he just doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. He'll talk about how his doctor is full of shit because what the doctor said doesn't fit with his mental model that he built upon reading a couple of articles in a science magazine. Or how teachers ought to do "X" (he's never taught). Or how programming is "Y" (not a programmer). Or how the football coach should do "Z" (never played or coached). Backs everything up with solid-sounding, logical arguments. But he simply doesn't know enough facts to start with the right axioms.

Very smart. Very persuasive. Very creative. And often very wrong.

Interestingly, as long as their right/wrong ratio is high, they can make great leaders- at least in the beginning of a movement. Alot of people find comfort in their black and white world.

But they are very difficult to deal with as a peer or in an employee/employer capacity. Tireless, pointless arguments that end with "I'm not convinced..." because NOTHING will convince them. They think they have the right axioms. Again, "pathology" may be too strong, but it's certainly a personality type I avoid all but the most casual relationships with if I can help it.

I appreciate your post and the thoughtfulness behind it. I readily concede that the man is stubborn but it's just as often a virtue as a vice.

How can he be "wrong" though, about something that he created from scratch, founded and has kept going strong for all these years?

Also, why should he take our advice when we've obviously rejected his (in many cases)? Anyway, good post and thank you for it.

I'm not exactly commenting on RMS. It's a point of faith for me that all our strengths can become vices, and all our weakness transformed to virtues. Any of us can be still more ourselves with some reflection and humility. But how RMS might best go about that is beyond my knowing.

But let me speak to stubborn as virtue or vice.

I'm a huge beneficiary of open source / free software. That culture seems founded by people who are a little bit nuts. Who can say whether more or less pragmatism would have accelerated or killed the movement?

It seems to me that some of what he's saying is even more applicable today. I've only lately stuck my head into in corners of the startup culture, and maybe I'm in the wrong corners, but I'm shocked by how little technical proficiency I've found. A lot of the design and implementation seems rote, and I have to wonder if some popular frameworks risk mind capture the way Windows did in the early 90s. (Caveat: New kid! Haven't seen it all yet!) One aspect of "free" is the ability to truly design anew from an understanding of core principles, right? Even where issues of commercial trust and network privacy are solved there is still a problem with not-free, right? I think this could be a real challenge for a new generation.

But we're not likely to hear the RMS take on the above, because he isn't even looking at all this stuff. From a simple rhetorical standpoint, he's missing a chance to make a possibly important point to a whole new generation. And even if he did, he's such an avowed fanatic that anything he did say would now be dismissed as a twist on his zealotry, rather than an honest concern of a viewpoint sympathetic to the generation's viewpoint.

Now, is that a necessary consequence of his radicalism? Is such radicalism necessary for the communal formation of proper principles? Does every Abraham Lincoln pragmatist require a John Brown wild-eyed radical? That certainly seems like an unsatisfying outcome, and one that might be avoided with some creativity.

Interesting. Well, our heroes have flaws :) While an RMS 2.0 might be better, the RMS 1.0 still accomplished what he set out to do, and the man is still kicking.

I'll never forget when he was promoting a book, and needed to get more copies from the car. It was an absolute downpour. But he was not dissuaded and I just had to follow this man (decades older than me) out to his car. I was huffing and puffing trying to keep up with him. And while I was miserable in that cold summer rain, he didn't seem to mind it at all.

On another note (unrelated to your comments), it's not a healthy culture that dismisses its elders. Of course it's a hallmark of youth to have little real appreciation (or mere lip service) toward the founders / elders, but in the case of RMS, the youth are more conservative, and the elder is more principled and uncompromising :)

This reminds of myself. I find it helps to preface my grand theories with "of course, I've never done X / Y / Z." I generally find that my grand scheme overlooked some important rule or risk constraint, or that I'm hyper-focused on an edge case, or some such thing. I learn a lot from both forming strong opinions and figuring out why they're wrong.

Every now and then I can't find out why I'm wrong. I'm trying to learn how to make better use of those cases . . . .

> I agree with you that sometimes people just won't listen to anything they don't want to hear, and if you wish to have them consider your idea you have to let them come to the same conclusions you did organicly- that is, by planting a seed.

Aren't most people like that, at least to some extent? As I see it, everyone has a bullshit detector, through which all external communication is filtered. They have to have this, because it's not in one's interests to be fooled when one is lied to. But when a person generates ideas in their own mind, they aren't passed through the bullshit detector, they are just accepted.

But some people are more open to being proven wrong. There are some who don't mind being challenged so long as at the end of the day they are smarter than they were at the beginning. It doesn't mean that they aren't skeptical, but rather that they are willing to consider the advice of those who have a very different mental model of things.

I think the writer offered excellent advice.

Now, as I said I don't know Stallman, so maybe he responds to 10 of these per month and is just sick of it. But even then, that's not a cool response IMO. If he has defended this before, point to a link or something.

"I don't think we should feel obligated to suffer through their pathology"

Some people seem to like following these type of undoubting & uncompromising leaders.

In communication courses, I learned that a rule of feedback is that the receiver is allowed to refuse it, which actually makes sense as feedback is quite subjective. I don't know if that is specifically German (Wikipedia tends into that direction).

Still I agree with your and the original poster opinions. RMS should reflect a bit on that.

> "I'll take feedback if I think it's valid". On its face, a perfectly reasonable reply, even if antagonistic.

It's not so much antagonistic, as honest. No-one internalises feedback if in their heart of hearts they don't agree with it, although they might pretend to to appease their boss.

> No-one internalises feedback if in their heart of hearts they don't agree with it, although they might pretend to to appease their boss.

This is not true. One may accept feedback to try a different perspective than his own, which may be effective... or not.

RMS is a man with deep seated principles -- a radical. He has a vision that is well thought out and extreme by most people's standards. We need radicals as a society, people who see the world in black and white bring needed clarity to those of us who live in a world that consists of shades of grey.

Asking someone like Stallman to moderate his message displays a profound misunderstanding of who he is and what he stands for.

William F. Buckley, a man who was, politically, very different from Stallman, showed us that you can be a deeply radical and influential person without being childish or unreasonable. In fact, he was instrumental in kicking the nuts--Randists, Birchers, and so on--out of the movement he helped to found, neoconservativism.

Though I suspect most people here (me included) would mostly disagree with him, you have to admit things went pretty well for the neocons.

Asking someone like Stallman to not moderate his message through the collimator of reason shows a profound misunderstanding of how to stand for something and how to influence people. I hate the idea that you have to be a troll in order to make a point.

The point is that you don't ask a radical to moderate themselves and get a productive result -- it just isn't who they are.

Likewise, if Buckley were alive, you probably would not have been successful at getting him to become a cheerleader for the tea party mob.

The answer to the "out there"-ness of Stallman are the mainstream people and companies that make open source work in the real world. The answer to the maniacs on the opposite side of the argument -- organizations like RIAA and RightHaven, are the content owners who embrace creative commons or make art available at no cost.

Yes, his principles are internally consistent and well thought out. The problem is with his crackpot government conspiracy theories. By talking about that stuff publicly he's harming the truly important principles he stands for.

Out of curiosity, how did you take care of the attitude problem?

If it were me I would have said something like:

0: Before we start, I'd like to give you some feedback on what you just aid - is that ok? <if not then wait until later>

1: When you said "you'd take feedback as long as it was valid"... <use direct evidence of behavior>

2: ...it made me feel that you were not receptive to feedback, and that you would not be ready to change if I gave you feedback. <say how it made you, your colleagues, clients etc. feel>

3: pause <and wait for explanation, give clarification on behaviors but don't enter into squabble on whether it was right or wrong>

4: In future I'd suggest there are three things I've found that are good to do when someone wants to give feedback. Let's go through them: a: drop what you are doing and listen - they have taken the time to try to understand what you are doing and to help you to improve. b: listen to the feedback with an open mind, ask clarifying questions and have a proactive problem soling approach to solving the issue c: thank the person for the feedback at the end <think of a practical and doable solution, and don't be afraid to offer your help to the person.>

The whole process should take 5 minutes or less, and should focus on one specific behavior. Try not to do several feedbacks at once - there is only so much we can handle.

This is straight from the McKinsey playbook, and one of the reasons the firm has been so successful.

I see. It looks like an effective method.

Though I'd argue the problem isn't quite that he's not receptive. Maybe emphasize that feedback sometimes has to be done, even if it looks wrong to him.

My guess is s/he fired him/her.