RMS and cell phone.

I was getting bored with the heap load of discussions about GNOME, Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth..... Here comes a whiff of fresh air from the Master.

"I don't have a cell phone. I won't carry a cell phone," says Richard. M. Stallman. That is a very serious statement by the founder of Free software foundation. RMS has always been vocal about any technology that invades privacy of people. Let it be the cloud, social networking sites which lack enough privacy extensions or recently the cell phone. RMS is always for absolute freedom. In India Sri Mahatma Gandhi called it "sampoorna" ie, freedom without any tag lines, without any special conditions, without any riders.

Now, what is it with a cell phone. I still have to come across anybody who can make that statement and stand by it. RMS walks his talk. When he was in India a couple of years ago, I read in Linux for you mag that he did not drink packaged water produced by the coca cola company. He waited until he found out a decent source of water not produced by the multinational company. Cell phones can be tracked to the last millimeter. With this we forgo the last millimeter of privacy which is left. The beauty is you will not know that u are being tracked. We do yearn for the good old days where meeting anybody after a long time evoked so much positve happiness among everybody who meets. Now everybody is connected and are normally updated every day/hour/minute by talking over phone or tracking on the social networking sites. Meeting people is these days never exciting. Now that was the "social" problem. RMS does not like the cell phone since it gives immense opportunity for big brother to wait on you, collect enough info on you and then fix you.

Can I live without a cell phone to his standards. No. Partially yes. I would definitely like to increase that "partial" to near complete No. Let us see how much I would succeed. As of now, I do support RMS with his statement regarding cellphones. Will he succeed in changing few others? Difficult.