March 2002
Beginner
240 pages
6h 19m
English
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Chapter 5. Small Puddle of Freedom
Ask anyone who’s spent more than a minute in Richard Stallman’s presence, and you’ll get the same recollection: forget the long hair. Forget the quirky demeanor. The first thing you notice is the gaze. One look into Stallman’s green eyes, and you know you’re in the presence of a true believer.
To call the Stallman gaze intense is an understatement. Stallman’s eyes don’t just look at you; they look through you. Even when your own eyes momentarily shift away out of simple primate politeness, Stallman’s eyes remain locked-in, sizzling away at the side of your head like twin photon beams.
Maybe that’s why most writers, when describing Stallman, tend to go for the religious angle. In a 1998 Salon.com article titled “The Saint of Free Software,” Andrew Leonard describes Stallman’s green eyes as “radiating the power of an Old Testament prophet.”1 A 1999 Wired magazine article describes the Stallman beard as “Rasputin-like,”2 while a London Guardian profile describes the Stallman smile as the smile of “a disciple seeing Jesus.”3
Such analogies serve a purpose, but they ultimately fall short. That’s because they fail to take into account the vulnerable side of the Stallman persona. Watch the Stallman gaze for an extended period of time, and you will begin to notice a subtle change. What appears at first to be an attempt to intimidate or hypnotize reveals itself upon second and third viewing as a frustrated attempt to build and maintain contact. If, as Stallman ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.