Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

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The article can be entirely dismissed on pompous pseudo-intellectual pontification such as:

> The Free Software coterie is fond of insisting that words mean what they say they mean, and that is a profound misunderstanding of the nature of language. Such linguistic naïveté is not an asset in pursuing political goals.

Uh, take your snooty diaeresis and shove it where l'accent aigu don't shine?

Defining terms is par for the course in the general intellectual sphere. Academic papers, data sheets for microchips and ISO standards for programming languages all define terms and insist on using them in the defined way.

If that's not enough, there is outright misinformed claptrap:

> With all that said, the intent of the adherents to the term Free Software is to seek to promote certain freedoms for the users of software, by depriving the creators of software (at least in the United States) of the rights afforded them by Congress under Article I, Section VIII, Clause VIII.

What? Creators of software are deprived of freedoms by the Free Software Foundation? Not simply encouraged to copyleft their software, while retaining all rights to license it in other ways at the same time?

Crazy.

A grating distortion in the article is that Stallman and the FSF tried to take the credit for Linux. ("The Free Software Foundation is famously fixated on insisting that it be given credit for Linux.") Stallman just wanted recognition for the GNU part of Linux distributions based on a GNU user space. "GNU/Linux" not "GNU Linux". Stallman never, ever wanted to take credit for the Linux kernel; that is ridiculous.

More abhorrent than that is the position that free software should be done in such a way that nobody claims credit, justified by a glib quote from Harry Truman. Harry Truman was a politician and, for a time, president of the United States. Presidents rely on other people to execute plans, and implicitly get credit for everything good that happens during their reign anyway, as well as blame for the bad. So it's easy to make seemingly magnanimous statements of that sort. I would rather say that the absence of a blame environment is more conductive to getting things done, rather than the absence of credit.

Software is a creative work made by specific authors, who undeniably deserve credit. Credit transcends even copyright. To falsely claim authorship of a work in the public domain isn't a copyright violation, yet it is plagiarism. It will forever be plagiarism, even when the work is millennia old. Falsely claiming to have produced a cave painting that is 30,000 years old is plagiarism. Some unknown prehistoric person is credited with that.

The western intellectual tradition is heavily steeped in credit. Theories, equations, industrial processes, objects and phenomena in nature, and other entities connected to ideas and discovery, are often named after individuals. Maxwell's equations, Einstein's relativity, Rayleigh scattering, Bell's palsy, Fermat's Last Theorem, Pascal's Triangle, Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production, Early effect in transistors ... credit, credit everywhere in STEM, philosophy, the humanities.

I find it obnoxiously odious for someone to dare suggest that free software developers should disrobe themselves of claims to credit. In free software, credit is your only reward, more often than not.

> the intent of the adherents to the term Free Software is to seek to promote certain freedoms for the users of software, by depriving the creators of software

Oh, he's one of that kind of cunts. Someone with an axe to grind against FLOSS because he obviously hasn't studied history of copyright in addition to his misunderstanding of FLOSS.

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