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Comment by doki_pen | Hacker News Reader

The comments in the blog talk about arrogance and how someone else would have done what RMS did if he didn't exist. They also complain that him being a "nutjob" has actually done harm to freedom. This line of thinking is dead wrong. It takes someone precisely like RMS to stand for his ideal and dedicate his life to what he believes. I, personally, feel a great debt to the man.

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It's "funny" that people see his statement, that perhaps it's better he didn't die as an infant because he's done some good, as arrogant. He could be paraphrased as saying something like "I've experienced such misery that sometimes I wish I wasn't here at all but on the other hand I think I've done more good than harm for others and there is some comfort in that." How that's arrogant is beyond me. I can understand people having the opinion that, no, he's done more harm than good - but he's not arrogant for thinking otherwise.

"I think I've done more good than harm" is vastly different than "in terms of the effect on the world, it's very good that I've lived", though. A little humility goes a long way.

It's not arrogant if it's true.

True or not, a little humility still goes a long way.

Towards what?

Being respected.

(for example: I respect his ideals but have a generally low opinion of the man himself. I think that can be important)

I'll echo the "being respected". I'll also add that it goes a long way towards effectively communicating a message.

Yeah, I'll have to agree with that sentiment, and hope that at least Stallman reads HN. I, for one, have been personally paid over multitudes of times due to free software, not just free to use, but also free to read and free to tinker. I'm better at what I do because of what he championed.

The "someone else would have done it" seems particularly unlikely to me, at least at the time. If you were to list significant bodies of free software that were released between the FSF's founding in 1983 and the Linux kernel's release in 1991, they're almost all GNU projects. The one significant exception I can think of is the X consortium's decision in 1986 to freely license X. And the stuff that started to be released starting in the early-90s pretty much without exception built on GNU stuff (even all the free BSDs still grudgingly include GNU code, despite 10 years of actively reducing their reliance on it).

"Good enough" is the enemy of "perfect".

What do you think would happen to FreeBSD if GCC vanished tomorrow? Hint: It would probably suddenly finish incorporating some other, more freely licensed, compiler into its base system.

FreeBSD's probably not the best example you could have picked; it can already build on a non-GCC compiler, Clang (for x86 and x64, at least): http://wiki.freebsd.org/BuildingFreeBSDWithClang.

And the last time I looked, it was more of "Clang not being complete" then anything else to hold up DragonFly BSD from compiling. Not sure about the state of OpenBSD or NetBSD with Clang, though.

On OpenBSD: there have been quite a few "Fix <simple bug>. Found by Clang static analyzer" commits. I believe that everything builds with Clang, but I'm not sure.

The question is not what would happen tomorrow...the question is what would have happened has RMS never existed. I think there's a pretty compelling case to be made that FreeBSD would have never happened; or at least, it would be a very different beastie.

I don't agree with RMS on all things, but he was absolutely instrumental in making our free software world what it is today, and just because you have differing beliefs about what a "free" license really is doesn't mean you should discount what he did for your favorite OS.

The question is not what would happen tomorrow...the question is what would have happened has RMS never existed.

My hope is that if RMS hadn't existed, somebody who wasn't a creepy, bearded hippy would have been the spokesperson for free software.. Hopefully somebody more balanced who didn't work himself into a tizzy over whether to call it "GNU/Linux or Linux" ..

The creepy, bearded, unbalanced hippy is what you see when you judge Stallman with a glance. His words, on the other hand, are unusually balanced and reasonable. In his essays and conferences, he wields them with extreme care, showing he fully understand their power.

Hence his insistence over GNU/Linux. It boils down to being aware of the origins of the system you are using: how it came into existence, and why. The answer, of course lies in the mouth of the original author. In the case of GNU/Linux, the name of the system directly influences which guru we are going to listen to (Linus or Richard). This is very important, because the two men have very different political opinions.

Plus, as far as I know, GNU is bigger than Linux, in probably everything. Especially at the beginning of Linux. So the legitimate name of the entire system may well be "GNU". Unfortunately, the GNU system became popular largely thanks to the Linux kernel, and people started to use the wrong name for the entire system. Really, "GNU/Linux" is a reasonable compromise.

The counter argument to that is that nowadays on my desktop based on the Linux kernel I use a lot of software that are not GNU projects. Sure they may not be as fundemental as say the coreutils - but they are just as important to having a useable modern operating system.

One doesn't even have to agree to use the term "GNU/Linux", in order to have some respect for the man who made a huge impact on a community and culture we all benefit from. We owe him a great deal of respect. That doesn't mean we have to use the exact same language he uses. I don't call Linux "GNU/Linux", for example, but I would never hurl insults at the man who made so much of this possible. Humans have a strong sense of "other" and since RMS has decided to be so other-ly from mainstream society, he gets a lot of flack. That judging is a failing of the people doing the judging; weak egos attack others to try to make themselves feel better. RMS is following his beliefs, completely and without reservation, which is something few of us have the guts or gumption to do. I respect him for that, even while disagreeing with him on a few things (like the name GNU/Linux).

Not to diminish the wonderful work done by the FSF, but you didn't look very hard for exceptions. Here are a few more for you:

Sendmail 1983 BIND 1985 patch 1985 CVS 1986 Perl 1987 TCL 1989 Expect 1990 TK 1991 Python 1991

And bsd unix, first release around 1977.

The request was for releases between the founding of the FSF and the release of the Linux kernel. So 1977 was too early to count.

The old BSD wasn't freely licensed, though. Some versions included source code, but with no license permitting distribution of derived works.

The first even partial release of a free-software BSD was in 1989, when UC Berkeley first wrote the 4-clause BSD license (with the now-dropped "advertising clause"), and released a non-functioning OS core consisting of TCP/IP stack and libraries, called "Net/1", but couldn't release a functioning OS because they couldn't get permission to release the code that AT&T owned. They rewrote a bunch of the AT&T code as free software and released the first-ever free BSD, Net/2, in 1991, which then led to the 386BSD port, and thence to FreeBSD.

And Minix (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX) in 1987.

That one also wasn't free software at the time. From the article you link:

  MINIX has been free and open source software since it was released
  under the BSD license in April 2000.

Prentice Hall owned the copyrights. Only after minix lost significant ground to linux was minix released under a different license.

I think that one was one of Tanenbaums great strategic mistakes. The world of software was definitely 'ready' to adopt minix instead of linux (micro kernel, big name behind it), but 'free' won out, and minix is a footnote whereas linux is the unix with the most distribution ever.

Until Keith Bostic et. al ported it you required a UNIX license from AT&T.

Bostic cites both the GNU project and the GPL as influential.

Free, Open Source software grew out of the polemic position it took.

BSD / MIT licenses might be "freer", in some sense, but almost all free projects are released because of the ideal of fighting propitiatory software.

I'm pretty sure that the GNU project was one of the main forces that inspired this culture.

The fight is still going on. Academia and business is still getting pushed to release code - think climate models and finance. If it weren't for RMS's work, would people really take such a hard line on propitiatory software? I doubt it.

BSD / MIT licenses might be "freer", in some sense, but almost all free projects are released because of the ideal of fighting propitiatory software.

This word, propitiatory .. I do not think it means what you think it means .. But even if it did mean what you thought it meant, I don't buy the argument. Lots of people don't release software for free because they're against proprietary software. Some release it for geek cred, or because they want somebody else to maintain it, or because it's not commercially viable as a product (which defines 99.99% of software that comes with a linux distribution .. I mean, do you really think you could get people to buy /bin/ls?)

The word you're looking for is "proprietary". And back in the day, people did (effectively) pay for /bin/ls. The difference between proprietary software and F/OSS isn't just price though, it's also the freedom of what you can do with it.

Quite true. A movement like the free software one needs people who are not willing to barter with their ideals. I for one do not agree with RMS on everything, and I do still use a few proprietary pieces of software, but I do appreciate the fact that RMS is who he is.

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