Comment by _b8r0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _b8r0 | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with your first point, however:

> 2) rms is a practical guy. stop acting like he's a mad man who knows nothing. He started GNU, wrote emacs, glibc, gcc and probably others. He created the concept of free software and wrote a license as good as GPL to defend it.

He created the concept of 'Free' (note the capital F) software as his definition of free. People were sharing source code beforehand. The source to Unix was available under licence, there were plenty of tools available (ISTR TECO, EMACS' predecessor being open source for example) with source. I can create a definition of something that distorts other peoples' views of the truth and misappropriate it as my own.

Secondly, he wrote all of those things as part of his GNU OS, which he never finished. As someone who's written hobby OSes before I can understand that GNU was a massive undertaking, but he's not the only guy ever to write an OS and deserves no more kudos for it than the BSD guys or any other OS developers. He is not some magical wizard of software freedom.

> 3) rms doesnt want people only to use free software.

This[1] article by a certain Richard Stallman on gnu.org begs to differ. Maybe it's a different Richard Stallman?

[1] - http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/schools.html

I think the meaning of point three was a bit lost in the grammar.

Yes, RMS has (very clearly) stated that the only software a person should use is software that is free.

However, I think emilsedgh's point is that RMS _first_ wants people to value freedom, and use only free software as a result - as opposed to using free software because, for instance, it is (generally) cheap.

I can only speak of personal experience (and having spent time with RMS twice in total, several years apart that's not a lot).

My experience of him was that publicly he wants people to value free software, but it's a means to an end. I don't actually have a problem with about 60% of what he has to say on the matter. Open source software fuels innovation and as long as people can still fund further innovation I'm happy with that. However, what I object to is the idea that only FSF-papal-blessed software constitutes free software. If I want to release my software under a BSD licence, it's not free software because RMS doesn't think it is. That's my problem with him, at least professionally speaking. On a personal note I don't think we'd get along - primarily because (and credit to him) that entire argument is pretty much his life (as far as anyone can say from meeting him twice).

Now I could be completely wrong about all of this, and maybe RMS is a pragmatic standup guy and I just got the wrong impression, but even Theo De Raadt had a sense of humour.

"If I want to release my software under a BSD licence, it's not free software because RMS doesn't think it is."

I thought the FSF had publicly stated that BSD licenses were compatible with the GPL, and thus "Free" software. I wouldn't be surprised if rms wished the software were more free (in his sense of the word), but I don't recall him ever saying it wasn't free.

They do consider the modified BSDL to be both a Free Software license and compatible with the GPL. There are other licenses which are not compatible with the GPL, such as the original BSD license (with the advertising clause), yet they do still consider them to be Free Software licenses.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

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