An elegy for GNU and RMS
catgirl.ai
catgirl.ai
- There isn't a big pool of people willing to devote time to Free Software. If we had a big pool of people who are better than Stallman and more willing to work on the cause then we'd talk about them. Stallman may not be unique, but he is rare in being simultaneously 1) principled, 2) motivated, 3) willing to work very hard for not a lot of money or prestige in the circles of power and 4) willing to put himself out there pushing a message.
I can find any number of people who are 2/4 on that list. 3/4 is rare. A lot of people who want Stallman gone are going to trade off their principles when they realise that they can get invited to very expensive parties put on by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Or plan on just fading in to the background. I think there is an interesting wound to be reopened in the Eich v. Mozilla topic on this point as well.
- No related to this article, but people have completely unrealistic standards for volunteer leadership. The man is human and has flaws. Everyone has flaws. We can tolerate some flaws in people who are doing good work.
(To be clear, re #3, there exist people who have done as much or more for free software as RMS, but people don't idolize most, except perhaps Linus, to the same degree)
Indeed, fame is often the result of them being outspoken.
Sometimes people's flaws prevent them and the people they work with from doing good work.
A lot of people I'd describe as "principled" don't want to be anywhere near Stallman for various reasons, often related to their principles. Maybe he's just cleared his orbit of anyone else who actually fits your 4 criteria, so only appears to be unique. This seems like a rather common failure mode of personality cults, tbh.
RMS’s behavior is way past “some flaws”.
No company on earth would have let him stay this long.
Huh? Working together in a group at a company does not imply any kind of standard for behavior, although companies pretend outwardly that there is some professional standard they abide by. The truth is that work places are filled with all kinds of horrible human behavior, always have and always will be.
People work together in bands, on art projects, on house renovations, on family housework, on adventures, on radical political movements, and it is OK for them to have complicated human relationships while they do so and capitalist companies do not deserve to have a say.
There isn't really an ideological bent there that can throw a wrench in the works unless you are doing harm as a company.
Yes, it took too long.
The system (at two separate companies) eventually worked.
That's not the only reason companies will get rid of people of course, because they are ultimately capital-dedicated authoritarian organizations. But it is a reason, which is my point.
And across the industry there is something akin to a floor of acceptable behavior. I cannot go into the office nude. I'm generally not allowed to abuse the other employees (however the higher up you are/the more important you are, the harder it gets to remove you, and it always relies on reporting).
There is a floor, and it's in practice lower than I'd like, but it exists.
define toxic.
Companies often promote people that would be immediately kicked out from any other of those examples.
Nobody would start a band with Elon Musk.
Welcome to the finish sauna located inside the office.
It always context dependent. Organizations and companies in particular have cultural filters. I know people who find it toxic when people mix alcohol and work, while other find it useful to grease the professional relationship. Personally I find having a work get together at the sauna more suitable then the bar, but I am pretty sure 99% of HN belong to cultures that disagree.
I think it might be you that’s missing the irony.
I also accept the FSF/GNU don't operate like a typical authoritarian company - although I do think there are probably more similarities due to the fact power structures and human psychology dictate certain behaviors than FSF or Stalmman care to admit. But we absolutely shouldn't expect him or the FSF to operate in a similar manner, corps are what produce the toxic behaviors in the first place (not human toxic, toxic to society).
Being nice and polite, and being forced to murder kids and pillage third world countries, that has always had the smack of pure evil to it to me.
Maybe being polite is overrated after all. Fuck off, hitler (or whomever the evil dictator is).
The whole point of FSF is that everyone can have control over their software and do whatever the heck they want with it, even if it makes no sense. Here you have an excellent example, and you're suggesting there's the same freedom in finding somebody else to control your work.
To give a counter-example: in my observation, in academia (in particular math and physics departments), there is a lot more tolerance towards excentric traits than in companies - and collaborating in a group nevertheless works.
Thus, companies are an insanely bad example to define a reasonable floor. Rather, the traits that are considered acceptable in companies are whether they are useful for making the company money. For example dark triad traits can be useful for that, so such traits are somewhat accepted in companies.
Companies represent a floor of acceptable behavior for people working together in a group in a company (and that's not even true between different companies).
There are an infinite number of people working together in a group that do behave acceptably but not in the same way a company would.
for example: politics, unions, military, volunteers, churches, research etc
Because no company on earth wanted what he wanted.
If he had different flaws, ones which companies found acceptable, it is doubtful that the state of technology we enjoy today[1] would exist.
[1] Almost all of which was built on free software foundations.
They can go start their own Foundation (and those sort of people probably will do exactly that). GNU sounds silly anyway, and all the licenses are FOSS compatible. We've seen schisms already, that generally end well.
The Open Source people already did that at a grand scale, it was a massive success. Stallman's entire ideology is perfectly compatible with people doing a great job out-competing him at his own game. We would be lucky to have multiple organisations working to promote freedom in the software world, in multiple different ways.
Stallman's principles are important, the man saw really far into the future towards which we have been heading. However, in the GCC AST case these principles really got in the way of good work.
Free software is supposed to be the superior software. It seems obvious to me that superior software would be easy to interface with and build upon. GCC should have been no exception but he chose to make it hard on purpose because some proprietary software somewhere might interface with it some day and he didn't want to help those people. It's my understanding this is one of the many reasons why clang is so relevant today.
This unwillingness to help proprietary software shows up in other parts of the free software culture as well. For example, nobody seems to care much about binary interfaces, only source code that can be recompiled.
Superior, yes, but only for "some definition of superior."
It's not meant to be "better in every way" and could never be that anyway since "best" of anything, is always a compromised nuanced collection of competing interests. With the FSF there aren't competing interests, there is one overriding interest and all others are subservient to that.
Thus GNU software is always the "most free", but is also unsuitable for most users. Emacs may be free, but my mom uses MS Word. Her definition of "best" might be different to mine, not least because her goal is writing a letter, not analysing source code.
To the original author I suggest the following - let the FSF be the FSF and decide for yourself what tools best suit you. There are plenty of alternatives to GNU software for anything that matters. If gcc doesn't do done thing the use clang etc.
The "pure" FSF approach to computing is not meant for the masses, it is meant for a tiny few. You are not one of those few. (I mean that in the pragmatic, not pergoritive sense.)
Programmers see computers as "a thing" - 99% of the world see it as just another tool to get through the day. My mom cares about her computer about as much as I care where, or how, paper is made. She cares about her software about as much as she cares about her coffee machine.
In one sense RMS is a visionary leading us all to software nirvana. In another he's irrelevant. In many ways he can be both at the same time.
It doesn't matter whether emacs does this, or gcc does that. We don't really need a more pragmatic FSF - there are already lots of open source advocates filling that space.
If you want to be pure, the FSF is the home for you. If you want to be more pragmatic then find somewhere else.
Personally I am not one of the tiny group of perfectly-pure users with no reasonable phone or laptop. Personally I think the FSF stance is absurd in most cases and out of touch in most others.
But I completely respect their mission, and I completely enjoy many of the freedoms that mission has brought me indirectly. Open Source exists because of the FSF stance - a happy side effect of it maybe - and that is a very important thing.
The world needs extremists who model an alternative extreme. Homesteaders don't make me want to live off-the-grid, but they do inspire a model of more sustainable living, I'm encouraged to use alternative water for some uses, perhaps install some solar and so on.
Long may the FSF set a standard for impractical, unwavering dedication to an unrealistic computing standard. They set a boundary for the rest of us to see in the distance, and they allow a middle ground far closer to that boundary than we would otherwise aspire to.
The FSF is gloriously irrelevant, and long may it last.
Free software isn't supposed to be anything except free. If it's superior that's nice but that isn't really the goal.
The first one I think is pretty important, as the saying goes if the cure is worse than the disease its not worth it.
Security flaws is arguable, not enough people have an incentive to work on free software, not because it doesn't get used, but because companies themselves haven't and aren't built to contribute back. We could have solved this fairly easily, just not in the software world, but I digress.
Lastly, more features, by which I don't mean in the sense you are probably thinking i.e. the narrow mindset popularized by MVP thinking "can it do X". More in the sense, "can you do X in Y manner". If you have ever used software and thought "why does it do this stupid thing or take so long" etc., its what I mean. Corps often build MVPs and "working" software that is otherwise horrible, free open source software is often used and improved by end users. Technical users, often, but they wear a user hat as well. Users can complain and request things directly.
It can produce bloated software as well, but when you don't have a budget you can do things like refactor. It will take a while but it can happen, where I think often corp software is held back by layers of deadlines, product owners, and BAs - the users are so far at the end of the chain the software they learn to live with is an absolute nightmare. They use it for some business reason, not because the software is in the least bit good.
It is a one-sided view, and I see at least one important inaccuracy. FSF and RMS were certainly not asked for their view. Given that, would it make sense for RMS or FSF to write anything about this post publicly to give it validity and attention? Very doubtful.
Given all that, I found this bit pretty amusing: "I'd be surprised if he or any of the people with any influence even read it", how would the author ever find out? lol.
It is sad that this person cares about emacs, but dropping a big dis track and walking away without even suggesting any practical solutions really does not help things. Emacs has a very few core maintainers, FSF has a small staff augmented by volunteers, this is not some faceless entity like a big corporation or government.
Update: the author has since published their email address. Good for them.
It's not like Free Software is exclusive property of rms and FSF. Many parties can take part in the fight.
I also find Stallman's position on a contributor/project head positions imbalance to be perfectly reasonable. Contributor has to convince project head to do something. Project head doesn't need to do that. If a contributor is unhappy, he can fork the project, become the head himself (with all the problems that such position brings), and do a better job.
There 100% was such a pool of people but Stallman scared or domineered them all away.
You say this as if there's not much more work to do, not many more features or improvements to be had. So your point appears to be wrong.
Not trying to be snarky, I'm genuinely curious. I know that RMS has been very active in the emacs-dev mailing-list. Not sure if he's become more active after he was forced to step down from FSF board, and what impact (if any) his return has made. Aside from turning emacs-dev mailing list into a weird place where one has to be a bit careful even when asking technical questions, what "good work" has RMS done in the past decade? Again, I'm not trying to downplay his achievements and accomplishments in the past, I'm sincerely interested to know about his work. I know he wrote tons of essays, but he doesn't contribute to Emacs codebase anymore, right?
This puts Stallman in a pretty massive demographic, one that includes the clergy, public school teachers, and professional baduk players.
The real question is whether RMS is actually doing good work. I don't question his intent, but the outcome is… let's call it "debatable." And, arguably, the gaussian on that outcome very much includes negative results — not sure where the overall curve goes…
How this could be tagged as not good enough work for somebody is beyond my comprehension.
"skin in the game" as taleb would say, only a little bit more subtle.
Why were you stunned? The guy signs his emails "Dr. Richard Stallman" whilst only having an honorary doctorate. Clearly there are issues. It's as insane as signing emails "Dr. Bill Gates", "Dr. Clint Eastwood" and "Dr. Billy Joel" (all having honorary degrees).
As he should. He earned it
It's also illegal to do it without actually having the title.
Still, it is a fact that he has a doctorate. I don't think he's wrong to call himself a doctor. A little formal, perhaps?
This is false and insulting to people who earned real degrees.
He has an honorary doctorate. Which is about as worthless as if someone had the local trophy shoppe mint you a plaque that said "World's Greatest Hacker".
Honorary doctorates are created for this cases, when the recipient is --the-- expert in the field. Is a shortcut to encourage this experts to became teachers and pass their knowledge. Win-win. Do we really think that somebody spending four years writing a these about emacs knows more than Stallman about a program that he developped since 70's?
Is abused to groom donors? Yes, Sometimes is abused, but is a perfectly legit way to became a doctor.
No, but at least in the US, they're often given out for things other than achievement in a particular field, like as unofficial quid-pro-quo for large donations to the university.
Perhaps that doesn't damn the practice entirely, as many are awarded for extraordinary contributions, but it does add an unfortunate extra step, having to ask the question, "did this person get this honor because they did amazing things, or because they paid amazing sums?"
A honorary doctorate is to a doctorate as a honorary citizenship is to a citizenship. It does not imply any rights or qualifications and trying to pass it of as the real deal may be (and in some places is quite explicitly) considered fraud.
I suspect it's some sort of cultural thing, and that with how much computer people tend to reject typical forms of formality we're just mostly on the far opposite side of whatever cultural thing it is.
Let's not even talk about medical doctors everywhere, or formal engineering qualifications, both are very often used in letters.
The argument is that they make a direct difference to the perception of the individuals competence (and I know that for medical doctors there is a direct effect on earnings). While I don't think it would make a difference for RMS corresponding with software engineers he might be thinking it does make a difference because of his interaction with other stakeholders. Not really defending it, just offering a different perspective.
I think it does make a difference: many software developers might take him less seriously because of it. And that has nothing to do with the fact that his doctorates are honorary; same goes for someone who has completed a PhD program.
They also omit the "med", which is much like omitting "h.c.". And they are very keen on using the title in general.
Expat living in Germany here. You’re absolutely correct according to my experience. In fact, I’ve seen people with PhD put “Dr.” on the mailbox in front of their home.
Granted, these are mostly (or even all?) people who received their doctorates in the past 10 or 15 years, and as such are a good 30 years younger than Stallman, so perhaps there is a generational thing at play here too, where the respect/desirability of titles like that has been dropping over time.
Perhaps the PhD holders don't want to be associated with the hubris that most medical doctors exude. For reference, google "endometriosis suffer" or spend some time researching medical malpractice.
It also is possible that a lot of kids coming out of the 80s got a bum deal on their education - or at least feel they did. Like, "it was too easy to get this degree" - from the standpoint of applying themselves, not the overall workload of getting a PhD. Medical Doctors who are board certified, that did all their rotations, and whatever else required, there's only one other doctorate that requires more workload, and that's psychiatry.
What should maybe be questioned is why someone needs a doctorate for "the world to learn from them."
To give another data point: in France I remember the university having to ask the local profs. to put their titles (Dr, Prof, etc) in their mail signature as otherwise students thought that french teachers were much less competent than e.g. teachers from germany who would have three layers of Dr. Eng. prepended
A PhD has earned their title "Dr".
Many people use it, and they should. They paid for it with their mental health.
I apply the title to everyone I know with a PhD.
One common situation is introducing an invited speaker at a conference. After the first mention, you refer to the speaker using a mix of pronouns and names. Full name or last name would sound weird. Using first name works if the speaker is your friend and many people in the audience also know them as a person. Otherwise "Dr. Lastname" is a reasonable choice.
Academic websites are full of short biographies of speakers, lecturers, PIs, and so on. They are often written in third person. Again, "Dr. Lastname" is often the form of reference that sounds least weird.
Academic spam is often addressed to "Dr. Lastname", especially if the sender is asking the recipient to do something. Using "doctor" as a title is a safe default choice. It sounds respectful, it's very likely to be correct, and it saves the sender from guessing the gender (and possibly marital status) of the recipient.
But this is not relevant here, as Dr. Stahlmann doesn't work in Tübingen.
A doctorate is a doctorate. And if it makes him happier, why not? There's no harm or confusion (his qualifications are clear enough in any context where they matter). Unlike, say, the case of Dr. Phil.
There so many other things to have an issue with about Stallman, I don't know why this one stands out in particular.
...that said, the only time I've used the "Dr." next to my name was on obnoxious web forms which force me to choose between Mr/Ms/etc, and Dr. is the only non-gendered option.
Except Dr. Phil does have an actual PhD. Which he attended university and defended via dissertation. Unlike, say, RMS.
Well that's the point.
When RMS says he's a "Doctor", the expectation is "made a significant contribution to computer science" - which, arguably, he did.
When Dr. Phil says he's a "doctor", the expectation is "qualified and licensed to practice medicine in his field". Which he is very much not (in particular, he hasn't renewed his license).
Context matters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_A8Xe9M0NY
Call me doctor (Call me doctor)
No need to look
He's not in the book
The doctor's not an M.D.
What he does this time he does for free
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2VaMIFEQDg
>Mom, I am going to rip off your head and shit down your neck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeOBZWQEJE4
>For whatever intimidation and injustice vie with decency and honor, let the Doctors arise, and arise they must, for within every one of us, there is a Doctor, a dormant Doctor, a supreme arbitrator, who can be summoned to intervene, when crises threaten the stabilities and well-beings of our heartlands. Now let's party!
One of my professors used to talk about the difference between a Masters degree and a PhD:
"To get a Masters degree you have to learn something. To get a PhD the world has to learn something."
The world has learned a great deal from RMS. Regardless of what one thinks of him as a person, he's probably been more influential on how the world thinks about software than the vast majority of PhDs.
Of course, he took that as license to just do whatever he wanted to do. Personally I wouldn't even consider adopting any kind of title in the first place, but if I was of that bent, I would at least have the decency to append the "(h.c.)".
I do believe that RMS's contributions to the world have been significant, but, to me, at least, a doctorate is something you get after completing a doctoral program. If you don't do that, you should call yourself a "doctor, honoris causa" -- because that's what you are! -- not a "doctor".
But what do I know, I only completed a bachelor's degree, and even then only barely.
[0] https://stallman.org/articles/dr-stallman.html
[1] I learned something new today!
So, regardless of your personal opinion, he is allowed to call himself Dr.
This is character assassination, leave it alone.
So it doesn't bother me if any of them signs Dr. Bill Gates, Dr. Billy Joel or Dr. Clint Eastwood as they, in all likelihood, are important in their fields, much more than I was when I submitted my thesis.
Anybody with a doctorate can decide to use the title, use it only in an ironic way, or just don't use it, as you wish. "Dr. Clint Eastwood" would not be a symptom of anything strange. Eastwood is clearly an expert in films, successful at both sides of the camera, so... why not recognize it?
It is pretty normal behavior for RMS. And his fundamental reason for limiting access to the AST makes no sense.
It makes sense in the context cited in TFA.
RMS would rather go down in flames than risk having third parties "abuse" GCC.
Substantive evidence that the situation has changed since the founding of GNU is moot.
RMS's binary view is arguably unfortunate, but there it is.
He's painted into a corner by ideology. He can't get any more flexible than he already has.
RMS has a towering reputation in the computer science field based on very significant accomplisments, that is undeniable. Any random person on a forum is welcome to challenge that reputation, but they'll need to do it properly, not just sling mud.
He doesn't know operator overloading exists. Then when he's told and given an example he claims it doesn't interact with type deduction in a way that is not true in C++. Then when given a simple example with auto he claims that the method overload resolution is equivalent to finding the right return type, ignoring multiple overloads and the possibility of type conversion after the function returns.
All these mistakes are acceptable, but when they were pointed out to him, he reacted by claiming blanket bad faith on everyone who was trying to justify using the full AST. He then said he wouldn't listen to them and instead would talk to "people he trusts".
This is of course technically feasible, but a huge amount of effort, and will constantly have to be updated / changed. When people are effectively arguing “it’s a much more forward-compatible and scalable approach to let tools use the AST directly”, he rejects that as changing the discussion, not a concrete example, and/or pressuring.
This is super ironic coming from someone who made an editor entirely based on LISP, which is successful precisely because it is completely transparent and anything can be changed / inspected / done.
Given the success of LSP in the recent years, it’s super evident that RMS was wrong on this matter. It has created an ecosystem for LSP around clang, and the integration with emacs is great.
But the LSP doesn't expose the AST. It just expose what the editor needs. That looks like the kind of interface RMS was asking for.
But yes it’s a good point that LSPs are actually an API for editors instead of exposing the AST to the editors directly, but from the discussion I’m fairly convinced that RMS lacked the imagination of all the possibilities LSPs could create.
And it’s also quite ironic that he resisted opening up the compiler to support these kind of tools, and it ended up being a for-profit corporation that spearheaded this whole open standard / ecosystem of LSPs.
You're right, too, though: this exact argument is part of why LSP and clang won. When people showed up (in _2015_!) to try to start on support for this sort of thing in emacs and gcc, the dictator at the top could not be convinced this was worthwhile. And now the world uses Clang and LSP and the GNU counterparts get dustier and dustier.
If you don't like his way of management, you are welcome to fork the project.
Free Software is not about governance; it's pretty much a complete antithesis to such power structures. Communities voluntarily coalesce around software projects with a core developer group. Don't like the group, fork the code; don't attempt a takeover/coup and if you do, or agitate for one, then you've revealed your true colours and that community will now see you as a hostile threat to their project.
Like it or not, FSF has governance and power structures. The GNU project power structure is very top heavy, effectively a dictatorship. I believe dictatorships are bad so I'll continue advocating for GNU to change.
Interestingly the approach to cooperation you're describing (if you don't like it, fork it) is actually the same as OG crypto Bitcoin people. IMO it's not conducive to good outcomes and most of the crypto world has embraced processes that lead to consensus building and more inclusivity (although clearly not perfect yet).
I think you should be more a bit subtle in your analysis and weight the pros and cons. Especially in the context of software projects where nobody gets killed or detained :)
Not saying that dictatorship is the only good way to lead software projects but there are enough highly successful dictator led software projects that it's worth not rejecting this type of governance as just "bad".
> Emacs is not an independent project, and it isn't governed by its contributors. I'm the head of the GNU Project, and that includes Emacs. > > You, as a contributor, can advocate a certain decision, which means you present arguments why I should approve it. I don't need to advocate a decision in that sense. > > I leave most technical decisions up to the contributors, including you, because for most of the questions I don't have any special preference of my own. For those questions, I'm happy with whatever works, and I know the contributors can figure out what works.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2018-03/msg00...
I don't see that as 'playing the governance card'; I see that as him rejecting the attempt by others.
Because of RMS's opposition to making gcc usable in any context other than gcc, people just moved to llvm and clang.
The core issue is that these are people who care about FSF, GNU, gcc, etc running headlong into RMS who is forcing design decisions based on a threat that does not exist, leading to the gradual erosion of there relevance.
Take gcc as in the example thread: RMS intentionally hobbling gcc means that gcc is simply not involved in any significant amount of compiler and language research any more. Why bother? it's intentionally designed to make the kind of things that compiler researchers would want to do hard, to "stop it being used in non-free software", similar happens for new languages: why bother messing around gcc where by design your only real option is "compiling" your code to C, which comes with _many_ costs.
These are people who _want_ to use gcc, who _want_ to use gpl, gnu, fsf, etc software, but cannot because functionally RMS does not allow it.
Those people who you speak of that have a romantic attachment towards GCC, are creating their own issues by being inflexible. However, I fail to see how their attachment should be of any serious concern to anybody. Surely, the mature way of dealing with this is for them to learn to let go and vote with their feet sort of speak.
Like, no, that's not how it works! This person is a volunteer with a detailed design proposal for a prototype. You can't just ignore the proposal and demand something entirely unrelated! I was blown away.
> This is IMO embarrassing and unprofessional behavior for an adult. Most engineering managers or architects in most jobs would be reprimanded or fired
I don't understand why I keep hearing complaints about "professional behaviour" in an open source context, where it's most likely not the "profession" of the people involved.
Please stop asking open source maintainers to behave professionally, until you are paying them a full time salary.
Periodically, they usurp huge contributions from outsiders and market the success to their employers as a project success without mentioning the actual author. Then they boss around the author until he/she rage-quits.
And while they were young, they were entirely rude and unprofessional. CoCs are a political tool to protect the inner circle.
At least RMS is not a hypocrite. Neither is Torvalds.
Are you paying RMS for work rendered? If not, you have no standing to demand RMS act professionally.
Not to mention, FOSS by its own definition excludes all facets of money and is in practice primarily driven by volunteers. You can't and shouldn't demand professional behaviour from people who are not professionals.
“The skill, good judgment, and polite behavior that is expected from a person who is trained to do a job well” Merriam-Webster
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/professional
("professionally" also redirects to the above URL.)
---------------------------------
professional adjective
pro· fes· sion· al | \ prə-ˈfesh-nəl , -ˈfe-shə-nᵊl \
Definition of professional (Entry 1 of 2)
1a: of, relating to, or characteristic of a profession
b: engaged in one of the learned professions
c(1): characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession
(2): exhibiting a courteous, conscientious, and generally businesslike manner in the workplace
2a: participating for gain or livelihood in an activity or field of endeavor often engaged in by amateurs
a professional golfer
b: having a particular profession as a permanent career
a professional soldier
c: engaged in by persons receiving financial return
professional football 3: following a line of conduct as though it were a profession
a professional patriot
professional noun
Definition of professional (Entry 2 of 2)
: one that is professional
especially : one that engages in a pursuit or activity professionally
---------------------------------
The phrase you are looking for is perhaps "act like a gentleman", among many other ways to describe behaviour that is mature and reasonable, but in any case RMS is not a professional and thusly none of us can demand he act professionally.
"workplace" is defined as "a place (such as a shop or factory) where work is done"[1].
"work" in the context of "workplace" is defined[2] as follows under definition 1:
---------------------
1a: to perform work or fulfill duties regularly for wages or salary
works in publishing
b: to perform or carry through a task requiring sustained effort or continuous repeated operations
worked all day over a hot stove
c: to exert oneself physically or mentally especially in sustained effort for a purpose or under compulsion or necessity
---------------------
Definition 1a is a direct reference to monetary payment for work rendered. Definition 1b describes the act of working itself. Definition 1c loosely refers to some sort of goal or need, which may or may not include money, as a motivator for working.
So in a very, very liberal context you can pedantically use "professional" in a non-monetary sense, but there are much more accurate ways to describe what you want to convey such that you wouldn't need to be liberal with your choice of words.
RMS isn't a professional, so he can't be demanded to act professionally.
The way I used the words "behave professionally" is very common in American English. You could use this phrase to describe a student, a volunteer, or even a dog at a dog show.
However, slang is slang. Officially, the definition of a professional is whether you make money for work rendered. The slang usage of "professional" is incorrect.
The slang usage might get added to the dictionary and become correct some day, language evolves, but as far as I'm aware today is not yet that day.
That's not the definition in question here. This is:
> exhibiting a courteous, conscientious, and generally businesslike manner in the workplace
A. adj.1. Relating to or marking the occasion of entrance into a religious order. Cf. profession-ring n. at profession n. Compounds. Obsolete. rare.
2. Of or relating to a profession or declaration; that is avowedly (but sometimes falsely) the thing specified; professed. Obsolete.
II. Senses relating to or derived from (the conduct of) a profession or occupation.
3.
a. Of a person or persons: that engages in a specified occupation or activity for money or as a means of earning a living, rather than as a pastime. Contrasted with amateur. Sometimes applied disparagingly to a person who makes a trade or profession of something usually associated with higher motives.
b. Of an event, activity, occupation, etc. (now esp. a sport): undertaken or engaged in for money; engaged in by professionals (as distinct from non-professionals or amateurs).
c. In humorous or derogatory use. Of a person: habitually making a feature of a particular activity or attribute, esp. one that is generally regarded with disfavour; inveterate.
4. Of, belonging to, or proper to a profession.
a. Relating to, connected with, or befitting a (particular) profession or calling; preliminary or necessary to the practice of a profession. professional examination.
b. Engaged in a profession, esp. one requiring special skill or training; belonging to the professional classes.
c. Characteristic of or suitable for a professional person; (now esp. of equipment) of a type used by professionals.
d. That has or displays the skill, knowledge, experience, standards, or expertise of a professional; competent, efficient.
5. That has knowledge of the theoretical or scientific parts of a trade or occupation, as distinct from its practical or mechanical aspects; that raises a trade to a learned profession. Now rare except as merged with senses at A. 4.
6. Physiology. Designating or relating to a cell which is specialized for the ingestion of particles by phagocytosis, such as a macrophage or neutrophil (as distinct from a cell capable of occasional phagocytosis).
III. Senses related to the office of professor.
7. = professorial adj.Now rare.
B. n. 1. a. A person who engages in a specified activity, especially a sport, as a paid occupation. Frequently opposed to amateur.
b. Chiefly colloquial. A prostitute.
2. A person engaged in a profession, esp. one requiring special skill or training; a professional person, or a member of the professional classes.
3. Scottish University slang. Short for ‘professional examination’
4. A person who does something with a high level of competence, commitment, or expertise.
-----
So the use in this case can be construed to be entirely correct, c.f. Sense II §4 and Sense III §2 and §4
I think when you get down to debating definitions you’ve probably lost some of that professionalism.
As a manager I probably would be reprimanding people debating definitions like this. We should be asking: “do we understand each other?”
The point of this entire argument is Stallman isn’t paid, dedicates his life to this work, probably is overworked and runs his org and does so completely openly (ie you’re likely to see lots of good and some bad). He’s not a professional; he’s a passionate, often crazed and zealous leader of an organization with an extreme position (free software being the exception not the rule).
I frankly wouldn’t expect anything from Stallman. Manners, personal relationship, etc.
I posted this to highlight the absurdity of the original posting of another definition. I perhaps could have been more explicit, but I thought that my tongue being in my cheek was established by making the point that the original excerpt was taken from an American-English dictionary. Should've started with "Akshually..."
Yes, perhaps this pattern of behavior is to be expected from someone who's staked out such an uncompromising position and stuck to it for ~30 years.
But it's also really sad that, in acting this way, he undermines his own goals.
Not so. This is partly where the "Cathedral" nomenclature came from.
OED really goes all the way into their words
(though those who already act professionally already knew it ;) while other people will grasp at straws and try to find technicalities to justify their bad attitude )
Just like we expect our neighbors to be respectful to us even when we don’t pay them for the privilege, there’s nothing surprising that users ask a maintainer to be respectful of their time. Yes, the users can go somewhere else, just like how we can move if we have a bad neighbor, but that’s just not a good way of going about things.
No, that's not how it works.
I'm free to publish something and completely ignore bugreports.
There is no such responsibility principle. Some people, out of goodness of their hearths, follow up on things. But they have no obligation to do so.
No we can't agree on that. There is no obligation to be polite.
Of course I wouldn't expect people to love me for that, and it's not how I personally act; but if someone felt like acting in this way, it would be fully within his/her rights to do so.
My point is that the way he chooses to behave is in the long run damaging to the community that he founded and leads.
You are somehow deciding that collaboration is needed and wanted by every maintainer.
That's your (wrong) assumption.
This entitled attitude that maintainers owe their users anything is visibly driving people away from that work.
What people would think of us if we were famous? I try to be very polite and reasonable at work but I know, for a fact, that I'm not always at my best. The alternative is easy: you start to talk like a big corp CEO or a politician. You say nothing or give pleasant lies. Your acts may be later despicable but somehow facts are open to interpretation while your words carry all the weight.
I'd argue that such things tend to happen when a mob tries their best to destroy your reputation by publicly associating you with crimes you haven't committed.
What do you mean?
While I have presented a series of arguments, which in my opinion could not be refuted logically, it was not possible to change RMS's mind about anything, so the discussion has ended with everybody keeping their original opinions, unchanged.
Nevertheless, I am immensely grateful to RMS for his past work. I am a very good programmer and i could have been able to write all the programs that I use daily, including an operating system, device drivers, compilers or a text editor.
Nevertheless that is a huge amount of work, which would have taken many years of my life. Due to the open-source movement, I was able to benefit of the work shared by countless others, thus saving an enormous amount of time.
I usually take advantage of the open-source nature of the programs to make customizations that would have been impossible when using proprietary programs. However, making various modifications to an open-source program is orders of magnitude less work than writing the program from scratch.
While the great quantity of open-source programs existing now is the work of a very large number of developers, RMS has played a critical role in catalyzing this evolution, which must not be forgotten.
I also agree with the author of the article that in general all the targets set by RMS about free software and hardware remain as valuable and important as ever, but the strategy and tactics advocated by him are no longer effective and by now it cannot be expected that he will ever change in the future.
The concept of "linking" in GPL also came from Eben Moglen. The legal theory was fairly simple, ie, would a non-technical judge see a linked program as one large single copyrighted work or two independent separate works (originally in US legal context only)? RMS initially viewed it as two works, but Eben Moglen had a different view about it, which RMS then changed his opinion to.
Using an interactive dynamic language with FFI, I can connect to a shared library at the REPL and interact with its functions, just as if I were calling programs in /usr/bin.
Ash put it well, to describe Stallman as stifling GNU's success. At this point, GitHub, NodeJS, and PyPI have done more for open source software than any GNU axe-grinding. As Clang grows, the FSF and GNU software shrink away. NeoVIM is on Apache. GCC still doesn't have LSP bindings, and it's due at least in part to this petty email exchange in 2015.
And that isn't even getting into these dumpster fires:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619440
- https://www.reddit.com/r/justneckbeardthings/comments/2vkeze... (which he was handing out as late as 2019!)
- https://thenewstack.io/why-almost-everyone-wants-richard-sta...
Except there wouldn't be GitHub and NodeJS and PyPI and certainly no GNU/Linux if not for Stallman starting the whole movement.
Who says that RMS is not telling what the truth is from his perspective?
Alice More: Arrest him!
More: Why, what has he done?
Margaret More: He's bad!
More: There is no law against that.
Will Roper: There is! God's law!
More: Then God can arrest him.
Alice: While you talk, he's gone!
More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man's laws, not God's– and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.
With every passing year, and the way modern web/cloud based SaaS is playing out, RMS seems increasingly prescient. His uncompromising and principled stance on software freedoms is crucial to maintaining the Overton window on the matter, allowing space for others to make compromises and find practical solutions.
And his public behavior has been equally worrisome. According to dozens of witnesses, Stallman actively sexually harassed women students and faculty at MIT, for 30 or more years. To the point that women have passed down RMS-specific avoidance tactics like he hates plants so faculty should fill their offices with them or “If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.”
It had allegedly reached the point that he was asked so many times to stop asking out colleagues and students that he decided to create and hand out a business card to non-verbally harass.
Georgia Lyle, who worked at FSF from 2015 to 2018, wrote a long Twitter thread about the exhaustive — and ultimately moot — efforts she and other FSF staff made trying to change Stallman’s toxic behavior and silence his “racist and sexist ‘hacker humor’.”
I don't think I can improve upon that.
Remember, this was only one year after the movie Revenge of the Nerds was a lasting hit (it spawned one theatrical sequel and two more TV sequels). Viewed with today’s eyes, the movie is unequivocally terrible, with rape perpetrated by the movie’s protagonist being played for laughs, among many other things. But it was not viewed as terrible by audiences at the time. However, the people who liked the movie at the time, and even the people who made the movie at the time have presumably changed in the intervening years, and may not deserve to be judged by something they did forty years ago.
It was not.
> Remember, this was only one year after the movie Revenge of the Nerds was a lasting hit
Holy non-sequitur Batman!
I’ll take your word for it (and I upvoted your other comment which stated this).
> Holy non-sequitur Batman!
It was not a non-sequitur. It was an example meant to conclusively illustrate of how radically morals and attitudes (in the time period in question) differ from the current ones, even though we collectively might feel and remember otherwise.
Stallman said that it was a misunderstanding, that it was never meant as a threat, nor a demand.
Secondly, you are mischaracterizing what he actually wrote¹.
The context, that this was a debate specifically about the age of consent, is relevant. Otherwise you seem to imply that any discussion of the age of consent is reprehensible. The age of consent differs quite a lot over the world, and you could declare every citizen of those countries to be terrible people, which would at least be consistent, or you could concede that there was a debate to be had. You might not agree with what RMS wrote (neither does RMS, now), but would you declare every person in a debate to be a terrible person who does not argue the side of the prevailing one? Even if they have since changed their minds?
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."
There are no links in this original post besides the one to the news article about the Dutch party pushing to lower the age of consent to 12. The page defending Stallman quotes from the news article (omitting the detail about the party's goal to go on to remove the age limit entirely) and then adds this comment:
"When people talk about pedophilia, what usually comes to mind is prepubescent children. Not what Stallman was referring to."
I'd say my previous comment contained an accurate statement of the view Stallman expressed there (and later retracted): that pedophilia is fine, if it's voluntary. Stallman's own later distillation of his prior view in his own words was "I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it."
This page was written in the context of Stallman already having disavowed those earlier posts, but its tack for defending Stallman in relation to this quote is still to essentially say "12? misleading to call that pedophilia." On the one hand, this statement is itself misleading (Stallman offered no lower age limit for his views on voluntariness, in the context of discussing an article that included the idea of completely removing the age of consent, and further, the idea that he didn't really mean pedophilia here rests on the idea that famous language pedant Stallman repeatedly misused the word).
Beyond that though, my point in my previous comment was more that, as an implied statement of the author's idea of what the public generally believes and as a matter of rhetorical tactics for defending Stallman it was... a choice.
Yes, that was what they actually wrote.
> "12? misleading to call that pedophilia."
Mischaracterization of that same sentence.
However, what you are actually criticizing is apparently not actually Stallman, but the defense of Stallman? In that case, perhaps this page does a better job:
https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai...
https://mobile.twitter.com/secparam/status/13742198880893050...
This is the first time I've ever seen that quote. I would note it is evidently anonymous hearsay.
I’m sure RMS could be like that, however having spent some time with him —- I didn’t see anything like that. He was frankly more interested in his laptop and food than people.
* stuff like "knight for hot ladies" is just corny not bad.
* the abort() joke was as follows: "Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function. We would be required to say that this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program." that's not that bad honestly. it's more pro-abortion than anti-abortion so i'm not sure why progressives got mad.
* the "emacs virgin" shit is cringe but not rly sexist? anyway i think he switched it to be either men or women later so it was still cringe but not gendered.
idk if there's other stuff i missed but that covers what your article and the twitter thread you mentioned point out. like, yeah, it's cringe asf. but is it rly "cancellable? nah.
btw i still think his presence in the open source community is a negative in part because of goofy ahh shit like emacs virgins or knight for hot ladies, mostly because the amount of cringe it produces attracts more asocial weirdos like rms and puts normal people off open source stuff. like, i'm a outgoing person and can sit and enjoy a coffee with almost anyone. but i feel like spending 5 minutes face to face with rms would make me lowkey want to unalive. i also really don't like a lot of his politics. so i'm in no way an apologist, just don't think a lot of what you referenced is problematic.
ofc, i think there's enough evidence of creepy behavior, especially now, to kick him out and don't really have a problem with it. just the goofy ahh jokes isn't the right reason to do it.
"Progressive" got mad at him for being pro abortion, because anything goes.
I wrote about it here: https://stallmansupport.org/testimonies-letters-writings-and...
"In fact, Stack Overflow’s 2020 survey found that “developers who are men are more likely to want specific new features, while developers who are women are more likely to want to change norms for communication on our site,” a request that’s frequently paired with the terms “toxic” and “rude.”"
It is difficult for me to seriously treat an article that considers "rude comments" more important issue than "features". What a regular person wants is something that works. Whether it was done in a way that kept Susan happy is tertiary at best.
Is this all that RMS is accused of? If so, I am only glad I am nowhere near that scene.
edit: Come to think of it.. is the reason new software sucks so bad lately ( the focus on stupid stuff )?
> It is difficult for me to seriously treat an article that considers "rude comments" more important issue than "features". What a regular person wants is something that works. Whether it was done in a way that kept Susan happy is tertiary at best.
I think it's worth considering the fact that calling an issue "stupid stuff" and saying a "regular person" wouldn't care about it is essentially a self-reinforcing confirmation bias. Most people won't try to talk to someone about something if they know they're going to get a dismissive response, but that wouldn't stop them from being more vocal about it in an anonymous survey. If your daily experience differs so drastically from the reported survey results, how would you tell if it was the survey's data that was inaccurate or your own anecdata? Alternately, if you think the results are accurate but that the people who responded to it are out of touch, how would you be able to tell if it wasn't them but actually you?
<< If your daily experience differs so drastically from the reported survey results, how would you tell if it was the survey's data that was inaccurate or your own anecdata? Alternately, if you think the results are accurate but that the people who responded to it are out of touch, how would you be able to tell if it wasn't them but actually you?
And here I do not have a good answer that would scale. The dismissive approach works well on an individual level. I think experience ( and knowing that surveys have all sorts of flaws ) helps. Now, anecdata has its own obvious issues, but at certain point anecdata becomes data.
<<I think it's worth considering the fact that calling an issue "stupid stuff" and saying a "regular person" wouldn't care about it is essentially a self-reinforcing confirmation bias.
You might be right on confirmation bias. Still, I challenge you to defend the proposition that focusing on making a given piece of software work or adding features is less important than "toxic" behavior. As a user, do I care that, say, notepad++ was created in an environment that was not "toxic" or that it does what I want it to do and that it does it well? To me, at least, the choice is simple and not controversial at all.
For starters, the survey was given by StackOverflow, so my interpretation is that these responses were given by people about what they would prefer as developers working with other developers. It seemed to me that the idea was that some people did not feel like they were being treated fairly when as members of the tech community, but I guess I could be inferring incorrectly.
As for the actual question, this seems similar to me to the question of whether we have obligations to others in society or if things are "everyone for themselves". This obviously is predicated on the fact that the complaints of the survey responders are valid (which my previous comment is my attempt at explaining my view on), but assuming they are valid complaints, the question is whether I should care about the treatment of people who made a product that I use. There's a spectrum of potential issues that they could have to deal with; I don't pretend that everyone will react the same way to if notepad++ were being developed by workers who were forced without pay to develop 12 hours a day to if they no longer got free coffee in the break room, but there's undoubtedly a line we have to draw somewhere about what we're willing to tolerate and even a spectrum on what "toleration" looks like. Personally, I don't have any issue with the idea that the people who make the software I use would insist on an environment free from harassment, and I wouldn't want new features at the expensive of the treatment of the people who make it. This feels pretty simple and non-controversial to me, but I guess this could be my own confirmation bias that makes it surprising that anyone would feel differently.
"Georgia Lyle", there is no such person, the Georgia you are thinking of wrote ~3 tweets, the FSF staff who were her coworkers did not agree that they were accurate. She rarely interacted with RMS, it was not part of her job, she was spreading rumors she had heard (and posted years after she had left the FSF and had no further involvement with Free Software). It looks like she's deleted them since. I think a lot of RMS misinformation has been an attempt to support feminism at his expense, and because his personality/autism tends to make some people rather unsympathetic to him. Note, the current FSF Executive Director (who's job is to work with the board, thus RMS), is currently a woman who was on FSF staff for years before taking that job.
A normal person probably doesn't see the double-indirection and ambiguity in this. The first indirection lies in using 'I'm a vi user' as a proxy for 'I don't like Emacs'. The second indirection lies in using 'I don't like Emacs' as a proxy for 'I reject you romantically'.
The ambiguity is even less visible. Some women use an indirect 'No' as a shit test. The man is supposed to ask again. This is phenomenon invisible to normal people because it occurs in a social context of body language and flirting. Normal people find this social context conspicuous. Consequently, normal people are oblivious to the phenomenon of men with poor social skills failing to navigate the treacherous waters around the "ask again no" and the very different "don't ask again no". These waters are a normie's paddling pool.
Remind yourself of the big picture here. We have a highly intelligent man with embarrassing blind-spots around certain social skills. We have intelligent women attempting to communicate with him. They choose a code with two properties. First, it aims at a social skills blind-spot; the message is likely to be misunderstood by the target. Second, it is a trivial code that normies will not even notice breaking. They get to have a sneer and a laugh at the expense of the loser who misunderstands the coded message. The joke lies in the weakness of the code. Everybody except the victim gets the message effortlessly.
So long as 'I'm a vi user' is a private joke, its heartless cruelty is mitigated by its pettiness. But RMS is the victim. To tell the tale as a strike against him lacks self-awareness.
This article gives good reasons why modern financial incentives make it increasingly irrelevant if software is copylefted (the Corps interpret copyleft as damage and route around it; the free software community has not demonstrated enough organizational energy or proactive vision to outpace moneyed development with their copyleft solutions). Meanwhile, some of the Fundamental Freedoms are philosophically undercut in the Cloud era; why should you have the right to view the source code or modify what runs on someone else's computer? The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud," which is head-in-sand ignorant of how modern developers value things.
New approaches are needed, and the approach represented by GNU has run its course. The Overton Window moves regardless of RMS's opinion these days
Because the user should have that right regardless of where the program happens to execute.
> The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud,"
Er, no? They wrote the AGPL.
Sorry, that makes no sense. I have no right to the source code of the bank's ATM, and even less right to run any software I choose on that hardware.
Nor is an AWS node.
Free software presupposes free general purpose computers. It assumes we can write software and run it on our devices. What is the point of free software if we can't run it because the corporation that actually owns the keys to the machine won't sign off on it?
Lol wut? I feel like this comment is willfully ignoring hugely popular projects such as Nextcloud! There are lots of GPL web services that are available which provide 'Cloud' functionality without being crazy invasive proprietary data-mining platforms....
It seems to me that these services certainly reflect a good portion of 'GNU Philosophy'...
A lot of people who have 'worked for' him consider him to be a terrible boss. There has been many posts like this over the years, when a true believer figures out the leader is terrible at leading. You could even look at the history of FOSS organizing as setting up alternative organizations where RMS has no pull. Even Debian was about "laws, not men".
I also do not believe Stallman 'got' SaaS or ever even really understood the basic economics of the software industry. Emacs was originally SaaS software if you weren't aware.
There's a solution to that: shove him off somewhere to the side, enshrined as a "spiritual leader" people consult with for nuggets of wisdom, and then 99% of the actual functioning of the organization is done by other people.
They use morality to strike against powerful men and in turn feel a snippet of power themselves.
No need to contribute to free software to the same degree as him to prove him wrong, that's too much trouble. Their contribution shall be retribution. A destructive action, instead of a more commited creative one.
"but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect
like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock
their finest art"- Charles Bukowski
Look at who many people here work for. Look at the power that Big Tech holds. Look at my dead comments and realise that there's a crucial battle boiling beneath the surface, one that they definitely don't want you to know about. The war on general-purpose computing is continuing and they are going after those taking the side of freedom.
Why? Because he does a bad job in his role of movement leader and made himself irrelevant.
He's irrelevant even in niche circles -- how often do places like HN speak of anything related to RMS other than the drama of him being removed and later re-added to the FSF? Compare with the coverage of other prominent figures. For them we typically have regular non-drama news of what they're actually doing. For RMS we mostly have discussions of "is he a dinosaur?" and once in a while, "Stallman was right about something he said 10 years ago".
Why would it bewildering? The guy created a great thing, but is now one of the main impediments in the way of its success. I'd rather have his principles outlive him. His creation is more important than he is.
That being said, I 100% agree with you! I don't care if everyone considered RMS to be a saint. Free software is about freedom and software, not a cult of personality.
He's insisting that technical barriers be erected to protect something, when that is the job of licensing.
We would never take some GPL-ed shared library, say, and cripple the API with inconveniences so that proprietary applications can't take advantage of it. That will cripple the free applications too. Of course you make the API technically excellent and complete, and then protect that with the license; it's a GPL violation to link it and call it from a GPL-incompatibly-licensed program.
Same with GCC: expose the full AST so that people are unblocked in doing whatever analysis they want, and protect that with licensing, if you must.
By favoring technical barriers, Stallman is being exactly like the jealous company that didn't give him the information to fix the printer, without signing an NDA.
"You can view a printed version of a partial AST, in a pitch dark room, using a tiny spotlight, and take only handwritten notes, provided you sign this agreement ..."
Come on ...
They should have moved gcc into being GPL licensed libraries to achieve this.
The underlying problem is this elephant in the room: no matter how you set up the access to the AST, it will be legal for someone to make a GPL-ed utility program which uses that API, and dumps the data to standard output. That utility can then be used in a proprietary development ecosystem, the same way that GNU Bash, Make, CoreUtils, Awk and everything else can be used in a proprietary ecosystem.
The subtext behind RMS's arguments is to make it difficult to write such a utility such that it pieces together the entire AST. That's probably why he was vehement on the techincal solution.
I'm amazed Stallman just doesn't come to the conclusion "so what?" like everyone else.
If someone user finds value in GCC just as a parser, maybe that's better than them not finding any value in it at all.
Say someone uses an IDE, whereby GCC is used to help with completion, refactoring and all that. But the actual product that is built for the target uses some proprietary toolchain (e.g. licensed ARM stuff, run on Windows). The back-end parts of GCC aren't used at all. Well, "so what?"
That's like saying it's a crime someone proprietary app only used malloc and strcmp from glibc, but rolled its own printf.
What if GCC was used to compile the code, but only to obtain diagnostics and maybe run some unit tests? That happens, and I suspect it really bugs Stallman.
Isn't that the point of Free Software?
But the argument that this will make it easier for proprietary software to use GCC to parse code doesn't make any sense.
GCC is almost literally nonexistent as a place for new compiler research in large part thanks to previous stallmanist approaches to managing, this isn't just some cutesy hypothetical about principles and so on.
The above also ignores stallman's manner around people.
I believe that you are referring to the old LLVM modularity? That is old news. GCC is now (reportedly¹) better in C++20 standard compliance, and this will probably not change, since, (reportedly²) both Google and Apple have moved away from LLVM involvement.
When I read papers on new compiler techniques it's never GCC getting the implementation, this saddens me but it's true.
Correction: according to what you've linked, it is not LLVM but clang. This correction would be extremely important for my reply.
I can't see how is that a good news for GCC. This (and other incidents) suggests that both companies have lost interest in investing the future of C++, and they were already building their own languages for a long time. You can argue that they wanted to bend the standard and implementations as they see fit---and it's partly true, otherwise why would you want to join at all---but it's probably more likely that C++ is becoming irrelevant at least in some applications. And if the language is made irrelevant, a better standard compliance means nothing.
LLVM is very much alive at all big tech, to my best knowledge. It's C++ that's dying there (and I say - good riddance).
I think "freedom to manipulate the source code" may not be a popular point, but it seems foundational in that it restricts what the software can otherwise get away with.
e.g. I don't like the idea of buying 'smart' TVs which come bundled with adware.
You're right, the closest we have is ReactOS which doesn't have enough interest (although understandably so).
Oh, it's very, very relevant. For example, I can't think of a person who wouldn't ask a programmer friend, or hire a freelancer, to remove ads from their devices, if they had the option to do so.
People want to control their software, even if they're not programmers, because people like being in control of their lives - it's natural. I don't see how could anyone argue against human desire to control their own machines.
Much like how Linus has a decent say in what happens to Linux.
Why should RMS change how he does something because some big corporation can write a propriety editor, and a proprietary compiler? This is nothing new. There were plenty of proprietary compilers at the time the project started and that was one of the primary reasons to write it.
Instead of bitching about leadership on a free software project and feeling entitled to have it changed to yours and others liking If you feel strongly that Emcas or GCC is heading down the wrong path, you are 100% free to fork it and within the limits of the license write whatever features you want,
Perhaps if it is hugely successful or the features do turn out to be killer additions GNU may decide to add some to Emacs.
In so far as fighting the good fight for Libre software it is the same fight he has fought for decades and the way the world has developed lately I would say most of these predictions have come true.
RMS is extremely smart and extremely dedicated, and he has made a lot of sacrifices due to his principles. Yes, he is stubborn (So is Linus) and eccentric. So what?
How the F can people claim to be fighting for an "inclusive society" if you can't let a guy, be a bit eccentric. If anything, we need more eccentric people in a society that is turning ever more and more homogenic.
And please consider that Linux would not exist today if it was not for the GNU compiler, and a lot of the GNU free tools.
Today they can be replaced but back then it was available for free. Compilers used to cost a lot of money way back when and a lot still do.
Honestly adore this attitude and wish more devs had the self-assuredness to run their projects this way. Assured not only in the their vision but in their ability to have a vision.
When that’s missing it becomes really easy to write software that creates tedium instead of freeing us from it. There’s even a word for when a project’s vision is to avoid vision. The one word in a readme that fills me with more dread than any other — “unopinionated”.
Translation: “Here, you make all the decisions, because the only way I know to avoid having any Wrong Opinions at this scale is to have none”. If the concept of “unopinionated software” had a favorite color it would be “What’s yours?”
The vast majority of open source software is effectively maintained by people who don't give a shit about users/contributors, obviously, as they're unmaintained github projects.
It's fine for the majority of projects because no one uses them. What's weird is that anyone uses emacs when it's led by a fairly incompetent developer and a radically incompetent leader.
It’s visually pleasing to see written out and to scan over, at least in my sans-serif browser font — unopinionated.
- Check our how it has a completely uninterrupted horizontal sight line!
- The unbroken visual falls along the midline for a nice balance between the above and the below. The eye can’t stray into words on adjacent lines like it could if we were focusing along the word’s baseline or at cap height.
- The properties of the leading ‘u’ glyph welcomes the eye to start reading the word left-to-right. The ‘u’ has nothing below baseline or above midline to be a visual obstacle blocking any angle of entry to the word. If our focus enters the ‘u’ anywhere below x-height the first thing we see is its happy smiling bowl with nothing sharp telling us to look away. If our focus enters it at or above x-height, the two sharp stems would look unwelcoming, but the adjacent ‘n’ is ‘u’s perfect opposite and makes that entry angle into something unique, a yin/yang sort of thing, pulling our eye’s motion into at the very least a diagonal. Without the ‘n’ our gaze could enter the word straight down and just sit in the bowl of the ‘u’ instead of continuing to scan right.
- The tittles on the ‘i’s prevent the above-sight-line negative space from overwhelming, breaking it into two wide and one thin segment.
- The ‘n’ shoulder connects the two tittles into something like a paperclip that feels as though it pins our line of sight tightly to the tops of the lowercase glyphs.
- The ‘ini’ group has its own line of vertical symmetry, like a cute li’l’ sans-serif Solomon’s Temple, and the location of that group provides a nice thick natural visual center point in the word as a whole. It sits a little bit left of actual center, but that gets balanced by the two ascenders on the right side.
- The ‘t’ ascender would break our sight line, but its cross-stroke falls right along the line of sight, ensuring it will always be the first part of the ‘t’ we see, so it will never fail to grab and hold our gaze until our focus is safely on the other side having dodged the ascender completely.
- The ‘p’ descender balances the ‘t’ ascender both in horizontal distance from the word’s visual center and with its opposite orientation. Those qualities combine with the ‘n’s shoulder to imply possible rotational motion of the entire word around that origin.
- The ‘d’ ascender would break the sight line of it weren’t the last glyph, but instead it provides a nice satisfying perpendicular terminus, stopping our left-to-right scan at the best possible place where we’ve seen the entire word but get made to linger and take it in for just a moment longer.
Its syllables form a naturally musical staccato rhythm, and the necessary mouth movements feel physically pleasant to say — unopinionated
It’s a perfectly-sized dose: six syllables is long enough to be satisfying, and any longer than a single word would be too much. It’s the same feeling as picking the ideal number of Skittles® in a single handful:
- Three is too few and just feels like the remains of a previous mouthful as soon as you start chewing.
- Four is like the minimum that won’t make you think “I should have taken one more”.
- More than seven and the whole wad turns into a brick around the back of your teeth so you can’t even chew properly to break it down.
- But six? Perfect sweet spot.
The word as a whole has a smooth rising and falling sound when spoken. Say it over and over and you can feel it like a sine wave — unoPINIONatedunoPINIONatedunoPINIONated
Emotionally, saying the word has that ‘90s-cool-guy vibe, like I’m smart enough to be able to care about things if I, like, wanted to, man. Stop, like, harshing my buzz.
This comment is not a joke in any way. I still hate the word’s meaning but admit it has an impressive form :)
Ok, one joke: I just spent like 15 minutes trying to think of things I like about this word because I thought it would be funny to be opinionated about ‘unopinionated’.
Later we argued over whether digital artistic content should be made freely available, and he took the side of unequivocal defense of a user's right to resell, regardless of there being any derivative effort, and with no obligation to compensate the creator. He had no clear concept of how to compensate the original artist aside from an initial work for hire model.
In his desired reality, wealthy persons would provide patronage to artists and artists would have no other source of income, because redistribution would be free. It's positively medieval.
Do you prefer copyright where someone can make one thing in their 20s and live until the end of their lives doing nothing else but reaping the money from what they did once?
Or dead authors still being paid for their creations?
Its positively nonsensical.
RMS simply did not care, explicitly so, about compensating creators and supporting their efforts. Vigorously, clearly, did not care.
Should a house be open to the public after the owner dies? Should it go to some government?
There isn't any sort of consistent logic here. Once you think about assets, companies, multiple people working on something etc, it will never make sense to think someone dying means all their work should be free unless they own it and make it free in their will.
The right to legally enforcable exclusivity in intellectual property regimes like copyright or patents stems from a balancing exercise between incentivising the work being done (i.e. authors writing books, filmmakers producing films, drug companies researching cool life-saving medical innovations etc.) and ensuring that at some point it reaches the public domain (plus a bit of practicality).
Human leisure, desire and opportunity to consume artistic works is a fair of the population size, and is not unlimited.
That's why you don't see a unique and profitable theatre company present on YouTube for every individual of the population.
Also there are already time limits for things to be in the public domain and medicine patents expire and become public domain, so I'm not sure what your point is.
It's no coincidence that the explosion in creative works and professional artists occurred after the advent of copyright.
(If you're looking for a text editor developed under that philosophy, I can recommend Visual Studio Code.)
I see a lot of references to getting with the times and modernity in the complaints against RMS. I don't see much in the way of complaint that GNU is insufficiently free-as-in-freedom, which is the only thing I really want out of GNU.
Not diabetes, not the poor children in Africa, not child slavery in China, not social justice - just software freedom.
If they start caring about other issues unrelated to software freedom, they would have to divert their resources from the issues of software freedom to something else. Demanding they care about other issues is demanding they care less about software freedom, as their resources are limited, naturally.
It's the difference between "we're not actively campaigning for improvements around climate change because that's not our thing" (morally neutral, probably) and "unlimited free intercontinental supersonic jet flights around the world for people who license their work under the GPL" (may encourage GPL usage but at a high cost in pollution).
(Controversial thread disclaimer: this is a counterargument solely to your comment, and not an expression of any particular opinion outside of what I explicitly wrote here.)
To make such an argument, you first have to demonstrate how exactly is FSF making other things worse.
Of course, "not doing anything to help X" is not the same as "actively making X worse".
For example, having a spokesperson who some people actually listen to publicly question whether a very young woman coerced by Jeffrey Epstein into having sex with his friend can justifiably say she was "assaulted." If he actually cared as much about his social impact as his friend's justifiably ruined reputation, he'd have just shut his mouth at the very least. If you think that's an unreasonable expectation then that's just sad.
You mention the phrase "stepping on people". What exactly do you mean by that - both in general, and in the specific case you've mentioned?
Do you mean that people don't like his words, and he's figuratively "stepping on them" by expressing his thoughts? Because it seems to me that the only argument against him is that "some people don't like his words". If there is anything more to it, I'd really like to know.
No. The purpose of FSF is not to be demagogues and bend at every whim of the mob. Public opinion is driven by gossip and yellow press, not by facts and original sources - which was clearly demonstrated when the yellow press accused RMS of saying the girl who approached Minsky was "entirely willing", when all he said is that many scenarios are possible, but he believed that it was plausible that she was directed by Epstein to "present herself as entirely willing" - which was not nearly the same, but was taken out of context by the yellow press in order to destroy his reputation.
Now please apply the same principle to yourself and stop avoiding the questions that I have asked:
> How exactly does RMS voicing his thoughts and opinions make anything worse?
> You mention the phrase "stepping on people". What exactly do you mean by that - both in general, and in the specific case you've mentioned? Do you mean that people don't like his words, and he's figuratively "stepping on them" by expressing his thoughts?
By him discussing it publicly he did exactly that. Everybody likes to think their opinion stems from pure reason and logic while everybody else is just an angry mob driven by pure hysteria, but he was just as full of shit as any other random person talking about it. However, he was a public figure speaking about it publicly. If he had just shut his mouth, he would have been doing what you insisted he actually did. Giving a shit doesn't mean you have to be an activist. Sometimes you just need to recognize that you don't know any better than anyone else, and especially if you're a public figure, keep your mouth shut.
> Public opinion is driven by gossip and yellow press
Public opinion being based on yellow journalism and gossip means it's bullshit, but it absolutely doesn't mean it's inconsequential.
> How exactly does RMS voicing his thoughts and opinions make anything worse?
> You mention the phrase "stepping on people". What exactly do you mean by that - both in general, and in the specific case you've mentioned? Do you mean that people don't like his words, and he's figuratively "stepping on them" by expressing his thoughts?
I explicitly answered these questions. As a public figure-- someone whose words are read and commented on by many people-- I think it's pretty obvious that his public statements affect public opinion. You still didn't provide any real answer to whether you think that a) public opinion isn't consequential (as opposed to truthful or trustworthy,) or b) whether public figures don't influence public opinion with public statements. So? If you do think public opinion is consequential but don't understand how a public figure publicly questioning the account of an alleged a rape victim constitutes stepping on someone, I'm not sure what to say.
I don't - I thought I made myself clear. The "public" is not a hivemind - what you're talking about is the mob of cancel culture that wants to remove everything they deem to be thoughtcrime from the face of the earth. The mob doesn't donate to FSF. I don't give a shit about the mob, RMS doesn't give a shit about the mob, and neither should you.
> public figure publicly questioning the account of an alleged a rape victim constitutes stepping on someone
People, whether public figures or not, should have the right to discuss any topics as long as they do it in a rational and civilized manner. The fact that you don't like the topic does not give you the right to silence others. Hiding behind the "public opinion" is just an attempt to project your own values onto that intangible boogeyman who you deem, for some reason, an authority.
Why would Peyton Manning implement a broad sweeping smear campaign against a faculty member that (not publicly) accused him of sexual assault? Why would that be a problem for the victim? Just personal preference, right? Delicate sensibility? Why would other victims ask to be shielded by anonymity in public disclosure?
Why do people make statements that convey anything besides entertainment or data? Why do companies pay influential people millions upon millions to deliver those messages? Why does Stallman advocate instead of just writing software?
Federal Rule 412 says that a sexual assault victim's reputation can sometimes be used as evidence in civil cases. Could questioning statements influence people's opinions on someone's trustworthiness, even subconsciously?
Recruiters almost always search for someone's online presence, and many are eager to avoid potential controversy, especially in higher-level jobs.
Public opinion destroyed Monica Lewinsky's life. Or maybe she merely disliked the public flaying of her credibility from a million different angles?
A Ukrainian truck driver in New England was quietly acquitted of DUI after a head-on collision killed seven motorcyclists from a local USMC motorcycle club. It turns out his drug use was 10 hours earlier, and the motorcyclists were all shitfaced, but public discourse on the matter shows he was convicted on the first day. The little commentary on the acquittal indicates most people haven't changed their opinions.
What are the chances of one of these people's potential future boss having such an opinion? What's the likelihood of that affecting a hiring manager's opinion, even subconsciously?
--
I initially posited that people in positions of influence shouldn't value their desire to publicly voice their opinions over the consideration of the adverse effects on others, especially those with vastly less influence who couldn't hope to defend themselves.
We've arrived at a point where you say he shouldn't care if his words affected public opinion and, consequentially, negatively affected someone with vastly less influence. You justify this and nibble at the general premise by saying nobody should care about public opinion and that people who influence it shouldn't consider the consequences of their speech (unless... giving them money) because it shouldn't matter.
In summary, you have a different ethical take on it and, despite lots of typing, haven't countered any of my assertions except that he should give a shit. Your opinion is not uncommon. Many argue that freedom of speech essentially means speech occurs in a vacuum, so we can all ignore the consequences of that speech, and anyone who disagrees is thin-skinned. And the funny thing about mob members is that they all like to think they're individual thinkers whose values are derived from pure reason, logic, and proven philosophical constructs, while those that disagree are irrational maniacs controlled by groupthink.
Anyway, you'll keep responding by restating the same subjective values you started with couched in arguments that nibble at the general premise instead of addressing my actual statements, so I'm done engaging with you on this.
I think he made the wrong call and should have opened it up and gone for a re-licensed GCC under the AGPL or something similar if crippling proprietary software was so important.
I think we know why. The point is to cancel Stallman and thus his ideas and free software. People that actually care about the issues aren't wasting their time prioritizing this. People who want freedom dead so that they can profit are though.
- (Especially FSF) A political organization to advance the ideals of free software, or more generally present a more equitable vision of how software can fit into society. Here RMS is effective, but for years now as a writer and thinker and not as an organizer or administrator. Here lots of others are qualified for those roles, but RMS has spent decades driving many of them off.
- (Especially GNU) A particular technical vision - probably best summarized as "a free user-programmable Unix". Here, RMS is fairly effective, but it's not clear this technical vision is good anymore. Qualitative advancement often happened via long-term, sometimes acrimonious forks (GCC, Emacs) or in parallel (Linux). A small steering committee would likely be a better approach to avoid RMS's personal technical biases and blindspots. And here again, RMS's approach has made a lot of people who could significantly contribute here uninterested in returning to try to fix this.
- A particular style of project/team management. This should have been dead, or at least not so dominant, as soon as Linux took off. But RMS has a style of working which is wildly out of sync with even his own contemporaries, let alone the current generation of programmers. And the development and administration end up bound to that, discouraging and occasionally completely forbidding anyone else.
- RMS's attempt to rebuild a social environment he had and lost at MIT. Especially for "core projects" - Emacs, GCC, Hurd - you had to be RMS's friend, or at least RMS would come to think you were his friend. This means technical disagreements would tend to get interpreted as personal betrayals, which is unproductive at best.
As long as RMS demands the organizations fulfill all of these (and especially the last) role, the good parts will never succeed dragging the bad parts along.
Autocomplete isn't really helped by the AST. Here instead is how it works:
(1) Query the backend "at the specified line+col in the file, what context are we in?"
(2) The context might be a qualified identifier, e.g. "foo.|" or "foo.ba|" or "MyFoo::|", in which case the context will have to tell you the type of the thing to the left of the qualifier. You then make a second request to the backend to ask for a list of members of that type. (This requires you have some common language with the backend for referring to types).
(3) Or, the context might be an unqualified identifier, e.g. "|" or "fo|". In this case you have to assemble a list of all possible identifiers in this position. (You might also want to assemble keywords here, but it's hardly necessary). This list will include all local variables; for this, you can use the AST so long as the semantics of your language aren't too tricky about what variables are in scope, or you might query the backend for them. The list will also include every single top-level symbol in your entire project. (Even in languages which require import or #include statements, you still want to list top-level identifiers that haven't yet been imported, because that's what a nice IDE experience is -- you help the user type this and then help them auto-insert the import).
This fact means that autocomplete has to be powered by the build system, has to know about all files in the project. Also, for large projects, there might be countless top-level identifiers across the project, maybe in the tens of thousands, so autocomplete needs some serious pre-compute assistance.
So how would one achieve any part of the above with an AST? The AST solely helps with part of the first step, allowing you to identify which AST node you're in. Then you still have to query the backend using the exact same API as above to learn the type of the qualifier to the left of the current AST node. Then you still have to query the backend to find all members of that type. And you still have to query the backend for its build-system knowledge of every type in the file.
In other words, the AST has barely helped you at all in your quest to implement autocomplete.
The thing is, RMS is also a free software extremist in ways. He uses free software exclusively. Hard to imagine living that way. At some point you will have to interact with Windows in our modern world, or interact with other proprietary software.
That said, I use Trisquel[0] as my daily driver and have no issues, but I also own a workstation with Windows 11 installed for programming and general computing. The software available for Windows is fantastic and many vendors target Windows and treat Linux as a second class citizen, so I'm forced to use Windows just to interact with our modern world.
So in a sense I'm enjoying the best of both worlds and not letting the free software ideology rule me.
A long long time ago I was a moderator at a (mostly) teenagers' forum. And back then my personality morphed into a state that may talk like that. I'm not proud of it. It lasted for a half a year or so, before I recognized that I became a jerk. I still feel the shame. I hope though that it was a good for me to see how power corrupts. I hope I'm immune to it now. But it is sad to see it in RMS.
But corporations would never ever fund the FSF.
Google is rewriting a whole OS to avoid having to give device drivers for android.
Companies prefer to spend millions of $ to avoid the GPL. They only like MIT-like licensed open source. They hate anything that can be used to give freedom to users.
Google has forbidden the use of AGPL software completely.
This means that having support from companies is incompatible with making libre software.
https://www.blender.org/about/license/
The Software
Blender is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL, or “free software”).
This license grants people a number of freedoms:
You are free to use Blender, for any purpose
You are free to distribute Blender
You can study how Blender works and change it
You can distribute changed versions of Blender
The GPL strictly aims at protecting these freedoms, requiring everyone to share their modifications when they also share the software in public. That aspect is commonly referred to as Copyleft.
The Blender Foundation and its projects on blender.org are committed to preserving Blender as free software.
Unity. AWS. Meta. nVidia. Decentraland. NetEase Games. Epic. egirl. Intel. AMD. Blender Kit. Ubisoft. Blender Market. Phala Network. Adobe. Microsoft. Google. Steam Workshop. Reallusion. Activision. Op Games. CoreWeave. CGCookie. Q Orihect Studio. Wube Studio. Oracle. Kista. Looking Glass Factory. WebsiteSetup. Numfum. StringKing. Cube. CGSLab. BlenderMagic. PolygonIQ. [...]
>This means that having support from companies is incompatible with making libre software.
Bullshit. Cygnus Support's motto was "We Make Free Software Affordable". Big companies support free software, and free software supports big companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions
https://web.archive.org/web/20220228142052/http://www.toad.c...
>Marketing Cygnus Support -- Free Software history [...]
>We had the grandiose idea that major computer companies like Sun, SGI, and DEC would fire their compiler departments and use our free compilers and debuggers instead, paying us a million dollars a year for support and development. That wasn't quite right, but before we starved, we stumbled into the embedded systems market, doing jobs for Intel (the i960, a now-forgotten RISC chip), AMD (their now-forgotten but nice 29000 RISC), and various companies like 3Com and Adobe who had to port major pieces of code to these chips. In that market, once we fixed the tools to support cross-compiling, we had major advantages over the existing competitors, and we swarmed right through the market for 32-bit embedded system programming tools. And ultimately, we did get million-dollar contracts, such as one from Sony for building Playstation compilers and emulators. This allowed game developers to start working a year before the Playstation hardware was available. This enabled the Playstation to come to market sooner, with more and better games. [...]
>Later, after hiring more experienced executives, we discovered that our pricing was "leaving money on the table". We still needed to estimate our own costs and overheads and profits -- but we also needed to estimate how much money our work would SAVE our customer, or MAKE FOR our customer. When there was a big discrepancy in those two numbers, we could raise our price significantly, and the customer would still be happy. For example, the Sony PlayStation contract enabled Sony to ship the PlayStation months earlier (with working third party game software). Even a single month earlier of shipments would result in hundreds of millions of dollars of income for Sony. Similarly, big networking vendors like Cisco had tens or hundreds of millions of dollars riding on the introduction dates of their new products. We were selling them "insurance": if any big problems came up in the development software as they worked on the product, we'd fix them rapidly so their engineers would be able to deliver the product on time. Chip vendors, for whom we built many compilers, were betting big money on getting at least one large customer for their latest chip. Early availability of our tools allowed their customers to reliably prototype large, complex products with the chip. Our pricing gradually grew to include a percentage of the value that our work was creating out in the world, for our customers. [...]
Gumby, one of the founders of Cygnus, was just discussing gdb development on Hacker News a couple days ago:
I’m just observing that the FSF needs the magic torch to be passed on to the next generation and doesn’t believe in organic leadership changes at least at the top level.
I think we should look at the statements like that through the prism of skepticism. Whenever something like that gets said about a person alive. In the same manner, people talked about Hitler, Putin and Trump.
No living person is irreplaceable in the context of societal progress. Sometimes, after they die, we may acknowledge their role, their remarkable achievements, and their legacy.
Can we please stop idolizing RMS? I think, doing that today brings nothing but harm to the people who promote ideas of free software, Emacs aficionados, et al. I'm not claiming your statement is wrong, you may be 100% right, and who knows, long after he leaves us, we may come to believe that he was indeed worthy of adulation. But while he's still alive, let's not make it weirder than it already is. I don't want to be called a cultist because I use Emacs.
I have no complaints about how it has developed
I was particularly surprised when it complains about the GC discussion without noting the words of wisdom RMS was offering: Put the maximum effort into user visible changes.
It was not that he (RMS) wanted a word processor and GC was not getting there. It was because GC improvements do not improve (in this case) user experience. It (ash) seems to think this is a sign of malevolent, not benevolent, dictatorship.
I guess that's the thing with humans, we like to go along with everything.
I wonder what would happen if all the engineers were cats.
Do you think they aren’t? You’ve clearly never managed engineers ;)
That seems entirely reasonable to me.
The motivation for neovim being forked was a frustration with having a vim PR rejected over fear that something would break. The last few years neovim and vim have competed.
'BDFL' I'd most associate with Python, where Guido van Rossum recently stepped down from the role IIRC.
Of course sometimes that governance comes in the form of a benevolent dictator workaholic running the whole show. Nothing wrong with that as long as it works.
E.g. Linus Torvalds might not be the nicest person to deal with, but he sure gets a lot of people to contribute very meaningful changes to Linux continuously. I'd say he's an extremely effective manager of what is arguably one of the fastest evolving bits of software on this planet with a sustained modification rate of many tens of thousands of lines of code every month for decades. So, I would call that good governance.
Other projects do less well because of governance issues and inter personal issues. Not going to name names here; we all know examples of such projects.
My observation is that ideology, dogmatism can get in the way of good governance. There's a lot of OSS software that gets written and sponsored by corporations. You tend to see a lot more pragmatic attitude in projects like that. People working on those projects are getting paid to do so and are expected to do so competently, solve technical problems, and generally do things that have business value. Conflicts can happen in any project but when the conflicts are of an ideological nature, there isn't a pragmatic way of resolving those issues. Pragmatism and ideology simply don't mix. At best you can agree to disagree, which is the pragmatic thing to do.
Secondly, it seems Vim was forked for less disagreeableness from Bram than what RMS has displayed. Is there a popular fork of GNU Emacs?
More people channeling their unhappiness with RMS into something constructive by exercising the freedoms FOSS gives them and less time spent demanding the organization RMS founded become more like the OSI, EFF, GNOME Foundation, or Linux Foundation seems like it would be more productive.
I think that is impossible.
constexpr is to a first approximation a C++ equivalent to rust's macros. Being C++ it is exciting, and basically requires a correct C++ compiler to include a correct C++ interpreter.
So what's your solution that would prevent commercial interests screwing it over?
I don't hope to see this comment beyond down vote oblivion. the author dances around a fire I want to throw myself into though. for the uninitiated, RMS as a potential sexist, and his unorthodox commentary on the age of consent in particular made him an unwanted figure. never meet your heroes, or so they say I suppose...
my burning question is what is RMS now? repentant? reflective? changed? alloyed or convicted beyond his gnu?
He did some very important work at launching the idea of free software and starting important projects/groups. That’s very commendable.
What has he done in the last 20 years to seriously benefit things? He had refused to budge on software being free, and that’s laudable. But what has he done tangibly? Because all I ever see reported is software-wise is him standing in the way of things or rejecting the idea of improvements. What has he done to improve things?
I’m not aware of anything even semi-recent.
The man is 70 years old. Decent odds they'll be doing without him sooner than later.
Hopefully after he’s gone SPI, SFC, et al. can fill the (already present but not worth fighting with) development management void.
Whatever happens, we’ll learn for sure just how important he is now as opposed to important what he had previously done was.
say what you will about RMS but this is pure unadulterated gigachad.jpg
10 years may not be an old-timer in Emacs terms, but it's well past the clueless newbie phase.
We kind of already have that in “open source”. What Stallman was advocating for was the far-left pulling everyone further with him.
That said, I think what actually failed him was his poor management and discipline. He couldn’t build an organization. He could inspire and advocate.
What’s troubling to me, is that no other organization or project really pushed free software in the same way. Out of the tens of thousands of people working in tech. How many were principled enough to do what Stallman advocates. Very very few, if any. And none are as effective.