... the road to July!

23 February, 2004

Face-to-Face with R.M. Stallman

Much early I read “How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is”. And only lifetime examples substantiate such sayings, making them believable forever. Although interaction with this amazing “Human Professional” justified innumerable sayings but that’s just one part of it, a person whose every part is magnificent whether it be his fate or the way he’s been behind it.

>>A Historical day at CUSAT<<

Interaction with this Role Model was at times blowing, at times austere, other time funny and sometimes silly, when fistful learners had an opportunity to actualize a great noble vision. Session started with his introduction & certainly the politics dominating in the software industry, pronouncing consonants extremely clearly in a slow, soft, and steady voice, Talks forwarded with the discussion about his community members working at Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, US, the way they all enjoyed programming and fun at work. Their approach for naming new softwares was indeed unique! Which caught huge attention of the masses, happened to be a recursive acronym sending a recursive Message e.g. GNU (Gnu is Not Unix) .

Those 5 hours had a terrific impact on the mind and soul of everyone present. I had experienced such perspective for the first time and that indeed droved me to write something which I felt. For the first time I started thinking against the giant M (Microsoft). At such an age he seemed more enthusiastic than anyone of us present there. The vision and the courage that he depicted not only justified the realm of programming but the real essence of a programmer. I felt extremely great to be able to get the direct corroboration with one of the best programmers the world has been blessed with. My experiences with such a motivated hacker, living activist shallth remain living forever!

1 comment:

ali asgar said...

Finally here i m spending time commenting on ur post. ;)
The time when RMS came to CUSAT, LINUX was just catching up... and now its giving a serious backseat to M$.
RMS believes that, "Private life has quite simply been abolished when governments monitor the people you're talking to, where you're going and what you're reading". and as such His aim is not to "protect private life" but "human rights".
This is exactly wat we need to understand. Most ppl hav a fetish attitude towards some s/w giants who ensnare them & take away their freedom, leaving them handicapped.
It was really a substance of pride to have such a great freelancer (who rocked the world by introducing the concept of 'copyleft' ) in our campus.