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Comment by _RPM | Hacker News Reader

I know some people on HN do not have respect for RMS, but lest we forget he is a true Hacker who built very useful pieces of software, GCC, ls, GNU Emacs, GNU Bison, just to name a few pieces of code that I almost use everyday. Some interesting facts about him are that he has been awarded 15 honorary doctorate degrees.

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Honestly, GCC and the GPL are probably the largest contributions of all time to software development. Although GCC has waned in popularity of late, at the time it truly is what sparked the "Open Source" and "Free Software" movements.

Without those, I couldn't imagine the world progressing as fast as it did. Especially, without someone like Stallman behind it, almost completely devoid of social understanding, he was able to stand up to virtually unlimited pressure and keep to his values.

I agree some people on HN don't respect him, or just generally dislike him. They claim he hurt GCC or Emacs, and to an extent he did through the GPL and/or his lack of technical guidance. However, without him, they wouldn't have existed at all. GCC is still pretty competitive, and at one point was the most competitive free compiler - which is why both movements gained so much momentum.

RMS' fervent defense of freedom has been both his greatest asset, and his greatest weakness. I find it hard to criticize the man who literally dedicated (and in a sense sacrificed) his life to ensure humanity doesn't have to pay for every single piece of software.

Hell, would we still have to pay for web browsers?

> ensure humanity doesn't have to pay for every single piece of software

It is nothing to do with money, it is the freedom to have access to the source code of softwares.

It's not merely having access; even the source code to Windows is available to those who "need" it. It's about users having the freedom to copy, modify, and distribute modifications to software they receive, and ensuring that users further downstream have the same freedoms. Or for more detailed info, read about the Four Freedoms on the FSF site.

Unfortunately the GPL is not magic pixie dust and is often outright ignored. To fix that you need lawyers, such as the FSF or these folks getting compliance:

https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...

We may never know precisely how much more powerful the ideology of software freedom made us as developers, but there is no doubt in my mind that the work I do every day is on top of a foundation of free software and the compounding returns it yields over time.

Thanks for the software, RMS, but more importantly, thanks for the freedom.

> We may never know precisely how much more powerful the ideology of software freedom made us as developers

Just try to describe what the world would be like without it.

.doc instead of .html was a real possibility at some point. The horror! The horror! We'd be living in a pink & blue Information-disneyland, paying monthly fees to AOL and Microsoft, getting Cyberclippy to play our companies' jingles to non-premium users every 12 minutes.

Software engineering would probably be more of, well, more of engineering, and less of hacking, like all the other —thriving— fields of engineering, implying higher quality and more accountability.

Do you have any evidence to support that? I don't see that any software companies now do anything like engineering. Whether it's open source or not, "Software Engineering" is still basically just hacking.

Mostly just hacking. There are areas where quality and accountability matters. Space and aviation for example. I'd say Windows and what came of that taught the common user horde to accept junk, so now it is hard to sell quality at a higher price regardsless of free software.

The big pieces of software you mentioned -- GCC and Emacs -- have been weakened in various ways because of RMS though. RMS' fear of proprietary programs accessing certain internals, like the AST means that GCC doesn't have the extensive plugin ability that clang does, limiting the types of code analysis and transformation that can be done [1]. He has also shown himself to make knee-jerk reactions about pieces of free software which are not under control, such as his refusal to merge in basic lldb support into Emacs' gud [2], invoking the bogeyman of Apple in doing so. In the past, he has also told people to memory hole software he personally disagreed with [3]. He has done some impressive things in software development, however, his more recent points of view have had some serious problems in dealing with the relevance of users and developers today. Stallman needs a better team of people around him to advise him on modern practices, otherwise all his efforts will go to naught as people migrate to other Free tools that better recognize and respect more recent software and social practices.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/629259/

[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/632773/

[3] https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-02/msg00895.html

While your statements are true, they are viewed through a lens of popularity. RMS goal is not popularity first. It is freedom, and history has shown that freedom is under constant attack. His positions have sometimes seemed extreme, but ended up vindicated. Try "freedom to read" for one example. The FSF clearly documents their philosophy. Do you see them not following it? https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html

He can also be pragmatic and compromise. See for example the LGPL (note leading L) or one of the audio/video libraries (apologies for forgetting which one) where he was happy with a BSD license, for popularity reasons.

You don't need to agree with him, but there is substance behind it, and for some freedom really does matter.

That's just it, all of what I described were him attacking other Free programs. Telling someone to delete mentions of a Free compiler because it could potentially be used by someone to improve proprietary software harms those working on Free software much more than those working on proprietary software, and discourages future people from working on more challenging free products. His claims of LLVM being an attack from Apple are factually questionable, given that Apple hasn't been a majority contributor to LLVM for a considerable amount of time, plus LLVM being used in a number of Free projects, like Xorg. While he's kept the same dogma, he's not kept up with what users expect from their tooling.

I understand he doesn't care about popularity, however, how can you sustain a Free ecosystem if your tooling is generations behind what's available in other, still free, ecosystems. All the small compromises in the world don't matter if you're not willing to listen to people describing what is currently wanted and needed for modern software development. While Stallman has indeed kept the same ideological course, he's not kept up with the social aspects of the industry, to the detriment of everyone. That's the part that he needs to change.

You are confusing "respect" with "disagreement". I have great respect for RMS, but I often disagree with his views on stuff.

> I know people on HN do not have respect for RMS

Shame on them! 90% of tools they use either draw inspiration from, or use, or built using, or licensed using his ideas and implementations. Stallman has more fingerprints over the world than any 2-bit hacker here.

I have immense respect for RMS as a person and as a hacker. I also have several points of disagreement on philosophy, ethics, politics, etc. (and occasionally on facts), but that's not the same thing as not having respect for him.

Indeed, I would paint myself much the same. However, I've been around this business long enough that when I look back on areas where I have disagreed with RMS, there are a disturbing number of times where RMS turned out to be right in the long run. So now when I find myself in disagreement with RMS, I think long and hard to clarify exactly why I disagree -- which is certainly a valid definition of respect.

> I know some people on HN do not have respect for RMS

Don't misunderstand disagreement on politics with disrespect. I don't subscribe to his views, but I respect him for strength of his convictions and software that he developed.

RMS is in the same collection of great hackers that Dennis R, Linus Larry Wall, Guido, etc are in. Thank you RMS.

No, more like Eric S. Raymond with mirror-image political views.

While there are people that do not respect RMS, there are others who appreciate the work he has done (both as a hacker and an activist), but are vehemently against the way he goes about advocating free software.

I personally do not like the absolutism he preaches.

Neither does Linus.

It's easy to look at him as an odd piece of history. But so far I manage to not forget how much we rely on what he said and did.

Happy he gets recognition.

I'm new to the comments section here but I find it hard to believe people in this community would not have respect for RMS and what he has done for the industry.

You mean well but this reads like an apologia and RMS does not require one.

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