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Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

Yet another reason why I'm not a fan of Richard Stallman.

Most of the decisions he made over the past 25 years have been self-defeating and led directly to the decline of the influence of his own movement. It's not that "the GCC project" avoided that for ideological reason, Stallman was personally a veto on that issue for years, and his personal objection led to several people quitting the project for LLVM, with a couple saying as much directly to him.

https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...

(both threads are interesting reading in their entirety, not just those specific emails)

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I think that's an unreasonable lens for viewing his work. Of course he values purity over practicality. That's his entire platform. His decision making process always prioritizes supporting Free Software over proprietary efforts, pragmatism be damned.

Expecting Stallman to make life easier for commercial vendors is like expecting PETA to recommend a good foie gras farm. That's not what they do.

>Expecting Stallman to make life easier for commercial vendors is like expecting PETA to recommend a good foie gras farm. That's not what they do.

He threw open-source developers under the bus in the process. As a result approximately nobody writes GCC plugins, open source or otherwise.

Alternatively, if you join a Stallman-led Free Software project and hope he'll accept your ideas for making life easier for proprietary vendors, you're gonna have a bad time. I mean, the GNU Emacs FAQ for MS Windows (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/efaq-w32...) says:

> It is not our goal to “help Windows users” by making text editing on Windows more convenient. We aim to replace proprietary software, not to enhance it. So why support GNU Emacs on Windows?

> We hope that the experience of using GNU Emacs on Windows will give programmers a taste of freedom, and that this will later inspire them to move to a free operating system such as GNU/Linux. That is the main valid reason to support free applications on nonfree operating systems.

RMS has been exceedingly clear about his views for decades. At this point it's hard to be surprised that he’ll make a pro-Free Software decision every time, without fail. That doesn't mean you have to agree with his decisions, of course! But to be shocked or disappointed by them is a sign of not understanding his platform.

But the person you're responding to never said he was shocked or disappointed by the views; he just said the views are bad/counterproductive.

But they're only bad/counterproductive when assessed against their own goals. They're a lot more reasonable if you assess them against Stallman's, where you could say "yeah, these actions kept GCC from becoming a handy tool for proprietary interests who don't want to share their work back with us".

I found out the older I get the more sense rms makes.

On the subject of software freedom, I hate how accurately prophetic he is.

RMS: Here’s how they'll get ya!

Me: Nice, but that'd never happen.

Vendor: Here’s how we got ya!

Me: Dammit.

Seriously, he must have a working crystal ball.

Now, my agreement with him starts and ends on that subject. He says plenty of other things I wholly disagree with. But his warnings about proprietary software lock-in? Every. Single. Time.

for the record, I meant software freedoms and sometimes technical stuff only!

I mean, I think he is right. If everyone stopped supporting Windows, it would have long died out in favor of easy-to-install Linux distributions... probably.

In reality though Microsoft just added a WSL; not bad: Linux code can run on Windows now.

Also, if you want Windows to die you need to work with OEMs: I assume that most users simply use whatever OS is pre-installed.

I agree.

As gray dog around the prairie, had Microsoft actually been serious with POSIX subsystem on Windows NT/2000, instead of some marketing material and low level effort, GNU/Linux adoption would never taken off, at least not at a level that would have mattered.

With OS X on one side, and POSIX subsystem on Windows NT/2000 side, everyone would be doing their UNIX like workflows without thinking once to try out GNU/Linux.

At my university we only cared about Linux on its early days, Slackware 2.0 days, because naturally we couldn't have DG/UX at home, and that POSIX support was really unusable beyond toy examples.

> His decision making process always prioritizes supporting Free Software over proprietary efforts, pragmatism be damned.

No, this is giving him too much credit. His stance on gcc wasn't just purity over pragmatism, it was antithetical to Free Software. The entire point of Free Software is to let users modify the software to make it more useful to them, there is no point to Free Software if that freedom doesn't exist - I might as well use proprietary software then, it makes no difference.

Stallman fought tooth and nail to make gcc harder for the end user to modify, he directly opposed letting users make their tools better for them. He claims it was for the greater good, but in practice he was undermining the whole reason for free software to exit. And for what? It was all for nothing anyway, proprietary software hasn't relied on the compiler as the lynchpin of its strategy for decades.

Don't forget that the LLVM folks actually went to GNU and offered it to them, and they failed to pay attention and respond. (It's not even that they responded negatively; they just dropped it on the floor completely.) There's an alternate history where LLVM was a GNU project.

With the benefit of hindsight, I'm glad that that didn't happen, even though I have mixed feelings about LLVM being permissively licensed.

Gcc is the flagship of the GNU Project - allowing an endrun of the the spirit of the GPL in gcc was never going to happen. The project paid more attention than you give them credit for because allowing closed source plugins and improvements that use gcc as a frontend is anathema to Free software.

There's an impedance mismatch between people who think gcc should have maximized user utility vs. the actual GNU philosophy. The actions of the gcc project make a lot of sense if you consider the FSF/GNU are monomaniacal about maximizing users freedoms, and not popularity, momentum or other ego-stroking metric.

Whether you care about number of users or not, there's value in considering whether what you're doing is actually advancing the cause of Free Software or not.

GCC today has a very interesting license term, the GCC Runtime Library Exception, that makes the use of runtime libraries like libgcc free if-and-only-if you use an entirely Free Software toolchain to compile your code with; otherwise, you're subject to the terms of the GPL on libgcc and similar. That is a sensible pragmatic term, and if they'd come up with that term many years ago, they could have shipped libgccjit and other ways to plug into GCC years ago, and the programming language renaissance that arose due to LLVM might have been built atop GCC instead.

That would have been a net win for user freedoms. Instead, because they were so afraid of someone using an intermediate representation to work around GCC's license, and didn't do anything to solve that problem, LLVM is now the primary infrastructure people build new languages around, and GCC lost a huge amount of its relevance, and people now have less software freedom as a result.

> allowing an endrun of the the spirit of the GPL in gcc was never going to happen.

You're right:

https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html

> If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these details.

Also note that GCC adoption only took off when Sun introduced the concept of UNIX developer SDK, where developer tooling was an additional license.

Without GNU, GPL and Richard Stallman, FOSS would not exist in the first place. The GPL forced companies to make FOSS a thing, whether they liked it or not.

And then the world started moving on, with other licenses that gave even more freedom and flexibility.

It was a great start, but you need to adapt or you perish.

When VSCode et all beging shipping DRM and who knows what in their extensions, then we'll se what with happens with these half-shareware semilibre projects.

Specially when propietary dependencies kill thousands of projects at once.

Well, you are already unable to get most of the functionality out of vscode without Microsoft's extension store.

I, for one, am happy that there are still a couple of people here and there that you can really trust on this stuff.

> other licenses that gave even more freedom and flexibility

That gave vendors more freedom and flexibility (to lock their software away from their customers.)

As usual, customers got less freedom and flexibility.

I disagree. They got software that’s open under a different license that otherwise would have just been purely proprietary, or not created at all (due to the compounding effects of open source)

We are currently talking about GCC, where they would have gotten the source prior to LLVM.

> They got software that’s open under a different license that otherwise would have just been purely proprietary

This is not a given, even outside of compilers. It's a heck of a cope there.

> Without GNU, GPL and Richard Stallman, FOSS would not exist in the first place. The GPL forced companies to make FOSS a thing, whether they liked it or not.

I was responding to this, which is more widespread than GCC (although it was one of the first wins of the GNU).

There were various companies who wanted to add on backends and other bits to GCC, but wouldn’t due to the license. That’s one of the reasons LLVM is so popular.

As with any other achievement of civilization, younger generations will at some point find why previous ones fought for something and how it sucks to loose it.

But when this realization comes, it will be too late.

Bsd was long a thing proving you wrong. Yes gpl got more press but the other options existed for long.

Yes, and UNIX vendors and MS were happilly taking pieces of it without upstreaming.

I think without GNU/Linux, most likely all UNIX vendors would have a better market share today.

I doubt that. People often say "without <person that started thing> we wouldn't have <thing>!" but it's nonsense. Someone else would have done it just slightly later.

The question is if that person would have dedicated their life in the same way.

Kind like how GPL 3 makes it infeasible for most companies to use/support free software. At least Stallman gets to feel morally superior though

And Free Software does not benefit from a morass of mutually-incompatible copyleft licenses that may as well have been proprietary since you can't use them together.

None of the permissive licenses have this problem.

Which open-source licenses can't be used together?

GPLv2 and GPLv3, for one example... It's sad when two licenses from the same organization are incompatible.

GPLv2 and Apache.

The number of significant software projects which are licensed as GPLv2-only, and which are therefore incompatible with GPLv3, can probably be counted on one hand. Normal GPLv2 projects are licensed – as instructed by the text in the license itself – as “GPLv2 or later”. Which means that any normal GPLv2-licensed software can be relicensed to GPLv3, and can therefore be combined with any other GPLv3-licensed program without any issue whatsoever.

For GPL v2 only, let's start the list with Linux and Git...

The "or later" has been used in creative ways, like relicencing all the Wikipedia content, or the Affero to AGPL transition. Nothing shady, but unexpected.

Do you trust RMS to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence? I do, but he is not longer in the FSF.

Do you trust the current members of the FSF to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence? I don't know them.

Do you trust the future members of the FSF to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence???

>Do you trust RMS to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence? I do, but he is not longer in the FSF.

Yes he is: https://www.fsf.org/about/staff-and-board

Section 14 of the GPL says "The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns." Given that the preamble to the GPL explicitly says "the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users", I don't think that a judge would find that a hypothetical GPLv4 that was basically MIT or something is "similar in spirit" to the present version.

If you're worried about the other direction (i.e. a hypothetical GPLv4 that had some bizarre restriction like "all users must donate to the FSF"), the "or any later version" means that as long as you don't decide to update the license you use yourself, people can continue to use it under the GPLv2 or v3 indefinitely.

Honestly at least Linus has his head in the right place

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