Richard Stallman and the History of Free Software and Open Source (2016)
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This is almost a trope, socially awkward person becomes good at computers. When I was at Uni studying computer science, a good percentage of the students matched that profile.
I wonder if this is less common today though, given that a career in a computer-related field is considered a "good career" and many more people try it. Do the "popular" kids like computers? (I'm 40-something and I wonder if that's the case with today's teenagers or 20-something generation).
Why? Are you saying that person with good social skills can't work as a dev? I don't see the connection.
It's tough to stay motivated and learn constantly when you don't like engineering and coding...
I found a really nice spot working in a developer enablement / platform engineering role. You can continue to be condescending to average developers and then steer them in the right direction!
While many people in CS that go to FAANG, et. al are high-achievers, most are the cohort of those people interested in science and technical work more than social focused work. Much bigger overlap with pre-med defectors. Also we had plenty of "anti-social" kids, but interestingly they achieved less and were more likely to work at a small regional company after graduating than a SV tech firm.
I think it helps to think of "high achiever" as PR spin for the go-to status/prestige careers for children from affluent and connected families. Whatever that is at the time.
If we wanted to call someone in software a "high achiever", I suppose it could be used to describe someone who breaks the class barrier, to get the affluent go-to status career. Despite whatever affluence-biased gatekeeping the affluent established once they took it over.
I'm 17, so here is what I have to say on that. Keep in mind I live in a rural, farm town so it might be a bit different in more urban areas. I don't know. I'm just basing what I'm saying on what I hear online, and my own observations.
Computer related fields are DEFINITELY looked on as a "good career" and "the future", but I see a lot of my peers, even if they are vaguely interested, believe that they "aren't techy enough" to have a computer related job in the future. Which I always find strange, because you don't have to be "nerdy" or anything. You just... learn? Like any other job that requires some kind of skill. You don't have to be "plumber-y" enough to get a job as a plumber, and similarly you don't have to be "techy" to get a job in tech. Anyway...
Most people my age that I'm around don't know the difference between Google and the Internet, and it still tends to be the socially awkward, nerdy people who get into computers. So, to answer your question, maybe social awkwardness or being nerdy is less of a "requirement" now than before because being a "geeky computer user" isn't really a stigmatized thing anymore since everyone interacts with computers in some fashion nowadays and my generation as a whole seems a bit more open minded with a lot of things compared to previous ones, but it's still definitely a stereotype that's sticking around and probably will stay around for a while.
If you're still in middle or high school (i.e. Between 12-18yrs old), you're at the worst part of your life for liking computers and geeky stuff. People around you don't know how to deal with anything that doesn't conform, so they are pretty ruthless about people who like different things. It's nothing personal about you. It's insecurity on the part of other people.
If you can hang on a little longer - just long enough to get to University - you will see a total change in the environment around you. That was the first time in my life that anyone around me had any idea of what electronics or programming was. It was magical.
It's a hard thing to hear when you're in the middle of what feels like an endless, miserable slog, but hang in there! University more than makes up for how lousy high school is.
Mine were sometimes rough, sometimes beautiful. More rough though.
It can help if you have any inclination for the performing arts. Music, dance, theater. Many more of those people are accepting of differences and or quirky. I was and value those people and times highly.
But yeah, hang in there. This all does improve.
Edit: I am getting older now. There is another phase! You will eventually find your place among peers and do what you all do and it will be amazing.
Family, work, friends, projects, all of it.
Then, at some point your own grow, and you get to help them, plant seeds. My granddaughter has this spark we are talking of here. And she is young, and I can share, and remember back to when I was young.
My own kids had no real interest, but did learn the basics. Fine. They can do if they need or want to. But this little one in my care now is so damn much fun!
Call it the circle of geek nerd life.
And this all reminds me... are there older mentors you could hang with at times? If so, you should do it. I learned so much and it really helped with the angst. Older people, who I looked up to, saw me as I am and it all being fine, their nudging and teasing more out of me were very good times.
I know this isn't your main point, but I don't see much difference so far. I think the internet has allowed people who don't fit in locally to fit in with groups they find online, which is good, but that's been happening for 30 years.
A "friend" recently told me off for being too nerdy, and I couldn't help but think (maybe it's too self-centered of me, but still) "Fuck you, people like me built the world as it is now so people like you can spend all day playing video games".
Did you personally contribute to this great "world building" or are you just being tribal?
Well, if they spend all day playing video games who exactly is or is not the nerdy one here.....?
Not the video game players.
This kind of technical culture has been around donkey’s years, if you read some of the conversations between early wireless telegraphy operators it sounds a lot like the early internet! Babbage himself basically told a British politician to “STFU noob, garbage in garbage out” when asked whether his difference engine would emit the right results if its operator put in the wrong figures into it.
That's exactly what I've realized and why I decided to get serious about cs. I didn't start in cs because I thought it was for geniuses. Then I realized a lot of non-geniuses were getting the good paying jobs, so I switched to cs just to realize that's what I actually enjoy learning about.
So yeah, it looks like it's the new banking for overachievers but the lack of passion is easy to spot I'd say.
When I was a teen I understood that I'm a liability in sports although my friends tried to be inclusive so again I spent my time doing nerdy things alone until I got my computer and naturally became good at it.
In college I was forced to take on Computer Science by my parents as they felt it was the least physically tasking yet provides a good career; They were right.
Even though my story fits the narrative of socially awkward being good with computers, as a disabled I didn't have much of choice and I feel this might be true for many.
As awareness and importance of the field has grown, it has become a lot more diverse and involves a lot more interaction with other people.
For better or worse, you can't just hide in your safe corner and quietly build stuff anymore, you have to interact with people and accept having the lights shine on you from time to time.
Just for an overview of my workplace, I think we've got maybe 7 or 8 nationalities, one person is a dance instructor, one is an almost stereotypical handsome player who woos all the girls at parties, one plays D&D with his kids, one is a weightlifter, one competes in bicycle races on a high level. It's still mostly male, but there are more and more women in IT now.
Common to all of them - no matter their other traits - is that they're all extremely inquisitive and curious and have a great desire to learn, and I think that's the most important factor.
I think this is now changing in unexpected ways, one is that devices are becoming really locked down. (On the other hand you can now install a full-featured GNU/Linux as a app... FWIW when I tried Linux the first time it was with Winlinux or so on Win95) On the other hand documentation has become extremely good, it's more common to see devs with no engineering/math background at all.
no, autism spectrum disorder (formerly called asperger's) is not less common today. and, btw, some hypothesize the awkwardness comes not from a lack of empathy, but actually hyperempathy, and stallman's concerns for social policy can be seen as empathetic
I don't think it's either; I think it's a different empathy. For some, it might be a subset of “normal empathy”, and for others it might be a superset, but those are probably exceptions. From talking to people, it seems like strong empathy with the easy-to-imagine (e.g. familiar) experiences of others, but less empathy with unfamiliar experiences of others – sometimes to the point where it's hard to tell the emotional state of others, or even predict how they'd react to certain situations.
I'm guessing this has something to do with the "harder to model other people as being different people" thing that some people have – see the “pencil in a Smarties tube” test.[0]
edit also this is from 2016, which is why recent events were not even hinted at.
Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html
Even if it was surprising, it was more than just a whim. As you see, Raymond didn't see it as disturbing or incomprehensible.
I think this has been shown to be something of a myth. The term clearly predates when she claims to have coined it.
No, it hasn't.
The only thing that's _clear_ is that, despite a handful of likeminded folks perennially floating this claim here and being challenged on it, evidence overwhelmingly shows that the term "open source" was minted in 1998 exactly the way history says it was, and that some people on the wrong side of hubris and/or the Mandela effect refuse to accept it. It's like the software world's very own strain of truther conspiracy.
What _has_ been shown is that there exists a document predating 1998 in which the words "open" and "source" are incidentally adjacent—in a completely different grammatical context. It is telling, now just as it was the last time, that this slippery document (which has been perniciously retitled, no less) is The One that is always held up as proof—instead of a representative sample of the, you know, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of examples showing "open source" in casual use that would be expected to exist if the claim actually held any water.
> Linus's [and the BSDs'] disagreement with RMS's ideology is well known, so if "open source" were really already a thing before 1998, then we should expect that the number of times "open source" appears among his cohort prior to 1998 would be [...] as common as it is today. For it not to show up before that point and then to explode in use post-mozilla.org[...]
I don't think that's an honest description of what's in that email. It says:
> Caldera believes an open source code model benefits the industry in many ways
So they're already using the phrase 'open source' as a compound adjective.
> The One that is always held up as proof
Well it's not just one email. For example here's another, from 1993:
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.wi...
It uses the term with the same meaning:
> Open Source is best for everyone in the long run.
It's literally written as a proper noun!
Either source is fair play, of course, but it would be a waste of time for anyone to engage, as an attempt to prosecute any of your claims, without some kind of indicator that you're not just going to abandon the pretext for the current line of inquiry at any given moment and try to hop to another branch.
Every time I run into someone trying this trick, it reminds me of a Scott Aaronson post about people who are either incapable or unwilling to subject their "side" of an issue to logical deduction:
> What fascinated me was that, with every single issue we discussed, we went around in a similar circle — and Kurt didn’t seem to see any problem with this, just so long as the number of 2SAT clauses that he had to resolve to get a contradiction was large enough. [...] Inspired by conversations with Kurt and others, I hereby wish to propose a different theory of fundamentalist psychology. My theory is this: fundamentalists use a system of logical inference wherein you only have to apply the inference rules two or three times before you stop. (The exact number of inferences can vary, depending on how much you like the conclusion.)
People claim the OSI coined 'open source'.
I provided a counter example that shows they didn't.
That's not enough, and you claimed the example was the only one in existence, so I provided a second, which must have been a surprise to you!
Both use 'open source' in a similar context. One even capitalises it as a proper noun and presents it as a movement people should get behind.
What is your argument at this point? Both authors of those emails are time travellers or something? Do you think someone is fabricating these emails? Why would they do that and how would they get them onto these third-party websites?
You know it's not.
> Do you think someone is fabricating these emails? Why would they do that and how would they get them onto these third-party websites?
Once again: any attempt to engage requires as a precondition some kind of indicator that doing so wouldn't be a monumental waste of time. You seem comfortable providing assurance that such a thing will remain forever absent.
Since you are engaging by replying, you must have some kind of indicator? You chose to reply in the first place and to keep replying.
And you said you were only aware of one example, so you must be rapidly re-examining your own position, right?
We can restart the conversation if you like? What do you think is wrong with my multiple examples of the use of the term, in context, before they claimed to have coined it? Why don't they count in your mind?
There's an implicit "further"—as in "engage further"—and an explicit "to prosecute any of your claims". It's clear enough what type of "engaging" I'm referring to.
> You chose to [...] keep replying.
My mistake.
At the moment you've just entered a conversation, said you don't agree, then refused to explain why when asked, and complained that you'd be a fool to reply. Why get involved in the first place when you don't have any arugments to offer?
You didn't, actually.
It's true that the words "open" and "source" were occasionally combined previously to express a variety of different concepts related to software, and the term "open source" as such also existed to describe a kind of "intelligence information" that was drawn entirely from open sources like newspapers rather than closed sources like wiretaps. But that's entirely different from the term being in usage with a well-defined meaning.
In this particular case, it's relevant that OpenDOS was never "open source" in the sense coined by Chris Peterson. Caldera was trying to see if they could get the benefits of free software without paying the costs (loss of control and revenue) by making DR-DOS what we would now call "source available", so they promoted what they called an "open source code model". This phrase doesn't make sense if you parse it as "open-source code-model"; there's no such thing as a "code model" in any context related to software. Rather, they intended it to parse as "open source-code model". So "open source" wasn't even a phrase in this case until Adam shortened "open source code" to "open source" for the subject of his email.
Caldera's attempt to promote the idea of an open source-code model, as distinct from "free software", failed, though I probably did download a copy of OpenDOS at the time. People didn't go around talking about the advantages and disadvantages of "open source" or even the "open source-code model". It just wasn't a thing.
Later in the thread, you point out https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.wi..., from 01993, three years earlier, where one Jerome Schneider says, "Open Source is best for everyone in the long run," but is not talking about a social movement, just about source code being open (in the sense of published) rather than secret. None of the six replies refer to "open source", and apparently nobody used the term for three years, at which point it occurred as the grammatical adjacency coincidence you're pointing at, and then apparently nobody used it for two more years.
The OSI did not coin "open source", as the OSI didn't exist at the time; Chris Peterson did, in a meeting of free-software people who were trying to figure out how to persuade more companies to do what Netscape was doing and release their software as free software. The next day, Eric Raymond sent out the email I mentioned, and updated his home page to replace "free software" with "open source". That's the day the term came into existence. I think it took a few weeks to hammer out the OSD and organize the OSI.
I was on the fsb ("free software business") mailing list at the time, where we constantly talked about the issues of how to build businesses on free software. (Maybe that's why Eric Cced me on the email; I certainly wasn't the same kind of luminary as the other people on the list.) The term "open source" just wasn't a term that we were using. Debian wasn't using the term. On FoRK we weren't using the term --- I wasn't on FoRK in 01996 but I was in 01998 http://web.archive.org/web/20080517045124/http://xent.com/Fo....
It's true that if you go looking through a large enough corpus of historical documents looking for a coincidence of two common words, you will find occurrences. There are occurrences of the term "internetted" documented from 01874, for example. It's surprising that in the 25 years of Usenet and mailing lists prior to 01998 you've only been able to find two coincidences out of the hundreds of millions of public messages posted by tens of millions of people; surely there are five or six more in there at least.
I'm answering you at such length in part because I've seen you to be a reasonable person at times in the past; I did read your dissertation, after all, and learned some things from it.
Please don't disappoint me by continuing to advocate the same clearly false position. You have enough information now that persisting in your error would amount to reckless disregard for the truth, and therefore malicious slander against the people whose reputations your falsehoods tend to damage.
Free software is coterminous with open source: the source is freely available for anyone to use and modify.
The Stallmanism for "viral" software is copylefted software. Stallman would recommend you copyleft your software, but you don't need to in order for it to be considered free software.
There have been some cases of disagreement in the past between the FSF and OSI, where they differed on how to interpret a license. None of these were major licenses like the BSD license; they were minor disagreements that were quickly resolved, generally by updating the license to eliminate the ambiguity that was the cause of the disagreement.
Your claims are made dubious by your repeated posting of supporting claims that are easily shown to be completely false, including by material you have already been referred to in this very same thread.
Overall you're correct. The actual differences between free software and open source are trivial.
Open source really is just free software with sexier marketing. ESR and RMS were close friends, once, before RMS went full CWC. Based on ESR's blog posts I would guess his perspective to be that yes, proprietary software is inherently evil, but you can't say that if you want to win hearts and minds in the real world. You have to talk up the practical, bottom line advantages: how is releasing the source code under a liberal license going to contribute value to our company and to society at large? And how can you make money while doing this? That will get the ear of mainstream society, especially decision makers in government and business. Not Stallman's wear sackcloth, eat bugs, and cry into the wilderness approach.
The Eric Conspiracy's plan worked a little too well, and thanks to sexy marketing corporations have embraced open source and now have a vast library of code with which to do nefarious things unheard of in the era when Microsoft was the evil empire.
... i.e. let's not really care about the 'freedom' bit."
There, FTFY.
Free Software came first, with the motivation being maximizing user freedom.
The term Open Source was created as a marketing hack in response to the observation that open collaboration lead to higher quality software but Free Software was being misunderstood as "cheap software".
While many Open Source advocates appreciate the freedom it provides, in the early days the focus was almost entirely on quality as they tried to increase awareness. Richard Stallman's reaction at the time made it very clear he felt that Open Source was trying to hijack his mission to provide user freedom and replace it with corporate value as the new goal.
(I suspect rms still does, but I stopped watching him tilt at windmills about a decade ago. We owe him a lot for laying the foundations that made F/OSS possible, but we owe just as much to many other early contributors, including Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond for the Open Source marketing hack that built on that foundation. Not to mention Netscape, Mozilla, & IBM for demonstrating that F/OSS was for more than just "long haired hippies".)
For me considered as the end user, free software constrains my freedoms. Free software goes beyond individual users, for the bettering of mankind
Wasn't the cancel Stallman movement pretty much... an anonymous blog post and nothing else?
A lot of people deeply involved with the free software and open source movement(s), including people who worked at the FSF, had been unhappy with him as a leader for a long time. https://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and... (GNU project maintainer, summarizing - with links - views of other GNU maintainners) and http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html (long-time FSF staff, Conservancy cofounder, and 2021 FSF awardee) are good places to start reading. Or see how FSF staff unionized (unusually for tech!) to protect themselves from him (https://twitter.com/paulnivin/status/1374532930400227328 , https://twitter.com/NovalisDMT/status/1172573166956437505).
It's true that that blog post (which was not anonymous, there's a name on it???) is what catalyzed something to actually happen, and you can dispute whether the blog post by itself merited anything. And - largely because these were things that a small group of people were trying to handle internally (did you know that the FSF staff are unionized?) - there didn't seem to be much public discussion beyond that one blog post. The GNU maintainers' mailing list is private, the discussions between FSF board members are private, etc. So, it certainly looked to the casual observer like it was a single blog post. But that wasn't the reality.
The author's name is right there in the URL.
Look at https://stallmansupport.org/#intro
There are many people covering for him, including a lot of prominent women.
This simply isn't true. There was testimony by the victim.
But regardless, Stallman didn't even dispute the allegations. He accepted the claims as true and expressed that he saw nothing morally wrong about them
These aren't the sort of crimes where most people consider "oops, I didn't realize" an acceptable defense
The legal criterion for statutory rape varies from place to place, but in many jurisdictions it is legally a strict-liability offense. This is a controversial idea; Catherine Carpenter, for example (professor at Southwestern Law School; formerly Vice Dean, Assistant Dean, etc., at Southwestern Law School, and former chair of the Accreditation Committee of the American Bar Association) made an influential argument in 02006 that statutory rape should not be a strict-liability offense: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=907682; and, also in 02006, the Irish Supreme Court struck down Ireland's existing statutory-rape law as unconstitutional precisely because it was a strict-liability offense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_rape#Current_issues.
Your evident repugnance for any opinion that differs from your own would, I suppose, drive you to punish Dr. Carpenter and the Irish Supreme Court for their scandalous opinions, given the opportunity. I hope you don't own a gun or have a way to travel to Ireland.
However, there are practical reasons for treating the legal question as a strict-liability question; in particular, mistake-of-fact defenses in rape cases commonly amount to dragging the victim's reputation through the mud, enumerating for the jury all the reasons the perpetrator "reasonably believed" the victim to have consented to sex --- and to have been of age to do so, if that is in question. This does not apply to the corresponding moral question.
The moral strict-liability criterion you're proposing, when applied to adultery, is the criterion under which husbands consider it justified to kill their wives because those wives have been raped. When applied to homosexuality, it is the criterion under which fathers consider it justified to disown or kill their sons because those sons have been raped. And, when applied to statutory rape, it is the criterion Jeffrey Epstein used to acquire blackmail material on a large number of rich and influential men, though evidently he failed with regard to Minsky in particular. He invited them to his private island resort, instructed his underaged sex slaves to seduce them, and filmed the resulting rape, archiving it on CDs in a safe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#Video_recordin...
He did this because he knew that people like you would blame the men he was blackmailing if he revealed the material, and that under the legal strict-liability standards that apply to sex with 17-year-olds in the Virgin Islands, they would also be legally guilty. That way, he knew he could count on their support whenever he might need a favor from them. This is precisely the sort of scenario Hubin and Haely describe as "admittedly concocted (but not impossible)" in their 01998 Law and Philosophy article, "Rape and the Reasonable Man" https://philpapers.org/archive/HUBRAT.pdf:
> Suppose a man – we’ll call him Horgan – threatens a woman with severe harm to herself or her children if she doesn’t do as he demands. His demand is that she entice a man to have sexual intercourse with her while Horgan is watching and never let the man suspect that she is not doing it of her own free will. The woman is, we will imagine, an accomplished enough actress to carry this off. We believe that she has not consented to the sexual intercourse because her actions were the result of the wrongful coercion by Horgan. Nevertheless, the man she encourages to have sexual intercourse with her is not guilty of rape if there was no reason to suspect that she was being coerced in this way.
Unfortunately, it turned out not to be as concocted as they naively hoped. I was dismayed to learn the other day that Buster Hernandez had done the same thing to at least one of his victims, in which case the man was her own boyfriend.
Clearly you disagree with Hubin and Haely about whether the second man in their scenario, like many of Epstein's male houseguests, is guilty of rape; and you would punish them for writing such a scandalous article if you could, because this is precisely the opinion you think it is justified to retaliate against Stallman for expressing.
But the strict-liability criterion in the law, in accordance with your preferences, gave Jeffrey Epstein an enormous amount of power, allowing him to continue raping enslaved trafficked children with impunity for a decade --- and, with a little more luck, he might have been able to continue for another 30 years.
Perhaps that means it is a bad criterion. Perhaps, on balance, it is a good criterion anyway. But I think it's clear that we should at least be able to have the debate without retaliation from thugs like you and Buster Hernandez, because that will just cede the debate to whichever side has more efficiently brutal thugs. Instead, we should decide the question with reasoned argument, and do our best to protect the people making the arguments from intimidation and retaliation.
In any case, the rape allegations against Minsky do not hinge on this question, since they are rape allegations against a dead man, made on the basis of no evidence, by people who didn't know the alleged victim Virginia Giuffre --- who has, herself, made no such allegations against the dead man in question; and they are allegations that the alleged perpetrator's wife has given evidence against. So, regardless of whether Minsky would have been, morally speaking, a rapist if they had had sexual contact, there's no reason to suspect that they did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky#Association_with...
So, downplaying those rape allegations was the right thing to do in any case, and Stallman, whatever his other sins, should be commended for his bravery in doing so.
RMS is trying to nail himself to a cross, and at first he drives one nail into his right hand by holding the hammer in his left hand and pounding. Then he gets this frustrated look on his face when he realizes he can't do it all by himself. So he plaintively whines "Will you please help me nail my other hand to the cross? I can't do it myself." So you take the hammer and nail from him, and start nailing his other hand to the other side of the cross. Then he loudly complains, "Owwwwww! That huuuuurts!!!!"