Summary: George Carlin (1937-2008) said some wise things about how people are led to believe they have freedom because they're given a few choices and how their rights can be taken away or denied at any time
THE stand-up comedian and popular critic of society came from a family cynical about the state of the country (and its society); he repeatedly spoke about how "choice" (like Apple or Microsoft) is used to distract from actual freedom (not just a freedom to make binary choices). Here is what he said about "rights" (similarly animated) in his later days.
George Carlin is an excellent commentator, putting comedy/humour aside. Like a sit-com artist, he takes actual (real) issues and turns them into catchy skits. In some sense, he was ahead of his time. ⬆
Ubuntu "took off" not because it was very good or very easy. Ubuntu "took off" because of ShipIt, i.e. because of a multi-millionaire subsidising its mass distribution (at a personal cost).
In a healthy company, the CEO and CFO would get sacked on the spot for doing so. But IBM is not a healthy company, it's just a sick cow being milked to death.
"Considering Stallman worked in the MIT AI lab in the era of symbolic AI, and has written GCC (an optimizing compiler is a kind of symbolic reasoner imo), I think he has a deeper understanding of the question than most famous people in tech."
