As someone who isn't intimately familiar with the open source or free software world, what does that mean? I thought Stallman and Torvalds were both the good guys. This makes them sound like mortal enemies.
That makes it sounds more dramatic than it is. Stallman is an idealist and attaches moral value to the licensing of code. Torvalds is an engineer and just wants to ship code. His license of choice matches his model for doing this.
Basically Stallman is ideologically opposed to the existence of proprietary software and Torvalds is fine with a mixture of free/open software mixed with proprietary software.
The two of them are often mentioned together because the largest results of their labours (the GNU userland and the linux kernel) are combined to form 'linux based distributions', generally just referred to as 'Linux' (or 'GNU/Linux' as Stallman insists, because he justifiably wants some more public recognition of the impact of his project even if that just isn't the way things work).
Considering their differences and the way in which their works are combined it shouldn't be that surprising that there's some friction and snarky comments that spill out from time to time.
But, to answer your question, Stallman is interested in the freedom of the end user to modify the code and redistribute the modifications to that code freely. He has been almost freakishly consistent on this topic for the last 200 years, restating that stance in a multitude of articles, interviews and talks.
Anything that ultimately results in code being 'locked down' and unavailable to the end user to modify and then redistribute, he has a problem with. This includes the public domain.
To me, however, it seems like the goal of GNU/Free Software is usually conveyed as maximizing freedom in regards to software. They themselves stress that word "free," and point out that it's "free as in speech, not as in beer" without emphasizing that they really just mean "free for the end user to see and modify the source."
In my opinion (and yes, under my personal definition of "free") the GPL does not maximize freedom and instead is exactly like other copyrights except that the restrictions it places on software are perhaps different than other copyrights. I personally do not think that software should be covered by "property" protection laws, because I think the analogy of software as property is fatally flawed and leads to serious contradictions and ambiguities. Also, on the more practical level, I do not think that intellectual property protection for software is necessary for a thriving and innovative software industry.
It is freedom as in speech, because it is the freedom for users of code to take that code and use it to express their own ideas, and to redistribute that expression to their friends and anyone else who may be interested. In that context, code is literally a form of speech, and the software an expression of an idea. Under the freedoms provided by something like the GPL I can take someone else's idea, change it to suit myself and redistribute that change.
The GPL clearly does not attempt to maximize the freedom of developers or distributors who wish to deny end users the freedoms that the GPL provides.
Again, this is ground that seems to be covered over and over. It is hard for me to believe that someone like you, who is clearly intelligent, has clearly thought about the subject and discussed it previously, has truly never had it explained to them, or has entirely failed to understand the distinction. I hope this has helped a little.
Still, I find the GPL to be more restrictive and less free than the public domain, and therefore less desirable. I take issue with the way RMS and GNU uses the words "free" and "freedom" because I see their philosophy not as a principled desire for freedom, but rather merely as a desire for certain restrictions on freedom (granted, a different set of restrictions than proprietary software licenses).
I think that "The Free Software Movement" is an unfortunate title. Not only do they have to constantly remind average readers of their definition of "free as in speech, not as in beer," they also should be clarifying their definition of "free" for people like myself who believe that freedom is an utmost concern. Perhaps a better though less catchy title for their movements would be "The Publicly Available Source Code Movement."
'people like myself who believe that freedom is an utmost concern'
which freedoms matter to you, and for whom? without context your statement is pretty much content free.
IME almost everyone believes that freedom is an utmost concern, even Brutalog, the Despotic Dictator Of Zoogtzargle believed that he was fighting the good fight for freedom.
The interesting differences seem to lie in the context under which they define the term.
Regarding practicality, RMS claims that the GPL forces companies to open-source software that would otherwise by proprietary, thus opening up the information contained within to everyone, for their use and improvement. In reality, I see more cases where the company instead recreates the software using a proprietary (or, if we're lucky, permissive open-source) license (PySide and Clang come to mind).
Here's an example of this
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/10/european-copyrigh...
The GPL, or CC (or some other license) sidestep this issue by working within the nearly universally accepted legal framework of copyright vs. the Public Domain. In Stallman's view, because PD cannot be guaranteed to use the force of law to maintain his view of freedom, it's unworkable for his purposes.
Quote from Linus:
There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.
And another one
Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested. 99% of that I run tends to be open source, but that's my choice, dammit.
and pragmatists ship.
The only really significant project from GNU that never shipped was the kernel. And Hurd wasn't RMS's project; it was just the project that got the GNU label. He shipped plenty of code in his day.
With Stallman running the show, you'd still be waiting for HURD. No Tivo, no Android, no drivers, routers, etc. (I suppose they'd all be running FreeBSD, though. But the point remains - it wouldn't be Stallman that did it, and that really pisses him off.)
Also, can you really think of him honestly as the driving force behind GNOME? He had something to do with initiating it over the Qt licensing tiff, but I don't think he did a hell of a lot else for it.
Edit: Software isn't "free" if only experts can use it, or if what it does is a decade behind the current technological standard. And what usability there is in "free" software is more than offset by being years behind commercial software in features. Take, for example, my iPhone. It has zero learning curve, yet it is loaded with awesome advanced features. I'm actually free to enjoy my life by virtue of having such convenient, well-designed software and hardware that I never have to futz with. Retina display? Front and back-facing camera? HDR photos? Video recording/chat? Music whenever I want, with controls on my earbuds? Awesome battery life? Slim design so it fits in my pockets? It's all there, and I've had it for eight months. I have the freedom to enjoy all this great stuff with an iPhone, but none of that freedom if I limit myself to the tiny world of "free" software. But GNU acolytes say that this isn't the kind of freedom they mean. What then, do they mean? Why does Apple (or to a lesser extent, Google, Microsoft, etc.) have these kinds of features, but GNU does not? I think the difference is that I'm talking about enjoyment and freedom in reality, not RMS's Platonist/ascetic make-believe world.
No Android: you do realize that Android still depends on GCC for all native code compilation, right? And uses the Linux kernel, licensed under the GPL, a GNU license? As does Tivo? And many of the free drivers we have we only have because of the GPL that the kernel is licensed under, giving leverage to convince companies to release the code to the drivers that allow us to use their hardware.
Why do you think it would upset RMS to use code that he didn't write or wasn't involved in? He uses plenty such code all the time. What he cares about are freedom (and getting people to respect freedom, rather than releasing source code for other reasons such as to allow companies to work together without respecting the freedom of the end user), and the GNU project getting credit for work that it has done. I find that a lot of people ascribe motives to him that I have never witnessed. He is single minded and obstinate, but it is pretty much always in support of software freedom and the projects that he runs to promote software freedom, nothing more than that.
Yes, HURD never shipped. Who really cares? What does that have to do with whether RMS can ship code? He's shipped plenty of code; one single failure, of a project that wasn't even his (yes, it was the GNU project's official kernel, but he never worked on it), when it happened that there was already an appropriately licensed kernel that could be used (Linux), does not mean that he can't ship code.
And no, GNOME was not his in the sense that he wrote any of it, but it is part of the GNU project, which he started. Several of the other things that I listed he never worked on directly, but they are part of the GNU project. My point was not just about what code RMS has personally shipped (which includes Emacs and GCC), but also about code shipped by the GNU project (like GNOME, Bash, binutils, make, glibc, and so on).
And heck, the whole concept of free software, software that respects users' freedom, was something that he originally named, articulated, and advocated for, and has been the strongest defender of ever since.
So yes, RMS has shipped plenty of code. Linus has too. They've both done wonderful work. What I appreciate about RMS is that he continues to fight for user freedom. There are some of his tactics that I disagree with (the whole "GNU/Linux" thing is a losing battle, even if I see where he's coming from, his insistence on recommending against distros that even have "contrib" or "ports" repositories which contain non-free software, etc), but on the whole, I find that his work is valuable as corporations and governments try to foist more and more software and services upon us that leave them in control, not us.
P.S. It's obvious you have less than a 4th grade education on both software and linguistics. "Free" means "Freedom" only one definition out of like 10, in every dictionary, defines it as "free of cost". Stallman wants (and now has), the freedom to edit source code of all software he uses, he also wants everyone to have access to gain the same freedom if they so want to obtain it.
And your whole iPhone argument is completely ridiculous, Android has more power (and now equal market share) because of its underlying OS tools are Free Software. An iPhone out of the box can't do very much, you add apps to get more functionality. You do know that someone has to develop those apps, right? Having more of the platform liberated allows for developers to take more advantage of the platform, meaning more apps, more advanced apps, and easier proliferation of those apps and features across different hardware. Also, an Android phone will be the first to be quad-core powered. Know how hard Apple would have to work to get that to work on an iPhone? Yeah, a whole primary kernel module rewrite, and a $900+ price tag.
Uhm? Xcode is free, and it compiles my iOS apps with GCC… go figure. And somewhere there is LLVM in the works, and Apple supposedly had some say in making it happen. And the there is WebKit somewhere in the picture.
> An iPhone out of the box can't do very much, you add apps to > get more functionality.
Android does everything without apps? Interesting.
> meaning more apps, more advanced apps, and easier > proliferation of those apps and features across different > hardware.
Last I heard there was no shortage in quality apps for iOS. How far is iPhone apps market lagging behind that of Android? How about possibility for developers to sell apps on Android market compared to that of App Store? Last I checked I still could not neither sell nor buy apps on AM in my country.
Are you really thinking that Android market share is equal to iOS because it is open? Not because there are more than one manufacturer and more than three devices they make with android?
How open is Android when it gets to under control of carriers? Where do you get source code for Google navigation app, or Google Voice?
Ad hominem. Nice.
Linus similarly pragmatically saw that most the odds and ends needed to make an OS useful were done, they just needed a kernel, so he built it and shipped it.
Since then? RMS has gotten religion in the worst way and hasn't shipped pretty much anything in decades. He's used his notion of Freedom to constrain what he is capable of (restricting his own Freedom, by another definition of the word, "free from confinement") -- demonstrating by his own example a world filled with users unable to operate in the modern world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
Stallman's only computer is a Lemote Yeeloong netbook (using the same company's Loongson processor) which he chose because it can run with 100% free software even at the BIOS level, stating "freedom is my priority. I've campaigned for freedom since 1983, and I am not going to surrender that freedom for the sake of a more convenient computer."
http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/
For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
http://cdevroe.com/notes/stallman-email/
Most of the time I do not have an Internet connection. Once or twice or maybe three times a day I connect and transfer mail in and out. Before sending mail, I always review and revise the outgoing messages. That gives me a chance to catch mistakes and faux pas.
Far from saying this is bizarre behavior, he's merely demonstrating a consistent life with respect to Free (liberty) software. This helpful demonstration shows why a life under this philosophy, the idealist, not the pragmatist, is not Free (from confinement) at all -- it's horribly limiting and doesn't really accomplish much in terms of shipping anything.
In other words, Stallman has provided a perfect exemplar of life before and after his idealistic Freedom and he accomplished a great more before.
Unlike Stallman, Linus' ideals are superior because they're good in theory and practice, whereas Stallman's ideas aren't even good in theory (unless you already subscribe to a very narrow belief system similar to his).
Evidence (LKML Wed, 23 Apr 2003):
"The GPL requires you to give out sources to the kernel, but it doesn't limit what you can _do_ with the kernel. On the whole, this is just another example of why rms calls me "just an engineer" and thinks I have no ideals.
[ Personally, I see it as a virtue - trying to make the world a slightly better place _without_ trying to impose your moral values on other people. You do whatever the h*ll rings your bell, I'm just an engineer who wants to make the best OS possible. ]"
Read last few questions in GNU/Linux naming FAQ http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#force
At the end of the day, Stallman is only interested in one thing: getting the glory. Not even the FSF, just himself.
He's a lunatic, just ignore him.