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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

The reasoning in this short message seems very unlike anything else I've heard from Stallman. Has he changed a lot since 2001? From what I've read I'd gander that Stallman has become markedly less pragmatic (or more radical?) since this was written.

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."

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Stallman has been viewed as "radical" his whole career. Certainly there was nothing more "pragmatic" about him in 2001.

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.

Stallman has two really, really annoying features:

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.

#2 is total bullshit.

can you elaborate on that?

[ citation needed ] on both the declaration that he's been proven right and on your slapdash dismissal of that assertion.

And, please, could you be more of a contributor and less like an aggressive drunk starting a bar fight?

This very story is a potential example. The mp3 patents in the US will expire in 2015. What "harm" has been done in that time? Fraunhofer made a pile of dough and that's about it. The open alternatives failed to catch on and my guess is that after 2015, mp3s will still be used as before. Very few users will know or care that the patents have expired.

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.

What we lost was a competitive disadvantage for Linux distros and countless software and hardware products never released by independent developers. Failure lacks a marketing budget.

I don't think desktop Linux's competitive disadvantage had much to do with mp3s, given its tremendous deficiencies elsewhere. I say this as someone who contributed to KDE back in the 3.x days and has been running Linux since 1997.

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.

It's easy to look back and say "see, it didn't do any harm!" Predicting the future is much more difficult, and it's perfectly reasonable to look at past trends in that prediction. If Frauenhofer had stopped giving out licenses, would you still be making that argument? If they started patent trolling, what would you be saying?

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.

It's very hard to say what Frauenhofer would have done if Vorbis didn't exist. Likely the situation would have been very different.

This section of the discussion has entirely been about hindsight, specifically that RS has always been right.

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.

If mp3 was compatible with free software then Mozila would have pushed for the audio tag sooner and one big reason to use Flash would disappear.

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.

> I guess you could say Stallman wasn't wrong exactly, just unnecessarily alarmist over this particular issue.

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.

What harm then is there in software patents at all? They eventually expire.

Please re-read my comment. I never said software patents are benign, in fact I said exactly the opposite.

I'm trying to understand what it is you find non-harmful about the MP3 patent that is harmful about other software patents.

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?

There are varying degrees of harm. The fact that equally effective free alternatives to mp3 never caught on makes this obvious. My point was that Stallman is not right 100% of the time, as the above poster asserted.

2. He's been proven kinda correct on everything he's warned us of in this industry to date...yet for the most part it hasn't really mattered all that much.

> yet for the most part it hasn't really mattered all that much.

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.

I guess I'm being too strong. I think what I mean is that if the world had followed RMS in keeping away from non free software we'd all be surfing the web through daemon that scrape a URL and then emails us the results.

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?

I don't think so...at least not all. One thing the open source model has not been able to do is lead in many areas. End-user facing software and easy-to-use guis is a notable example.

Firefox & Chromium are pretty damn good end-user facing software.

Pretty definite counterpoint to "surfing the web through daemon that scrape a URL and then emails us the results" I suppose.

To further this point, take a look at "Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library", which outlines Stallman's very pragmatic reasoning for his strategy regarding the GNU C libraries: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html

> 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.

I think the problem is not so much with his message but with the steps that he suggests to address it. People are uncomfortable with doing things that severely change their lifestyle and it's easier to rationalise someone as crazy than it is to change.

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 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".

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.

Installing Windows was often complicated at the turn of the century, too.

How many "normal" users actually installed Windows, rather than just having it because it was already installed on the computer they purchased from Best Buy?

> 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.

That wasn't quite my experience. No decent office suite, lack of support for many soundcards and modems, severe distro / package format fragmentation wars. Lack of staples like Flash. Instant messenger clients didn't support all features that the Windows versions did. No gaming to speak of.

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.

> No decent office suite

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.

It really depended on where your priorities lay and how much they intersected with the OSS developers at the time.

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.

I'm not sure it's worse than telling a (stereotypical, since that's where we've gone) teenage girl she has to drive an ugly car that she needs to work on every couple weeks.

Yes and no. Clearly people were doing productive work on free platforms in 2001. But remember that 2001 was right in the middle of the era of MS dominance. Netscape had been mostly beaten at this point. Mozilla existed, but it was routine for sites to simply not work with it. Java was still alive and vibrant (.NET wouldn't arrive to kill it for another year), but it wasn't free software either and frankly worked rather poorly on Linux (and even, ironically, Solaris).

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.

> 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.

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).

Ubuntu starts with Debian unstable (usually) and adds their own bugs. I fully expect it to break when updating.

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.

I do agree about debian, and were I to care about a long term installations I would probably go with that (or freebsd, depending on my needs). But again, I don't think that debian has the user friendliness that ubuntu does, in fact I can't think of any other distribution that works as well (that's not an ubuntu derivative itself).

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).

Linux Mint has a Debian Edition. I think it's based off Testing rather than Unstable. That would probably be my default recommendation for newbies.

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.

Hmm, good to know. I don't write web stuff so production environment = generic linux distro, most likely to be ubuntu.

> 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.

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.

Stallman on steam for Linux (in 2012/2013 ?).

"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.

He's both pragmatic and radical. He feels that using free software is morally superior to using proprietary software -- and is unwilling to concede that point. But it's not a binary distinction between the righteousness of free software and the sin and damnation of proprietary software. There are gradients of freedom that can be climbed; so Stallman will defend the use of non-GPL or proprietary software in situations where there are no other options, and said use gets more people to use free software. For example, a port of a widely-used proprietary CAD system to (GNU/)Linux would be viewed as a good move by him, but only as a precursor to the development of just-as-good free CAD systems.

The reasoning in this short message has been a consistent part of RMS' talk and actions since the very beginning of the GNU project. Earlier than Ogg Vorbis, the very existence of the LGPL is an example of similar reasoning, applied.

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.

I think it's not that Stallman has become more radical it's more that the mainstream of the free software community has shifted away from Stallman making him seem more radical and more fundamentalist. Really he should have stepped out of the discussion about 10 years ago to make way for someone more pragmatic.

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.

Being less radical would diffuse his message and make it more difficult to explain to the masses. I dont agree to with him to extent he make his points and historically he has always acted "radical", so the thing im trying to say is very arguable. But his uncompromising stance could very well be a pragmatic approach, because there is next to no one doing it instead of him.

Regardless of how you feel about the man, it's very difficult to predict when he's willing to compromise. LGPL is another common example of unexpected (at least for me) compromise.

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