The RMS Tour Rider

larry bagina writes "It's no secret that rock stars have riders — provisions on their contractual appearances that require a bowl of brown-free M&Ms or specify the exact brand of bottled water, cocaine purity, etc. Well, Richard Stallman has his own quirky list of provisions." Some of the best stuff is at the end, including: "I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about what I will do [for] breakfast. Please just do not bring it up," and "One situation where I do not need help, let alone supervision, is in crossing streets. I grew up in the middle of the world's biggest city, full of cars, and I have crossed streets without assistance even in the chaotic traffic of Bangalore and Delhi. Please just leave me alone when I cross streets."

Just seems like a well thought out list

[Dr_Barnowl]

It reads like a list of his negative experiences. Especially the bit about parrots.

I found myself identifying with a lot of it - I'm obviously just better socially adjusted than he is when I put up with these things.

It's a lot less ridiculous than some of the riders of celebrities - it actually represents his preferences, mostly his preference to be treated like an independent adult, rather than stupid things that crop up on some peoples riders like a bowl M&Ms with all the green ones picked out.

Re:Just seems like a well thought out list

[merrickm]

The Van Halen M&Ms thing wasn't stupid. It was right in the middle of a bunch of important safety stuff that was particularly important due to the huge crowds Van Halen was drawing. If no M&Ms, they knew the venue hadn't carefully gone through the safety stuff.

This kinda pissed me off

[Just Some Guy]

I saw a lot of RMS haters posting this and making fun of him for being a demanding ass. In particular, a lot of popular Mac people on Twitter were laughing at him for being a prima donna. I just don't get it. His requests are basically:

1. Don't misrepresent my position by describing me as advocating something I'm not.
2. I'm not rich, so don't make me pay for stuff out of my own pocket because I can't afford to.
3. I'd much rather sleep on someone's couch and hang out with locals than be chauffeured around and entertained constantly.

I don't think any of those are unreasonable at all. And as to the "parrot" part? Dude likes parrots. He goes out of his was to say not to buy one for just for his benefit, but if someone already has one he'd like to talk to it. I can't imagine a personal preference request being more accommodating.

A lot of people disagree with RMS and that's fine. But there's nothing in his tour rider that deserves derision, and I'm not sure why so many people are having fun at his expense when everything he asked for seemed perfectly reasonable.

Re:First post? I brought up breakfast once

[Dunbal]

Most fatties don't eat breakfast. It's one of the first things nutritionists try to fix. I should know - I used to be a fatty 60 lbs ago. Now I eat breakfast.

Re:Just seems like a well thought out list

[cs668]

I worked at a company that shipped hardware, as a part of the contract the customer agreed not to open that hardware. Inside every shipped system there was a rubber chicken, if anyone ever called the support line and asked about the rubber chicken you knew they opened the box.

Re:Strangely inspirational

[tomhudson]

He doesn't get to define the term "open source" OR the term "free software." Reality disagrees with him, but that's no surprise. Unlike Steve Jobs, the RMS Reality Distortion Field only extends to his outermost dirt layer.

The reality is that the GPL is more restrictive than the BSD, MIT, Apache, or many other licenses, and the financial reality is that successful products (in the sense that you make money selling the software and not a bundle of services) are going to have to either use a GPL exception, multiple licenses for the same code, an LGPL workaround, a different license, or layer a differently-licensed product atop GPL-licensed code.

GPL-licensed code is not free software. THAT is the reality. It's not free as in freedom, and it's only "free as in beer" if your time is worth zero. This doesn't mean it doesn't have value - just that RMS vision failed - miserably. Think of it - Microsoft had a huge problem with Vista, and WalMart, who can sell pretty much anything cheap, couldn't successfully sell a $200 linux pc because the GPL prevents the development of a stable desktop stack. The returns ate them alive. Contrast that with the FreeBSD-based Darwin/OSX, sold by the most valuable company in the world. Apple hired some of the FreeBSD devs, and contributed back a lot of code. Win/win. Now think about this - originally, they were going to use linux, but the GPL killed that idea.

Linux is winning in the mobile world only because it's buried underneath a layer of Android code (with that "nasty" free as in we really mean it you are even free to redistribute without having to give up your source Apache license).