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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

I stand against Stallman. I'm no bully. I don't personally know or insult him. But I do disagree with his position on software (I agree with some of what he says, but I think we end up falling in opposing corners nevertheless).

But standing against someone and pointing out why you disagree I think is quite in the spirit of Stallman himself.

With that said, I don't know the extent of the abuse that Stallman has received from others, but its not obvious to an outsider what the abuse is. Some mocking over a rider? You should hear the abuse I've gotten over some of my haircuts.

I will say that while I disagree with RMS I do think his influence has been large and positive for most of his career. I don't think he's a particularly good spokesperson, but he makes up for it in other ways. I've even listed RMS as one I think is on the short list of potential Turing Award winners (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2305496).

I stand against Stallman, but I'm glad he's there to stand against.

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First of all, this article was about standing up against people bullying Stallman for personal quirks. Is that what you stand against? You think it's bad for him to be a bit weird? Or did you just read the headline, and not the article?

Also, standing against a person isn't terribly productive, unless you think that person can do no good or have no good ideas. Do you disagree with everything that Stallman says? Will Stallman saying something make you automatically disagree with a position, even if you agreed with it before?

No? Then you don't stand against Stallman. You might disagree with some of his tactics. You might stand against free software. But I'm not sure why you would state this as "standing against Stallman," as if he, personally, is an affront to you.

I can't speak for kenjackson, but Stallman states that writing proprietary software is unethical, and I find that idea unpalatable. I generally think that its better for software to be open, but I don't think a person who writes a piece of proprietary software has taken anything away from society, nor have they done any harm. That puts me at odds with Stallman's philosophy, which is predicated on the idea that writing such software is unethical and enslaves the user.

RMS himself showed he'd accept some degrees in the evil scale. ie said Android is not really free but a great step in the right direction. He said also it is ok to use non free software, eg Google.

I'm not in his shoes nor in yours but I think there is a scale for proprietary software, ie if you write server side, it is less enslaving than client side, if your product use open formats and allow users to go away with their data, it is better than not, etc.

The assumption that proprietary software is slavery is the primary reason that I have no use for Richard Stallman.

(Secondary is, yes, his personal behavior. I don't make fun of him for his grooming or anything quite so superficial, but I think his behavior towards women in the tech community is notably not something to be proud of and his lack of common respect in other ways[1] is appalling.

[1] - "It doesn’t take special talents to reproduce—even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill." http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/36460 )

I don't see any thing untrue in the quote you propose to our reading. It is a bit untactful in our PC times but, guess what, I agree that RMS is not the most tactful guy in the world. I'd boldly say he might agree himself.

Slavery: It is a metaphor. A proprietary software handling my data, my content, my texts, my thoughts, my music or my relationships, and save these important personal assets into a format I cannot control, disallowing me to take it back in a useful way, is a kind of "ball and chains" that can be allegorically referred as "slavery": the user is losing important personal freedoms, most of the time unknowingly, or unknowing of the alternatives.

Stop right there. There is no slavery here. Nobody is forcing anyone to use a proprietary service or software product over a free alternative. Users now have more of a choice with FOSS alternatives than ever before.

This is a(and I really hate this term) first world problem of the greatest order. "I can't use Facebook because it's proprietary and they're evil." So what? Just don't use Facebook.

At this point(and RMS and the FSF have been a major contributors to this, for which they should be thanked), users have a choice in the software that they use. They have the freedom to choose what they want, whether it's proprietary software, OSS, or FOSS.

Slavery doesn't come into this. You believe that a product or service doesn't respect your freedom? Don't use it, or use an alternative that gives you what you want. That is the choice that Stallman has helped bring about.

> This is a(and I really hate this term) first world problem of the greatest order. "I can't use Facebook because it's proprietary and they're evil." So what? Just don't use Facebook.

You're forgetting another first world problem that many people have: peer pressure. "What, you're not on Facebook? Lol, looser." Besides, with bullshit like the Facebook Login coming up, it's not unreasonable to assume that you WILL be forced to use Facebook for many things on the web. While I personally don't care and can put up with the peer pressure, other people can't.

And people ARE being forced to use proprietary software. At home, at work, everywhere, and if it's only because they don't know any better, or have been locked in by proprietary formats. You don't always have a choice.

Furthermore, it's not just about having a choice. It's about breaking the dominance, and eventually getting rid of proprietary software altogether. The only rational choice for any human being who's interested in progress and long-term sustainability is Free Software. Proprietary software is opposed to both of these concepts.

peer pressure. "What, you're not on Facebook? Lol, looser."

Weird worldviews will result in you be treated weirdly. Deal.

And people ARE being forced to use proprietary software. At home,

Change. If it's that important to you, you will.

at work,

Quit. If it's that important to you, you will.

if it's only because they don't know any better

Then they don't care, and it's unimportant.

You don't always have a choice.

Yup. Life kinda sucks, huh? Wear a helmet.

This does not follow from...er...reality. Terribly sorry.

I write proprietary software (TEH HORRARS!). I am also interested in technological progress. The two are in no way opposed, unless as your postulate you take the really cretinous stance they they are--and once you do, well, sure, it's obvious. But that postulate is wrong and cretinous, so...

I hope you revisit some of his philosophical speeches and reconsider your position. When software runs the whole freaking world, it is entirely possible to enslave the world through onerous license, copyright, trademark, patent, etc. fees.

I've read his tripe. His postulates are wrong.

That he sees it as unethical at all makes our views incompatible. You're speaking of less evil, but I don't think proprietary software is evil at all. The idea that proprietary software being unethical is fairly fundamental to Stallman's thinking, and I can't reconcile that with my own thoughts on the subject.

Speaking to pragmatism, Stallman has unequivocally said in interviews that if you write proprietary software you should quit your job because you are doing something unethical.

Now, I'm glad Stallman is around. The FOSS movement is, I feel, very important, and its important that FOSS exists. I don't wish that Stallman would go away simply because we do not share the same fundamental beliefs regarding software. I think that would be a loss. But I'm also glad that there are like minded people like myself who do not view a proprietary app as some sort of violation of basic human freedoms.

Well, it depends on what you mean by "accept." He acknowledges that Android is a step in the right direction, being much more free software than iOS, and restricting what software end users can run less. But it's not something that he considers acceptable; he would never own an Android phone, unless it were running something like Replicant and the radio firmware were replaced by free software or locked in place (so that it acted more as hardware than as software).

The article wasn't about agreeing or disagreeing with Stallman's beliefs, it was about all the comments that inevitably pop up about how fat, weird, smelly, unkempt, etc. he is, which has absolutely nothing to do with his beliefs.

I agree. I was trying to offer a data point to lambda's question about how someone might "stand against" Stallman. I suppose I went off on a tangent. I agree with the gist behind the article that we should not attack Stallman based on the fact that he is not typical.

I still don't understand how you can "stand against" Stallman, as opposed to particular views of his. He has lots of opinions. Some of them you may share. Some of them you may not.

Just deciding that you disagree with some views that someone has and thus you stand against them entirely is a bit extreme.

Would it be possible for someone to call one of your habits unethical and you to find it palatable? If not, then palatability is probably not a good indicator of whether ethics questions directed at you are reasonable.

I don't use my feelings regarding the manner as a measure of reasonableness. I've really tried to understand Stallman's arguments, but I really can't come to agree that proprietary software is, in and of itself, unethical.

Not to get bogged down in words, but you are saying, "I stand against Stallman," but isn't it better to just focus on the ideas? He is a man of ideas, after all.

If you disagree on the ideas, you could still be friends with the man (and he is an incredibly nice and friendly guy who treats people better than he gets treated, that's for sure.)

Just curious: by any chance, are you "standing against Stallman" while simultaneously using his work? I could not do my job without using Stallman's work in some form (in many forms in fact).

If you disagree on the ideas, you could still be friends with the man

Can you? Is it possible to be friends with someone who says that anyone who disagrees with his ideas is evil?

I'm an atheist, yet I have no problem with being friends with people who are religious. I do, however, have a problem with being friends with someone who ends every conversation with "... and you're going to burn in hell for an eternity". RMS' refusal to accept the possibility that any position other than his own might have value puts him firmly into that camp of people I don't want to have anything to do with.

> I don't want to have anything to do with

Gotcha, and I'm not trying to be argumentative, but do you use his work? And if so, are you okay with using his work, but disagreeing with his ideas?

I don't want to speak for anyone, but while Stallman definitely thinks that using work created from a differing ideological perspective is seriously problematic, one shouldn't assume the same from people who disagree with him.

For someone who claimed in a parent comment, "...puts him firmly into that camp of people I don't want to have anything to do with", I would.

"I put [X] firmly into that camp of people I don't want to have anything to do with, but I am fine with using [X]'s work for my everyday activities."

*but do you use his work?

I don't think so. I certainly use a bunch of GNU code, but as far as I know he didn't contribute to any of it. It's entirely possible though.

Do you use gcc?

Nope, I'm firmly in the llvm/clang camp.

     "... and you're going to burn in hell 
      for an eternity"

I never heard him say anything like that in his speeches.

Maybe I have a short memory, unless you mean the short NO answers he gives to people that ask whether bending the rules a little is OK to do or maybe you're referring to how he hasn't given up on correcting people about the GNU/Linux naming. I also heard multiple times about how he holds the FSF members to these higher standards.

But have you ever asked a Christian if you'll go to hell for being an atheist? The answer is pretty predictable. And compared to Christianity, a faith based on non-falsifiable beliefs, Stalman was proven right again and again.

Maybe he just got tired of repeating everything like a broken record? Maybe, just maybe, he worked for his whole life trying to build the GNU operating system without the results he wanted? And to put salt to the injury, OS X built on top of those tools. Wouldn't you be pretty pissed about it?

He's not young anymore, he may not have the same patience or pragmatism of 20 year old. He does sound like an old grump. His idealism is kind of obnoxious.

But regardless of that, he's one of those people that pushes the human race forward. It's OK, you don't have to be friends with him to give him a little respect.

"But have you ever asked a Christian if you'll go to hell for being an atheist? The answer is pretty predictable."

I'm guessing you haven't asked a very wide variety of Christians that question? Because in my experience you'd get a pretty wide variety of different answers...

You must from the US and it shows :)

From my experience there are 2 kinds of Christians: those that believe in the New Testament and those that reinterpret it here and there to suit their own feelings about what is right and wrong (after all, a father wouldn't punish his children for all eternity and why punish a good man, even if he's an atheist?).

However the New Testament doesn't really leave room for interpretation on this one. Non-believers will burn, says so Jesus. And if you ask any priest from any of the major Christian churches, like Catholic, Eastern Orthodox (my own), Protestant, the answer will be without doubt Yes.

Of course, there's always Jehova's witnesses, that simply rewrote the bible, but I don't think that counts.

There's nothing wrong with inventing your own religion based on a good set of moral values, especially casting away anything that leads to hatred of other people (dare I say it, Jesus would probably agree) and I do that myself, however I wouldn't shout from the roof-tops that I'm a Christian as that would be a little bending of the truth.

Since Vatican II, the official Catholic position is that salvation is open to non-believers. Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Anglicans believe similarly. In fact, most protestant denominations believe the same thing. Your opinion is not held by the majority of Christian denominations.

(From Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: "The non-Christian may not be blamed for his ignorance of Christ and his Church; salvation is open to him also.")

I actually tried that experiment at one point, and there were surprisingly few popular sets of hell criteria. The main disagreement seems to be over the following questions:

1. What is hell, and does anybody go there? (Popular answers: nonexistent, some kind of vague "separation from God", or a literal eternal torture place.)

2. Do people get saved from hell by faith, or by good deeds?

3. What about people who have never heard of Christianity, or who were indoctrinated into another religion so thoroughly that they will never accept it?

4. What about children who die before they can learn about religion?

These four questions cover the great majority of the variations in Christian hell-beliefs.

Well summarized.

Some surprising-to-me data points I researched last night while working on a longer response to bad_user I decided not to post:

1) Apparently (based on a couple of surveys) at least 25% of American Christians don't believe in hell at all.

2) Based on an admittedly quick survey, the four gospels seem to strongly emphasize the positive benefits of believing in Jesus. When they do speak of hell, like the Sermon on the Mount, it's all in terms of what will happen to you if you're not a good person: "Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire."

3) The strongest phrase I was able to find in the gospels was "...but whoever does not believe [in Jesus] is condemned already..." In that context (John 3), it seems to "be condemned" is to not have eternal life -- and then it immediately softens it up three verses later with "But whoever does what is true comes to the light..."

All in all, I found a lot less Biblical support for "If you don't believe in Jesus, you will go to hell" than I thought I was going to. Perhaps I just wasn't looking in the right places...

Can you? Is it possible to be friends with someone who says that anyone who disagrees with his ideas is evil?

Yes. Depends on definition of evil, I guess.

P.S. in Stallman case I guess definition of evil goes something like this: "I think with your rules you're doing harm to long term development of intellectual property like software. You're evil and you will burn in hell." Pretty mild definition of evil in my opinion?

Stallman is an atheist, but he uses religious expressions and extreme caricatures like that to be funny. If you're mortally offended, you're taking it the wrong way. He can be very witty, if your skin is thick enough to appreciate his sense of humor.

At a science fiction convention in the 80's, Mike and I (who worked for "Evil Software Hoarder" Unipress on Gosling's "Evil" commercial version of Emacs) ran across RMS:

Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?"

RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance."

Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!

Stallman didn't focus on Steve Jobs' ideas, so one can hardly be blamed for holding him to his own standards.

You misunderstood his position, he clarified it later and corrected the quotation he used.

AFAIK, he corrected the quotation, but did not take back anything he said and even insisted that the misquotation "did not alter the meaning." He did say "My feelings about Jobs as a person are not strong," but nonetheless stood by his gloating that Jobs — the person — is gone, and continued to attack him by name rather than just the abstract ideas Jobs stood for.

That is false.

He wasn't glad Jobs, the person, died, but he was glad Jobs, the CEO of Apple, is gone.

So if I use a tool or product, I must automatically agree with the maker's ideology?

I've used John Galliano aftershave, and I'm no racist.

actually RMS is an excellent spokesperson which is why the movement is so successful.

In a world of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Open Source, I wonder if FSM is actually successful. Sure it's had successes, but success-ful, I would hesitate to call it.

Also, I'm pretty sure the original commenter was implying that RMS is a bad spokesman because he is so polarizing/unattractive (idealogically).

How much did it cost you to learn to program? Before Free Software, it would have been a lot. Now you can learn and create amazing software without spending any money. And there is a culture of sharing that's made software one of the most successful fields to date.

This stuff is always difficult to figure out with any certainty, because the "what if" world will always remain hypothetical.

For instance, the FSF is fairly successful, but in an alternate universe, with, say, David Hasselhof (or, KITT, for that matter), as their spokesperson, maybe they would have been vastly more successful.

With regards to the availability of free software, who knows how much is due to them, how much is due to BSD type sharing, and how much is simply due to the economics of free software making a lot of sense for some kinds of programs.

gcc.

BSD predates the FSF by almost a decade. pcc predates GCC by about the same amount of time. I know that you know that projects like Perl have nothing to do with the FSF as well.

BSD however, was not BSD licensed untill the early 90s, and they clearly stated this move was in response to GNU and the GPL, to use BSD before that point required an extremely expensive AT&T source code license.

Most of the tools I used to learn to program would not qualify as Free Software by RMS's own definition. Most of these were Open Source.

Perhaps you are not aware that the vast majority of open source software does qualify as Free Software by the FSF's definition. Certainly BSD-licensed software does.

The vast majority of tools I used to learn how to program were not Free Software as defined by RMS.

But were OSS? An example, please?

BSD as it currently is(the "new" BSD licenses from 1999 on), because that's GPL compatible. The original BSD license does not count as FOSS as far as the FSF is concerned.

The original BSD license was free too, it was just not GPL compatible. The FSF has always recommended against it, but they have always called it a Free Software license.

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

I very much doubt that, since the definitions are very similar. Just because you could look at the source doesn't make it Open Source, as defined by the OSI.

Again, the vast majority of tools I used to learn how to program were not Free Software as defined by RMS.

I don't doubt that. I find it hard to believe they were Open Source.

Please don't pedal this nonsense.

"Free software" existed well before Stallman.

I learnt to program from magazines that had "free software" written out in BASIC. It was free (cost and freedom). After that we used to download free software from BBS's. Fractint etc.

Free software existed before, it'll always exist. It's existence has nothing to do with Stallman.

About as irritating as hearing 'Crockford invented JSON'.

That was "free software". This is Free Software.

Words and expressions often have more than one meaning. This is the case.

See Gratis versus Libre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre

Was it actually free as in libre? Did the magazine include a license for the code samples? If there was no explicit license then it was absolutely not libre due to copyright.

The Apple II, the first mass market personal computer, predates the "Free" software movement by several years, and came with Basic-- the most popular language at the time for hobbyists-- installed, by default, for free.

For the most part, Apple has given away development tools for free, or at very low cost, primarily to cover the overhead of offering them.

Since Mac OS X has been out, development tools have been free, and in the box. (Though now you download them rather than get them in the box, of course.)

XCode is just recently free, it always cost something before now. Without GCC being out there, would it have been free this whole time? I don't know either way, no one does, but I cheap != free. GCC has always been free.

> XCode is just recently free, it always cost something before now.

This is plainly false and easily checked by simply looking at archive.org's record for developer.apple.com.

Don't you think Basic was the most popular language at the time because it came for free with many home computers? C and other compilers were hideously expensive at the time, no wonder these languages weren't particularly popular.

And have you considered that one reason for OS X development tools being available free of charge these days might be because Free software changed the development tools landscape dramatically in the last two decades?

For the most part, Apple has given away development tools for free, or at very low cost, primarily to cover the overhead of offering them

There was no freely available compiler for the mac between System 1 and OSX. My fifteen-year-old self had to make an at-the-time pretty significant investment to buy Metrowerks Codewarrior.

That was the anti-golden-age of programming.

Stallman and GNU effectively ended the market for high priced proprietary dev tools. As a tool builder and user this is good and bad. That whole market segment has been removed for consideration and now the tool builder/user can sell their creations (the part that solves non-builder's problems while now giving away the tools they create while solving the user's problems). This transition has been very liberating. Now anyone with a modest hardware investment can have some of the best tools in the world to solve problems with. Amazing times.

My first C/C++ compiler cost nearly as much as the machine it ran on. This will never happen again and we can thank the GNU ecoSystem for jump starting the new ground rules.

I dumbfounded by all the awesome software I can use to build larger systems with everyday, literally millions of dollars worth of assets. Anyone anywhere could do this, with only food, water, hardware, electricity and internet.

RMS/GNU played a role. However, they had very little impact on the non-*nix space until prices of development tools had already dropped pretty sharply on DOS and then Windows. (Borland had a lot to do with it.) Tools, especially the pro editions and a lot of add-on libraries, were still a long way from free but the price points were coming down markedly. Ultimately though, I agree it was open source that drove the final nail into dev tools as a standalone business for most purposes.

GNU tools have profoundly changed the Microsoft platform, I remember when http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/ came out, everyone could get a legit C compiler for DOS/Windows. This was a huge deal.

Microsoft did its damnedest to kill Borland and its inexpensive tools.

Proprietary dev tools still exist, true, but the landscape is so vastly different. Even my favorite IDE IntelliJ has the source released under a BSD license, I actually reupped my license when they did this.

Did you forget about Apple's MPW? I don't know when you turned 15 but there was a very long span of time during which MPW was a good free option.

I'm not from the US and my first computer bought in year '94 was 5 times cheaper than an Apple.

It came with MS-DOS 6.22 and had QBasic. But it was useless. You see, I wanted to create games. And not shitty games using ASCII-art, but the kind of games I played daily.

I then got a pirated Turbo Pascal and I learned the ins and outs of it. But it was also useless -- I had to develop my own graphics primitives, but the environment was extremely limited. What I really needed was a C++ compiler that could compile executables for 32-bits protected mode and a library that already had graphics primitives optimized for something better than 320x240 Mode X in 80286 assembly.

Then I got to DJGPP, a GCC port for MS-DOS and Allegro. It was heaven-like from initial testing, but reading on DJGPP I began reading about Linux and for the first time I got the feeling that I was using an obviously crippled environment, because it was. And for Windows 95, since it was getting deployed everywhere, Visual C++ and Borland Delphi were expensive, too freaking expensive.

You may feel nostalgic about Apple II and that lovely Basic you loved so much. But it was also useless. And the "free development tools" from OS X? The compiler itself is GCC and the command-line environment is composed of lots of tools proudly wearing the GNU mark. Only in recent years has Apple started to consider other options, like LLVM, but that's because GCC has some technical issues, but otherwise it is the most mature and widely deployed compiler on this planet and has served Apple well.

You see, OS X wouldn't be OS X without the GNU tools and I really don't get how OS X can be used as an argument.

Mac OS X development tools are no more free in than Mac OS X.

It's also worth noting that Mac OS X's "free" development tools include the GNU suite.

They're completely free. The total cost of the Mac developer tools is zero; I bought a Mac and Apple packed them in. I didn't buy XCode, I bought a Mac. (Though, to be fair, there was a time when they were like $5 for an upgrade. Then they weren't.)

Now, they don't fit the FSF's definition of "free software", but I have little use for the redefinition of words to attempt to push a political viewpoint, so, y'know.

Redefinition? I think english has used "free" to mean either the state of having freedom or no cost for quite a while.

I only see one person here trying to redefine words to push their political viewpoint.

I'll cop to playing their game in jest, but more seriously: my definition does not exclude freedom. Nginx, for example, is free of charge. It is also permissively (one might say 'freely'!) licensed.

Stallman's, on the other hand, rather sadly attempts to pervert the discussion with such headscratchers as (say) "Visual Studio Express is nonfree." Well, no, it's quite free, I just downloaded it and they said the corporatey equivalent of "use in good health" (though this was, as is their sort of thing, buried in a EULA that was many many pages long). If they said "VS Express is not freely licensed," well, yeah, sure. Instead the FSF and similar unfortunates attempt to reverse the overload (underload?) of the word 'free' to mean only the meaning of 'free' that is politically appealing to them.

So, you're right, there's only one party committing etymological warfare in anger--though I'll cop to doing it in jest to get my point across. :)

You're completely missing the point. Or rather, the context. RMS/the FSF never tried to pervert the meaning of "free" to only mean "libre". It's just that in the context of their work, it makes little sense to use the other meaning of free (as in beer) - they acknowledge it exists, but it's rather irrelevant to them.

When you hear RMS using the word "free", it will mean "libre". So if RMS says something is "unfree", then it's glaringly obvious what he means, and in no way "etymological warfare".

You could just as well complain about the English language being ambiguous. It's quite unfortunate that free (as in Freedom) and free (as in beer) mean completely different things depending on the context, yet use the same word, but there's little we can do about that.

It's silly to say that XCode or Visual Studio Express are free, as in speech or beer. XCode is a fundamental component of the Mac OS X operating system, and though Apple doesn't put a price on it, it still figures into the cost of every Apple device, it just doesn't have a line item. Most of the components in a computer don't have line items, they all have a cost.

Visual Studio Express is the same basic deal. Microsoft doesn't give it away for free. They grant license to use it to anyone with a Windows license.

     "Visual Studio Express is nonfree." 
     Well, no, it's quite free

Try developing a plugin for it. That's lack of freedom right there.

Here, let me define freedom for you:

    the state of being free or at liberty rather 
    than in confinement or under physical restraint

Or here's another one:

    exemption from external control, interference, 
    regulation

Both definitions do not apply to Visual Studio Express, no matter how much wishful thinking you're trying to push ;)

ALSO, VS Express is not free as in cost either, as long as it only works on Windows, you do have to buy Windows Licenses. It's basically a complementary product. With GCC on the other hand you don't give a crap what platform you're using or what platform you're targeting. Well, actually you do give a crap because that's an extra benefit. Depends on your perspective.

The development tools might be free, but OSX certainly isn't, especially when you factor in the overpriced hardware. This is the number one reason I picked Android development over iOS.

No, it did not come 'for free'. It's included in the 'asking price' of Apple II. The money it cost Apple to bundle basic with the system was spent in order to make it more attractive and that cost is in turn part of the final price the customer pays when buying an Apple II.

Regarding the cost of learning to program: That's thanks to free-as-in-beer software, which is quite different from the FSF's free-as-in-speech software. (Though it is true that free-as-in-speech software also tends not to cost anything, since it's basically unsalable.)

And the culture of sharing exists outside of Stallman's highly restrictive copyleft bubble. Ordinary open-source software falls short of Stallman's demands, but it actually grants the user more freedom than GPL software does.

Since we value individual freedoms the most, the author decides what do with their software. Author's Choice. If you dont like the license on GPLd software, recode it and release as BSD. Go compete in the marketplace of ideas.

Free Software is successful because Apple and Google would not have been successful without it. OSX & iOS are built on BSD, and Google's entire back end is based on open source software (Linux, Java, et cetera).

BSD has nothing to do with the FSF and Stallman.

BSD does not use GNU software, IIRC. The BSDs use a separate re-implementation of the Unix base software under a BSD license (instead of a GPL license).

That said, I'm a little fuzzy on how much FSF may be inspired the BSDs to exist.

edit: I was overstating what I actually meant when I said that they don't use GNU software. I don't know about the current crop of BSDs, but I was referring to the original BSD system not being built on top of the GNU base.

Most of the current BSD projects do in fact use some GNU tools. BSD predates the FSF.

There are a lot of tools and major projects within the various BSD's that are GPL'ed software. This includes but certainly isn't limited to gcc, gdb, grep, binutils, diff, and more.

It is only recently in the last few years that the BSD projects have started removing GPL'ed software from their base trees and replacing them with BSD equivalents. clang is slowly being accepted by FreeBSD (a BSD compiler developed by Apple), tools like grep and diff are being redone under the BSD license, and OpenBSD is looking at pcc to replace the gcc compiler for their base system.

The main reason is simply because they want to create a fully BSD distribution of components, where none of it is under the GPL license, secondary only recently has there been a new compiler available that is as good as gcc and could be a viable replacement.

For people who care there are big differences between "free" and "open" and other similar terms.

BSDs are open source, and free as in beer, but there have been years-long flame wars between RMS (and FSF advocates) and Theo de Raadt (and BSD advocates).

Stallman may say that free software has not been successful when people use the term Linux instead of GNU/Linux. (and yes, I am aware that there exist Linux Kernels without GNU userlands.)

The BSDs are also Free Software.

Yes; thanks for the correction. I'm not sure where my confusion came from.

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

In a world of Apple, Google and Microsoft FSM seems to be our only hope...

You said it perfectly, kenjackson. Everyone needs to chill and stop crapping their pants every time someone disagrees with Stallman. Public figures get insulted by morons like us all the time. They don't sweat it and if they do should get out of the public eye.

I'm a Steve Jobs fanboy but I certainly don't care if someone mocks him, even posthumously. I did get very offended by Stallman's comments the day after his death but that's a whole other animal there. Otherwise people need to stop taking our opinions so personally. If I disagree on just one point or everything he stands for it doesn't mean I don't like him unless I say so. It also doesn't mean I respect or don't respect his previous work. Enough with this cult of personality stuff already.

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