7 ms·

Some people will never admit they are wrong...

carapace 11y ago
Richard Stallman, however, is correct. (I'm going to get that on a t-shirt, printed in block letters: "Stallman is correct.")
- jordigh 11y ago
  I would buy a shirt that said "Richard Stallman... was right :-(" with a frownie face and all.
- geofft 11y ago
  Isn't the argument above that he was wrong? He may have been morally right that free software is an inherent good over proprietary software, but that's sort of a given for this discussion. He was tactically wrong in taking an expansive view of both what free software licenses should enforce and what fell within their realm of enforcement. He was hoping that GCC would be so much better than the competition that people would use it despite it being GPL, and for a long while (e.g., NeXT's Objective-C patches) it was. But the GPL, especially the GPLv3, was perceived as way more onerous than Stallman expected it would be, and eventually it became worth people investing heavily in a competitor just to avoid the GPL. If he had aimed a little less high with the GPL and admitted a plugin architecture / documented IR for GCC earlier, then LLVM may never have taken off. Alternatively, he was tactically wrong in thinking that strong copyleft was required to achieve the goal of software freedom. Note that the clang in the NDK "is now a nearly pure upstream clang," not because they're required to, but because the pace of modern software development makes it genuinely easier to voluntarily submit changes upstream.
  - pekk 11y ago
    If Apple takes a stance against GPL because they don't perceive it as in their commercial best interest, that doesn't mean Stallman was wrong even in a 'tactical' sense. You can't do anything about haters.
    - geofft 11y ago
      Of course Apple does not perceive the GPL as in their commercial best interest. Back when NeXT was writing what would eventually become Apple's toolchain, Steve Jobs tried to convince Stallman that he could come up with a plugin architecture and keep the Objective-C bit private. Stallman went to his lawyer and came back and said, no, you can't do that. Steve Jobs' perception, and NeXT/Apple's perception, never changed. What changed is that in the NeXT days, GCC was so much better that Apple said, we'll make the tradeoff of using GCC even though we don't want the GPL. A few years ago Apple said, we'll make the tradeoff of avoiding the GPL even though we want GCC. And they went and invested significant resources into LLVM. The GPL was meant to be a tool to get people who did not perceive free software as in their best interest to contribute to free software anyway. It might not have changed whether they were "haters" as a matter of opinion, but it was definitely intended to change their concrete actions. And it did -- for a very long time.
  - techdragon 11y ago
    Morality is a hard thing to pin down. See the trolley problem if anyone reading this things morals are black and white. It's much easier to compare them philosophically. Commercial/ Proprietary - unrestricted free market capitalism Copyleft licenses - socialist (not communist, there's a difference people, learn it) / commercial cooperative (think farmers cooperatives and anyone who might use a .coop domain) Permissive licenses - various anarchistic philosophical positions Market anarchism is much more compatible with existing corporate dynamics so it's pretty easy to see why it's trending this way.
  - spiralpolitik 11y ago
    The dream of a GPL world only ever worked if the entire ecosystem was GPL and it was possible to derive a living from ecosystem. The revolution never happened. One could even argue that RMS' more civilized age never really existed outside of the MIT AI lab so it was doomed from the beginning. Due to his stubbornness in not accepting the realpolitik the savannah has now become a reservation that is shrinking daily as people abandon it for more liberal climes.
    - rimantas 11y ago
      In GPL world any user is a developer too. This might have been true at the begining, but it is very far from true now. That's what RMS failed and still fails to grasp.
      - Nononce 11y ago
        I think you've got it backwards; In GPL, every developer is a user. This becomes apparent when you see why the GPL came into existence and what it sets out to accomplish (Safe guarding users' freedoms at the expense of the developers').
        throwawaykf05 11y ago
        And GP's point is that a) statistically speaking, pretty much all of the users of software today are non-developers, and b) these users don't care about the freedoms that the GPL seeks to protect. Even in the small subset of users that are developers, the popularity of permissive licenses indicates that most would rather just use and open up source code without worrying about restrictions imposed by others or imposing restrictions on others out of some sense of morality. The upshot is that the GPL just creates additional friction for developers in the pursuit of ideals that, statistically speaking, nobody really cares about. This is why it is misguided.
        Nononce 11y ago
        I respectfully disagree. The primary purpose of the GPL is to insure that users have the freedom to modify and redistribute the software they use should they choose to do so. Whether the user does so or not is irreverent. That's why I don't think it's a matter of whether end users care, or how large of a percentage they form of the overall user base. Developers who decide to license their work under the GPL do so to safeguard their own freedom and the freedom of their users. To that end, I think the GPL hits its mark.
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  People make the mistake of assuming Stallman or the FSF cares about "market share".
  - dgellow 11y ago
    That's the correct response.
  - frankchn 11y ago
    They did at one point, or else they wouldn't have anointed the ECGS fork of GCC as the official version back in the day.

Richard Stallman, however, is correct. (I'm going to get that on a t-shirt, printed in block letters: "Stallman is correct.")

jordigh 11y ago
I would buy a shirt that said "Richard Stallman... was right :-(" with a frownie face and all.
geofft 11y ago
Isn't the argument above that he was wrong? He may have been morally right that free software is an inherent good over proprietary software, but that's sort of a given for this discussion. He was tactically wrong in taking an expansive view of both what free software licenses should enforce and what fell within their realm of enforcement. He was hoping that GCC would be so much better than the competition that people would use it despite it being GPL, and for a long while (e.g., NeXT's Objective-C patches) it was. But the GPL, especially the GPLv3, was perceived as way more onerous than Stallman expected it would be, and eventually it became worth people investing heavily in a competitor just to avoid the GPL. If he had aimed a little less high with the GPL and admitted a plugin architecture / documented IR for GCC earlier, then LLVM may never have taken off. Alternatively, he was tactically wrong in thinking that strong copyleft was required to achieve the goal of software freedom. Note that the clang in the NDK "is now a nearly pure upstream clang," not because they're required to, but because the pace of modern software development makes it genuinely easier to voluntarily submit changes upstream.
- pekk 11y ago
  If Apple takes a stance against GPL because they don't perceive it as in their commercial best interest, that doesn't mean Stallman was wrong even in a 'tactical' sense. You can't do anything about haters.
  - geofft 11y ago
    Of course Apple does not perceive the GPL as in their commercial best interest. Back when NeXT was writing what would eventually become Apple's toolchain, Steve Jobs tried to convince Stallman that he could come up with a plugin architecture and keep the Objective-C bit private. Stallman went to his lawyer and came back and said, no, you can't do that. Steve Jobs' perception, and NeXT/Apple's perception, never changed. What changed is that in the NeXT days, GCC was so much better that Apple said, we'll make the tradeoff of using GCC even though we don't want the GPL. A few years ago Apple said, we'll make the tradeoff of avoiding the GPL even though we want GCC. And they went and invested significant resources into LLVM. The GPL was meant to be a tool to get people who did not perceive free software as in their best interest to contribute to free software anyway. It might not have changed whether they were "haters" as a matter of opinion, but it was definitely intended to change their concrete actions. And it did -- for a very long time.
- techdragon 11y ago
  Morality is a hard thing to pin down. See the trolley problem if anyone reading this things morals are black and white. It's much easier to compare them philosophically. Commercial/ Proprietary - unrestricted free market capitalism Copyleft licenses - socialist (not communist, there's a difference people, learn it) / commercial cooperative (think farmers cooperatives and anyone who might use a .coop domain) Permissive licenses - various anarchistic philosophical positions Market anarchism is much more compatible with existing corporate dynamics so it's pretty easy to see why it's trending this way.
- spiralpolitik 11y ago
  The dream of a GPL world only ever worked if the entire ecosystem was GPL and it was possible to derive a living from ecosystem. The revolution never happened. One could even argue that RMS' more civilized age never really existed outside of the MIT AI lab so it was doomed from the beginning. Due to his stubbornness in not accepting the realpolitik the savannah has now become a reservation that is shrinking daily as people abandon it for more liberal climes.
  - rimantas 11y ago
    In GPL world any user is a developer too. This might have been true at the begining, but it is very far from true now. That's what RMS failed and still fails to grasp.
    - Nononce 11y ago
      I think you've got it backwards; In GPL, every developer is a user. This becomes apparent when you see why the GPL came into existence and what it sets out to accomplish (Safe guarding users' freedoms at the expense of the developers').
      - throwawaykf05 11y ago
        And GP's point is that a) statistically speaking, pretty much all of the users of software today are non-developers, and b) these users don't care about the freedoms that the GPL seeks to protect. Even in the small subset of users that are developers, the popularity of permissive licenses indicates that most would rather just use and open up source code without worrying about restrictions imposed by others or imposing restrictions on others out of some sense of morality. The upshot is that the GPL just creates additional friction for developers in the pursuit of ideals that, statistically speaking, nobody really cares about. This is why it is misguided.
        Nononce 11y ago
        I respectfully disagree. The primary purpose of the GPL is to insure that users have the freedom to modify and redistribute the software they use should they choose to do so. Whether the user does so or not is irreverent. That's why I don't think it's a matter of whether end users care, or how large of a percentage they form of the overall user base. Developers who decide to license their work under the GPL do so to safeguard their own freedom and the freedom of their users. To that end, I think the GPL hits its mark.
rpgmaker 11y ago
People make the mistake of assuming Stallman or the FSF cares about "market share".
- dgellow 11y ago
  That's the correct response.
- frankchn 11y ago
  They did at one point, or else they wouldn't have anointed the ECGS fork of GCC as the official version back in the day.