Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
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But I'll give the man a grudging amount of respect: he hasn't budged one inch on his position toward "freedom to tinker" as it relates to software in the entire time I've been aware of his work. And, more than that, he walks the walk; he won't urge anyone to do something or take on a position that he's not willing to jump into wholeheartedly himself.
He's a fundamentalist, but any successful movement needs people with "clarity of purpose". He has it in spades, allowing many of the rest of us to be rather more pragmatic.
I just wouldn't want to hang out with the guy. I say "Linux" and buy proprietary software. I'm sure he wouldn't want to hang with me either, but I do respect him.
Apple do contribute to open source software, but you certainly don't have freedom when using their products, which is what RMS is all about.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/feb/23/openso...
They're not as upfront about it as Stallman and the FSF are about proprietary software, but they clearly don't like open source software. From one of their reports:
"For example, in March 2009, the Ministry of Administrative Reform (MenPAN) issued Circular Letter No. 1 of 2009 to all central and provincial government offices including State-owned enterprises, endorsing the use and adoption of open source software within government organizations. While the government issued this circular in part with the stated goal to “reduc[e] software copyright violation[s],” in fact, by denying technology choice, the measure will create additional trade barriers and deny fair and equitable market access to software companies."
Source: http://www.iipa.com/rbc/2010/2010SPEC301INDONESIA.pdf
An example of an opposite goalpost on the same end as RMS might be Bruce Perens.
There are lots of market forces pulling towards proprietary. Most people don't care about software freedom - they want shiny toys right now. Jobs, Gates, Ballmer and Ellison cater to them. They build and sell tools to help you lock yourself to their software. And they even use free software for that.
edit: dear downmodder: try harder. I am sure you can articulate a useful argument instead of just downvoting a comment you disagree with. This should be a place for debating ideas.
Big corporations led by big egos have the power to kill products and permanently remove innovations from the market: by [ab]using software patents, buying and killing threatening start-ups, or under-cutting competitors to drive them out of business. One of the most attractive aspects of a Free Software ecosystem unencumbered by patents is that ideas don't have to die while they are still useful to somebody.
I agree very strongly with Stallman and the points he regularly makes regarding the dangerous of proprietary software, and I am very grateful for the things he has done to push his ideals and to increase awareness of the issues and dangers surrounding copyright abuse and the freedom of software users.
I also create and sell proprietary software, and I disagree with him that it is immoral to do so.
No need to oppose him, I can simply disagree with his conclusions while agreeing with a very large number of the points that he makes.
Agreed. I won't go as far as he does, but I thank him for making a stand. As far as the user makes an informed choice, I am not against selling proprietary software. Still, God kills a kitten every time a proprietary license is sold.
Even if it's your startup selling it?
Seriously, when your user knows and willingly enters what has a good chance of becoming an abusive relation (depending on your upgrades, being unable to migrate their data, forcing you to support ancient versions because they don't have the money to upgrade), I believe it's fine.
But I would prefer another model.
They probably don't feel like they're resigning their fate to an abusive relationship.
Big corporations led by big egos have the power to kill
products and permanently remove innovations from the market
Are you aware of any other freedom I don't know about?
Tell me one freedom that does not involve denying freedoms and I'll give you the point. If, however, the only freedom you want is the one to deny freedoms, then, this argument became circular a couple messages back.
Using the GPL you deny no other freedom to your downstream users that that.
"Freedom" is not black and white. Sometimes you need to deny users one freedom in order to give them another. For example, Spotify is a non-free application and it has DRM and lock-in and nasty things like that (no doubt required by the music industry). However, it's completely changed the way I listen to music and given me freedom to listen to more music than I could have done before. I have essentially traded the freedom to tinker for the freedom to listen to music.
you traded your freedom to tinker
Once GPL'ed, any derivative must also preserve the freedoms of its users. This doesn't happen with MIT/BSD and that's one of the reasons there is a vibrant ecosystem around the Linux kernel and the GNU userland and nothing comparable around *BSDs.
So you want the freedom to lose your freedom, for a short term benefit. Make no mistake: you are not as free to stop using that proprietary software as you might think. Most proprietary software strongly encourage you to stick with them, and make switching difficult. The best examples I have in mind are operating systems and office suites.
The same could be said about slavery: you give up all your freedoms for the ultimate short term benefit: staying alive. Fortunately, we try to eliminate this horrible choice, by abolishing slavery.
Likewise, abolishing proprietary software might be a good idea. Until then boycott is all we have.
There're also plenty of examples of businesses trying to buy as cheap as possible while at the same time trying to sell as expensive as possible. That just proves that buyers should beware.
Also, proprietary software is not equivalent to high switching costs: in fact, it's a rather subjective calculation. If you don't care about keeping your old emails, switching your E-mail client has nearly no costs, for example. Additionally, "free" software doesn't imply low switching costs: develop a large application using the KDE or GNOME APIs, and you'll find that switching is rather expensive.
In general, your argument is a red herring: Since switching costs may establish a trap, you should warn about software with high switching costs, not about proprietary software.
Actually, most people don't know a thing about the issues around proprietary and free software. If they did, I am confident that most (more than 50%) would rather buy free software.
Now of course those who sell proprietary software happily buy proprietary software: they often don't have a choice. They can't use GPL software. They can however, use BSD licensed software. And I bet they prefer that over proprietary products.
Most proprietary software strongly encourage you to stick
with them, and make switching difficult. The best examples
I have in mind are operating systems and office suites.
Most people aren't as cautious.
The company I work in currently have to buy and use MS Word 2003 because the government agencies it deals with want .doc, period. The sysadmins are forced to use windows because that's what most people use, and they just won't switch. (And we're a tech company, so imagine the others.)
Inertia is enormous. People tend to stick with whatever they started with (Blender vs 3DsMax is a good example). Proprietary formats and non standard APIs make it worse.
'Installing software' is a fairly abstract concept, especially given how liberally RMS likes to see the GPL used beyond normal software. To that end, I think that if he were truly logically pure, the same logic would apply to the iPhone. But, he would never agree that allowing something like an iPhone to be OK with free software (rightfully so), and so I think that should have demanded that every bit of that microwave be free. And everything else in his life.
Also, his comments on co-op food "Thus, food co-ops are not useful for me. I like them in principle." GPL-encumbered libraries are not useful for me. I like them in principle. Good day sir.
The iPhone, by contrast, has millions upon millions of reasons you might need/want to tinker with the software. Hence the demand for source. Seriously, RMS is not the one with a logic problem.
However, no one is clamoring to write apps for a microwave. A microwave really just has one function and as long as it does that one thing then it doesn't really matter how the software works.
To a hardware hacker that would be a false statement.
Tinkering with the software on your phone has much less potential to do so, for me it's simple if it has software in it and you bought it then you should be able to tinker with it.
When you buy a microwave, you are buying it to heat food. You are not expecting to be able to browse the web on it or play games. If you are, then you need your head examined or to invent this new product (if you are right that it's a reasonable/desirable expectation, there should be a market for it). I think the distinction is actually very very clear, continuum or not.
Once the microwave starts allowing for remote control and twittering its status, the line does become more blurred ;)
iPod classic, it's not going to hurt anyone if you screw with the firmware, you should be free to tinker to your heart's content. There are also enough obvious deficiencies (lack of support for a variety of codecs) which can be improved.
Same with a TV, the Kindle, the Drobo.
Unfortunately, the line between the two is blurry at best. For example, I'm not sure how well this jives with the case of the printer software which provided the catalyst for RMS starting the FS movement in the first place.
See for example, "Predictable Programs in Barcodes":
http://repository.upenn.edu/cis_papers/200/
From the abstract: "...In particular, we consider programs for microwave ovens, which provide a basic open API for controlling cooking times..."
The authors were only able to _simulate_ a microwave oven, presumably because the software on real microwave ovens is closed. A reasonable argument could be made that the proprietary nature of microwave oven software has limited innovation in this market.
The point is not that the iPhone should be considered the same as a microwave, but that there is no hard line. If you are going to be a fundamentalist, like RMS, you need to carry it through to all things. There is no point where a microwave becomes definably different than an iPhone. Its a continuum.
"The only way I could justify this is if I began developing a free replacement for that very program. It is ok to use a nonfree program for the purpose of developing its free replacement." - RMS answering 22.
The guy is in a tough spot.
I wish someone would have asked him about the eating of his toe jam. :) It was touched on, and I understand it is not important, but his appearance distracts from his goal. And who in the hell eats the crap between your toes? ( I mean, in public that is, I do so in the privacy of my safe room, duh! )
How in the heck could he have forgotten the belittling of a small kid. Either the OP was in fact making it up/embellishing, or there is no way he forgot, and was covering.
The hypothetical about the software based medical solution; that was a surprising answer to me. In a way, he has invented a religious dogma. He seems to have an answer to everything that comes up, in the same way religions also have an answer for dinosaurs and aliens.
Just pick a damn movie and pick a damn book for Christ's sake! :)
This one just killed me:
When a company says, "We want to merge with competitor XYZ,
since we are too small to compete in this market, and by the way
the merged company will become the biggest in the field," we
need to respond, "We won't let you merge. However, we just split
your biggest competitor into 5 pieces; maybe now you will find
it easier to compete."
His inability to adapt his position hurts him in the long run. When making comments about textbooks, it was clear to me, that the preferable solution would be to use a free textbook over a non free textbook. I can get behind that. However, when the quality of the non free textbook is abysmal, you must go with the non free version. We are talking about one's eduction, or health, or life saving scenario, their future in general.
Giving up a little in the beginning to position yourself to be able to make sure that what you gave up in the beginning never happens again, is the adaptation he lacks, which hurts his end game.
Compromise does not seem to be in his vocabulary, yet I suspect he would be so much further along had he learned about it. He may walk into a meeting with major leaders of other countries to get them to look into free software deployment on a scale of millions. That sets the tone to be able to one day implement his idealistic end game. That meeting would have no negotiation to it, it would be his way, or no way, in which case, Microsoft just made all the money, and he took a step backwards for the sake of being stubborn.
Thank God Stallman helped all of those sick kids with Malaria in Africa with by giving them GIMP and GCC.
Way better than the billions of dollars and thousands of vaccinations Bill and Melinda Gates gave to them.
In all seriousness, if we're going to argue the ethics of charging for software,at the end of the day who has done more good? Bill Gates who made himself rich, gave thousands of people jobs, created products that made the lives of millions of other people easier (all snarking about Windows and Office aside, they ultimately made computing more accessible to everyone), and has created the world's most well-funded charity which actually goes out and does good, like giving vaccinations to sick kids around the planet.
When I compare the more calculus of capitalism and propreitary software against Stallman's dogmatism, it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good.
Free software have nothing to do much with capitalism. Stallman probably agree with the idea of competition improving life. What he disagree with is what he called combat.(Or what I least remember from reading one of his essay) Rather than improve over your competitors and sell great stuff to customers, you seek to annihilate your competitors by unethical means and gain control over your customers.
So why does the GPL make it so difficult to make any kind of money. Many of the supporters are also against any and all forms of commercial software.
"What he disagree with is what he called combat.(Or what I least remember from reading one of his essay) Rather than improve over your competitors and sell great stuff to customers, you seek to annihilate your competitors by unethical means and gain control over your customers."
His answer to this is to force everybody to the same level (IE: as soon as a company improves their software, all competitors should get those improvements).
How many Free software supporters did you count said they're explicitly against profiting from software?
Beside, if GPL make it difficult to earn money, than it's a pure side effect.
Do I really need to keep count? Look at any discussion involving the GPL.
"Beside, if GPL make it difficult to earn money, than it's a pure side effect."
A side effect? I just don't believe it. Stallman and many people from the community are very focal about being anti-corporation and anti-profit.
If you can't see this, then I don't know what to tell you.
I have not detect any anti-business bias in the discussion where I was involved. I didn't hear free supporters hating the profit motives in the time I been around.
A side effect? I just don't believe it. Stallman and many people from the community are very focal about being anti-corporation and anti-profit. If you can't see this, then I don't know what to tell you.
The FSF sold software packages in the past. Stallman keep saying that he isn't opposed to software developers not being able to make a living.
Ever consider that your views of the world might be colored about what you think you see in Stallman and the others?
Now, it seem that you and I hold the same views about business and the profit motives. The only difference is that I don't see free software as antagonist to the profit motives and the ability to make a living, partly because I actually try to make money off free software and free content.
You can mock RMS's contributions all you want, but the fact is that he has done a good deal for the world. He created the basis and licensing for the operating system that's been on more devices than any other operating system that's ever existed, that's run on more processors than any other operating system that's ever existed. This thing he started is the basis for the bulk of the internet, for the architecture that runs web sites; people don't give it this credit often enough, but Gnu/Linux in many ways has made the modern technological world possible, and without things like GCC and the standard utilities, it would have died a sad death in 1991. Heck, just for his work on Gnu AWK alone, I think Richard Stallman deserves a few geek medals. And finally, his Gnu Public License and its derivatives (the Apache License et al) have been instrumental in filling the world with an open architecture that makes many of the amazing things we're able to do now possible.
It is possible to admire Bill Gates for his humanitarian work while believing that much of his Microsoft legacy has been bad for software and for freedom in general. I know Stallman can seem like a cranky old man, but he's more careful and thoughtful than you're giving him credit for. When people ask him whether Microsoft (or any company) is "evil," he usually says that you can't say that a whole company is evil, and you have to think about particular things they've done. I believe that his argument that some of Microsoft's business practices are unethical is sound; and while I think Bill and Melinda Gates are wonderful philanthropists, that doesn't mean that I have to think that they're great for software, too.
Their foundation has done a lot of good, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Why does it have all that money in the first place?
Well, mostly because Microsoft managed to work itself into a monopoly position with dirty tactics, and the proliferation of their own proprietary file formats. This meant that millions of people and organizations had to pay the Microsoft tax, which was later used to start the B&M Gates Foundation.
How many millions of US$ would those people have donated to charity if their budgets hadn't been constrained by purchasing Microsoft software? Some of them were probably African countries that could have used that money to buy vaccines 10 years ago.
Don't get me wrong, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing some good work now, but to only look at their current donations is to only see the tip of the iceberg.
*I heard about this several years ago so would be happy to be told they've changed this. Their response was that the fund management and philanthropic arms of the foundation were firewalled and the former's directive was to simply maximize growth. I find this unfortunate at best.
There was an informed article in The Nation which touched upon the undemocratic vision the Gates Foundation allegedly has; people affected by poverty do struggle to fix their own problems in a self-governing way. Elite benefactors like Gates or Soros may conceivably help to strengthen the systems which make it hard to self-govern, along with whatever benefits they accomplish.
http://www.thenation.com/article/gates-foundation-and-africa...
(Incidentally, I don't see why Gates is considered a particularly predatory businessman. He just happened to be the one who succeeded, as usually happens; and other businesspeople don't like an entity with the resulting market power. He might be a much nicer guy than many of his competitors, for all I know.)
There are few OSS projects that have done anything more than steal ideas from commercial software in terms of innovation. Programming languages are the only place I can think of that OSS is cutting edge.
MS pushed the boundaries of software to the extreme. Go look at any of their competitors at the age of their dominance. Man, look at Netscape navigator in its bloated unusable form when IE6 came out. Compare Excel to Lotus 123. Or Outlook to Lotus Notes.
MS didn't win because it was evil. It won because it was very, very, very, very, very good.
Google is winning now, with its even more extremely closed source software known as google search, because it is very, very, very good. It's just pretending to support OSS. Without actually giving away the crown jewels.
And MS still is very good in a lot of fields, OSes being the primary one. Only Apple is a close competitor and it's a lot more expensive.
So get off your soapbox and smell reality. The overall benefit MS software has donated to the world is worth many more trillions of dollars than the licenses cost.
Or your point is totally fucking retarded. One or the other...
I really can't make the distinction.
Google search is not closed source as it is a hosted service. It would be if it was redistributed under closed source license. This is why RMS himself said he uses Google.
> It's just pretending to support OSS. Without actually giving away the crown jewels.
It has not given sources, but Google gave many papers about the technics they use such as map/reduce and compression which enable projects such hadoop, yahoo search and even Bing.
Where exactly did he say this? He's opposed cloud services from the beginning and designed GPLv3 to attack web apps.
Last I checked, the man scarcely browsed the web.
Hence, he was still lying about Stallman "using Google search".
My cry of shenanigans stands.
Surely you're joking? Outlook is a crappy email client. Mutt which is older than I am, handles mail better than Outlook does, I hate using Outlook. It means archiving my mail every month (several accounts over several PST files over an a very high mail volume). Ever since it's beginning outlook was the crappiest mail software. You can't figure out what the hell it's doing and it crashes all the damn time without error or with generic/cryptic ones. The only way to fix it is to wipe your settings from the hard drive, and reset registry keys to defaults. And if that doesn't work reinstall office.
Not to mention compiz/beryl had desktop effects before any other operating system. Linux in the kernel level has removed the need for file polling, replacing it with iwatch. Linux has on demand file system and virtual file system mounting. There are hardly any drivers for file systems or virtual file systems on Windows. Dokan is the only place where you can get FUSE or SSH and the software is crappy.
MS to this day hasn't standardized it's own security structure (EX: runas.exe in XP will have the processes pass on administrator rights to all child processes 7 doesn't neither does Vista). And lets face it on the top of it's game Windows default security could have been over-riden by pressing cancel on the logon screen. On anything but a fickle consumer and ease level Windows and to some extent OSX (although the use of a BSD kernel and the growth of MacPorts mitigates this a bit) don't hold a candle to the features found in Linux.
You seem to equate success and innovation with sales and press releases. In this case you probably think that MS is doing something revolutionary by letting Xboxes read usb drives.
Surely you're joking. First, Outlook isn't for anyone who'd be comfortable operating mutt. Period. Second, sure, Outlook has stupid design-decisions. But nobody claimed that Outlook is perfect, it was argued that Outlook was better than Lotus Notes which is was competing against when it was launched. And it was (and is), leaps and bounds. Third, Outlook isn't just a mail client, it's an integrated communications suite. It has taken OSS years and years to catch up with this. You may not agree that it's a critical feature, but for millions of business users, it's a deal-breaker.
There's good innovation in the kernel-space, too, but user-facing apps are playing catch-up.
KDE has had very good PIM software for a while now even before KDE4. Kontact has always been a suite for that kind of stuff, and it's possible to do most things in Outlook in Kontact. Also if you're talking about Exchange and groupware servers there are a few for Linux like Zimbra. However I haven't even seen Fortune 500 companies make most of the use of Exchange features.
Also your measure for success is very shallow. Essentially you don't see OSS as competition, which belies your actual position and tells me that there's no point in arguing this with you considering your mind is made up about OSS. As far as I'm concerned all vendor software loses out because it's missing basic features from a IT management standpoint. Also from my experiences millions of business users are too stupid to use Outlook in any shape or form because they lack basic computer proficiency skills.
As long as we're comparing who did what first (as if that's relevant today), ReadDirectoryChangesW came in Windows 2000. inotify came in 2005.
> MS to this day hasn't standardized it's own security structure (EX: runas.exe in XP will have the processes pass on administrator rights to all child processes 7 doesn't neither does Vista)
Given that Vista overall has a rather different security structure from XP, I don't see how this is relevant.
> And lets face it on the top of it's game Windows default security could have been over-riden by pressing cancel on the logon screen
Amusingly, this just displays your own naivete. The only way to get security if someone has physical access is through cryptography. Pressing cancel on a local login screen is equivalent to booting into single user mode or just using a boot disk and wiping out the local administrator's password.
> You seem to equate success and innovation with sales and press releases.
Microsoft Research is the most prolific non-university academic CS research lab in the world. The people that work there are all truly brilliant. (disclosure: I did an internship there this summer)
Inotify was a replacement for dnotify. Which was there since 2.4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnotify
Also comparing the two subsystems is entirely wrong. ReadDirectoryChangesW is still a polling mechanism, inotify and dnotify are kernel level events.
>Amusingly, this just displays your own naivete. The only way to get security if someone has physical access is through cryptography. Pressing cancel on a local login screen is equivalent to booting into single user mode or just using a boot disk and wiping out the local administrator's password.
You're just being an obstinate child here. There's a difference when anyone can defeat your security, and when knowledgeable people can defeat your security. Why do company's take people of the premises when they're fired? Because it's easier for them to lash out, and cause damage. Well it's certainly easier for a passerby to break into your system by pressing cancel. Outside physical threats are always there, especially in the form of delivery men. What's the point of even password protecting something when the UPS guy can come and hit cancel cause he has 95 at home? Not only that but you still need a password for single user mode, and it would take a bit longer for him if he had a boot disk.
>Microsoft Research is the most prolific non-university academic CS research lab in the world. The people that work there are all truly brilliant. (disclosure: I did an internship there this summer)
This isn't about Microsoft Research, this is about Microsoft products. This is a completely irrelevant point. MSR is a fine institution which is a great place for academic papers, they don't generally develop products for Microsoft.
> Also comparing the two subsystems is entirely wrong. ReadDirectoryChangesW is still a polling mechanism, inotify and dnotify are kernel level events.
ReadDirectoryChangesW sleeps while there aren't any changes and only returns once there are some changes. Efficiency-wise there isn't any real difference between kernel-level events and sleeping on a different thread, and I don't see one as clearly better than the other. After all, waking a thread up is also a kernel-level event!
> Not only that but you still need a password for single user mode, and it would take a bit longer for him if he had a boot disk.
Who cares? The difference in the level of security you get is a small epsilon. You either don't care about physical attacks, in which case you don't care whether it takes 5 seconds or 5 minutes to break, or you do care about physical attacks, in which case you encrypt your data.
Of course, your entire point is irrelevant -- calling Windows 9x "on the top of it's [sic] game" in terms of security is lying. Windows 9x was insecure in much more serious ways than a stupid login prompt. Windows NT-based systems, especially Vista onwards, are much more effectively designed.
> This isn't about Microsoft Research, this is about Microsoft products. This is a completely irrelevant point.
You used the words "success" and "innovation". The fact that MSR exists and is as good as it is, is an important part of Microsoft's success as a whole, and there's no lack of innovation on display there (witness Street Slide for a recent example). To consider "success" and "innovation" only in terms of released products is myopic.
Don't talk shit about stuff you know nothing about.
You’re joking, right? Mac OS X has always had some sort of desktop effects. Hardware accelerated Quartz Extreme was part of 10.2 in 2002. And Exposé was introduced in 2003… All before Compiz/beryl.
Bill Gates didn't become rich because Microsoft managed to work itself into a monopoly position with dirty tactics. The whole problem people have with Microsoft is that they abused their monopoly in one area to gain a foothold in another! They already had a virtual monopoly on desktop computers. How did they get there? By having smart people and making really good software that more or less worked everywhere.
When Microsoft started becoming evil they were already fully entrenched in the market.
How many millions of US$ would those people have donated to charity if their budgets hadn't been constrained by purchasing Microsoft software? Some of them were probably African countries that could have used that money to buy vaccines 10 years ago.
Yes, I'm sure that any money left over from a large corporation's IT budget would have gone straight into the donation budget.
Regardless of your opinions on their specific business practices, I think the OP's point still stands: its difficult at best to laude someone for giving away money that to some extent was derived illegally.
About charity, Microsoft may have improved, but a few years ago standard operating procedure was for the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to tie charitable work to large Microsoft purchases. If a government bought from Microsoft, the foundation would come in and start providing assistance. If the government went to Linux, the foundation would pick up and leave.
The use of this tactic has left me with a bad impression of said foundation, despite all of the unquestioningly good work they do. (They may have gut this out more recently. I no longer pay attention to Microsoft now that it is clear that they aren't going to be able to destroy the parts of the IT world that I care about.)
That's what I've always believed - if you want to do any sort of significant and impactful good in this world, you have to have capital. I can't help but give Gates the nod here when it comes to the greater good.
It's a mighty big leap from the charity of Bill Gates to the essential moral quality of capitalism.
That is a heavy statement, and highly contextual. I expect it to be popular in this forum where people view technology as a way to make life better, but keep in mind that strong control over technology can do amazing evil more easily than it can meager good.
Gates' philanthropy may appeal to you, but only because as individuals we cannot fathom the whole of an industry. Imagine that for every dollar of aid sent to Africa, one thousand dollars have been spent on extravagance and inefficiency. Maybe not by Gates himself, but certainly by the whole of the industry he profited from.
The last ten years of technological progress have largely been run on Linux, mostly as a cost saving tool but also due to the merits of Linux. The efficiency gains are enormous, much larger than if every computer needed a buggy, licensed copy of Windows that automatically updated in the middle of your slideshow (happened in the office yesterday). Compare the revenue that Microsoft would have made to the idea that an operating system could be free-as-in-beer, and you might have a different perspective of the meager billions that Gates has put to good use. We detonate more of our tax money in anger every year than he will ever use to help the poor and needy.
Especially in a discussion mentioning Linux, configuring a piece of software to behave how you want should be a basic sort of thing to do.
The efficiency gains are enormous
It was so much more efficient the other day when I had to cobble together a bash script to poll MySQL to show running queries, then realise it wasn't running fast enough, switch on query logging, find a reference telling me SIGHUP doesn't cause MySQL to reload config files, restart the database, run some tests, disable the logging, restar the database again. I was so pleased I couldn't just open SQL Server Profiler/Tracer and see live database activity in a couple of mouse clicks and no restarts.
The efficiency gains are arguable and situation (and person) dependent.
yawn, welcome to 1995 again.
Stallman has given us GCC which is free in the many senses of the word free. The Microsoft C compiler has been good too, but it comes with strings attached, just like vaccinations and bio-tech.
"Alone, I have seen many marvellous things, none of which are true."
What are these strings?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_charitable_f...
The US was and is far more liberal than most countries, and prosperity has followed liberalism (not democrat/republican liberalism, dictator/freedom liberalism) in every case where freedom has been allowed to prosper.
EG, we can't judge RMS's decision then based on what BG later became.
>Way better than the billions of dollars and thousands of vaccinations Bill and Melinda Gates gave to them.
RMS and the free and open source community have given way more billions of dollars and jobs that Gates ever has. Let me explain. Many governments have switched to Gnu/Linux and are saving billions of dollars each year for the last ten years such as Brazil ($1 billion per year http://www.brazzil.com/2004/html/articles/mar04/p107mar04.ht...). Given that many governments have switched to gnu/linux and free and open software, that's billions of dollar saved each year for the last 5 to ten years. Those are billions that can be spent on health, education, employment and more, it's an invaluable gift to humanity. I know Bill Gates fortune doesn't exceed $50 billions so I'll let you do the math. RMS and the free software world have given way more to the world than Bill Gates ever will. And Free Software will continue to give while Bill's fortunes will soon be over.
> In all seriousness, if we're going to argue the ethics of charging for software,at the end of the day who has done more good?
See above.
> Bill Gates who made himself rich, gave thousands of people jobs, created products that made the lives of millions of other people easier
Free and Open Source software give millions of jobs too. I'd say even more especially with the internet. Do you think Google could have been done without Gnu/Linux when they needed to install thousands of servers and didn't have yet the money to pay licenses? How about the internet? It's all free/open source software, a way bigger revolution than the PC which was a boring work machine before for most people.
> When I compare the more calculus of capitalism and propreitary software against Stallman's dogmatism, it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good
Well, think and try to calculate again. Gates' done way less.
It's funny how you can make the argument about money that "would have been spent". Many open source zealots (and Stallman himself) talk about how the software industry can't equate piracy to dollars people would have spent. Why should this be any different?
Software licenses are also a very small part of the entire cost. The biggest costs are support (this is how most open source companies make their money).
Even if governments had saved as much money as you want us to believe, I seriously doubt it would go into healthcare, education, and employment.
"Do you think Google could have been done without Gnu/Linux when they needed to install thousands of servers and didn't have yet the money to pay licenses?"
There are other variants of unix that have even less restrictive licenses. BSD comes to mind. Gnu/Linux was a means to an end.
"It's all free/open source software, a way bigger revolution than the PC which was a boring work machine before for most people."
Most users don't use a variant of linux on their desktop. Microsoft brought computers in every home and made computers "interesting".
"Well, think and try to calculate again. Gates' done way less."
Gates has proof that he has helped the poor with billions of dollars. Stallman has possibilities and no direct proof of anything.
Stallman is the guy who pushed the asteroid and watched it sail harmlessly past. In alternate reality, Gates is the guy on the ground helping the survivors clean up after the asteroid hit.
Metaphorically, of course. Stallman's good is causing unknown amounts of freedom restriction and consequent problems to not ever have happened - which isn't really tangible.
Without Stallman and the GNU, we would still have just as much software on the market. Many of the people and companies would have most likely released it under the BSD license (or public domain).
..and like I said. I still don't buy it. Piracy causes unknown amounts of damage to commercial software companies. If the community comes to terms with this, I might be more apt to come to terms with the amount of unknown "good" Stallman has done.
It's still billions of saving that are not being used in taxes/licensing and being used for doing actual things for the public which is the job of the government and yes, that includes health, employment, education among other things.
> Microsoft brought computers in every home and made computers "interesting".
No, the internet did. I have yet to find "regular" people who were actively using computers at home before the internet era. Give a computer with no internet connection to a non geek, in most case he'll tell you it's useless.
> Gates has proof that he has helped the poor with billions of dollars. Stallman has possibilities and no direct proof of anything.
The cost of a Gnu/Linux distribution is estimated to the billion dollar, not to forget other big free software projects such as Samba and others. And it's all for free. Plus the saving done by governments are very real, they are real proof. This is huge for both governments, people trying to build a business and people living in 3rd world like myself (Peru) where people cannot afford to pay billions in licensing. I'm glad our governments is not wasting their money on Microsoft licenses as they are switching to free software. This is real proof, real benefit no matter how much you want to deny it and it's way bigger than all of Gates billions put together because once spent they won't be there unlike Gnu/Linux and Free Software which will benefit the world for many many generations to come.
The Gates Foundation vaccination programs are expected to save 7.6 million children's lives over the next 10 years. You don't think 7.6 million children living who would have otherwise died isn't a benefit that will last for many generations?
[1] http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/redhat71-v1/redhat71sloc.html
Which RMS isn't, he's arguing the ethics of restricting freedom. Which means he'd probably disagree with your claim "[Microsoft] created products that made the lives of millions of other people easier" and frame it as a negative not a positive.
Bill Gates made his money restricting the freedom of hundreds of millions of people, from which he bought a huge house and then gave some of the remainder back to the world.
Freedom is nothing without survival, but stealing freedom from some to buy survival for others, at a personal profit, is not clear cut moral or good.
The only reason you can write that is because there is a dollar value attached to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, which in turn allows you to measure how much money is being pumped in to those projects.
But the effects of open source on the way the third world is operating are much harder to quantify, it could very well outweigh the effects of the money that goes in to helping those sick kids with Malaria, by enabling a solution to the problems around them rather than just curing a disease they've got.
Both are good, both have a place in this world, don't take the easy way out and use the money as the yardstick, and no, capitalism is not more or less moral than open source and does not do more good, after all for every Bill Gates there are lots of Larry Ellissons.
PS: Consider how much time/money was wasted because IE tried to avoid standards compliance. IMO, the world would have been far better off if MS had spent an extra billion making better software and Bill never donated a single cent.
Bang! Nailed it. This I think is the source of all problems in the friction between open source philosophies and the general populace. At his heart, RMS is an economic theorist, not a social or technological one. This is because software takes time to make, and time = money. Yet he continuously fails to understand this because he's never personally had to feed himself with the fruit of his daily labors. In RMS's mind, making money from your effort = mistreating people.
The analogies between RMS and various communist thinkers all derive from the simple fact that none of them ever had to feed themselves in that way and simply don't understand how basic economics work and all come up with various economic ideals that simply aren't modeled on how the world works.
By his model, all people have to do is write software, give away all their labor for free to be "ethical" and then feed themselves off of reward payouts and speaking engagement fees (or some other mysterious source of money RMS has left unspecified because he simply doesn't know how people actually make money in the real world). This is clearly a model that doesn't scale beyond maybe a few dozen people on the planet. The rest of us need to eat, arguing that we are bad people because we demand our supper after a day of work is what makes RMS's arguments ultimately unethical. He would rather people starve to death than charge for software -- this is ultimately what his equation balances out to.
If I ignore this type of prattling nonsense, I have to say that RMS has been on the balance a force for good in the world. But he's fantastically out of touch and seems perfectly oblivious to it.
Now, if he changed his message and said "it's a good and useful thing, it's 'nice' for people to release free software, and we all can benefit from sharing and pooling our labor together" I don't think anybody would have a problem with him. But like many here have said, RMS represents the extremist goal posts of the idea, and on the balance, that is a good thing, just so long as everybody is aware that a world at the end of the field is not one conducive to people eating.
Stallman's contribution is much greater than that of cheerleader or discussion framer - the ecosystem that exists in large part because of him is, I suspect, tremendously important in the day to day lives of many of the people reading this.
One thing I would suggest, for those not familiar with RMS's history, is to take a moment to read the Wikipedia page on Lisp Machines. Specifically, this passage:
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
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine
I find, knowing a bit of the backstory, that RMS is a more sympathetic character. Honestly, I can't say that, put in the same position, I might not have arrived at the same world view he did.
(Not true of everyone, of course.)
Richard is a tremendous hacker, but he's a lousy salesman. I'm not a big fan of salespeople in general, but guys like DHH have proved that it's not enough to be a great hacker if you want your code and ideas to flourish. You need to understand that marketing really does matter.
Glad to hear he's lightened up a bit over the years, though. Maybe GNU will finally see a rebranding. GNU is such an ugly logo.
A few years ago I asked Duane Bibby to do some artwork for The GNU C Reference Manual. I rather like his whimsical approach on the gnu...
If GNU wants to brand itself to anyone other than hardcore hackers, it’s probably going to need the kind of logo that hardcore hackers will complain is generic and corporate-looking. The 1975–era homebrew esthetic is exactly the kind of surface feature that people dismiss RMS for. (Not that he’d necessarily be super popular even if he were a charismatic Lawrence Lessig type, but it couldn’t hurt.)
I wasn't aware that GNU tools had a marketing problem, since they're all over the place, even in business worlds. Leave the marketing to the distros and programmer employees.
I've taken on occasion to calling it LNU, not GNU. The L is for "Linux kernel", to give proper credit to the Linux kernel for turning GNU from just a set of third party tools you installed on your proprietary Unix system into a complete system.
If I want to be formal, I call it LNU/Linux.
I'd be happy if they just dropped the hard 'g' pronunciation.
I mean... are you saying that Stallman's code and ideas haven't flourished? Everyone who uses the internet in a day is participating in Stallman's vision.
15. MendaSpain: Hi Richard. I love all GPL software, but I have a dilemma:
I'm writing a program which needs a lot of time to be coded but at the same time it's really easy to be used. I could license it as GPL and wait for donations, but from other people's experience just almost nobody make donations to free software projects. Support is not necessary because as I've said before, it's a really easy to use software and nobody would pay for a 3 page manual.
For "big" software it's easy to get money using any GNU license, but for "little" software the only option I see is selling it using the Apple App Store approach.
What can I do in this case?
RMS: You have a choice between deserving a reward and not getting a material reward, and getting one but not deserving it.
RMS: I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people. I hope you will do the same, because that way your program will be a contribution to society instead of a social problem.
Yikes.
One of his major principles is that the community organizer has to help people see why it's in their best interest to organize or make change. According to Alinsky, arguing that people should agitate and work for change because of the common good or because the change is the right thing simply doesn't work.
I believe the OP is saying that Stallman isn't doing a great job of incorporating that aspect of Alinsky's principles and in doing so is setting back the free software movement.
EDIT: I just read a little further down in the thread and saw this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1559283 : "The problem with Free Software is a marketing problem." That's similar to an Alinsky comment, although in different language: if you can't "market" the change you're trying to encourage by making people realize why it benefits them, you're not going to make that change happen.
Meanwhile, only the tiny population of people who are programmers really even have a basic understanding of what Stallman's freedom is all about, and even they do not value it very high.
On a micro level I don't care about software freedom that much, because mostly I just want to get something done, and if 0.5% of my yearly income is going to commercial software that I find useful and have no desire to modify, then the freedom issues just don't even enter my conscience.
However on a macro level Stallman's slippery slope argument is correct. If the balance of software shifts to proprietary, then I feel the goodness of software in general is greatly reduced. If GNU/Linux didn't exist for instance, the technological landscape would be a shadow of what it is today.
But I digress... for free software to ever gain any mindshare in the non-developer community would require a stroke of marketing genius the likes of which I've never seen. It's just not reasonable to rank freedom with such a high priority for the average person who has no ability or desire to modify any software. There might be a redistribution angle, but again, it would have to be sheer marketing brilliance to convince anyone of that.
Alinsky's ideas --- which are extremely relevant to marketing --- mostly involve adapting your message to the realities of your audience. That means listening to them, understanding their problems, and being prepared to spell out how their lives would work out after you've changed them.
Here Stallman stipulates that it's self-evident that unfree software is bad, and that your personal well-being is less important that the principle of freedom. It's not even a 'wrong' point; it's an overtly hostile and stupid one. Free software has answers to that problem ("design your application differently, run your business differently"), but Stallman's idealism keeps him from understanding those answers, and so all he can do is bloviate.
Rules for Radicals isn't just a good book, it's also a fun one. As the Tea Party people are showing, it's also not inherently left- or right-. It's short and cheap, and if any part of your life involves wanting people to change anything they're doing (from how they vote to what flavor of ice cream they buy), you should get it.
Whatever your views on software—and by default most people will disagree with him on many points—his contributions to the software world are undeniable. There are a lot of fundamentalists out there, and 99% of the time they scare the shit out of me because of what their unchecked advocacy could ultimately lead to. Stallman's fundamentalism on the other hand, does not seem likely to ever lead to any detrimental effect on society.
In other words, it's not just about respecting Stallman's conviction, but also acknowledging that his convictions are well-placed, even though my lifestyle would never allow me to share his position per se.
I don't know whether our community will make a "high end video game" which is free software, but I am sure that if you try, you can stretch your taste for games so that you will enjoy the free games that we have developed.
The asker wants a high end video game, and is prepared to pay for it and accept non-freedom. RMSs position is basically "you're wrong for wanting that which doesn't fit into my dogmatic world view".
I mean, his Hollywood-answer is coherent (don't give money to Hollywood, they spend that money to actively destroy your freedom), but this is declaring bankruptcy on his philosophy. His "iGroan/iBad" and "Billionaire Polluters" puns doesn't make him sound less like a 12-year old. Does he also spell Microsoft with a $?
in some ways, the guy is right. annoyingly, stubbornly, horribly-marketedly right.
to get people to really understand how freedom to modify software is important the way freedom of speech is important (i.e., it just saves time for everyone in the long run. take the gates-has-done-more-good-for-kids-in-africa argument. the counter argument is that those kids wouldn't have malaria if something more akin to the freedom to modify software were believed by more people. i.e., we did not excuse exploitation and we safeguarded against it heavily. against de beers. against remnants of colonial governments. against rebel armies. against anyone who takes advantage of other people.) -- anyway, to get people to see why it's important (and it took me -- what -- two decades of interaction with software as a user and now a developer?) -- this may sound lame, but i think there is a great character out there that could be part of some novel or screenplay.
it would be like sue sylvester as a team leader / tech lead. this incredibly uncompromising hardass who for some reason insists on free software. total jerk to new hires. rejects code left and right, almost arbitrarily (i'm reminded of the whole xemacs situation, but i suppose that's different.)
but then one day you'd have the sue sylvester's sister episode or whatever. maybe some unexpected vulnerable conversation with our once brow-beaten, junior-developer protagonist. and the glorious recognition scene would hit you and you'd realize -- f-, in some ways that dude is right.
"I value freedom more than technical progress."
"We need to make it so hard to move production from one country to another that each company will be stuck in one country, so that country will be able to regulate it.
And a hybrid between a Unix box and a Lisp machine would be awesome. Too bad GNU didn't turn out that way.
edit: apparently, BRL-CAD has no teapotahedron primitive: http://brlcad.org/gallery/s/diagrams/primitives.png.html
Someone must add it.
Some people say he softened up over the years, but sometimes it appears to me as if he were just growing wary. In another interview that was on HN a while back he said something along the lines of "It is not great, but this is the life I have chosen for me and I have to live it this way".
Am I the only one who feels that way? Maybe it's just because I'm listening to the Schindler's List theme ...
Tell me again, why he should get the Gnu/... in front of the kernel name?
While Emacs, GCC and coreutils are more historically "GNU" than say GNOME the vast majority of GNU projects almost from the very beginning has been donated code or projects that otherwise fell under the GNU umbrella.
A $1M grant from the MacArthur foundation and another $1M from the Takeda foundation tends to skew one's view of economics somewhat.
Note also in that article he talks about how much he likes to travel, and slates BP a paragraph later. Hypocrite, much?
It's a lot like "Trusted Computing"- a surface reading might suggest it means the computer is "trustworthy" or dependable to the user, while it actually refers to a "Trusted System" in a security engineering sense.
PG > Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it? It always will when you're trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. ... We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
RMS was the first to venture into the new world of OpenSource , software freedom .. and so he has all the traits of early explorer.
> The reason I don't use nonfree software is that it would take away my freedom. I don't want to let that happen. So I don't consider installing nonfree program, even as an possible option. I treat them as poison. I hope that you will too.
This man lives in an imaginary world where no one has to make any money (or if they do, they are evil) or deserves to live a comfortable lifestyle by receiving monetary rewards for good and hard work.
Frankly, I believe that this tone and rhetoric devalues some of the great things he has done.
EDIT: clarification where I say (or if they do) I mean if they want to.
EDIT 2: I don't understand why I'm being downvoted for expressing my opinion...
Why is it that so many people believe they have a God-given right to make money by doing a certain activity? I see this same thinking all the time in arguments about the future of newspapers. Programmers are generally smart people. I'm sure most of them could find a way to make money if everyone stopped buying proprietary software.
You do not have the right to succeed.
I just don't think it's valid to say that carmakers should continue to be able to profit making cars in a world where nobody wants them simply because its hard work that they like.
I don't think that will happen, though, for precisely the reason you state.
The main effort of making a car is still making the car. Just because you can download recipes or a CAD drawing of a car chefs or car makers aren't going to go out of business. They provide a valuable service that people want to buy.
Similarly, programs aren't going to write themselves. There's always going to be demand for skilled programmers, just like there's demand for skilled carpenters.
A lot of people are doing this sort of thing already, so you can make a living off it.
Just because people demand a different color toilet paper (free software) the demand doesn't go away.
If everyone demanded that software be free we'd still have cellphones, search engines and games because people want that stuff, and they're going to pay for it one way or the other.
Of course business models would be different, but the end result probably wouldn't be. The main difference would be that there'd be more collaboration on shared problems (like game engines), instead of each proprietary software company coming up with their own solution.
WTF are you talking about?
Are you saying that all these nights I'm not sleeping, working 14 hours per day, not spending time with my family ... don't have a cost?
Is this not manufacturing?
> under a free software model you'd have to make money by continuing to make improved versions under contract, or offering support, hosting or other things like that
Yeah, that's called consulting or selling complementary products that are proprietary.
It sucks.
I prefer to exercise my freedoms that I have in the quasi free market I'm operating in and decide for myself how I want to sell my work.
No. Note that this whole conversation started with a car analogy, under that analogy writing software would be designing a car, not manufacturing it. In software manufacturing is distribution, which carries virtually no cost.
Of course making software would still have a cost.
> I prefer to exercise my freedoms [...] to sell my work.
More power to you then. Note that I never said that I agreed with Stallman.
I've was just responding to the fallacy in chc's post where he claimed that just because consumer demand would shift towards free software, that the entire software industry would be destroyed. That's ridiculous.
Software would still be needed, and people would still need to be educated and compensated for writing and maintaining it. To assume that the market couldn't come up with a way to meet the demand and that the clock would be reset to 1920 is naïve.
I completely disagree. He has certain values and political goals which he believes very strongly in -- and espouses them aggressively. This is true for all of us. I personally disagree with him (I am willing to give up some of my freedom for money), but I would never say that that diminishes his accomplishments and contributions.
Proprietary vendors can do things to prevent a suitable alternative from existing, but that's a separate consideration from whether or not you're freer for choosing one way or the other.
With proprietary software, you absolutely give up that ability.
So yes, you do always give up the freedom. The counterpoint, though, is that if you were never to exercise the freedom, it has no value. So even though you've given up a freedom to use a proprietary solution, if you never encounter a case where you want/need to exercise that freedom, it hasn't really hurt you. That may be more what you are getting at?
Working on it though. :)
Stallman believes that you should vote with your feet and avoid using non-free software, and that if we all did this for everything there would be no space for non-free software in the market.
That doesn't mean that you can't sell software. The FSF has always sold copies of their software (I know because I've bought some). All of their licenses allow you to sell software, they consider any license that doesn't allow this to be non-free.
And this falls under the mantle of "consumer protection" how? Maybe a world with no non-free software would be better for me personally, or maybe it wouldn't (I think it probably wouldn't), but trying to create a world in which a particular product category doesn't exist doesn't exist isn't consumer protection.
[Silly counterexamples include: flamethrowing baby-cribs. Fine, abolishing flamethrowing baby cribs does count as consumer protection.]
There are similar movements that advocate boycotting e.g. out of season fruit, or goods manufactured by oppressive countries.
Because doing so creates a bigger market for free programs,
and reduces the market for proprietary ones.
They aren't trying to abolish money. However, they are trying to abolish the idea of making money selling software.
"Stallman believes that you should vote with your feet and avoid using non-free software, and that if we all did this for everything there would be no space for non-free software in the market."
Stallman wants all copyright abolished, which would abolish commercial software. Stallman doesn't want freedom, he wants everyone to follow his rules. True freedom means we have a market of free and non-free software.
"That doesn't mean that you can't sell software. The FSF has always sold copies of their software (I know because I've bought some). All of their licenses allow you to sell software, they consider any license that doesn't allow this to be non-free."
Which also allows the user to re-distribute the software for free. If companies did this, many wouldn't have a business any longer because anybody could legally get it for free.
> You have a choice between deserving a reward and not getting a material reward, and getting one but not deserving it.
I think that RMS sees our current society as intrinsically flawed with regard to how it is that we reward people for their good and hard work (and the behavior patterns associated with that work). It is not that he lives in a world where no one has to make any money.
He is a tremendous hacker and has analyzed the system. He has come to the conclusion that the system in which we live is flawed. The way that you (generally) make money is by hurting other people.
Free software is based on the idea that we should change what behavior we reward. The idea being that proprietary software inhibits freedom of a computer literate (programming literate) person. We should not reward this behavior.
'Making money is evil' is a tremendous oversimplification of the philosophy. If everyone adopted the free software maxim of not using proprietary software, it would be inevitable that society would become extremely computer literate, and/or we would develop a way of compensating people for working on free software projects.
This might be putting the cart before the horse, however. What is really needed is a way to reward people handsomely for working on free software projects. Then it would slowly become a norm to have access to the source code, and society (maybe) follow.
How could a company like Google, built fundamentally on trade secrets, ever be developed. No one would invest the kind of money that was required to build Google into what it is today if Microsoft could go to Github and download "google-search".
It is pie in the sky stuff, unfortunately.
I assume you think that the existence of Google has led to other good things, but I don't see any reason to believe that the people at Google are doing better or more valuable work there than they would be if Google didn't exist.
The best people, an already massive and growing infrastructure, and a proven-successful platform are all things that can't be readily duplicated.
In this situation, monopolies like Google and Microsoft probably wouldn't exist at all. I think search is an excellent example, actually, of something that is required for the proper functioning of the web. It is practically a public good. If we found out Google were biasing its search results, it would be a very big deal (but how do you know it isn't?). If it were open source, we would know.
I guess the question then is 'who pays for the hardware to run open source Google,' and that is a good question, to which I do not know the answer, but seeing as anyone can download the software, it seems anyone could.
Almost every freedom you enjoy came as an economic incentive first.
This is also an oversimplification, but implementing shit without understanding the impact on society historically has led to disaster.
Saying that it would be better if the world did X or Y is very shortsighted without having stats to back your claims ... especially without first demonstrating a sustainable economic model that can survive X or Y (like selling shit and receiving money for it).
More likely would be that software development would be a true commodity OR software would evolve to make Free Software irrelevant.
And it is already happening.
Every interesting application that happened in the last 5 to 10 years is a web application. Web applications are services, not products ... with web apps, people aren't having access to the binary of that application and it doesn't even run on their machines anymore (with the possible exception of distributed systems, like Bittorrent ... but you can see how well Chandler worked out and compare it with the Google Apps).
bad_user,
I'm sorry, I am not quite understanding your definition of 'almost every freedom'. There are plenty of freedoms that I enjoy which are not economically driven. Freedom of religion, freedom to assemble, right to bear arms, freedom of the press, etc, etc.
I mean, are we talking fundamental freedoms?
RMS sees the ability to hack your own system as a fundamental freedom. Computer as an extension of your mind/person. It would be like me telling you that you are not allowed think certain thoughts.
I don't disagree that there is no data to prove that free software would do this, but then again, how exactly are you going to get economic statistics and test cases without going ahead and trying to do it? I also don't disagree that RMS is taking the wrong approach in not having a sustainable economic model for free software (I think I explicitly stated that, in fact).
I see no reason why a web app would not be viable GPL (or massively distributed for that matter). HTML, Javascript and CSS are prime examples of successful open platforms. HTML is so easy to learn because you can take any web page and look at the source. The real secret sauce in something like Facebook is the huge number of users. You have to be on Facebook because all of your friends are on Facebook. Posting some code to the internet wouldn't instantly remove their real advantage. (Similar could be said of something like gmail).
Under these rules, I should be able to include GPL source in a proprietary application and not have to release the code. It's my fundamental freedom to do as I wish with open source code. Yet, it doesn't work this way. People that do this get sued.
I like the mind analogy, it is sufficiently weird.
Lets say my friend Phil and his pet Demon have the technology to implant a calculus subroutine in your brain.
It is a little buggy, but overall it works pretty well, sometimes it will get the wrong answers, but it is about 80% there (the marketing brochure, however makes it sound like it is 100% accurate).
It is perfectly (and easily) within their ability to give me the ability to introspect the subroutine so that I can safely fix any bugs that I find.
But they do not, because then I would know how it works! I could potentially duplicate it elsewhere.
They in fact go to disproportionate lengths to make sure that the particular subroutine is a complete black box. They encrypt it and use a Vulcan mind-meld to wall it off from me.
For a while they push updates, to that corner of my mind, but eventually they go on to greener pastures (they get jobs as consultants or win big in the VC lottery), and I am left with a buggy, 85% understanding of calculus.
If we take the idea that the computer is an extension of the mind seriously, any sort of proprietary software is extremely anti-social behavior. If I create proprietary software and allow people to install it, I am cutting them off from little pieces of understanding and knowledge that they could otherwise have.
It is even worse if it doesn't work properly and I 'hang them out to dry' once they depend on it (i.e. stop fixing bugs).
I didn't come in here to argue that RMS is right, but there does seem to be some sort of moral or ethical issue behind this that is far beyond RMS getting upset that someone else is able to make money with his code. I suspect that he could make quite a bit of money not being the 'free software' guy, if it were mere jealousy.
For me, the issue comes down to my own rights as a developer. If I sell an application with no source, nobody has a right to:
1) copy it freely to their friends 2) get my source
RMS gladly sacrifices the rights of a developer for the rights of a user and I just can't agree.
"If we take the idea that the computer is an extension of the mind seriously, any sort of proprietary software is extremely anti-social behavior. If I create proprietary software and allow people to install it, I am cutting them off from little pieces of understanding and knowledge that they could otherwise have."
The computer isn't an extension of the mind. It's just a tool.
"It is even worse if it doesn't work properly and I 'hang them out to dry' once they depend on it (i.e. stop fixing bugs)."
If that's the case, move onto another application. It's obviously working to some degree if you are using it. Even changes in operating systems won't suddenly make an application stop working (you can continue to use the old OS until you change to a new application).
Open source won't save you from this scenario. Open source developers stop fixing bugs all the time. I can't tell you how many abandoned projects I've seen on Sourceforge or Freshmeat. Sure, you could hire a developer to make changes..but you either have to:
1) hire a contractor (it's not easy to find a contractor that can get familiar with the code you need or is competent enough to get the job done in a timely fashion. This wastes lots of time and money (I know, I've been there).
2) Hire a full-time employee. So now, instead of paying a company $1000/year for bug fixes/updates, you need to pay a full-time developer 10X more.
3) wait for someone to pick the project up. This happens, but since most open source projects are a hobby for the developer, major bugs that you need fixed aren't a priority when the developer needs to pay the rent.
Some companies based on open source do offer support. But it's just as expensive as any other company. So it really offers no benefit.
Either way, Stallman, the pirates, and the zealots have pushed me away from selling software. This is mostly because many of the people from all of these communities feel entitled to my proprietary work. Over time, this is going to make it difficult for anyone to sell software (because everyone is going to just share it for free..and not care). So, all of my software ideas are now web service ideas. This is where software is headed. So now instead of paying a one-time fee (which is what I was going to do originally), you will be paying a monthy/yearly fee to use software (and you won't get anything even close to the source).
I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by 'society' but:
The view that society would become computer literate is incredibly naive. People have limited time and want to focus on things they enjoy.
See: every other thing in life that is already free. Like your car, your bicycle, your front lawn, your kitchen cabinetry, and what you eat for lunch tomorrow.
People want things to work, and they want them to look nice. They generally want no hand in doing so to the point where they are considered literate on the subject. This is why fast/frozen food is popular, and most people take their car to a mechanic to change their brakes.
Life is full of too many things to become literate at everything in life. On the whole, computers are no different than any other object in life. Most people just want them to work, just like I just want my car's brakes to slow my car down.
Tax software can and should be released by the state under a free license. But when the state fails to do its duty, the community do the job.
In Brazil, FSF Latin America releases free software for filing tax returns, and this year managed to release the free program before the state released its nonfree program. So don't say it's impossible.
I don't like to talk about "consumption" of these programs because that term adopts the narrow mindset of economics. It tends to judge everything only in terms of practical costs and benefits and doesn't value freedom.
The reason I don't use nonfree software is that it would take away my freedom. I don't want to let that happen. So I don't consider installing nonfree program, even as an possible option. I treat them as poison. I hope that you will too.
I don't know whether our community will make a "high end video game" which is free software, but I am sure that if you try, you can stretch your taste for games so that you will enjoy the free games that we have developed.
If you want to maximize the freedom values, than you would trade X values for that freedom values, often controls over other people.
Did you even read the article? He says it's ok to make money with free software and should be advertised:
"When you meet people who think free software is supposed to be gratis, tell them "It's free as in freedom; it doesn't have to be gratis." Then refer them to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html, and you should be able to educate them with very little effort on your part. When you get practiced in doing this and you see how easy it is, you won't feel annoyed when the need arised."
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I'm very glad to see him looking happy.
Love his geek answer to "what's your favourite movie?". Why don't normal people react better to answers like that?
Perhaps the love for him is because, for anyone who is even the least little bit weird perhaps in secret, Stallman is a shining beacon of weirdness. More power to him!
This is a terrible way to sell. You're going to have a hard time convincing people that the only way to be "morally acceptable" (in the eyes of someone they don't even know, no less) is to take a step back in most of your computing experience. He would have had an easier time getting fat kids to eat their spinach.
Doesn't one work against the other? In other words, a government with enough power to make citizens' organizations squeal by practical necessity risks becoming a "surveillance state."
As much as I like GNU, free software, and open source, I can't help thinking that carpenters also don't construct fervent ideology about hammers, either.
However, I have now lost all respect for him for making non-free software a human rights violation.
EDIT: Grammar
At least he's consistent.
> No. I spend most of my time travelling, so I could not have any pets.
> If it were possible, I would like to have a friendly parrot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ
No wonder computer people have a brutal rep for social interaction. WTF.