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Comment by Maro | Hacker News Reader

The reasons RMS has for not liking Github have nothing to do with the recent MS acquisition.

If you read into the thread, it's quite non-sensical, RMS eg. says Github is evil because the license picker doesn't push his license strong enough, with just the wording he'd be happy with: "You've put your finger on the problem. The site leads people not to specify explicitly whether it is [GPLv3] "only" or "or-later"."

I read into thread about 10 deep but I had to stop, my blood was starting to boil from the nonsense.

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RMS has been doing his blood boiling nonsense schtick for going on 40 years now, citing all sorts of nonsensical/utopian/nitpicky/you-name-it balderdash in pursuit of goals that, well, OK, actually are pretty sound but damn are his methods crazy, amiright?

And he's been right about things. Almost every time. I post this basic quip every time one of these threads comes up. After the fifteenth "Oh, yeah, I guess he was right" you start to cut the guy a ton of slack.

Without being too reductive, Stallman and others apply extreme cynicism (assume the worst case scenario will happen), and they are "always right" because the naysayers seem to apply undeserved optimism. Companies like Slack initially try to appeal to the freedom crowd (IRC gateway), until they decide it impedes their business model. Stallman can see it coming from a mile away because he correctly views people and entities from a cynical perspective that many others aren't used to doing.

This chronic downvoting on HN is getting boring.

This is an excellent comment because it explains Stallman's accuracy (vs his opponents) not in terms of the fundamentals of their reasoning but in terms of their heuristics for judging motivations.

Not only that - respected HN citizens need to create new throwaway accounts on order to speak their mind. It's becoming a new normal. That's ridiculous.

You shouldn't even have to be respected: it's tiring to express your opinion here and contribute to a conversation only to have it downvoted because it wasn't the right contribution.

I stopped caring about these things at all. When you need to speak up, you just do it without thinking about downvoting. Otherwise HN will just become another echo chamber, and that would be really bad for everyone.

By the way, it always seemed to me that by civilized discussion once can learn the opponent's point of view and maybe even reach a compromise, but it seems HN works in a different way, hiding downvoted posts. When I expand them, I'm often surprised to see they're not spam nor offensive content, but just statements many people don't agree with.

What exactly is has RMS been right about? That closed source software will be used for all kinds of evil purposes? Well no shit sherlock! No one anywhere has ever made the argument that closed source is a good idea because it allows people to do bad things with software.

The argument for closed source software (and indeed intellectual property in general) is that it incentivizes creation by giving creators a means to profit from their ideas.

Now RMS of course has his own arguments on that point, which is great. But, my point is that predicting that people will sometimes do bad things with closed source software doesn't make you a prophet. It means you have an IQ above 15.

It would be like if I "predicted" that baseball bats would be used for violence and then every time a crime was committed with a baseball bat, everyone was all like, "oh, he was right again about the bats!" Everyone everywhere knows that bats are sometimes abused for violence. That's not foresight, it's common sense.

Your simplification of his breakdown re: the specific methods is disappointing at best.

> Github is evil because the license picker doesn't push his license strong enough, with just the wording he'd be happy with: "You've put your finger on the problem. The site leads people not to specify explicitly whether it is [GPLv3] "only" or "or-later"." - Maro

> Recommends and encourages GPL 3-or-later licensing at least as much as any other kind of licensing. (C5) - https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.html

Do those two look like identical statements?

Also:

> RMS eg. says Github is evil because ...

vs: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnustep/2015-12/m...

> > talk directly to GitHub people.

> I already did, starting about a year ago. I even had dinner with one of their executives. It seems to be a promising conversation, but they dropped it inexplicably. So we developed our repo criteria instead.

> If they want to resume the conversation, I won't refuse.

Does that sound like hate, or the actions of someone who has said a company is evil?

It's simple, really.

Git, the protocol is distributed. You can have a copy, I can have a copy; anyone can have a copy. And they're all equal.

Github is Git with a bunch of stuff that's not copyable. If you want to move your data elsewhere, you lose access to a host of stuff. Wiki, issues, PRs, branches, fixes.. All sorts of things.

There's people who've developed bandaids to triage that data lockin, but they only stem the bleeding. They don't solve the problem, and that problem is your data is in a roach motel.

What RMS keeps going on about much of the time is a high level engineer-y view of the problem. He forgets to bring it back down to earth, to explain that "Yes, these things I talk about affect us all!"

For me, I'm setting up a new server right now, and I'm putting Fossil SCM on it for my repo instead. It does handle all those data assets that makes github useful. And its license compatible with Free Software.

https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wi...

edit: I'm also a card carrying member of the FSF. I've lived through enough computer "revolutions" to identify bad stuff when I see it. I'd rather my knowledge be portable, with usage and configuration of free software, than lock it up in proprietary blobs that change underneath me.

RMS doesn't forget to bring things to earth. He talks all the time about very specific concrete cases and the real-world problems and injustices they cause.

Indeed he does, but it's also interspersed with highly technical writing. That sort of stuff runs people off, unless you have the inclination like that you see on HN.

I think RMS can be about as crazy as David Moore, yet I can see the method in the madness.

So I'm in my mid-30s and I still really believe in the GNU GPL. I even license my own stuff as GPLv3 (except for some libraries I released under Apache).

I still really believe in the GPL and that model of OSS. I feel like I'm in the minority; that people my age and younger who give a shit about things like this, prefer BSD/MIT/Apache style licenses.

I'm slightly younger than you and feel the same way. We can be in the minority together!

I think I'm pretty left-wing, and I agree with software freedom as a general rule - but I don't really understand the venom over the subject. We live in a world where people of all ages regularly die because basic necessities are non-free. Software freedom is nice, but compared to every other political problem, kind of boring.

In the end, the entire development of computers has been underwritten by massive corporations, the military-industrial complex, and to a large extent, the surveilance/telecoms hybrid that spawned companies like AT&T. I don't really see where being extremely punctilious about software freedom wins you in this context. There's no such thing as a free computer - the concept is borderline absurd, and even if it was possible, you're still using a free computer in a world that's largely characterized by tyranny, which is also absurd.

Software freedom, as defined here and used by RMS has nothing whatsoever to do with the cost of software. It refers to the four freedoms of software (https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/basics/4freedoms.en.html). The right to basic necessities is actually a freedom everyone in the US outside those convicted has. The fact that those necessities cost money is tangential in a discussion of freedom just like the cost of developing software is mostly tangential. This isn't a discussion about cost. Or as fsf puts it, free as in freedom not free as in beer. There is indeed such thing as a free computer running free software that respects the four freedoms above. They are getting harder to find but they do exist and one could easily build and run one. It will cost money however, but as I said that's tangential almost to the point of being irrelevant in a discussion of software freedom.

I understand they mean free as in freedom. I also think that if you exclude the 'fact that ... necessities cost money' from the concept of freedom, you end up with a pretty poor concept. But that's not really the issue at hand here.

The issue is, if you have a 'free' device in a society that is largely based upon the absence of freedom, it's ultimately a fetish - in the magical-thinking sense. And honestly, if we were in a society that was substantially free, the FSF would never have been needed in the first place.

I think you're getting at utilitarianism versus some idea like Kant's categorical imperative.

From an idealistic standpoint, RMS's views are consistent and sensible, honorable even. But from a utilitarian view (which I support incidentally), we evaluate the actual real-world consequences of each decision. In that light, RMS's overall concerns still hold up completely but his emphasis on each person individually rejecting all non-free software uncompromisingly is non-utilitarian.

I guess consequentialist v deonotological would be another way of framing it. That all said, my suspicion is that most people that go hard deontological essentially do so because they care more about their own moral purity than the state of the world.

And, if you want to look at what happens when deonotological ethics are the norm, just look at medieval europe.

In the case of RMS, I find it extremely clear that he cares exponentially more about the state of the world than about his own moral purity.

> I feel like I'm in the minority; that people my age and younger who give a shit about things like this, prefer BSD/MIT/Apache style licenses.

I am of older age but I too prefer MIT over GPL. The logic is like this: time is precious and if I devote it to developing an open-source library, I want it to be used by as many people as possible. I see no reason whatsoever why I would exclude closed-source software from adopting it.

You may not care enough, but at least you could see a reason: to assure that those who use your work respect the freedom of their users.

You could even disagree with prioritizing this. But it's not like there's no reason to be seen.

There are cases where someone wants to build something with your work, period. And if you require that it stay free software, it will be free for the end-users where it wouldn't be otherwise.

But I don't recognize that definition of "freedom of their users". It's an artificial construct made by RMS. There are various reasons why some people or companies don't open their source code. That choice should be respected. I also write a lot of closed source, because it was decided the source should be closed.

If you want to disagree with the value, that's one thing. Not being able to recognize it is an intellectual failing (literally re-cognize, i.e. understand a concept, whether or not you think it's valid or important).

Let me help you out: if I have a computer and there exists software that I could privately run for my own purposes and the computer is set up to not allow me to run that software I want to run, then I am lacking some freedom to use my own computer fully. Or say I want to copy some software from one computer to another but someone has legally or technically put barriers to my ability to do that. These are not an artificial constructs, they are as plain as any concept of freedom can be.

Then why not use LGPL? It seems like the perfect compromise.

Context is king. In this thread, RMS criticises Github as a place for hosting GNU projects.

RMS, who leads the FSF, which owns GNU, thinks that GNU projects should not be hosted on services which encourage users to run proprietary software on their PC, or which don't encourage users to use the FSF's preferred license.

To me, this stance does not seem at all nonsensical.

Why would it upset you? This is how RMS always talks. Software freedom and the licenses that support it are what he most cares about. This is basically a religious discussion to him.

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