Richard Stallman on the Ogg Vorbis license (2001)
lwn.net
lwn.net
Listening to him speak in 2009 was surreal, especially during the Q&A session. I can't recall any specific quotes but he was ready to burn ten bridges for an ounce of symbolic freedom. The whole time I kept thinking of this John McCarthy (coined the term AI, "discovered" lisp) quote:
"He's a man of principle. He'd cut his mother's throat for a principle."
The important distinction is that the things (you don't list specifics, so I'm just assuming) that Stallman finds "important" seem like senseless distractions to his audience. It's hard to remember now, but in 2001 the idea of patent-encumbered algorithms being a threat to free software was not nearly as well-understood as it is now. Most people in the community were happy to download and build LAME (or whatever), and just shrugged when the Linux distros turned out not to be able to ship it.
Stallman was right (and to be clear: he'd been screaming about patents for a decade already in 2001). We were wrong. This has been a pattern his whole career.
So, again without actual evidence, I'm just going to guess that within a decade that stuff you heard in 2009 that sounded so "radical" is going to seem a lot more clear in hindsight.
> So, again without actual evidence, I'm just going to guess that within a decade that stuff you heard in 2009 that sounded so "radical" is going to seem a lot more clear in hindsight.
I remember reading what Stallman said about cell phones, location tracking, and privacy back in ~2004 and thinking he was being paranoid.
Boy was I wrong.
1. He is a grating and uncompromising lunatic, and does not make any attempts to present himself as agreeable to other people.
2. He's been proven completely correct on everything he's warned us of in this industry to date.
I'm a little confused by what you mean. Do you mean what he's afraid about doesn't matter that much? Considering the massive patent lawsuits flying around I think that's pretty blatantly false. I mean, some of this has been ameliorated by industry's unexpected generosity towards the open source world (Google via a ton of shit, Apple via LLVM), but certainly not all of it.
Personally, I've stopped ignoring what Stallman is saying. I'm not saying he doesn't have a side of him that worries about completely irrelevant shit, but I think he's been proven well enough on important topics that he deserves our (as hackers, consumers, and business owners) respect, even if you decide you disagree with him.
Put another way. RMS has warned about the dangers of hot water and has spent a lifetime taking cold showers. He's right of course, hot water can be dangerous, but warm water is just fine and gets things done.
He's presenting a binary choice when its not the choice that matters. It's about how hot the water can get for your needs and not be dangerous is where all the important things are happening.
I don't really care about what RMS says because it locks you into thinking binary extremes. Free or evil, the past or some hypothetical future, when it's the now that matters.
You don't think massive adoption of open source software would not at all imply that all the R&D effort spent on everything else over the last decades would have shifted to that instead?
And, please, could you be more of a contributor and less like an aggressive drunk starting a bar fight?
I guess you could say Stallman wasn't wrong exactly, just unnecessarily alarmist over this particular issue. I'm not saying software patents are benign, by the way - I'm only addressing mp3 here.
Who knows what knock on effects that might have had? Chrome and Mozilla could have had WebRTC happening years ago with a patent royalty free H.264, or a family of codecs that evolved from it, rather than waste their time (and a quarter of a billion dollars) on trying to break the codec monopolies. Less Flash, less IE, less Windows, more competition. What's not to like?
edit: or flip it the other way. If browsers or the web were patented, how many consumers would celebrate the day those patents expired? None, because all the good things that flowed from them not being patented would never have happened. "So Microsoft made a few more millions" they'd say, I mean its not like browsing the web ever became a big deal.
Calling someone out after the fact for warning about the potential for harm when the risk is very real based on what happened in the past just sounds like revisionism.
On one hand, it's possible that mp3 could have become the defacto standard by being widely available, and then had the patent holders clamp down and raise prices. This didn't happen, and I don't think it was likely to happen.
RS' writings always have two parts. First, he predicts what could happen if things keep going in the current direction. He's quite good at this, because he's a smart guy, and all of his predictions I'm familiar with reflect a future that I think is technically possible. Second, however, is the tone and gravity he assigns to the consequences and likelihood of those possible futures. I find those parts of his writing to be unreasonably pessimistic and actively harmful in avoiding real problems.
He's unnecessarily alarmist on all the issues he cares about. And because of that, he's bound to be right once in a while, but since it's impossible to determine when to listen to him, he's as accurate as a coin toss.
But that's just an opinion - I guess it's possible a lot of people were put off by the hoops necessary to install an mp3 player, although to be honest I don't recall it being a problem for a good decade or so now.
You say the MP3 patent really did no harm; what harm did it not do? And of the harm that it did not do, what harm do other software patents do?
In 2001 there were plenty of people who were critical of Microsoft and their market share abuse but this was at a time when saying "stop using Windows" was akin to saying "stop driving a car".
In 2001, that wasn't the case at all. You still needed to put in some elbow grease, and there were corner cases for sure, but I was using Linux with no problems (except a lack of Counter-Strike), had been for years and so had my parents.
These were dark days. The light didn't begin to shine at the end of the tunnel until Firefox started to crawl up the usage charts in 2003-4, and the beginning of the Web 2.0 era brought developer focus back to free technologies that it enabled.
Eventually it became clear that Microsoft had fallen asleep at the wheel, so in hindsight 2001 doesn't seem so bad. But at the time, I was pretty scared.
Linux (and the ecosystem surrounding it) definitely worked, it was just atrocious at most non-coding tasks. What would you do if someone sent you a .doc (I am glad those days are gone and I can demand PDFs these days), would you just work through the compatibility errors and hope you didn't lose any content? And forget it if you had any non-popular hardware: even if there were drivers for it, they were either incomplete (not blaming the driver writers, just the poor resources for them) or difficult to configure and work correctly.
It's really only in the past five years or so I would be confident someone could probably learn to use it without much help, and I would still recommend OSX for non-devs. I still can't upgrade my ubuntu install without breaking at least one crucial aspect of the system (graphics, sound, the goddamn user interface).
Could you use it well in 2001? Yes, but not without being either very familiar or only using web browsing and email (hope you don't run into active x or flash or any kind of codec that involves you breaking the law).
I had an enthusiastic period of Ubuntu and Fedora use. It seems stability is a virtue most appreciated in its absence; these days I use Debian stable and have largely forgotten about broken functionality. A few packages are pinned to testing, firefox and chromium were originally compiled from source and have been auto-updating since then.
Unless you have a need for every package on your system to be recent to within a few years, you may want to consider using a system intended to be stable. There really is no possible substitute for a years-long testing cycle.
If you are interested, my typical use case is spinning up a vm for about 5-10 hours of total work while I port my code to linux, and ubuntu is simply the fastest way to do that without snapshotting a clean install (which I really should do).
Personally I'm using Crunchbang, which is minimalist, lightweight, based on Stable, and comes with a nice set of install scripts for web servers and databases and suchlike.
Generally speaking though, if I were moving code between platforms, I would make sure that my staging environment matched whatever the production environment was -- I suspect not Ubuntu.
Having said that I still preferred it to Windows on a number of axis but it was only practical to use on the desktop as part of a dual boot.
StarOffice met my needs just fine; I could get work done in it, and it supported more Word formats than the latest Word (with occasional breakage - but that was rare).
> lack of support for many soundcards and modems
I think this was the case, yeah. You still had to be picking your HW to be Linux compatible (as opposed to these days where it's just a good idea).
> severe distro / package format fragmentation wars
I think much of that started later; at least, insofar as it impacted me. My experience was RPM pretty much dominating at that time.
> Lack of staples like Flash.
I don't recall what the flash situation was; on the other hand, that probably means it either worked for me[1] or I wasn't noticing the lack of it which would imply it was less of a staple.
[1] admittedly, this would undermine my initial point, as the question was really "a completely free-software desktop" not "a linux desktop", but I honestly can't remember.
> Instant messenger clients didn't support all features that the Windows versions did.
This is true, but it's hardly the difference between "car" and "no car" - more like a car with or without a CD player or something.
> No gaming to speak of.
I've played a lot of great games on Linux which were available then - I still go back to nethack from time to time. Admittedly, first-run commercial games weren't being released under a free license, but given Stallman's comments elsewhere that may be tolerable. There were some near-first-run games (and you weren't buying enough of them! 2001 is when Loki filed for bankruptcy) and Id was in the practice of releasing their games for Linux right away (and GPLing the whole thing years later).
> it was only practical to use on the desktop as part of a dual boot.
I wasn't dual-booting at that time, and it was practical for me.
There were certainly things that might have demanded Windows (there still are a couple, although I think virtualization is slightly more in vogue than dual booting?), but most people didn't need them like they need their car - remember, that's what I was responding to.
If you want to say a free desktop was like an ugly car you had to get up on blocks fairly often and source your own parts for, I'm much more on board.
For example , we might not care about using a more "minimal" chat client but for my sister that would have been a deal breaker "I can't have my animated pink cat avatar?!?! This thing is USELESS"
This problem is mostly alleviated now as the dancing cat programs have moved to the web and mobile.
The problem with Stallman's approach was that it basically said "you should value freedom more than dancing cats". Try telling that to a teenage girl.
Why was this? Perhaps because the state of free (as in speech) operating systems didn't allow most people to make the switch (put aside the corporate world for now). People want stuff that just works[0], and looks relatively pretty, and that was really not the state of GNU/Linux desktops at the turn of the century. I realize that the developers have fought against certain things outside of their control (closed source drivers, for instance), but there's always been that hacker attitude driving GNU/Linux development and usage, so the concerns of the non-power user are often an afterthought.
If there existed a legitimate alternative to Windows with the same ease of use, it would be far less difficult to convince someone to switch.
[0] Yes, I know, Windows crashes and Plug and Play is often not that.
Was that when RPI ACM brought him in to speak? I recall he spent a while complaining about Linus letting binary blobs into the kernel. Then in the Q&A, he got trolled by someone claiming a music sample business was being undercut by CC-licensed competitors. RMS didn't handle that well.
In my opinion, RMS is actually very pragmatic, meaning he's willing to do almost anything to further the goal. He only appears radical because he has uncommon ideas about what the goal is and what furthers it. His radicality varies according to pragmatic considerations. He'll give his blessing to BSD-style licenses in a case like this, and he'll hold out against GCC plugins for years when he thinks that furthers freedom.
From a purely principled point of view, Free Software advocates might want to weaken copyright for software. RMS hasn't put much effort into that, because it would weaken the GPL. It would also be harder for Free software to compete if all software could be distributed free and legally. So he rarely attacks copyright in general, for pragmatic reasons.
"However, if you're going to use these games, you're better off using them on GNU/Linux rather than on Microsoft Windows. At least you avoid the harm to your freedom that Windows would do.
Thus, in direct practical terms, this development can do both harm and good. It might encourage GNU/Linux users to install these games, and it might encourage users of the games to replace Windows with GNU/Linux. My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm. But there is also an indirect effect: what does the use of these games teach people in our community?"
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.html
He may not be as pragmatic as you would like. But he has his valid reasons and walks the talk.
It is important to not be offended when he calls you unethical for using / writing non-free software.
You wrote: "I can't recall any specific quotes but he was ready to burn ten bridges"
I think you might have been conditioned to expect RMS to be that kind of self-defeating extremist because many people who are opposed to him, including some who pretend otherwise, describe him that way.
The reality of the situation is that for the foreseeable future software patents are here to stay and the sooner the free software organizations get themselves involved in the committees that define things like media standards and start playing up the advantages of a "free" (as in software) implementations for everybody involved the sooner the damaging effects of software patents in these areas will be mitigated.
Sadly with Stallman as a figurehead the Free Software community isn't in the same room as these discussions. In fact they aren't even in the same building. They are looked on as the crazy people on the streets with the "end of the world is nigh" flags. And that is the real tragedy of the whole affair.
Using the ordinary GPL is not advantageous for every library. There are reasons that can make it better to use the Lesser GPL in certain cases. The most common case is when a free library's features are readily available for proprietary software through other alternative libraries. In that case, the library cannot give free software any particular advantage, so it is better to use the Lesser GPL for that library.
As an end user I can't discern any difference between the two in terms of filesize or sound quality.
But content rules. I have 8G of mostly-mp3 music in my Google Music account simply because that's how I got it. Players out there play mp3 because that's what is out there. Of the successful consumer platforms out there, only Android includes ogg support out of the box, and that mostly due to the whims of its developers than any real market pressure.
It's exactly that point that Stallman was talking about in 2001 -- despite having very good software available, we're now into our second decade of "free software products cannot play music by default". Maybe we should have listened to him more carefully...
Around the mid-2000's, iRiver sold an OGG player, though it was $300 alongside a $300 iPod. Their interface wasn't as good, and it was clunky to use (I bought and returned one). It fell through the cracks like a zillion other iPod competitors.
Also recall DRM was a big part of digital music for a while. iTunes was dominant, and made ACC popular. I'm not even sure you can add DRM to OGG, outside of wrapping the file or watermarking. Watermarking works, but wrapping an OGG file doesn't make it OGG anymore.
So in a nutshell, OGG failed to catch on because there wasn't enough hardware or software support. On top of that, few people knew what OGG was, and didn't demand it from companies. Content owners had no reason to support it as they were focused on DRM. Apple dominated the market and standardized on MP3/ACC.
For end users I'm actually not sure either MP3 or Ogg are dominant anymore. I would guess the iTunes Store's choice of AAC has pushed that format significantly.
"Network effects": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
And if you're considering Ogg Vorbis, lets remember that the "full" name of mp3 would be something like Moving Picture Experts Group 2 Audio Layer III.
People just call them by their file extensions.
Some file types just get an easy ride, like jpeg/jpg. Imagine if it was actually routinely referred to as a Joint Expert file. Maybe pngs would have taken off faster (they are still less frequently searched than gif or jpg according to gtrends).
Plus, I could play MP3 on virtually any device. Vorbis support depended on iRiver releasing new firmware, or hacking an iPod to support Rockbox.
The Hydrogenaudio forums [1] are a great place to see how the formats progressed, if you're willing to dig through the archives.
It wasn't until around 2002 that good integer only or fixed point Ogg Vorbis decoders became available.
Needless to say, he disagreed. Stallman is as stubborn as a boulder, and a complete extremist.
But he's also right.
Linux kernel running BusyBox? Linux, but no GNU software; not GNU/Linux.
GNU utilities, BSD kernel? GNU but no Linux; not GNU/Linux.
These are things that exist: lots of routers and similar "running Linux" use BusyBox; Debian will let you install a BSD kernel.
Of course, "I am running Linux on my desktop" is accurate, and carries the expectation that you're using much of the rest of the GNU system because that's by far the most reasonable (and common) option... so people say that, because it's fewer syllables, and the FSF feels like they're not getting the credit they quite rightly deserve, and that's the situation we're in.
But changing the name of the GNU project to Linux is not a solution at all; they're still working on Herd for one thing.
just name it FM4 (free music 4). is will just naturally enter the mind of everyone that hears it as a a natural replacement for MP3.
(dolbly did that, AC3 just to have the 3. mpeg-la did that, MPEG-4 after mpeg2)