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Comment by dmm | Hacker News Reader

RMS doesn't care about "open source", something he will gladly remind you of if you use that phrase in his presence.

His position in this matter is long-standing and consistent with his principles. That's how you have to understand him: a man of principles surrounded by enemies.

Look at OS X, why does it use such an ancient version of Bash? Why is apple so afraid of the GPLv3? It's not just an oversight. The GPLv3 provides strong patent protection for its users and Apple uses patents as a weapon. An example of this powerful weapon was Apple's conspiracy to suppress wages by threatening companies who poached Apple employees with patent suits.

Imagine you make a tool and someone proposes making a change to that tool that would be potentially useful to slavers, people who enslave other people. This makes you hesitate. Pointing out that people already use similar tools for slavery probably wouldn't make you change your mind.

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> Imagine you make a tool and someone proposes making a change to that tool that would be potentially useful to slavers, people who enslave other people. This makes you hesitate.

No, it really doesn't. "Bad people might use it to do something I don't approve of" is a terrible rationale for not creating something, mostly because it's almost always true. Strong crypto is great for terrorists. Psychology research is wonderful for propagandists in dictatorships. Unlocked cell phones are very useful for drug trafficking rings.

If we, as a species, refused to innovate when we weren't sure of the consequences, we would still be arguing about whether fire was a good idea.

This may sound like a reductio at absurdum, but if that innovation threaten your ability to survive, you will be very reluctant to research it, won't you? Gcc has been the very foundation of gnu, it's the cornerstone of the whole ecosystem: you cannot run Linux (or hurd) without compiling it first. Imagine you'd be commissioned to the fabrication of a virus immune to all known forms of treatments for the purpose of using it to hotpatch cancerous cells. Obviously this tech could have much more dangerous applications, and without a way to disable it, noone would stand a chance. In that scenario, wouldn't you try to reduce this virus' immunity to the minimum needed for its planned usage?

Being used for bad purposes is different than having a net negative effect. E.g. if you are making weapons or something like that.

A lot of people do this. Some people do refuse to work on military technologies. Even Google declared it wouldn't produce anything for the military with the robotics startups it's acquired. Some of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan project later regretted it.

If you really do believe the thing you are working on will have a net negative effect on the world than maybe you shouldn't work on it.

Military weapons have few non-violent uses. ASTs have many uses other than assisting proprietary IDEs (for example, allowing emacs to complete with proprietary IDEs on a level playing field).

It's more akin to refusing to manufacture kitchen knives and forcing all the chefs in your kitchen to chop things with spoons. Even though anybody who wants to stab people already has easy access to very big and sharp knives just by stepping into any other kitchen in the world. Also lots of your chefs keep sneaking over to the kitchen over the road to chop things and no newly trained chef wants to work in your kitchen because they think only chopping with spoons is stupid and only done by crazy religious old men with big beards. OK this metaphor is getting pretty stretched now.

The original OP was not adressing things that can have a dialetic good/bad use like a knife, but things that can only have a bad effect, like guns for instance, they will only be used to hurt or take lives, you cant cook with a gun..

In his manhattan project example, produce atomic bombs will have only one bad consequence, same with guns, but not the same as a knife.

I don't think the issue is just allowing proprietary IDEs to interface with Gcc; I think there are deeper issues at play.

Also, I wouldn't say that he's forcing anyone to chop things, he's more likely saying "let's make dishes from recipes which don't require chopping things", but his cooks are still used to chopping. Is there really an alternative to strong "intellisense" and refactoring abilities in IDEs for efficient development ? I don't know. I personally feels that this is a necessary step. Maybe RMS, with his experience of AI research (iirc), has a different view.

> Maybe RMS, with his experience of AI research (iirc), > has a different view.

RMS primarily uses C and Lisp. Lisp source code is a tree already. And C is so simple you can get by with tags and such.

If he was a C++/Java/C# programmer (which he is not) he may have a different feeling on the importance of the AST relative to the risk of Microsoft using gcc with VisualStuio to offer advanced features while by-passing the GPL.

Of course, but even with lisp you can't (programmatically) work on the code without having that code representation. If it's trivial, then there's no harm in opening it, but RMS thinks otherwise, so there must be something else.

A better analogy would be organic vs. non-organic food, where the non-organic food can get you much more consistent and cheaper results, but leads to a lot of negative externalities whose effects compound over time.

One is focused on short-term quarterly profit, the other on long-term social goods.

"The GPLv3 provides strong patent protection for its users and Apple uses patents as a weapon"

First, GPLv3's patent provisions are not particularly strong compared to other open source licenses.

Second, this has nothing to do with anything, and certainly isn't a reason for Apple avoidance of GPLv3.

Apple was almost unilaterally concerned with the installation information requirements in GPLv3 (that would require providing signing keys and allowing modifications/reverse engineering), not the patent provisions. They said so, multiple times in the various working groups/mailing lists/etc for GPLv3. Heck, APSL, The Apple Public Source License, version 2.0, which apple released tons of source under, predates GPLv3 by 4 years (2003 vs 2007), and happily grants patents.

http://www.opensource.apple.com/license/apsl/

Apple, for the record, was willing to give the GCC project all of the code to LLVM under the GPL and non-assert any patents (and to my knowledge, Apple has not filed patents on any part of LLVM that they have contributed to publicly)

Apple has also contributed to tons of Apache licensed code and similar code that requires contributors grant patent licenses.

I work for Google, and have personally seen them contribute code to our projects with patent licenses (though admittedly, not as much as they used to). Additionally, I worked on both LLVM and GCC, and was involved directly in the various plans WRT to LLVM and GCC merging. Same with GPLv3 stuff, etc.

There are plenty of things to rake Apple over the coals over, and plenty of reasons why Apple disliked GPLv3, but what you cite simply isn't one of them.

> rake Apple over the coals over

You spend a lot of time negating dmm's comments about Apple, when most of his post was about pools of power controlling or attempting to control a given bit of software. Granted, Apple spends a bit of time doing this very thing quite frequently and most people seem cool with it (because it's so easy!), so I'm curious why you are so set on defending it?

Because misinformation is misinformation, and i'm not a fan of sitting by and letting it drop, whether it's happening to me, my colleagues, or even companies i don't particularly like personally, but happen to know facts about.

Particularly when this is used as the lead-in and part of a strategy of supporting an argument.

In fact, i'll point out that RMS is actually very good about this stuff himself. If his position is based on factually incorrect info, and you correct it, he will often immediately change his position.

Thanks, I was wrong about apples reason not to use the gplv3.

The maintainers of pf (bsd license) were once hosed by Apple, understandable that rms doesn't want to enable easy future gcc front end proprietary software.

Henning Brauer: "We have no problem with them using our code but we do not appreciate that they subjected it to the Apple Public Source License. They introduce some interesting ideas such as a ref count of how many times PF has been enabled or disabled but we are unable to use their implementation. Furthermore, the Apple Public Source License introduces contract law to an environment that only relied on copyright law. This is unfortunate."

I think “hosed by Apple” is an unjustified summary. More like, “the maintainers of pf released their code under a very permissive license, and then one or more of them was unhappy when someone else took their license terms at face value and used their code in strict accordance with those terms.”

If what the pf maintainers really wanted was to use a GPLv2 type license, and instead they used BSD, and now are unhappy about the consequences, I can’t see how that’s Apple’s fault.

This. Henning doesn't understand licensing very well.

> Look at OS X, why does it use such an ancient version of Bash? Why is apple so afraid of the GPLv3? It's not just an oversight. The GPLv3 provides strong patent protection for its users and Apple uses patents as a weapon. An example of this powerful weapon was Apple's conspiracy to suppress wages by threatening companies who poached Apple employees with patent suits.

The Linux kernel developers also oppose the GPLv3. Are they enemies as well?

dmm didn't say anyone and everyone opposing GPLv3 are bad, he's just giving an example of how NOT using GPLv3 can be used to punish or coerce behaviour against the principles RMS stands for.

Yes.

To RMS? Probably.

The majority of programmers use free software for practical reasons and are willing to "compromise" with the desires of proprietary software companies.

For RMS free software is an ideological struggle. In his ideal world proprietary software wouldn't exist.

Its important to note, also, that for RMS the struggle is against non-free software, which is at times in conflict with what people who see free software as an ideological struggle to promote free software would view as desirable.

Its not just that its an ideological struggle for RMS, its what RMS sees that struggle as being about which can divide hi from others.

The problem is that the only way to win against non-free software is to provide viable free-software alternatives. Free software cannot win on ideology alone, it _has_ to provide the features users need.

RMS is unwavering.

He is an ethical fixed point combinator if you will, the fixed point combinator of FOSS. Like a lighthouse on a rocky shore he'll perpetually shine his light to keep you away from the rocks of proprietary software.

I'm not even sure how much of this is tongue in cheek.

His position doesn't make any sense, though. It only made sense as long as LLVM didn't exist, but now that it does, it only hurts GCC. Anybody who wants to incorporate Clang or LLVM into a proprietary project already can, so absolutely nothing is gained by crippling GCC to make it less useful to those people.

All this is covered in the letter, in fact. If his principles lead him to completely ignore the real world impact of his decisions, his principles are not good ones, and not something to be admired.

I do not believe you can claim that Stallman does not understand the real world impacts of license decisions in complex software ecosystems: the LGPL is an example, which is designed to be used when entering a realm with existing high-quality commercial competition, and in the case of Ogg Vorbis Stallman actually recommended the use of a BSD license as it made more sense as the real battle was against MP3, not between implementations of Vorbis.

http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3

I'm not saying, though, that he's unaware of the real world impacts. I'm saying that he doesn't care about them (in this case). He is a smart man, and a visionary, and believe it or not, I have a great deal of respect for him, in large part because of how prophetic he's been regarding some of the troubling developments of recent years. That said, he doesn't appear to care about the impact of this decision, which is to drive everyone to clang/llvm.

If no one forks gcc to keep it from becoming technically inferior, then in ten years, we'll just have another open source compiler monoculture, but this time it will be clang/llvm.

(Edit: forgot an important word.)

I rather have the impression that the development of IDEs ran past Mr Stallman - he didn't witness the development in refactoring, code completion etc. since these features are essentially implement in commercial IDEs (which he despises). So he just doesn't know anything about how useful (or not) these features are. He learned and did programming "in the old way" and sticked to that.

It doesn't have to be like that. I suggested elsewhere in that thread that emacs maintainers should use llvm for what they need, since it can already provide that service. This would require further down the road to have Gcc match llvm feature-wise (except maybe that feature), so that compilation of code accepted by llvm would be possible with Gcc.

I'm almost certain that RMS would veto the use of LLVM. He clearly views LLVM as an enemy of 'freedom'.

There's ethic, and there is practicalities. RMS stands by the former, while many engineers think mostly about the later. I wouldn't say that thinking ethically is a bad thing, but it may hamper things, because it usually deals very poorly with a situation already unethical in nature.

There are more than 7 billions people on Earth, but barely enough resources to content everyone. Pushing resource extractions will damage the ecosystem, but not doing so will provoke millions of deaths. Preserving nature is a laudable goal IMHO, wouldn't you agree?

>it usually deals very poorly with a situation already unethical in nature.

Allowing code completion and complex refactoring in emacs is "unethical in nature"?

He seems to think that gcc could output a incomplete AST that could be used to implement all necessary emacs features without being usable for compiler backends. The other emacs maintainers seem to think that is fighting with one hand tied behind their back.

For RMS, allowing non free code to be derived from free code is unethical, it goes against all the ideal of his movement. Indeed, from your standpoint, the thing he is fighting against seems trivial, but there are deeper consequences.

For RMS, non-free code period is unethical, regardless of its derivation.

His position makes complete sense then, because proprietary software developers you just incorporate Clang and ignore GCC. It might just be the case free software advocates and those who release under the GPL do not want to trade ethics for market share.

That is a better situation than GCC being the only show in the house and every company trying to find a way to break the GPL around GCC so they can reuse it without releasing source.

We aren't just talking about proprietary software developers using llvm. The projects most hurt by GCC being crippled by design are those like emacs that want to do more advanced things using GCC AST but can't. Emacs is being deliberately harmed to prevent other proprietary developers doing something they can already do anyway.

If you are saying GPL advocates believe they are correct to deliberately cripple their software for political reasons, then what kind of lesson do you think that is teaching an entire generation of CS postgrads and academics who are forced to use LLVM for their work because RMS thinks they shouldn't be allowed to do compiler research using Free Software. The damage to mindshare and reputation is huge here. To be honest I'm not sure it's even recoverable at this point. To a lot of people GNU software is turning into "stuff you don't use because it's crippled for political reasons and they want to control what you can do with software". Very morally pure I'm sure, but also suicidal.

In what way is Emacs being "deliberately harmed"?

It has worse code completion and refactoring support for C and C++ than it should have. Emacs users are forced to switch to other tools (like proprietary IDEs or LLVM based tools) when they need to do complex refactoring to c++ codebases. It could be improved (should have been years ago) but RMS has stated that he would block the inclusion of code to do those things if they use a GCC plugin that exports the full AST.

This is all discussed in the original mailing list thread and it's why one of the core emacs devs suggested forking.

See the thread that prompted this: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...

Basically, an Emacs maintainer thinks that this gcc restriction is so harmful to important emacs features that he would be willing to "consider a fork"

Why not reverse the argument? If llvm can already be used for that sort of task, why not simply use it in place of Gcc for that very precise task? I'm pretty sure RMS would not mind it as much as opening gcc's AST, and he would certainly embrace the idea of making Gcc able to match llvm feature wise to make sure that whatever becomes possible in emacs is handled at compilation by Gcc.

Yes, you'd think that, wouldn't you... But the only reason for this discussion is that RMS had already prevented the inclusion of clang-based tools in the Emacs code base. He thinks it'd undermine GCC, and by extension his cause.

Hmmm, Charybde and Scylla. There's no solution I suppose, or maybe just go by what RMS wants: produce a data structure for the necessary data for the simplest possible improvement, then define a more involved data structure for a more ambitious feature, and reiterate again and again, until the data structure becomes isomorphic to what Gcc deals with. No need to actually code all these steps, just specifying them should help RMS understand that it's inevitable at some point.

>a man of principles surrounded by enemies.

Or a zealot who sees enemies everywhere.

Neither of the above. It's no secret what RMS is doing here, and he's fully aware of the context and way in which he is perceived. Some people like to think that he doesn't care, and they have it almost exactly backwards.

The most extreme person on any issue is always ridiculed and disregarded by a large chunk of any community, regardless of whether this is correct or not. People like middle things. RMS's objective is to be the most extreme person, and to drag that position so far over that no other free software effort can be ridiculed or ignored in this fashion.

You haven't chosen to be the middle ground here. RMS has chosen to make you the middle ground, because that's where he wanted it to be, so he hiked all the way over there to plant his flag in order to move the middle. A few decades later, it looks like that worked.

I've never before heard the theory that Richard Stallman is consciously trying to move the Overton Window. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

The Occam's Razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor explanation is that Stallman genuinely believes his positions are correct.

The FSF as an window moving org is a view I heard expressly presented at their annual members conference a number of years ago. At the time the discussion, I believe, was in the context of the very active "defective by design" campaign, and in response to some views that a more moderate response to DRM (like that taken by other groups like the EFF) might be more effective.

This isn't incompatible with earnestly believing the views. All of us hold principles that exist on a spectrum and can pragmatically decide how we apply them without necessarily compromising them, in order to optimize for progress of certain kinds on certain time-frames with certain costs.

An example of this, RMS's positions have become stronger as free software as matured: IIRC GNU was originally developed on Sun boxes; but RMS would never use an outright proprietary OS today. Early free software system he used had non-free firmware or other blobs, but he advocates strongly against that today. There are a set of strong ideals, sure, but the amount of compromise someone holding them should optimally take depends on the overall state of the world and their position to influence it.

The notion of software freedom as a human rights issue can be quite foreign to people and without someone taking it very seriously some, especially those who have mostly regarded technology as a black box, can too easily dismiss it.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. - Hanlon's Razor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

It is not that his doing didn't turn out to be intelligent, but his intent almost certainly wasn't.

> IIRC GNU was originally developed on Sun boxes

Actually it was an unused small Vax (730?) running BSD. It was unused because it was in the AI lab, where we all used lispms or the PDP-10s upstairs (don't get me wrong -- some of the non-AI folks in computer science used unix).

I don't even remember why that machine was there in the first place -- it seemed so peculiar to have a machine like that in the first place. 8-bit bytes and the small, 32-bit word didn't feel like the future at the time (hah!). It was stuck in a small machine room.

While the 730 and the Sun-1 were available by the time the GNU project was started, I strongly suspect that an 11/750 was the original machine.

(I wasn't running GNU (emacs) until 1984, and didn't contribute to GCC until 1987.)

Indeed, now you mention it it was a 750.

Good thing for my self image I put that question mark in there.

Yeah, I suspected so.

DEC had a problem with selling MIT and other non-profits hardware at a discount, the US Federal government demands Most Favored Customer prices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most-Favoured-Customer_Clause), so I heard they came up with a not so desirable configuration of a Vax 11-750, a RK07 disk drive, and a VAXstation 100 display, which was a 68000 with a megabyte or so of memory and a very fast connection to the VAX.

Which I was also told had an outsized influence on the X architecture, its assumptions of a fast connection to a relatively dumb display, very much the opposite of what developed in longer term.

Which was a motivation for Sun's NeWS, which sent interactive PostScript to the display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS We aren't using it/you've never heard of it because of the "MIT License" vs. Sun wanting $100K to even give you a taste of NeWS.

Agreed completely and having met the man, can confirm that every cause needs an extremist and he is better at it than any one i can imagine. At some point in your life you have to decide to refuse compromise.

I was sat beside the venerable and lovely Bruce Perens at a conference at which RMS was talking and we had this chat. Bruce is too pragmatic to hold people to account.

People who know politics will tell you the same for being dragged to the middle by opposing parties.

> You haven't chosen to be the middle ground here. RMS has chosen to make you the middle ground, because that's where he wanted it to be, so he hiked all the way over there to plant his flag in order to move the middle.

I'm sorry: that's a good strategy, but I have known RMS since the late '70s (since back when he still had short hair!) and that is not has strategy. He is earnest, even when it is to his detriment.

Funny anecdote in this regard: I had never really met anyone quite so dogmatic, passionate, principled and resolute as RMS (you can say that whether you agree with him or not -- though roughly, I of course do agree with him). I used to consider him to be a uniquely polarizing figure. Anyway, in the 80s I had a girlfriend who wasn't in computing and had never heard of him. He came out to visit me in California. When she met him, she just commented, "oh, one of those guys."

WTF? Turned out the two of them had grown up in the same neighborhood in the Bronx. She said the 'hood was "full of guys just like him" (although presumably they were obcessed about some other topics). Sadly her family had since moved elsewhere so I never collected empirical confirmation.

I have no idea what your then-girlfriend meant by one of those guys. Or whether the Bronx hood was full of obsessed guys in the '70s?? I am genuinely curious, though.

FWIW I doubt she meant anything judgmental by her remark (approval or disapproval or whatever).

I think she just meant that she saw lots of RMSs growing up: a guy, perhaps a product of his time, who had a certain intensive attitude on a position, a taste for the extremist polemic, strongly held beliefs anchored in moral fervor etc. Also accent, body language, dress, etc. Surely similar people can be found everywhere, but in her case she meant that in the 60s, 70s and 80s Bronx you could get off the train and see bunch of guys that would look to her just like him. She grew up in the same cultural broth, even if it manifested itself differently -- but yes she was and is intense.

I haven't forgotten that simple sentence because it changed something for me: RMS sure can come off as being completely sui generis but really he (like everyone, whether a lowly ant like me or an Issac Newton or Barbara McClintock) is a product not only of self creation but also of his context and upbringing. And realizing that has helped me grow and change (or accept that some things are harder to change than others) over the past few decades.

> [RMS is] fully aware of the context and way in which he is perceived. RMS's objective is to be the most extreme person, and to drag that position so far over that no other free software effort can be ridiculed or ignored in this fashion.

This is an intriguing theory. But I find it difficult to believe that RMS is playing such a deep game when so much of his communication unrelated to free software principals -- e.g. his contract rider [1] -- comes across to so many people as tone-deaf.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/#!msg/mysoci...

Urgh, that should be "principles".

The problem is that, at this point, the FLOSS community increasingly treats RMS as damage and routes around him.

without the zealots the pograms of distributed piss taking will find you

> Imagine you make a tool and someone proposes making a change to that tool that would be potentially useful to slavers, people who enslave other people. This makes you hesitate. Pointing out that people already use similar tools for slavery probably wouldn't make you change your mind.

I know you're being hyperbolic here to represent RMS's take on the issue (or at least that's how I'm reading it), but I'm not sure the analogy makes sense.

If I were to reinterpret it using the same terms, the counter-argument isn't that "people already use similar tools for slavery", it is that "slavers" wouldn't care what you did with your tool because they're already having no trouble commiting their crimes with similar tools, and your new tool could be used in perfectly legitimate ways to support your own position which includes combating slavery.

> RMS doesn't care about "open source"

Apparently, he also doesn't care about free software enough either, since he apparently prefers users to switch to something they can _use_ than allow provision of the functionality they need, on the basis that the same functionality could be used by non-free software.

In this case, though, the tool is trivial to make. Any "slaver" that wants it can easily make it themselves. Foregoing making and using that tool for use in Emacs does nothing whatsoever to impede, dissuade, or discourage "slavers" from getting the tool. It just makes it much harder to give Emacs some features that many of its competitors have.

"enemies" or merely people who politely disagree with his definition of free?

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