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I admire his willingness to stand to what he believes. Also, extremisms aside, he's contributed a lot to the community.
by mtoledo 17y ago
I admire his willingness to stand to what he believes.
Also, extremisms aside, he's contributed a lot to the community.
- andrewljohnson 17y agoBeliefs are the bastion of the uninformed, and those so set in their ways they can't take a moment to think things through.
- rbanffy 17y agoWhat you call beliefs, I call principles. It's nice to know he doesn't compromise them.
- cschwarm 17y agoAnd what you call principles, I call dogmata.
- rbanffy 17y agoWhy?
- cschwarm 17y agoBecause that's what they are. From Wikipedia: "Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization: it is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted or diverged from." Some examples: * 4 rights constitute Free Software, not 3 or 2 or 1 but 4. * Free Software is equivalent to Civil Freedom and Human Rights. * Distributing software without any of these 4 rights makes the act unethical, immoral and evil. * All software should be Free Software. Doubt any of these and you are no true believer of the Free Software Movement.
- sax 17y agoThe Free Software Foundation defines the traits of Free Software as having 4 freedoms (not rights) and explains them in simple language at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. The freedoms are enforced by the GPL, just like any other EULA. So, trying to question why there are only "4" principles, is missing the point. The GPL itself has several terms and conditions. So, equating the 4 freedoms to the notion similar to the "religious 10 commandments" and then invoking the argument of "dogma" seems disingenuous.
- pingswept 17y agoWhy not compromise and call them principles, just this once? Principles, dogma-- what's the difference, really?
- axod 17y agoWhy is that a nice trait to have? The world isn't perfect. It's certainly not black or white either. You have to compromise.
- weavejester 17y agoOften it's the people that refuse to compromise that make the world a better place. Do you think Martin Luther King should have compromised on his vision of racial equality? Whilst the civil rights movement is obviously far more important than the free software movement, the idea that ideals should not be compromised is at the core of both. Unlike, say, the BSD license, the GPL is a license that allows for no compromise. If you want to distribute modifications, you must also distribute the source. It's this ideology that made the more pragmatic open-source movement possible in the first place.
- axod 17y agoHow is Richard Stallman refusing to use a webbrowser making the world a better place? :/ It's just taking ideals to extremes for the sake of it.
- notauser 17y agoBecause there are (a lot of) people on the close-everything side of the debate it's essential to have at least a few people arguing that everything is opened so that the eventual compromise is somewhere in the middle.
- weavejester 17y agoAs far as I'm aware, Stallman isn't refusing to use a web browser for ideological reasons. It's because: "Most of the time I do not have an Internet connection." Besides, I seem to recall he uses Emacs/W3 for viewing web pages (offline, downloaded via wget).
- axod 17y ago>> "To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me." You have to admit that sounds slightly quirky? I assumed it was an attempt to maintain that his personal PC is free from any closed source software, since it's not even rendering websites, it's just receiving email. Sorry, but to me it sounds like either someone who is so into ideals that they're cutting off their nose to spite their face, or someone who has simply failed to keep up with changes in technology.
- teeja 17y agoTypical Stallman ... having principles and living by them.