Stallman reminds me more of Steve Jobs than anyone else does:
- 70's wunderkind
- simple, clear belief about what computing should be
- realized his vision, creating permanent improvement enjoyed directly or indirectly by every computer user
- uncompromising in his determination to control his environment
Personally I believe he has some major blind spots -- so did Jobs. The failure of this community to hold him in comparable regard is just that, a failure.
> Could you explain how Stallman is a "software dictator", or how his own version of freedom comes at the "expense of their freedom"?
Richard Stallman believes in the freedom of software, not the freedom of individuals. The GPL ensures that software is always free, by restricting what you as an individual can do with it. To him software being free in more important than a persons freedom. The BSD/MIT/ISC licenses give full freedom to people, including letting people make the software non-free, that is the freedom of choice.
I personally believe in the freedom of people. I believe people should be able to make their own choices, even if I disagree with them. That to me is true freedom. Richard Stallman believes that everyone should do things his way, that people should not be allowed to choose to do things differently. To me that is a form of fascism (http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fascism).
> Richard Stallman believes in the freedom of software, not the freedom of individuals.
Stallman believes in freedom of indivisuals, _including_ the freedom of individuals down the stream. The BSD increases only your (egoistic) "freedom" to cut off other people from water supply, while decreasing everybody elses freedom to get to the water source, so it maximizes only one single peak of freedom, while everybody else loses. The GPL levels the access, it maximizes the total amount of freedom available in the ecosystem.
> That to me is true freedom.
According to that logic, a democracy is "unfree" because you are not allowed to turn it into a dictatorship, which is the "true freedom" then.
"Stallman believes in freedom of indivisuals, _including_ the freedom of individuals down the stream. The BSD increases only your (egoistic) "freedom" to cut off other people from water supply, while decreasing everybody elses freedom to get to the water source"
This isn't true. If I make changes to an app and don't release the changes, the only think you don't get is my changes. The water source is still available for all.
"so it maximizes only one single peak of freedom, while everybody else loses. The GPL levels the access, it maximizes the total amount of freedom available in the ecosystem."
If the GNU were truly free you wouldn't see so many GNU violators being taken to court. The GNU is about as free a s copyright. If you consider that freedom, then yes, it's free.
I would say just don't use GNU software if you don't believe in the licensing, but it's not that easy. The GNU is like a bomb about to explode. As a business owner, if one of your employees uses any GNU software in a commercial app and you have any sort of success, it could be the end of your business if you are forced to release the source. Why? Because someone can and will compile and release it for free, circumventing all of your commercial licensing.
Making software non-free is not something an individual does with software. It is something an individual does to other individuals.
You can do whatever you want with free software. You just can't prevent me from doing the same thing.
Similarly, you might describe freedom of the press as a form of fascism - in a land with freedom of the press, you lose the "freedom" to censor my newspaper.
The way you describe freedom is the way some oppressive regimes start, an individual believes their way is the right way, others will benefit from their way, so their way is forced on people.
With freedom of the press, the press has the freedom to choose what they publish. You as an individual have the freedom to choose not to read what they publish. You don't have the freedom to restrict what or how they publish, that is their choice.
With software licenses the copyright holder has the freedom to pick a license and publish their work how they choose. With BSD-like licenses the receiver of the software also has the freedom to pick a license and re-publish the work as they choose. With the GPL the receiver of the software loses the freedom to choose what they do with it, the copyright holder is imposing their will and beliefs on someone else. With the BSD License people have choice, including the choice to impose their will, but that choice is theirs.
Instead of the press, I think it might be clearer if you think about it as drugs or alcohol. You as an individual have the freedom to choose to sit in your home and get drunk. That is your choice. You do not have the freedom to get in a fight while drunk, or get in a car and drive drunk. Because when you do those things you take away the freedom of choice of others, you impose your will, you take away their right not to get hit.
It's about freedom of choice. The choice of an individual lies with that individual, with freedom of choice you do not get to restrict the choice of others.
You as an individual have the freedom to choose to sit in your home and get drunk. That is your choice.
I like your drugs and alchohol analogy.
With free software, you as an individual have the freedom to do whatever you want with it in your home. That is your choice. You do not have the freedom to prevent others from modifying or reproducing it. Because when you do those things you take away the freedom of choice of others, you impose your will, you take away their right to modify and reproduce the software.
The point you seem to be missing is that licensing software is not something you do to the software. It's something you do to other people.
You make an excellent point. I believe in free software, but I choose not to impose those beliefs on others.
I think there are times when freedom needs to be enforced through law, as the GPL does, because the consequences of losing the freedom is too great (injury or death included). The GPL was and still is important, it helped popularize the free software movement. Twenty years ago the GPL might have been required, maybe the software landscape was such that non-GPL free software would not succeed. I think now, in 2012, it is not required for most projects. I will concede there are projects where it is still important.
If you look at some of the most successful and thriving open source projects you'll see they succeed without laws enforcing their freedom. Things like Apache httpd, nginx, Hadoop, Chromium, and X.org. People and companies contribute to them even though they are not forced to.
If think there comes a time when societies and ecosystems no longer need such strong enforcement of freedoms, and freedom is actually increased by not forcing freedom.
A software license is a form of contract that individuals are free to accept or not. If you disagree with the contract, you are free not to use the software.
Here's another analogy. If I build a restaurant and want it to be non-smoking, I'm not restricting your freedom. You are free not to come to my restaurant.
I knew from the fact that the link title contained the word "Stallman" that it'd get Godwinned. Congratulations.
Do you honestly believe that you can separate what you describe as "freedom of software" from "freedom of individuals"? Does DRM or Tivoization serve the freedom of individuals? Does not being able to modify your computer make you more free?
No. Stallman do care about the freedom of the people. The problem is, he focuses almost entirely on negative freedom[1]. If one restricts oneself to Free Software, he can do whatever he wants with it (except restricting others' freedom, which is precisely what negative freedom is about). But there are additional degrees of liberty[2] to be gained if you also use proprietary software from time to time. Some capabilities just aren't in the realm of free software (the latest fashionable computer game, some device drivers, the Raspberry Pi —it uses some proprietary code).
Now, note that even someone very much aware of positive liberty could act the same way Stallman is acting. This is because we'd all be more capable if all software were free.[3] The only way to do that is stop using and making proprietary software. The problem with that is that it requires a personal sacrifice. At the consumer end, it means not enjoying some software (the proprietary ones). At the producer end, it means making less money.
In other words, we have a prisoner's dilemma[4]. Stallman is currently cooperating, and is urging everyone else to do the same. The GPL by the way is consistent with this: to some extent, it forces you to cooperate. You seem to think this is unacceptable. You'd prefer to be able to defect. But then I ask you: how do you justify this ? If you plan to cooperate, you don't need the freedom to defect. If you plan to defect, what is your moral basis for making the world a slightly worse place ?
This works even if we do not talk about you. If you think people should cooperate, why give them the freedom to defect ? If you let them defect (and they do defect), it again makes the world a slightly worse place. How would you justify this? (Note: my own moral alarm went off when I wrote that last paragraph. I suppose yours have as well. Just remember that this is probably a false positive, for the GPL actually is a give & take licence. Something like a clever Timeless Decision Theory[5] agent that will cooperate if and only if it knows you will cooperate if and only if you know it will cooperate if… infinite recursion resolved by symmetrical information —the text is laid out for all to see.)
[3]: This point is central. If you don't believe it, the rest of my argument doesn't work. That's why if anyone has reasons to reject it, I'd like to know about it (links to high walls of text are okay).
If people were to pick one reason HN has 'gone downhill', disrespectful comment replies would top the list.
A controversial feature request- when a new account reaches a negative karma level within a certain period, HN will display all other usernames associated with the IP address of the throwaway.
I'd suggest something different. Reduce the value of throwaway logins by making it impossible to comment for, say, 40 days. We can then modulate the quarantine period according to the level of hostility present on the site. Of coursesmart, flagging and hellbanning remains as usual.
Yeah. My idea isn't great, just a frustrated response to this person who claims to have been here for a long time yet still feels it's appropriate to make offensive posts about others here.
I like the idea of an incubation period, but I've seen valuable comments posted from new accounts- I bet a ton of people lurk for months before seeing a thread they feel they can make a valuable contribution to.
You may allow them to contribute - just make them work a little for it. Trolls are lazy - they won't go through a captcha just to harass other people - they'll go to Digg instead. And those who use throwaway logins to troll are also cowards, who don't want to be exposed as who they really are. We can work with that too.
We don't have (or, really, want) to prevent the use of quasi-anonymous logins. All we need is to make life more miserable to trolls than they make it for everyone else. With enough frustration, trolls will gravitate towards places where they can sublimate their frustrations more easily and, hopefully, leave HN for those who really want to engage in civil conversation.
How about a "silent shadow" system? When an account reaches a slope on the negativekarma-time graph, just make it so that a very small, random group of users are the only ones who actually see what they posted. To everyone else, it would be as if they hadn't posted at all. All the while, if what they do post gets a large percentage of upvotes compared to the amount that see the post, shorten the "shadow silent" accordingly.
It will not be made known to the user that their posts cannot be seen. They will have no reason to use alts, and we will have no reason to IP tracking, which could affect non-troll users.
While this wouldn't be a bad idea (for this reason) if every IP-number was only linked to a single person behind the screen, I would expect a lot of people on HN to be hidden behind VPN's and other solutions for masking IP-addresses. These normally use the same IP-addresses for several people.
It appears that you have committed the fallacy of composition here. The claim that Jobs and Stallaman have some similar characteristics is not the same as saying that they are the same.
For example, you can objectively say that Hitler was an influential head of state (e.g. starting WW II) and FDR was an influential head of state. These are both true statements, while at the same time, these were two very different men.
I wouldn't call it stupid, so much as superficial. Those qualities, apart from the temporal connection, could be applied to most people who have achieved any notable stature.
He has that same drive, the unwillingness to compromise, Steve Jobs had. I don't find the comparison inadequate at all - not all people with notable stature have that lack of pragmatism both Stallman and Jobs present.
When he would use things like the iPad from time to time, he would understand that convenience is the biggest threat to open source. Nobody cares how free Stallman's device really is. When he would speak for better open source devices, he would actually make progress. Right now is Shuttleworth advancing the free software movement to be accessible for everyone.
Reminds me of these ultra leftists, who declare their own government and live without electricity and fresh water. What do they achieve in the big picture? They do this just to feel better themself.
Linus Torvalds is the man who made everything possible. Google/Facebook would never have existed with a Hurd kernel and Git is now the big accelerator of open source. Stallman started it, but what did he achieve significant in the last 20 years?
Google and Facebook would never exist the way they do today without the free software movement. Both of them rely on a huge stack of open-source technology. Stallman's ideas are what makes it possible for a college kid to run a web startup today essentially for free.
Stallman's ideas are what makes it possible for a college kid to run a web
startup today essentially for free.
With lots and lots of limitations the GPL license imposes on him... I think the world would be a better place with less GPL and more BSD/Apache/... - He did great things, but many of his ideas are old and frankly, ridiculous.
I submitted this link a while back that has a great discussion about what people think of GPS's limitations: 'Why you should use a BSD style license for your Open Source Project' http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3402346
Read the linked HN discussion (and also the original FreeBSD.org article). As an example, You can't (technically) use GPL'd code inside your iOS application.
GPL is not the greatest license, that's why they created LGPL (to remove some of its stupid restrictions) and even that wasn't enough...
> You can't (technically) use GPL'd code inside your iOS application.
Web startups don't generally build iOS apps, they build web apps.
> GPL is not the greatest license, that's why they created LGPL (to remove some of its stupid restrictions) and even that wasn't enough...
Enough for whom? Microsoft? I know it's hard to believe, but some people do not have "allow companies to benefit from my work without giving back anything in return" as their top priority.
Sure you can - as long as you abide by the GPL and release your own software under the GPL. iOS libraries aren't GPL, but that's no problem as the GPL allows you to link against non-GPL libraries if they are part of the operating system.
The only problem is that Apple doesn't allow you to publish GPL'ed software on their market. But that's not the fault of the GPL.
> "Web startups don't generally build iOS apps, they build web apps."
That's a silly distinction to make - we have been moving towards this for years now, and we're already there - we are in an age where a single web service can have many clients, beyond browsers.
I suppose Amazon.com isn't a web company because they have an iOS app. Nor Facebook. Nor Google. Nor AirBnb. Nor...
We have had client apps written in languages with no memory management for decades. The value of the web is that it provides a widely supported API that is fairly "safe" to program in.
And with the exception of AirBnb (which is somewhat out of place in your list for other reasons) none of those web companies wrote an iOS app until they became well-established players. In fact, they're all older than iOS.
The iOS example was just to name one of many limitations of using GPL code.
> Enough for whom? Microsoft?
No, for developers themselves. Dynamic vs. static linking mess etc.
> ...some people do not have "allow companies
to benefit from my work without giving back
anything in return" as their top priority.
But in reality, that doesn't happen a lot - to name a few on top of my head: Webkit, PostgreSQL, Minix, LaTeX, Mozilla's softwares (to some extent), Apache and MIT's softwares and many other applications (and PHP, Python and Lua if I'm not mistaken).
It's like giving others a choice to be a bad guy or a good guy. In many cases, given the choice, people would contribute back to the community.
>The iOS example was just to name one of many limitations of using GPL code.
Why do you consider this a limitation of GPL, rather than of iOS?
> No, for developers themselves. Dynamic vs. static linking mess etc.
Can you explain this? It is the nature of closed-source libraries that deny us the freedom to modify them to our own ends or link them into GPL applications.
I know all of these regarding software which is deployed on someone else's hardware (iOS, embedded, etc); I wanted to know why the GPL is a problem for someone doing a web startup, which is the original point you made.
Nowadays most web startups don't do just web clients, they tend to create native clients for each platform. A web startup for sharing photos will fail on iOS if they provide only a web app. And even if you're creating just a web client, AGPL might still bite you.
I call BS. Most web startups don't do web clients. nknight in this thread agrees with me. Do you have any evidence to back your claim, or are you making up this statistic?
I specifically pointed out that using AGPL "might be a problem", so your inclusion here looks like it's evading your original comment concerning the GPL and web startups I ask again, what limitations does the GPL license place on a web startup?
You linked to an earlier HN discussion. Neither it nor the linked-to page mentions iOS or iPhone development, which seems to be your main concern now. They look like the standard random points that appears in any discussion of BSD v. GPL, so you'll need to point out the real issues.
Then again, you said "GPL is not the greatest license, that's why they created LGPL (to remove some of its stupid restrictions)" which is completely wrong. The "Why you shouldn't use the LGPL" document from the FSF says "The most common case is when a free library's features are readily available for proprietary software through other alternative libraries. In that case, the library cannot give free software any particular advantage, so it is better to use the Lesser GPL for that library." Even the title alone should tell you that LGPL is not meant as successor or improvement to the LGPL.
This leads me to believe that you don't know the issues and are winging it.
> The iOS example was just to name one of many limitations of using GPL code.
And is utterly irrelevant to the question that was asked.
> No, for developers themselves. Dynamic vs. static linking mess etc.
What mess? The requirements of the LGPL are clear, and in most cases quite trivial to meet.
> But in reality, that doesn't happen a lot - to name a few on top of my head: Webkit, PostgreSQL, Minix, LaTeX, Mozilla's softwares (to some extent), Apache and MIT's softwares and many other applications (and PHP, Python and Lua if I'm not mistaken).
All you've done is name some projects that happen to use non-GPL licenses in whole or part. You don't think companies take their output and use them in their own products without contributing back?
I have to ask, do you actually work in the software industry? Because it's not just common, it's pretty much universal to take liberally-licensed code, use it in a proprietary product, and give nothing back to anyone. Can you come up with companies that do contribute at least something back? Sure, but they're not the majority.
> It's like giving others a choice to be a bad guy or a good guy. In many cases, given the choice, people would contribute back to the community.
Actually, it's stating that they can use certain code under certain conditions. This, too, is universal, but more often the condition is "give me a bunch of money, don't tell anyone what's in the box, and if you become successful, give me a bunch more money".
Somehow, some set of people like yourself have found it in themselves to be offended by the notion that people might want to bargain with something other than currency.
I'm sorry. Maybe the iOS app was irrelevant to his/her point. But I think most web startups would want to create iOS clients too, and that's how GPL might be a limitation to them.
> I have to ask, do you actually work in the software industry?
No, I'm just a student/programmer. I mean I'm not working in an IT department in a big company, so you've got a point there that I might not be realistic.
> All you've done is name some projects that happen to use non-GPL licenses in whole or part. You don't think companies take their output and use them in their own products without contributing back?
I named some non-GPL projects that big companies are contributing to them. And I think I missed LLVM and Clang (and the amazing static analyzer) that Apple is contributing to.
Google, Apache, Apple Yahoo, ... (even IBM) are all contributing to non-GPL open source projects - not because they have to, but because it's good for their business and they will benefit from that, and as a direct result of that, we (the developers) benefit too. <----- MY MAIN POINT
What I'm saying is this: If Webkit was (pure) GPL, do you think Apple would even consider using it in the first place? No, they wouldn't, and they would roll out their own proprietary browser from scratch and the world would be a worse place. If Hadoop was not as liberally-licensed as it is now, do you think Yahoo would contribute to it? No.
I'm not offended - All I'm trying to say is that if you tighten up your software license, less people will use it, but they would have to contribute back. If you go with a BSD-style license, much more people will use and incorporate that project (for many reasons, including the fact that you can monetize your application much easier), and even if a small percentage of them contributes back, it's still good.
(I'm not a native English speaker, so I can't express what I want to say very well)
"If Webkit was (pure) GPL, do you think Apple would even consider using it in the first place?"
You've got your history wrong. Apple created Webkit, so they never needed to make that decision. You meant to write "If KHTML was GPL ... " (BTW, the qualification 'pure' is meaningless here; LGPLv2 is not an 'impure' version of GPLv2.)
Steve Jobs has been anti-GPL since the NeXT days, with the Objective C contribution to gcc, so of course that's was a deciding factor for Apple. However, they could have chosen Mozilla as the basis, or purchased the technology from some other company. There's no evidence that without KHTML they would have done a "proprietary browser from scratch."
I do wonder if the LGPL for KHTML is what made WebKit be available in the first place, but that is not relevant for this discussion.
"If you go with a BSD-style license, much more people will use and incorporate that project ... and even if a small percentage of them contributes back, it's still good."
As far as I am aware of, there is no evidence for this assertion. I've been involved with BSD and GPL projects, and the license does not seems to affect the amount of feedback or amount of uptake. In any case, the percentage of good code feedback is usually minuscule; excepting a few large-scale projects. You can see evidence of that elsewhere. Quoting Tim Bird, ex-BusyBox developer "[I'm the] guy who lamented that the busybox lawsuits had never produced a single line of usable code added to the busybox repository."
Your comments here reflect optimism, but that optimism has little base in how software is actually developed.
You're right. I was careless there, however I knew about WebKit's root, and I use a custom fork of WebKit for one of my own projects... And I never remember which version of GPL and LGPL imposes what restriction, so what I meant by pure GPL was the most restrictive kind of GPL.
> There's no evidence that without KHTML they would have done a "proprietary browser from scratch."
No, there isn't. But Apple is a company that doesn't do open source projects unless they have a very good reason for that. With the current hindsight, yes, It's clear that using an open source browser was the best choice for them. But at the time, no one knew that WebKit (and Chrome) would be such a success (with the huge adaption of Chrome on desktops and Safari on iOS's). That's just the way they did and continue to do their business. So while my assertion was just a guess, it's not a baseless one. We can never know.
> ...the license does not seems to affect the amount of feedback or amount of uptake.
No comment on that, because my experience is far less than you. I just feel that it must be easier to talk a non-technical manager into using a BSD/MIT/Apache-licensed codebase than a GPL one.
Again, I agree that my comment above was sloppy and I should've made my points clearer and spell them out as my thoughts, not facts.
"Apple is a company that doesn't do open source projects unless they have a very good reason for that"
In this case, it was to break the dependency on IE. Mozilla existed for the Mac, but the Mozilla codebase was clumsy. "KHTML and KJS allowed easier development than other available technologies by virtue of being small (fewer than 140,000 lines of code), cleanly designed and standards-compliant." (Quote from Wikipedia.)
It's then a business question of how to develop the project: proprietary/licensed (like IE and Opera), proprietary/internal (like ... AOL?), or public (like Mozilla). I think Opera was enough to give some estimate on the market size, and show there isn't all that much of a benefit to staying proprietary.
But hindsight is 20/20. I don't know why Apple went from releasing only WebCore and JavaScriptCore (the LGPL components of WebKit) to releasing all of WebKit (the rest under a BSD license, I think).
I think sek's post was more along the lines of "but what has he done for me lately?"
Right now, for every piece of open software that has enabled all kinds of world-changing good things, there's a dozen situations where open software is not a viable solution when compared to the closed alternatives for a wide variety of reasons, unless you're explicitly choosing to use only open software as a show of support for an ideological cause. What frustrates me about Stallman is that he spends his time lecturing people about why they're bad people for not using open software, instead of actively working to make open software a more appealing solution more of the time.
Have you ever listened to his talks? I have read a bunch of what he has written (mostly transcripts of talks) and did not get that impression. His main point is not that you are a "bad person" for using proprietary software--rather, it's more like you are the victim. Now, he does believe you should not use proprietary software, but because it's abusive and takes away your rights. Finally, I could see getting the impression that people publishing proprietary software are "bad", but that's a different story altogether.
Also, we're mostly developers here. Barring a few fields (things like .NET and iOS), free software is the best option for development. So while an artist using exclusively free software may be making a sacrifice, I have actually been much more productive on Linux/Emacs than I ever was on OS X or Windows. It's really a win-win situation.
As the FSF would point out, the free software movement is different from open source. If there was no free software movement, or a prohibition on GPL'ed software, then Google could have used other open source tools (eg, *BSD) instead.
One serious concern in the FSF seems to be that a large, programmer-centric company like Google could rewrite most free software, should the license not be compatible with the business model. Eg, the recent brouhaha on a non-GPL replacement for BusyBox and a comment about Google's goal of "reducing the amount of GPL software in user-space for Android devices."
> As the FSF would point out, the free software movement is different from open source.
They point this out and it's philosophically true, but are there actually any licenses that meet the definition of "open source" but not the definition of "free software" (or vise versa)?
All of the ones that people actually use (GPL, LGPL, BSD, MIT, ISC, and Apache, I think that basically covers it) appear to pass both DFSG and OSI definitions.
Going through the list of licenses which the FSF considers not-free but which are listed on opensource.org as "open source": NASA Open Source Agreement 1.3 (NASA 1.3), Reciprocal Public License (RPL 1.5). I'm hard pressed to think of something which can be considered free software but not open source.
My point though is that you commingled the free software movement with open source efforts. Google etc. could have implemented what they needed from various open source projects which existed at the time but were not part of the free software development.
The major exception, of course, being gcc. It's only now with LLVM that gcc has a serious open source alternative. (I assign that term carefully; LLVM is not part of the free software movement.)
Your distinctions in reality are pretty meaningless, you can be an open source guy using the GPL (look at Linus) or a free software guy using BSD. Both movements overlap enourmously, and the differences between them are very small compared to the rest of the software ecosystem. I wish we could stop all the silly infighting and see that we are all heading in the same direction.
The issue is that I did not like and do not agree with the statement "Google and Facebook would never exist the way they do today without the free software movement."
(There's the trivial sense of "way they do today" in the Microsoft, which uses some BSD technology in Windows, would also be here in the "way they do today" without that technology, but it would be generally the same.)
Do you agree with the above statement? If the free software movement had not existed, would Google and Facebook be seriously different than what they have become? How so?
Also, who is a member of the free software movement who also uses primarily a BSD license?
Saying Torvalds 'made everything possible' is technically true, but a bit misleading. If there was no Linux kernel, the free software project would have taken much longer, but without the GNU userspace the kernel would have been not much more than a curiosity. There's still more GNU code in your average Linux distro than anything else.[0]
People forget how much impact the lunatic fringe have on the rest of us. Before the free software movement, it would have seemed insane for a company to give away their code for free -- there was no precedent for it. When you shift the extremes, you also change what counts as being 'moderate'. Would anyone have taken Canonical's business model seriously twenty years ago?
TL;DR: We need people like Stallman to make the rest of us look less crazy.
> Linus Torvalds is the man who made everything possible.
Not to detract from the men, but he used the GNU C Compiler to compile its kernel, as well as the GNU bash shell, the GNU linker and so on...
Since its inception, the free software movement created a network of hackers and GPL programs that was well established by the time Torvalds started its kernel. Without that network, Linux and many other "groundwork" programs would not even been possible in the first place.
I don't think there's anything new there conceptually; Stallman is quite aware that convenience is one way that proprietary software wins over users, because that was also true in the 1980s. What benefit would there be if RMS used an iPad? He's not a UI designer for any GNU software, so he doesn't really need to do it for field research. The main software he's involved with at all (mainly GNU Emacs these days, afaik) is not really targeted at the same demographic as the iPad anyway.
I don't think RMS could advance the Free software movement by using a more normal setup. There are already plenty of people who think open source is sort of cool, and install it on their MacBook Pros when it's convenient, and sometimes help develop it. And they're better at making Free software accessible for everyone than RMS could be. They don't need his help. He contributes more by disturbing our perspectives in a way that no one else does.
Open source software and free software are two different things, and Stallman is an advocate for the latter (as well as the former). I think that's an important point, and one which people tend to miss.
Actually, I can't help thinking a much larger issue is marketing and fashion. Nobody except a few large proprietary software companies (Apple, Microsoft) have enough leverage to market heavily to average consumers. Most people do not make heavily researched, purely rational decisions about what to buy: they just get whatever they saw in an ad or whatever is in the store. In both cases, thanks to the obscene amount of money Apple and Microsoft put into distribution and advertising (as well as some monopolistic behavior), the most readily available computers run either Mac OS or Windows. Ubunutu is, in large part, successful because they at least have some marketing. If they managed to get Ubunutu laptops into stores, people would probably buy them. But then Microsoft would go out of its way to crush them (witness the Linux netbooks of a little while ago).
Stallman did write some brilliant software some time ago. Now, unlike Linus, he is concentrating on social issues of free software rather than on programming. And his advocacy has doubtlessly increased the use of the GPL, which has had some very concrete beneficial effects. For example, my understanding is that WebKit is largely free because it was originally forked from KHTML.
That's true for WebCore (the WebKit rendering engine), yes. But WebKit itself, actually, is BSD licensed and released just because Apple decided to release it. (About a year or so after WebKit was first publicly released, though, I think.)
"When he would use things like the iPad from time to time, he would understand that convenience is the biggest threat to open source. Nobody cares how free Stallman's device really is. When he would speak for better open source devices, he would actually make progress. Right now is Shuttleworth advancing the free software movement to be accessible for everyone."
I'm pretty sure he understands in his rude comments after Job's death he said:
“Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.
and
"Jobs saw how to make these computers stylish and smooth. That would normally be positive, but not in this case, since it has the paradoxical effect of making their controlling nature seem acceptable."
I think Stallman knows he just don't care much about it for personal use. The FSF does list
Gnash — the free software Flash player
Free software replacement for Skype
Free software video editing software
Free Google Earth Replacement
Help GNU/Linux distributions be committed to freedom
as top priorities people should donate time and money too.
The distros and stuff like android is where a lot of ease of use stuff happens and that is why the FSF lists (
Help GNU/Linux distributions be committed to freedom) and a 100% foss android named replicant under the under the reverse engineering priorities list .
"Stallman was responsible for contributing many necessary tools, including a text editor (Emacs), compiler (GCC), debugger (gdb), and a build automator (gmake)." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
Ignorance is incredible sometimes. We own both, Stallman and Torvalds a lot. I'm pretty sure Torvalds would tell you that he wouldn't make Linux without Stallman's work, in fact that's why Linux is GPL.
Richard Stallman is to software what Jean-Paul Sartres was to philosophy during his time and still now. JPS like RMS was living through his convictions and ideas to the point of refusing the Nobel prize because it would have tinted his motivations. RMS would do the same without any questions. Don't get them wrong: these people are not fanatic, they are just living and breathing a cause they started for a good reason. It takes courage not to give up to consumerism from corporates who try to milk everyone for the goal of making money and definitely not for bringing better living to our lives. Apple, Google, Facebook, they have a simple goal: $$$. When I see a guy talented and proficient like RMS defending his cause on a 9" OLPC, that takes guts.
I don't mean to belittle RMS's achievements, but as a general point, I don't think that simply adhering to conviction is courageous. It's the easy way out. It's the way that doesn't address the greys in reality, for the sake of simplicity of what you believe in. You are not tested in your decisions, because you have already refused to make any.
Socially speaking, I find it's easier to see gray. When you run into somebody in a social situation who knows you see him as heinously immoral, or maybe just a little bit of a sleazebag, there's tension. The tension is likely to get to him, causing him to needlessly bring up the issue in some contrived way. At that point, there's a magic phrase to completely banish the tension: "Well, yeah, shit's complicated." Suddenly you can be best friends.
I learned this trick when I was a strict vegetarian. I wasn't eager to confront people about their meat-eating, but when you don't eat meat, people pretty quickly jump to the conclusion that you think they're morally wrong to eat meat. The tension bothers them, so they bring it up in some awkward way. When my girlfriend's father did that (and later at one point her boss, at a company barbecue) I didn't want to get into the details, so I just said, "Well, it's a complicated issue." It was an honest statement, and I really had no idea exactly where I stood on eating meat, but I was so impressed with how completely it put them at ease and averted all conflict that I stored that memory away. Since then, I have used it many times dishonestly to avoid conflict with people who had power over me, my friends, or my family. Seeing gray is a "get out of conflict free" card.
I think the only time it takes bravery to see gray areas is when everybody else sees black and white. Otherwise, the "ability" to see gray helps you paper over disagreements and maintain valuable relationships with people.
Also, it usually isn't correct to think that a person avoids addressing gray areas by being black-and-white on a certain question. I am single, and for me, sex is an endless gray area. I have a conservative Christian friend who doesn't see any gray at all when it comes to premarital sex, but not because he's stupid or unthoughtful. He has to deal with gray areas in other places, such as divorce and state-mandated immunization against HPV. (His daughter will be immunized, and he thinks that's okay. He has friends who think it's not, and who are shocked by the fact that he doesn't resist in some way.) RMS sees gray areas in the use of non-free technology, and he makes concessions to reality. He's proud of his ability to use a completely free computer system, and he understands that it isn't practical for everybody, and he knows that even his success is limited to a very small portion of the technology that contributes to his existence. That's a gray area! I can understand where he's at. When I was a vegetarian, and now as a near-vegetarian, I know some people might think I'm being black and white to subsist on beans and potato salad at a catered barbecue lunch, but I think I'm being plenty "gray" by eating beans from a barbecue joint without asking why they taste so darned good. Everyone's thinking is gray someplace; the perception of "black-and-white thinking" is created by an observer focusing in on a certain place where he expects to find gray and is surprised to find black or white instead.
I seriously feel there should be a way in HN to save / bookmark comments that we like. Currently we can only save the main story thread.
Now I have to add this comment so as to bookmark your comment.
I agree, as a general point. When you are completely dedicated to an ideology, you don't have to worry about how it affects real, actual people. You don't have to morally weigh the consequences of your actions because you've already decided a priori which actions are right and which are wrong. Perhaps that's the difference between conviction and fanaticism.
Perhaps a MacArthur Genius grant carries a little less baggage than a Nobel prize? A MacArthur Genius grant is a no strings attached "do any research or work you want" funded by people who didn't have the huge negative impact on world society that Nobel did.
They're both honors, yes, but incredibly different in the implementation. A MacArthur is much more of an abstract honor ('You have done some great work, possibly in some field that can't even be named because it is so unique, so here is some money that we hope you will use to continue doing great work.'). Many MacArthur recipients would never in their lifetimes be eligible for a Nobel. (On the other hand, many Nobel laureates would never receive a MacArthur either).
A Nobel prize, by contrast, is only given in certain fields, which already constrains the way that it is perceived. With a MacArthur, you're not necessarily competing against others in your field, because you oftentimes don't have a field (what you do is so highly specialized that nobody else really comes close). Furthermore, the prize is a political tool as much as anything else nowadays. (Looking at many of the recent Nobel Peace Prize recipients, I think anybody would agree to that.) The MacArthur has much less political identification, even compared to the prizes for biology/chemistry. It's nice to be able to attach it to your name when convenient as it gets a little bit more respect, but it's hard to interpret it in a negative way (or to see a recipient of a MacArthur as somehow compromising his/her views -- remember that Stallman has rather weak opinions on money per se when it comes to freedom; one can have a FLOSS product that nevertheless generates money).
(And as for the awards, I agree - at this point in my life I would probably be satisfied with either one!)
Don't get them wrong: these people are not fanatic, they are just living and breathing a cause they started for a good reason.
AKA Fanaticism. He's become an inflexible, computerized hermit. His dogmatic adherence to a demonstrably untenable principal of "freedom" has relegated him a permanent state of pre-1995 digital stasis.
He's not principled, he's dogmatic. At best, he's a cautionary tale demonstrating the state of the world if he had his way.
> At best, he's a cautionary tale demonstrating the state of the world if he had his way.
How do you know what the state of the world would have been if he had his way? All you know is his state in our current world, which is vastly different from a world with nothing but free software. You think hardware manufacturers wouldn't use free software if that was all that existed?
You have no idea what the world of technology would look like if we had nothing but free software. And neither do I, and neither does Richard Stallman. But we do suspect it would be better. At the very least, don't discount the possibility.
" he's a cautionary tale demonstrating the state of the world if he had his way."
Almost all of the things you consider modern in the computer world are built on top of his creations. OS X, google, facebook, HN, etc ... all built on the foundation RMS laid. Without his creations we would be closer to your idea of a "pre-1995 digital stasis"
While I'd agree that much of the foundations of modern computing were built upon some form of free software, I disagree that it's primarily Stallman's work. For one thing, OS X is based upon FreeBSD and Mach, neither of which are affiliated with the FSF. And I'd argue that the foundations of Google and Facebook are PHP, Apache, Python, etc. which are also not FSF.
Of course it's a difficult exercise to try to imagine how things would be different had the FSF not been created, or what influence it had upon the creation of software that wasn't directly affiliated with it. Obviously gcc has been one of the most prominent GNU toolsets featured in modern operating systems, although that appears to be changing too (Xcode replacing gcc with LLVM).
"I disagree that it's primarily Stallman's work. For one thing, OS X is based upon FreeBSD and Mach, neither of which are affiliated with the FSF. And I'd argue that the foundations of Google and Facebook are PHP, Apache, Python, etc. which are also not FSF."
OS X used all the major GNU tools, and was built with GCC. Without his creation you wouldn't have been able to build OS X.
The foundations of Google and Facebook are ultimately the GNU toolset. Everything you mentioned, php, apache, python, are built on top of the GNU tools.
GCC is the most significant piece. So your point is that nearly all modern software is built on top of GNU, but some only use a small portion of the GNU stuff. I think you agree with my original point ;)
And how many of those things would be around if they weren't generating revenue for someone?
He's a living, breathing demonstration of the limits of free software. A world where progress slows to a crawl because the only people who have the time to write code are hobbyists and people who can get paid to lecture about how everything should be free.
That's the main issue I have with his ideas, they are thoroughly disconnected from reality. Not in a "Everyone should be nice to each other all the time way," but a "I'm going to ride my dragon to work," way.
Free software is a nice sentiment, but impotent. Nothing that has happened in the past 10-15 years in computers happens without a profit motive. Without a profit motive you may get a spreadsheet program, but no one motivated enough to get it distributed.
Free may get you on the path, but it doesn't get you very far down the road.
Not really. It's the cognitive dissonance of the Free Software Movement.
Software is either free or it's not free. It's either restricted or it's unrestricted. It's either proprietary or it's open.
Using hyper-capitalistic entities like Google and Facebook as a defense of the viability of free software is an interesting way to go. If anything, I'd argue they are almost perfect subversions of Free Software. Going a little deeper, a place like Y-Combinator is an even further subversion because, at it's core, it is a company that specifically exploits the profit motive of developers.
That aside, I think it's not particularly useful to argue that Stallman's contributions to the field are a vindication of his basic philosophy. Especially when those contributions are being used in a way that subverts it.
> And how many of those things would be around if they weren't generating revenue for someone?
I've visited the building where Red Hat has their Brazilian office (or, at least one of them). Nice place for a non-profit.
The argument it's not possible to make money and, at the same time, respect the rights and freedoms of users is an old one. We shouldn't be hearing it anymore.
Sartre's relevance or value depends on the relevance or value his arguments, not his age or affiliations or sex life. It happens that I think he was full of steam, but it wouldn't make him any better simply to be a woman, or young.
I think what I was trying to get at is that when I was younger, I looked up to certain bearded "wise men" and professors as archetypal "guides" or role models or whatever, but that was a mistake. Now that I am a bit older, I realize that it was wrong for me to look up to such men while ignoring others because by emulating the "wise man" directly I might have "skipped" a very important stage in a man's life: adulthood, when you're strong, aggressive, competitive, and otherwise awesome.
It is my philosophy that one should go through all stages in life in order, otherwise one will never be happy, though timing is not as important as order. I've seen old people get bitter and resentful when they see youth partying and going out -- because they themselves had never done so when they were young.
One of my favorite quotes from Nietzsche (though this guy also had a messed-up/nonexistent sex life): "Man is something to be surpassed, but only a buffoon thinks that man can be overleapt." Surpass but don't skip.
Does he have the same moral reservations for other devices in his life?
ie; what car does he use and own? All (modern) cars accept software updates which is his definition of a computer. Most modern televisions, dvd players, routers and even some microwaves/refrigerators can take firmware updates also.
Genuinely curious about the above - Not being a troll, just wondering how far the man really takes his beliefs. Does he stop at the most publicly noticeable devices ( laptop/cellphone ) or does he go all the way.
Does he have the same moral reservations for other devices in his life?
Yes, as far as I know.
ie; what car does he use and own? All (modern) cars accept software updates which is his definition of a computer.
I am pretty sure he doesn't drive, but this is what he had to say on the topic:
So, what about cars? Free cars would mean you are free to modify them and redistribute copies. Well, as for the modification, you are free to do that-lots of people modify and customize their cars. But when it comes to redistributing copies, the fact is we don’t have the technology to do it. There is no automatic car copier. Cars, today, are like books before the Xerox machine-the only feasible way to make copies was with a special factory. Copying your car is so hard that it makes little practical difference whether you are allowed to do this. Perhaps someday, through nanotechnology perhaps, a car copier will be developed. Then a Free Car Movement will be necessary.
In fact, to equate cars and computers in this manner is to commit a Category Error. They simply don't share very many properties (save that they are both sold for money).
Don't forget modern cars are computers with wheels. Every time you drive (or ride) one, you bet your life on the correctness of the software running its various vital components.
Buggy software can cause the Lithium batteries under your seat to overheat and, maybe, catch fire. Perhaps violently.
Awesome you still have that on the road. Im guessing you live in the south? Biggest difference I always notice about cali vs northeast is the amount of old cars on the road.
By that token, asking RMS about cars in relation to his attitude towards computer would be akin to asking whether he lives in civilization or not, since everything from traffic lights to voting machines don't have open software at all. The category error is one of scale, not technical advancement.
Example of a category error (stolen from Ryle): you are handed both the left glove and the right glove, and you ask where the pair is. The pair is not a separate thing from the left glove and the right glove.
'Category error' does not mean a quantitative or scale difference at all.
Well... I still own (and use, once every couple weeks) a car that runs on ethanol and has an analog electronic injection. The radio is, most probably, its smartest part ;-)
It can be examined and changed, but it's not as easy as recompiling its engine.
I think if ever a car was to be copied, the technology to allow it would have it's roots in today's 3D printers. Something that emulates the star trek emulator in a terribly rudimentary way isn't all that far off from what we have now with these technologies.
My understanding of his position is that he does not consider firmware to be independent software. The arguments by which he came to be in favor of free software do not apply to firmware.
The reason that he promotes free software is because software is capable of being free, that is, it is logistically realistic that people freely copy, modify, and distribute it. From this, he extrapolates that there is a right to copy, modify, and distribute software. If would be physically capable of modifying the code, but is legally prevented, then that is a restriction on his rights.
Under his reasoning, it also does not apply to firmware. Because it is so tied to the underlying hardware, it's not really possible to copy or modify it in any useful way. It is certainly free, in the monetary sense, but there are no useful results of doing so. Therefore, closed software does not restrict your rights in a meaningful or non-trivial sense.
Note that this is just my interpretation of what I've read of him, and I don't follow the Free Software thing that closely so I could be mis-interpreting key points.
> Because it is so tied to the underlying hardware
Firmware has changed over the years, as have the devices we embed it into. Thee devices are much more complex and capable, sometimes, smarter than the computers they connect to. I have worked with devices that ran MS-DOS-like OSs and applications on 386-class processors with built-in printers running a real-time Unix-like OS on a 32-bit RISC processor.
Also, many different devices share common hardware and designs. Hundreds of routers and other various networking devices currently run OpenWRT firmware instead of their original software. Those little boxes are smarter than the first Unix machines I used and at least an order of magnitude smarter than the Burroughs B-500 mainframe that ran land taxes for a whole city on my first internship. All it lacks is a line printer and tape drives.
Isn't the whole point of his choosing that particular laptop that it has Free firmware as well? Similarly, he chooses to use gNewSense because it doesn't include any firmware blobs or similar. That suggests to me that firmware is also something he cares about - because if you run Free software on top of a non-Free firmware, it is possible that the firmware could undermine your freedom - for example, a firmware update might remove the ability for you to install other operating systems.
Don't take this the wrong way but I personally feel that the GPL is not a free software license, I feel it's a community software license. BSD is a free software license, BSD code is truly yours, you want to create a proprietary fork you can do it, you want to create a GPLed fork you can do it, you want to expand the BSD code base you can do it. One thing I really love about BSD licensed code is that I feel like I own it, best of all this doesn't stop anyone else from feeling the same.
>you want to create a proprietary fork you can do it
Why should you be allowed to take away the Freedoms of others? The one thing the GPL restricts is your Freedom to restrict the Freedom of others. That's the foundation of copyleft: your rights stop where mine begin, and that includes being granted the four Freedoms of software as defined by the FSF.
In an ideal world, we would not need the GPL. Everyone would have realized already that it is in no one's prolonged interest to make proprietary software, and it would be frowned upon to do so. We would have implicit CC-BY (or -Zero) for everything and be done with it. No more copyright and licensing crap.
> Why should you be allowed to take away the Freedoms of others?
No one's freedom is being taken away when you create a proprietary fork. They are not forced to use your software, and the original is still intact. You do not automatically have a right to someone else's creation.
I don't mind paying for software, and I don't mind if they don't let me see their code the same way I don't mind when my local restaurant doesn't let me inspect their kitchen just because I want to.
>No one's freedom is being taken away when you create a proprietary fork.
You're free to make forks for your own personal usage and never give anyone the source. You don't even have to tell anyone that you did.
As soon as you share that software with anyone and refuse to hand over the source, and deny the recipient the right to modify and/or redistribute your program, you are taking away that person's Freedom.
>You do not automatically have a right to someone else's creation.
Then why do you insist on taking someone else's creation and basically make it your own by taking away the Freedoms granted to you by the original creator?
If find it highly unethical to want access to Free Software without having to actually contribute to it. It's demanding rights without wanting to have to deal with the responsibilities that come with those rights. It's selfish and greedy.
>I don't mind paying for software
Except money's got nothing to do with Free Software. It's explicitly stated that you're allowed to charge for distributing copies. I'm sick and tired of this "argument". It pops up every time Free Software is discussed here and elsewhere, and the only thing it proves is that the person bringing it up has not understood what Free Software is about in the first place.
> As soon as you share that software with anyone and refuse to hand over the source, and deny the recipient the right to modify and/or redistribute your program, you are taking away that person's Freedom.
I'm not taking away anyone's freedom, unless "freedom" has some definition I'm not aware of. You might be confusing "freedom" with "right", but I'm not taking away any right either unless I specifically violate the license. You do not automatically have the right to someone's work.
> Then why do you insist on taking someone else's creation and basically make it your own by taking away the Freedoms granted to you by the original creator?
It's not a freedom if the original creator forces me to release my code. Do you see how someone forcing me to do something isn't a freedom?
> If find it highly unethical to want access to Free Software without having to actually contribute to it. It's demanding rights without wanting to have to deal with the responsibilities that come with those rights. It's selfish and greedy.
No where did I say a proprietary fork wouldn't contribute back. Merely it shouldn't be forced to open up its codebase. You can make a proprietary fork of a project and still contribute back. I would like the freedom to choose which parts I contribute.
> Except money's got nothing to do with Free Software. It's explicitly stated that you're allowed to charge for distributing copies. I'm sick and tired of this "argument". It pops up every time Free Software is discussed here and elsewhere, and the only thing it proves is that the person bringing it up has not understood what Free Software is about in the first place.
You've missed the other part of that paragraph— the part having to do with Free Software.
In cases like this, I prefer to equate Stallman's idea of freedom to Illich's idea of conviviality--a convivial empowers the user, and gives her the ability to mold it and use it as she sees fit. If you just distribute only a binary, you aren't distributing a convivial tool. When we lose control of the tools we use, ultimately we lose some of our freedom.
But, no one is forcing you to take and use my tools. You can take it or leave it – that's your choice. I grabbed this open source code and made some changes to it. I can give (or sell) you my modifications if you want. If you don't want, then you can reverse-engineer my implementation and use that (just like what GNU/Linux guys did). I'm not taking your freedom away – I'm giving you a choice.
..and let me guess, you don't mind the company doing the proprietary fork, sue/threaten the open source forking guys, use software patents as a weapon/threat against open source developers. and you don't mind getting someone else's work, and giving nothing back.
In short your freedom is an egoistic tactic where you take, use and even abuse but dont care. There are people like RMS who think otherwise; they want a world where everyone shares to everyone so that everyone benefits from all derivatives.
That's quite the extrapolation. When did I ever say I don't mind those things? I mind them very much. I also mind being forced to do something. I can make a proprietary fork and still give back; when are those two things mutually exclusive?
In your quest for "freedom", you're endorsing a license that forces people to do something. Isn't that the very antithesis of freedom?
that "something" is crucial to the argument; GPL forces people to open their sources to ensure the freedom to use/distribute is passed further down the chain and to the future. Think of a BSD-licensed device driver; if a company forks it and makes it proprietary, develops a different but new device and sells the device with the new driver; Neither the users nor I; the original developer will be able to benefit from the derivative work and will end up with an unusable new printer in case the company ends support or does not solve a specific problem. I, as the developer and many users will end up in need to re-invent the wheel and improve the old copyleft driver.
So I the original developer, in case I give away my code with BSD license, end up allowing a permission to someone who does not give the same to everyone (and to me).
That seems like her freedom to you, but it is the freedom for one to end the freedom for many and to the original developer, in the long term, especially considering we all live in the same ecosystem finally. If BSD was ethically/not forceably used by every fork-er, that would be ultimately the same idea with copyleft.
Everytime I am giving away some code, I face this dilemma (I have MIT/BSD contributions too). I don't want to strengthen abusers, and non-contributors.
I appreciate your concern about "abusers" who use your code without giving back, but that's what I mean when I say GPL isn't advocating true freedom: They should have the freedom to not give back. What GPL does is force developers to release their code. I wouldn't consider that freedom, even if it's done in the name of protecting the ecosystem. "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions" and all that.
> Think of a BSD-licensed device driver; if a company forks it and makes it proprietary, develops a different but new device and sells the device with the new driver; Neither the users nor I; the original developer will be able to benefit from the derivative work and will end up with an unusable new printer in case the company ends support or does not solve a specific problem.
How likely is that, though? If you release your code under GPL, they'll just write their own version and keep it proprietary. At least with BSD, you'll have the same base if you needed to rewrite their driver.
A BSD license benefits the market and end user, while a GPL license benefits other developers if they decide to use your code to begin with.
> Everytime I am giving away some code, I face this dilemma (I have MIT/BSD contributions too). I don't want to strengthen abusers, and non-contributors.
I feel the same way, but I'd rather have code people can use without worrying about the license versus forcing other developers to adhere to my personal belief system. Your reason for using GPL sounds like the reason some publishers use DRM: They do not want to give abusers and pirates easy access to their product. With DRM, it only ends up hurting legitimate users while pirates illegally remove it. With GPL, it's not as clear-cut, but I'd imagine there are many projects who have used GPL'd code without releasing their source, while shops who abide by the license but don't want to release their code are forced to reinvent the wheel.
Again, I do appreciate your concern regarding code abuse. I certainly wouldn't like it if a company swiped by code and sold it as their own, but the chance of that happening is slim. I'm much more worried about the small startup who wants to use my library but doesn't want to release their code.
>They should have the freedom to not give back. What GPL does is force developers to release their code.
They only have to release their code if they are using someone else's GPL licenced code. They are totally free not to use GPL licenced code, we can argue the semantics of 'freedom' until the cows come home but nobody is forced to use someone elses GPL licenced code.
>A BSD license benefits the market and end user,
It benefits the proprietary market, and if you want your code to be able to be used in proprietary projects then yes, BSD is indeed a great choice. I don't see how the end user is better served by BSD than GPL.
However, many developers pouring hundreds of hours into code they then release as open source do not have any intention of having that code end up in proprietary projects. They want the code to remain open so that they as end users will be able to recieve any enhacements done to their source code. And given the vast popularity of the GPL licence, particularly for open source applications then I'd say it's serving it's purpose.
And don't take me wrong, I think programmers releasing BSD licenced code are extremely generous, and I personally think BSD/MIT style licenced code is a better choice for single purpose library/framework/component style code where there's little risk of proprietary forks.
At the end of the day GPL is about the source code and any further enhancements to it being made available to recipients, and this is what has made it so popular. And while that means it can't be used by proprietary code projects, we have ample proof that it's a licence through which lots of companies chose to cooperatively develop open source code, likely due to the very fact that all distributors of that source code is legally bound to release any enhancements.
But can you not at least understand that many people don't understand why those four Freedoms have to be assumed as given?
The disagreement is not about how to best make sure the four Freedoms are respected, it's not about implementation. It's about whether the Freedoms are Freedoms at all. That tends to get lost when all everyone always talks about is licenses (i.e. implementation details).
>But can you not at least understand that many people don't understand why those four Freedoms have to be assumed as given?
No, I can't. I fundamentally don't understand why you would keep source code secret, why you would deny me the right to change it or to redistribute copies. It's utterly incomprehensible to me.
On the contrary, I believe the burden of proof as to why we should deny people these Freedoms lies on the side of the advocates or proprietary software, and thus far I haven't seen any compelling argument.
You have to change perspective: Why don’t have I a right to keep my source code secret?
When I open an ice cream parlor you don’t have a right to know my recipe†. Why does that change with software?
Your argumentative work has to start there. You can’t just steamroll critics by saying “But the Freedoms are and should be Freedoms”.
—
† That right is of course limited: My right to keep the recipe secret is not absolute. I have to adhere to certain health and safety regulations, being able to keep the recipe secret does not override those regulations.
We can't really interact with ice cream on a higher level than would an animal, which is fine, that's all it's for. But software is a tool, and we learn from and improve our tools; that's what makes us human rather than mere consumers.
The same argument could be said about slavery. You are told you have freedom, but you don't have the freedom to enslave other people. A society which admits slavery is more free in the sense you say. But, really, would you feel OK with it? I believe that society's well being is more important than absolute personal freedom. The GPL reflects that, so I support it, and we really shouldn't care about petty arguments about which one is "more free".
For everybody to have maximal rights, you have to prohibit taking away others' rights. The GPL just codifies this: we give you the right to use this however you like as long as you don't take that right away from others.
You can draw a parallel to physical goods: everybody has the right to do whatever they want with whatever they've bought. However, this does not translate to being able to sell that thing to somebody else while restricting what that person can do with it. You do not have the right to restrict what people do with things you used to own.
I think there are two possible assumptions (or axioms) here.
Suppose there's a work X licensed under the GPL. You've assumed that if I create a derivative work Y, then everyone else has an automatic right to Y. If I were to restrict Y, I'd be taking away this right, and so the GPL stops me from restricting it. In fact, it severely limits what I can do with my code, but enforces everyone else's freedom to use my code.
Let us assume the opposite: that a work does not belong to the public domain until its creator chooses to share it. Then any work X that has already been shared is fully protected (by any free software license). If I create a derivative work Y and keep it secret, I in no way limit people's use of X, so I have not violated any of their rights. Similarly, if I make a restrictive license on Y, I still haven't violated their rights. They never yet had a right to Y, only to X. In this case, the GPL is violating my rights to do as I choose with my personal work, Y.
So we have two opposing assumptions and two different conclusions: If you think a work you create immediately "belongs" to the public, then the GPL protects people's rights; if you think it "belongs" to its creator until shared, then the GPL violates people's rights.
I myself am in the second camp, so I think that the GPL does not technically qualify as a fully free software license. Perhaps the distinction could be phrased this way: I believe that a potential author of a piece of code should be able to do whatever they want with it, while the GPL is predicated upon the belief that all potential -users- of a piece of code should be able to do whatever they want with it.
But I don't think you can have both. You either have to allow restriction of the users' options (if the author so chooses), or you have to restrict the author's options.
It comes down to how to define "freedom" for free software. RMS's is a very pragmatic (and in my opinion counterintuitive) definition: it just means that no one can conceal the source code. It's counterintuitive to me, because I would consider the maximum freedom being akin to public domain software: anyone would be able to do literally whatever they want with the software, including redistributing it without distributing the source code.
But as soon as you redistribute it without the source, the people who get that copy don't have the same rights. This is like the old saying: "your right to swing a fist ends at my jaw"; rights should not give you the power to take away others' rights.
I suppose it depends on whether you think there is an inherent right to access the source code of every software you use. The whole positive vs. negative rights issue comes into play big time.
They're both free, just with different goals. The GPL gives freedom to the user of the software, the BSD license gives freedom to the developer of the software.
like the ultimate freedom Apple enjoys, sucking BSD licensed code freely, giving little back (except when enforced in case of khtml/webkit) and using software patents against others using open source software.
That's a very interesting reinterpretation you have there which happens to tragically overlap little with truth. Seriously, claiming that they "give little back (except when enforced)" is just plain untrue. You can go download PureDarwin right now if you want to see what is probably the bulk of their "BSD licensed code". Or go look at Apple's open-source page[1] for a list of highly not-[L]GPL projects for which Apple's modifications are available.
Like their sizable contributions to LLVM, which is NCSA-licensed.
Or their whole-cloth release of Darwin under the APSL (a license that even the FSF agrees fits their definition of 'free').
Or their release of Bonjour (wholly in-house development, if I'm not mistaken) under the Apache license.
He has to compromise at some point. He can refuse to stick non-free software on his computer, but he can't refuse to benefit from the use of non-free software in the computers of the cars and planes that he uses for travel, and he can't refuse the non-free software that was used in the manufacture of many of the products he uses every day.
First, his main argument is that the user of software should have the right to inspect and modify that software. So just benefiting indirectly from proprietary software does not seem a contradiction: his--and the user's--freedoms are not infringed by using things that may have been manufactured with proprietary software.
Secondly, he does not believe that certain classes of software (like in your microwave) need to be free because they are basically part of the hardware. I imagine that if he owns a car, it only has low-level control software for the engine which is basically the same but not, say, a proprietary GPS system.
In planes it is again not an issue: he doesn't own the plane, so even if it had fully free software he would not benefit. I imagine if he ever did get a plane, he would want one with free software, but that isn't particularly pertinent since he will never buy a plane.
So the things you pointed out are not infringements of his rights--they're infringements of the rights of the manufacturer or the plane company. Stallman tries to persuade people like that to stand up for their rights, but that is all he does.
So, what's your point? That he shouldn't fight for free software because it's difficult? Imagine the world in the 80's, when there wasn't a free as in freedom OS; rms knows about compromise when there are no alternatives, he just doesn't want a non-free OS in a non-free computer when there are free alternatives. We usually call it coherence.
My response: "Is forced to compromise in the following cases"
I don't know how you managed to form your bizarre interpretation of what I said. I like the guy. I admire his ideals and approach and agree with his goals.
Sorry, I didn't mean to be rude, but it's not really much of a point to say "He doesn't refuse when there aren't viable alternatives". It's the same situation he was in the 80's with OS's, there wasn't a free OS for his computer, so he used a non-free one to code, a temporal compromise. When there's an alternative, even a very impractical one, he goes with that even though he could choose the other. So, "Refuses to compromise" is accurate, he refuses whenever he can.
Quite the contrary. It shows that something is severely wrong and in dire need of improvement if you need to go to those lengths to be able to run entirely on Free Software. Someone who wants to run only Free Software should not, by any means, have to rely on a 9" netbook from a single, Chinese manufacturer. It should be easy to buy hardware that is open, just as much as it should be a non-issue to run Free Software. Actually, it should always be the preferred solution.
When this link appears on HN I make a quick diff on two things and none of them change: what Stallman uses and what the comments are (I can make a bet I'll see comments about his mail forwarded web pages). And there are also comments about how GPL is restrictive and BSD is not...
But hey - this guy has principles and sticks to his guns. I respect him for that and I don't give a dime if he uses a one inch display on a PC with 64K of RAM
Sadly, this didn't actually provide the details of the most interesting bit of this setup: a separate system that receives URLs via email and emails back a text version of the webpage, which allows integrating browsing into an almost entirely offline batch-processing setup.
Edit: according to http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html he does use normal web browsers from time to time and even has a Twitter account for posting comments on websites. For text articles, his script probably just runs something like "lynx -dump" on the URL and e-mails it back.
RMS said he would ask someone nearby for a phone, not necessarily a cell phone. Landline phones don't use software, they're a microphone connected to some wires. But you can't exactly carry one around with you.
These days, if you ask someone for a phone and you are more than a few feet away from a landline, you're asking for a cell phone. To say otherwise is being disingenuous.
To me, it demonstrates a far less altruistic motivations.
> To me, it demonstrates a far less altruistic motivations.
He does not have a problem with cell phones. He has a problem with the fact that if you use the same cell phone repeatably, you give up a large portion of your privacy though all the meta-information that can be collected.
To make a simple analogy: RMS's cell phones complaints are the same as his compaints about the CharlieCard system that lets you pay for rides in the MA public transit system.
If someone gets your card, they can find when and where you entered/exited trains. So RMS uses a card swap system where a pool of people exchange cards. This muddies the waters enough to make tracking your movements much harder.
The GP said he's swapping the cards, not the phone use. He is using other peoples' resources without giving back with the phone use, I guess, but so what? I've let people borrow my phone before, and I don't really care if they've paid it back or not.
>"Once or twice or maybe three times a day I connect and transfer mail in and out. Before sending mail, I always review and revise the outgoing messages. That gives me a chance to catch mistakes and faux pas."
Some comments on the other posts here: I often find people to be most interesting and potentially valuable to communicate with when I don't totally agree with them. I don't agree with some of Richard's positions but acknowledge his huge contributions. I believe that he deserves some positive karma every time I use Emacs, gcc toolchain, various GNU utilities, and software and services built using GNU software (Google, Twitter, many libraries and applications, etc.) His knowledge, talent, and works are broad and deep in scope. It is interesting to hear so much dislike for the guy, but people have the rights to their opinions.
5 years back when Mr.Stallman worried about Privacy,Free Software I used to think he is nuts.. Now with SOPA/PIPA scenario its nuts to not listen him. So now i'm following his advice i will never move my data to Cloud.....
The device (ZT-180) is already out there and runs Android. Good luck to the devs trying to get kernel source from Zenithink though, not to mind hardware drivers. They've already said they've run into problems. The vast majority of Chinese tablet manufacturers do not honour the GPL and it's already killed one Linux tablet project, CordiaTab. In that case the Chinese company actually tried to extort money from the developers.
Many thanks for the link! I am curious to see some reviews when this device will come in production. Depending on the price it might be a good solution for my kids.
To understand Stallman, I highly recommend one read up on the history of Lisp Machines. Wikipedia's page is actually fairly decent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machines
In particular, I think this passage give some key insight into how Stallman developed his philosophy:
> Around this time Symbolics (Noftsker's company) began operations – it had been hindered by Noftsker's promise to give Greenblatt a year’s head start, and by severe delays in procuring venture capital. Symbolics still had the major advantage that while 3 or 4 of the AI Lab hackers had gone to work for Greenblatt, a solid 14 other hackers had signed onto Symbolics. There were two AI Lab people who did not get hired by either: Richard Stallman and Marvin Minsky. Stallman, however, blamed Symbolics for the decline of the hacker community that had centered around the AI lab. For two years, from 1982 to the end of 1983, Stallman worked by himself to clone the output of the Symbolics programmers, with the aim of preventing them from gaining a monopoly on the lab's computers.
On the other hand, "mail is what [he does] most of the time". I don't mean to belittle his achievements, I'm generally a fan of Stallman, but if that's really the case, then maybe we should call him a manager, rather than a developer.
How do you define "developer"? The man has certainly written his share of code, and has contributed it to the community. I don't know how he has made his living, over the years, but I bet he's been paid to develop at some point.
RMS makes his money by being paid for roughly half (iirc) of the talks and speeches he gives around the world. That has been his only source of income for years now.
Very narrow minded in my option. There's a reason why people prefer an iPad over a Lemote Yeelong. There is more to life than principles. I do respect his opinion but if he would like to continue to make a difference in the open software community he could stop spending so much time in email and concentrate on technology advancements and how to promote open source.
I am curious to know what cloud services he uses if any. I'm researching alternatives to proprietary/hosted software for some of my important data so I can avoid the privacy and security issues. Some of the services I would like to replace are GMail/Calendar/Contacts, Lastpass, RescueTime. Any suggestions?
Hey! That might be the set up I was looking for in order to hack on my clojure project during a 14 hours flight I will be taking in couple of months.
At least it's not gonna take battery.
Seeing larger developers using a really small computer with a really small screen is similar to seeing a basketball player driving a compact. It makes you wonder... Why?
The real geeks I know would at least dream of building a computer of which they control all pieces of software. Maybe for the achievement only, but they at least dream of it.
I am pretty sure that RMS gets his work done as well, whatever that work is. I wouldn't suspect him to be _lazy_.
What sort of ultra-geek uses that sort of setup? The current generation of that notebook has a processor that runs at less than 1GHz! The only reason he gets away with it is that he mostly does mail on emacs from console.
It's too minimalist for any present day software development work
I know a reasonable number of present-day developers who use a setup not much more complex than that: emacs or vim in a console. Not very practical for webdev, but you can do scientific-computing or embedded dev that way. For scientific computing you'd probably want a beefier CPU to run tests, but those are often run remotely on a computing cluster anyway.
On the contrary! I spend most of my working day using vim in a terminal (with tmux) to do web development. It's just text generation, after all.
I'd go so far as to say that if you're doing test-driven web development, it should be possible to build a system entirely within a terminal, and that's what I aspire to. It's only the front-end styling (CSS etc.) that actually needs anything more than a terminal.
And yes, I find this efficient: far more efficient than hacking and pressing F5. I think there are other benefits to this way of working: it tends to make progressive enhancement and accessibility the path of least resistance.
Yup. For embedded dev I use Vim in a console. It's convenient to have a big screen so I can have multiple terminals and reference materials open at the same time, but using a tiny computer like that is not out of the realm of possibility.
If by "any present day work" you mean "web development," then maybe I buy your point.
I know plenty of climate science and financial programmers who spend 100% of their development time SSHed somewhere else, or who write reporting code using a minimal test case set of data that runs in 1s on their (slow, old) machine. For these people a slow, old machine is often totally acceptable - it doesn't take much horsepower to SSH (or even to run emacs and perl locally).
I could do 99% of my job effectively on a ~200MHz Pentium with maybe 64MB of RAM. About the only thing that would really bite me is the occasional need to help the client team, which often means booting Windows in a VM and replicating their comparatively bloated development environment.
I was using a 633MHz PIII until about 3 y ago, then using it again recently when my main computer died, and its gotten a lot harder (on Linux) over those 3 y.
No, ubuntu specifically on that machine. The only tricky part as I can see it should be the webbrowser. You'd either have to use an old one, or a featureless one.
I was using an old one (Firefox 1.5) and it was extremely painful with Amazon.com. Amazon.com seems to have changed in the 3 years since I used it last with that browser.
I always thought that a "featureless" one (one without modern JS or CSS) would be extremely painful or useless, too.
Oh, I'm sorry. I thought I was on HN but it seems I wondered into Reddit or Slashdot. Let me amend my point of view: "I loooove Richard Stallman and I totally dig his choice of computing platform. I would never dare to say otherwise"
The saddest part of all this is that kids will read it and think "this is what 'sticking to my principles' is going to get me, so fuck it."
RMS used up his "I was there when" cred a long time ago. He's now the demented grandparent no one has the heart to tell to STFU when he yells at the TV. And yet simultaneously, one of the greats.
