Richard Stallman Eats Something From His Foot
Why Hacker News recommends it
Used as a recurring gag or jab at Stallman's social eccentricities; not recommended for its content.
What it is
A short clip from a lecture Q&A in which Richard Stallman appears to pick something off his foot and eat it.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2010 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Cites getsat · 2011-03 · on “Richard Stallman: Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream'”
Not antagonising you, but you are aware that he did something similar during a lecture once, right? His lack of concern for social norms is... intriguing. [this video]
Cites BigBubbleButt · 2020-10 · on “The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)”
> What's more worrying is people I speak to regularly now don't even know who he is. And if they do it's because of the toe cheese incident. I've known who Stallman is for a long time, but I had never heard about the toe cheese incident. I just looked it up. My reaction: [LINK] For anyone interested in the toe cheese incident: [this video] I'm not trying to malign Stallman here, but you can't deny this is interesting.
Critical blasdel · 2010-06 · on “GNU HURD: Altered visions and lost promise”
"like giving the Han Solo award to the Rebel Fleet" -- he was a terrific speaker a decade ago, even if he did get off the rails quickly raving about GNU-slash-Linux. Now he just eats detritus from his foot: [this video]
Critical bosch · 2010-07 · on “Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.”
I don't care what this guy has to say anymore. After he pulled his sock off, picked his foot and ate whatever the fuck it was he picked off, all in front of what appears to be a lecture class sized audience - I lost all respect for the guy. [this video] No wonder computer people have a brutal rep for social interaction. WTF.
Critical hugh3 · 2011-10 · on “Dave Winer: Why I stand up for Stallman”
Some folks miss the point. We only make fun of Stallman in an attempt to change his behaviour in a way that benefits both him and others. For instance, rms smells bad. If he could be persuaded to smell less bad, then everybody would benefit. Ridicule is a valuable social mechanism for giving negative feedback to those who behave inappropriately. For those who say "but can't we give this feedback in a non-hurtful way?", the answer is no, for the same reason that your brain can't make pain non-painful -- some people are too damn stubborn to listen to non-painful feedback. Here is a video of Richard Stallman, in the middle of a talk, eating something he's just picked off his foot: [this video]
Critical unimpressive · 2012-05 · on “FreeBSD 10 to use Clang, GCC will be deprecated”
For bonus points, in the actual recording they note that Hypocrites "Smells like thousand year old goat cheese.". which no doubt refers to Stallmans's legendary hygienic practices. [0] Needless to say, the BSD guys aren't really fans. [0]: [this video]
Critical btilly · 2013-05 · on “US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits”
As much as I appreciate Stallman, videos like [this video] show him as eccentric for reasons that go well beyond sticking to principle.
Critical SEJeff · 2018-11 · on “Amazon Timestream – Fast, scalable, fully managed time series database”
RMS has said publically that proprietary software should be illegal, and that free software guarantees user freedoms. This is a philosophy, and one that opines every user wants to become a developer. For things like emacs, and much of GNU, this is true, for most of the rest of the world, this is not. I eschew free software because I'm not about forcing my views on others (which is literally the mission of GNU). I'm about developing software to be the best it can be, and maybe meeting some friends along the way. Open source, being the best software development model overall, allows me to meet that goal. You could almost say some of RMS's more extreme quirks border on authoritarian (see the ex