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Fri, 15 Feb 2008

Richard Stallman in Russia and related problems.

Here are number of interesting moments in this miserable melodrama (got via Linux Today News).

Stallman wanted to visit Russia this March, and parliament member Viktor Alksnis promoted his visit and wanted to help with 'administration issues'. Then LOR (www.linux.org.ru, one of the most popular linux sites in Russia) moderator Sergey Udaltsov (who lives in Ireland) sent a letter to Richard, where pointed that Alksnis is not a good man, he also noted about Alksnis' "fight against the independence of the Baltic countries" in late 80s.
Stallman then said that he does not want Alksnis to organize his visit.

Well, my couple of points about this stupid situation.
First, Alksnis is really not a very smart person in IT, and it looks very much like he is a usual careerist, since I do not know about his work at all except stupid idea of creation of 'national OS', probably using 'nanotechnologies' (it is a modern trend here :).
Second, step of Sergey Udaltsov is very well braindamaged - while it is ok to describe who Alksnis is, but pointing to Baltic independence is even more stupid than 'national os' idea.

So, my simple point is that both Viktor Alksnis and Sergey Udaltsov just wanted to make some self-advertisement profit from Rishcard Stallman's visit and do not really do it because of open source. Although self-advertisement is not a bad idea (you read this blog :), such movements are stupid.
If Stallman got problems with visa (I'm surprised if it takes more than two weeks), then it means he does not really want to visit Russia, for example I got kernel summit invitation more than two month ahead of the meeting, which was enough to get visa (it required two (!) visits to the UK visa office just to give and get back documents, it took two (!) days to check documents, and it was possible to order a courier, although previous year time frame was shorter). If he does not want, why would we care?

If someone wants to visit a country, he can find a way to do that himeself and do not wash own brain with stupid rethorics.
I think it will be a cause for Richard not to visit, since it really looks like he does not want to do it :)

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