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Comment by BlewisJS | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain what the "evil" is this article seems to be talking about?

Heh, a lot of it is a generational thing. Back in the 90's, many if not most programmers would have passionately agreed with every word of this. Today, for younger programmers who take open-source for granted... it just seems like the incoherent ramblings of that old uncle who rants about Obama at every family gathering.

At any rate, where this is coming from would make a lot more sense if you'd come up in the 80's and 90's, and remembered what it was like before open-source gained a serious foothold.

> Heh, a lot of it is a generational thing. Back in the 90's, many if not most programmers would have passionately agreed with every word of this. Today, for younger programmers who take open-source for granted... it just seems like the incoherent ramblings of that old uncle who rants about Obama at every family gathering.

I think that drastically overstates the support programmers as a class have ever had for the Stallman/FSF view that tools to combat the use of non-Free software are a moral imperative, though I do think that that extremist position of actively combating non-Free software did seem, if not a moral imperative, at least to be important instrumentally to the promotion of Free/open source software before the pragmatic case for open source was broadly accepted by much of the industry.

The pragmatic benefits you mention are the direct consequence of the moral imperative the free software movement is fighting for.

No, they aren't. Both the pragmatic benefits and the perceived (by some) moral imperative stem from the same source, but neither the perceived moral imperative nor the pragmatic benefits that motivate self-interested actors to participate in open source are dependent on the other.

> that old uncle who rants about Obama at every family gathering

I'm still trying to explain to him that Obamacare was originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation as an alternative to "Hillarycare." Sigh.

The software world has changed a lot in the last 30 years. There are almost as many users directly using a Linux kernel-based operating system every day (Android) as there are Windows users worldwide, and Android will almost certainly take the lead from Windows by the end of 2015. I think this would've been unfathomable to the handful of people who knew what Free Software (in the rms sense) back in the 1980s and 1990s.

>I think this would've been unfathomable to the handful of people who knew what Free Software (in the rms sense) back in the 1980s and 1990s.

Err, back in the mid-to-end nineties far from being unfathomable, a widespread belief was that each year (or 'soon') would be the year of "Linux on the Desktop" and Linux overthrowing Windows.

The unfathomable part is that Android would not be free software.

Natalie Portman, hot grits, Netcraft confirms. I read Slashdot, too, but that didn't make the predictions any more real-sounding.

The existence and use of non-Free software, the singular "evil" that the FSF exists to combat.

Richard Stallman had a frustrating experience thirty years ago when he couldn't debug a software issue for lack of access to the source code. Since then he has used "evil" to mean anything that impedes programmers' ability to read source code with the original debugging symbols, regardless of whether those programmers are working on evil products.

Stallman's critiques of proprietary software are much more well-reasoned than "once I had trouble debugging an issue in a closed-source software project".

You two seem to be talking about different things. Motivating experiences are different than the reasons we use to persuade other people to really to our cause.

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