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Comment by kinleyd | Hacker News Reader

For all the good work that rms has done for the FSF movement, and for all his brilliance compared to the rest of us average Joes, he stands out as an example of what happens when you have a binary, black and white view of the world. It's no compromises, at any cost. What a pity.

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Not compromising doesn't mean "black and white". rms asserts that proprietary knowledge/software is bad for society, and he (naturally) gets a lot of resistance from people who have strong ethical convictions in general, but also skin in the game profiting from the way it is: i.e. us founders and developers and consultants. It's easy for us to see that the legal system is fucked up, but hard to be honest about our own field when our interests start conflicting. We talk ad nauseam about patents and engineering techniques, but have comparatively little discussion about the ethics of proprietary software. It's easy to just kinda take it for granted. And when rms does come up, these ad hominems are usually about as far as it goes. There's a line from Mad Men, "nobody knows what's wrong with themselves, and everyone else can see it right away."

rms isn't a businessman or a politician, he's a "prophet". However secular his beliefs, he sacrifices for his convictions (not that he has a "side", this isn't a sport!). He's in the tradition of Jesus, Luther, Copernicus. Their ideas threatened the orthodoxies of their time; what kept the money-changers in the temple, the Church profiting from indulgences and remaining the scientific authority. It wasn't a pity that Jesus waged peace on war, that Luther called bullshit on indulgences, or that Copernicus proved Earth went around Sun. If they'd've chosen otherwise, in retrospect, what good would it have done?

If Jesus led a rebellion against Rome, or Copernicus didn't publish, or, I don't know, Luther embraced the printing press + surplus cloth to trail-blaze the romance novel...

Their common enemy was ignorance, and history's been shaped by those who didn't compromise on what they knew mattered. That doesn't mean we all have to! I'm no prophet. I write proprietary software. But when I run across one of these articles, I remember that most software works best as a public good, that I should release more code on GitHub, that I should keep moving on my back-burner OSS projects, etc. His views aren't convenient to many hackers, but I find his determination admirable.

"no compromises, at any cost" is black and white. The operative part is "at any cost". rms has been brilliant at what he has achieved, with the problem being that he believes he's right and brilliant at anything he does. That's a huge leap in logic right there - you just have to visit his blog to see what I mean.

While there is wisdom in advising one to be single minded in one's pursuits, there is also wisdom in being open to the possibility of being wrong in that single mindedness. I believe rms is right to pursue the principles behind the FSF - it has brought much good. However, I think he is wrong to believe that FSF applies to everything.

I'm glad that Richard Stallman and his uncompromising position exist.

I'm also glad that his is not the only voice in the open source/free software community.

The real tragedy is that few people understand the value of an ideologue.

Not quite true, LGPL was a big compromise.

He has also supported a BSD license for Ogg Vorbis: https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3

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