> I can't sympathize much with those app developers, since they are making proprietary software. They all deserve to fail.
What a shitty, shitty attitude.
What a shitty, shitty attitude.
It could be we are thanking him in 30 years, or moaning that we didn't listen more.
I certainly feel the software user agreements are far more onerous than I would have expected 20 years ago.. and the surveillance more extreme. I wish I had listened more then to what Stallman had to say.
Even if almost all programmers believe that they should have the right to run any software on devices which they own - we don't seem to have any organised political / legal movement that would bring that into law - large companies have almost all the power.
How can we make sure that web apps aren't also censored on mobile devices in future? If Apple or Google decided to do that, the small user base doesn't have much power to fight back, and yet we all would have lost an important freedom.
If he thinks he's a visionary ahead of his time then he doesn't owe it to anyone to be nice about it. I prefer people say what they think.
But it ignores all the people making apps that do have open licensing.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store...
The majority of Apple's stack is opensource, too. Take a look through http://opensource.apple.com/ some time. The kernel and huge swathes of their ecosystem are opensource. I'm writing this comment in chrome, which has millions of lines of opensourced webkit code in it, written by paid Apple engineers. And compiled in clang/llvm, which is developed, maintained by Apple. Oh, and its opensource too.
I'm totally confused by the argument that Apple hates opensource. They depend on it. They give back. They're a good citizen.
They just aren't huge fans of the GPL, but so what? Neither am I. Neither is Rust (MIT), or Golang (BSD) or the NodeJS community (90%+ BSD/ISC). Opensource simply doesn't need the GPL to bloom in today's world.
Open source is about collaboratively building tools for developers and businesses, or simply because collaboration produces better software. The software is often released under permissive terms. Apple participates in open source projects.
Free software is focused on the end user having freedom over their software by ensuring that they have the ability to read, modify, and redistribute it. Apple does not give these rights to users of their platforms.
The post that was linked was the FSF, which argues from the free software perspective.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLCompati...
Note that the BSD license, Apache license, MIT license (which the FSF calls the X11 license), etc. are all considered Free Software licenses by the FSF and are okay in the App Store.
If its not illegal, then perhaps it should be.
He has valid points, but the general world of software is much more open and diverse and companies are doing things in the public more -- on github, etc. There is still a need to make money to pay people, and, well, there will be closed source and other paths the pay that way.
I've been spending much of the last year developing some open source code (a data flow ontology). Was thinking of using GPLv3. But, now leaning towards MIT. The first app to use it will be a visual music synth for iOS.
Ironically, Stallman just reminded me about GPL's philosophical baggage.
You're saying that the aim is to prevent somebody to make money on your work. This is absolutely not the goal of Open Source or Free Software. There is no issue in somebody else getting rich by using your work. A rough summary of both would be:
* Open Source: Stop reinventing the wheel every time. Somebody writes an implementation of a javascript interpreter, and everybody who needs one just uses it instead of writing one from scratch. If they find ways to make it better, they share their knowledge so that others can build on top.
* Free Software: As a user, I want to be able to understand how the software works, so I can fix it myself or ask somebody I know and trust to fix it if it's broken, or improve it if there are ways to do it.
The commercial side is neither seen as positive or negative; it's completely orthogonal to the question. My personal opinion is that I don't see why I should prevent somebody to earn money based on my work. To think that a software is enough to make a business and you could have made as much money as them if you just sold it is misunderstanding the domain. If they're better at it, why would I prevent them ?
Note that regarding Open Source and Free Software, I don't have a problem with any of those views. It's just important to understand the difference in philosophy if we want to understand why both styles exist and why some might choose one "side" over the other. I'll agree that in practice both styles are largely overlapping.