59

Richard Stallman Makes a Come Back in his first public appearance at an US event

The free software movement has been around for over four decades now. It started as a response to proprietary software licenses that restricted people from understanding, modifying, or sharing the programs they ran on their computers.

At the center of this movement is the Free Software Foundation (FSF), founded in 1985. It has been the organizational backbone for promoting software freedom, maintaining crucial free software licenses like the GPL, and supporting projects that respect user rights.

Dr. Richard Stallman has been at the forefront of this movement from day one, along with countless other people who joined up to make their collective vision a reality. If you want to hear from him directly, he's speaking at Georgia Tech on January 23.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] andioop@programming.dev 1 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Wasn't aware he ate from his feet specifically onstage.

Still not going to agree with you, sorry, as someone who does not agree with ridiculing people unless it's necessary. Of course, I'm not a perfect human being, I have probably unfairly ridiculed people, especially when angry and when pretty sure my target is someone that nobody will argue against me ridiculing. I'm just… as a person who desperately tried to avoid being "the weirdo" and still might fail at avoiding that nowadays? I'm pretty anti-"what a weirdo lmao," and want people left the fuck alone about their weird behaviors unless they are hurting people with the weird behavior; or they literally will not stop their actual harmful behaviors and ridiculing might have a slight chance to get through or erode the power they have to perform those bad behaviors consequence-free.

I can also admit that people probably do need some level of social judgment to not gross out the people around you, so the eating that onstage probably wasn't a great move (do not know what happened in context, I'm not very up to date on the whole drama of Richard Stallman). Now I know it was onstage and not some leaked information about his personal life, this does at least make sense as something people would make fun of, especially given I think most people, even the socially inept, would figure out not to do this by 6th grade.

Still probably going to dig in my heels on my belief that in this particular discussion bringing this up after "this guy has dangerous/regressive beliefs" feels a lot more like "and look, he's weird too!!! what a loser LMAO" gossip and less like a relevant thing we should know about him that can contribute to a useful informative discussion, though. Sorry.

[-] Asetru@feddit.org 2 points 20 hours ago

do not know what happened

I mean, the video is linked above? It's also kind of anticlimactic as he just listens to the guy giving a talk, silently picking his foot, then eating whatever he got from it.

Also... It's nice to be not too judgemental. Seriously, keep that.

[-] andioop@programming.dev 1 points 18 hours ago

I'll freely admit that you know the "did not read the article and still commented" folks?

I'm a "didn't watch the video" person and had to be told by other people what happened.

Also, at least one of them someone linked me of the foot thing was age restricted so I Xed out and took them at their word.

this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
59 points (96.8% liked)

Opensource

4835 readers
126 users here now

A community for discussion about open source software! Ask questions, share knowledge, share news, or post interesting stuff related to it!

CreditsIcon base by Lorc under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS