That Moment When RMS Walks Into Your Hackathon
brooklynhacker.com
brooklynhacker.com
But then, my current non-work hacking is mostly building against APIs that are open in the sense of being peer-driven community projects that produce open data and are hosted on open source software (OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia etc.). It's often more work, but you are playing in a free ecosystem rather than a vendor-controlled walled garden. If open data services go away, you buy some hosting and load up the last data dump...
Of course, if there are multiple implementation of the same API, or architecture to swap API's, this would be different. Exception cases exist, but in the general case, one should be careful to lock the programs fate together with the API.
Has he hurt anyone? killed? imprisoned? injured? threatened? Stalked? preyed upon? or been in general mean to someone?
If being of a different opinion and expressing it is enough to be labeled despicable human being, I don't know if I would call that fair.
For me, that's like calling Linus an despicable human being for criticizing Gnome 3. It's a really strange use of the word despicable.
Not everyone is going to go along with Stallman's free software puritanism. But a lot of those people produce free and open source software, or would be willing to help.
I personally read it as a socially awkward gray beard wandering through, imparting wisdom that will inevitably fall on deaf ears - they're going to have to learn it the hard way.
In this context, the comments serve as a contrast against his wisdom. Despite his disheveled appearance, RMS happened to be the smartest person in the room at that particular moment.
But many people seem to be reading it in a context of "weird old guy walks in and says something silly", which could fit the text too.
Personally I think RMS is so right about this issue that I didn't even consider it the other way at first.
What's the difference between a web API that provides data and one that's an interface to remote software? Seems like a blurry line.
If so, the company hosting it is providing a convenience. You can fork it, modify it, extend it as you like.
If not, the company can dictate how and when the service is used.
If they were writing against APIs provided by an open source library built on Overtone + Clojure (in some JVM-less form), I would hazard a guess that RMS would not have disapproved.
This may be sarcastic, it may not portray RMS in a good light (I disagree: I think everyone knows RMS is principled to the point of pig-headed; it doesn't change my opinion of RMS at all, just simply confirms what I already know). But it isn't an ad hominem.
People claim things are ad hominem falsely so often that some people have even started referring to it as The 'Ad Hominem Fallacy' Fallacy. http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html ;-)
I'm not sure if that is the case with this article, but it does put a lot of text into describing his appearance rather than discussing what the implications might have been if the hackday had been focused around free software music projects (stuff like LMMS , ardour etc).
Instead of doing all that free work, perhaps they should be building something they can own?
The world needs more RMS'es.
"Beard matted into a bizarre pizza crust flapping off the end of his chin... He waddled... RMS intoned gravely... he turned about on a heel and marched out... with a grad student in tow."
If that's not ad hominem, I'm not sure what is, you scruffy-looking nerf herder. But um, what's even more bizarre is that you're saying it's not ad hominem and then you're taking RMS' side.
P.S. The AGPLv3 is kind of nice; it's the GPLv3 extended to cover web app usage. I asked the FSF about a Lesser AGPLv3 but they said they needed lawyers a.k.a. money.
Of course, the implication isn't stated explicitly. Say what you will about that.
Neither RobSpectre or the Brooklyn Hacker were there, and this post is mainly just a one-sided attack on RMS by someone who ... wasn't there.
I expect this crap from Reddit, not from Hacker News.
I read it more as a humorous anecdote about our favourite old-school hacker and free software ideologist.
Beard matted into a bizarre pizza crust flapping off the end of his chin,
Followed up by
He waddled
Maybe I am being overly sensitive, but this is not how complimentary or affectionate descriptions often work in my world.
Beard matted into a bizarre pizza crust flapping off the end of his chin,
Followed up by
He waddled
Maybe I am being overly sensitive...?
It's a tongue in cheek description of our favourite open source advocate.
Personally, I find cartoonification (waddling) as a sign of endearment.
I think so.
I really appreciate RMS' purist stance because it brings my attention to the things I use, and how their openness or lack of openness affects me.
Create a movement and a website that lists closed APIs with this 'terms of service' condition.
That way, startups and large companies can still make kickass APIs and profit off them, but developers are never left hanging.
The only problem is from an acquisition POV, this likely decreases the value of the company. e.g. Face.com, Tokbox. But that's only an issue if the company cough facebook decides to shutdown the API.
"Windows has a back door with which Microsoft can forcibly change any software on the machine"
Does he mean Windows update? or something else?
Most free GNU/Linux distros provide some method of automatically updating software also which is enabled by default but can be disabled (same as Windows).
An out-of-the-box Windows will download and install the software and then automatically reboot the PC. You have to explicitly change the settings to avoid that.
On Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch and Mint (the desktop distros I've used at one point or another) you will be notified that the updates are available but you have to explicitly say that you want them installed. If they require special privileges, you will be asked for a sudo password. If they require a restart, you have to approve it explicitly as well.
It's not really a "backdoor" either, Windows update makes itself very obvious and tells you what it is doing.
RMS seems to have worded this to suggest that MS have built in some secret way to fiddle with your computer for nefarious purposes.
It is a back door because the user (even a sophisticated one) has no visibility into what's being installed (all the information the user sees is being controlled by Microsoft and the user has no way to verify it because of the closed nature of the system).
This means that fundamentally, the user has to trust Microsoft every time time an update is being rolled out. And as any other large corporation, Microsoft doesn't always do things that are in the best interest of their users.
Mind you, this is the back door that we know about. I don't want to go get into the conspiracy territory, but one of Stallman's points is that the user really can't know whether there's a hidden back door or not. And even if there isn't one now, they can use the Windows update to put it there.
Richard Stallman feels very strongly about this. Others may not. Depending on which side you're on, you may either make this a big deal or say that Microsoft (or anyone breaking and hijacking the system) is trustworthy so this is nothing to worry about.
How you talk about the facts is retorics. But at least on this subject he's not saying anything that isn't true (he may be bending the truth on other issues -- I haven't read the article so I can't honestly say).