7 ms·

RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”

65 points by Tsiolkovsky 10y ago

legulere 10y ago
Or to paraphrase it: All other goals have to bow before the goal of everything being free software as defined by Richard Stallman. I also think that open source is nice, but by far it's not the most important thing there is to software.
- cpkpad 10y ago
  Or to paraphrase you: "I don't know how to read. Ouch. Big words hurt my brain. I know! It's too complex for me, so I'll mock it."
  - legulere 10y ago
    "Even worse, that grants nonfree software legitimacy." ⇒ "nonfree" software has no legitimacy, no matter what. This totally ignores that there might not be free software for that use case, the free software alternative might be worse (very often the case). This article totally ignores those concerns and thus depreciates them as less important. What you're doing is calling me an idiot, you could have at least tried to come up with a counter-argument.
    - PeterisP 10y ago
      The article doesn't ignore those concerns, but it makes an explicit statement that yes, in their opinion "nonfree" software has no legitimacy, no matter what and even then using, creating and improving free software should be done instead of using the better non-free alternative. What counter argument do you want? FSF explicitly states their position, which seems incompatible with your position, so they acknowledge that your position is what they want to fight against, you are their "political enemy" and ask you to not call yourself their ally/supporter or claim FSF endorsement, as some of the targeted companies do. It's a statement of values and goals, which are obviously different for different people and organizations.
      - legulere 10y ago
        > What counter argument do you want? I expect no counter argument or faulty ones if I'm right in my view, and good ones that change my view if I'm wrong. I don't expect to be attacked just by insults without any explanation why I'm supposed to be wrong. I just pointed out with my original comment that the FSF doesn't tolerate other definitions of liberties and doesn't care if it tramples on them on their way to "replace and eliminate"(from this article) everything that doesn't follow their definitions. It also puts its own cause above everything else. This seems pretty extremist and totalitarian to me
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- PeterisP 10y ago
  Exactly, to claim that you support FSF, you should support the goal of FSF which is that the four freedoms of software are more important than having more/better/different software without some of those freedoms. As RMS says, "I also think that open source is nice, but by far it's not the most important thing there is to software." is a valid viewpoint but it's against the goals of FSF (not mild support, but opposition), so RMS would kindly ask you to cease claiming any endorsement by FSF in this case.
dcgudeman 10y ago
I really appreciate what RMS has done as far as start a movement that I think has contributed greatly to the human existence but when he says things like "The basic point of the free software movement is that nonfree software is unjust and should not exist." I can't but seriously question his judgment. It's one thing to personally want to use free software, it's another to claim that nonfree software "should not exist". If one person writes nonfree software and another person voluntarily uses it, I don't think anything "wrong" has transpired. People should be free to offer software under whatever terms they desire likewise people should be able to consume software under whatever terms they are willing to agree to.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  That is the liberal perspective, but one radical perspective would be that unfree software causes significant harm to society as a whole despite individuals having the choice not to use it directly, and so should not exist. Note that radicals don't necessarily support passing laws to get what they want - the goal of most political radicalism is to cause a change in society, not to force society at gunpoint to do something it doesn't want to.
  - legulere 10y ago
    One can also see harm that the free software movement causes. RMS tried to prevent emacs from having code completion through clang, modularity in gcc and puts software following his definition of freedom before the software being able to fulfill its task in a good way.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      One could argue that a society in which people cared about free software would not require the free software movement to attempt to protect itself in such a manner, though. You can find many similar examples in other movements where the movement needs to protect itself from integration into the status quo without completing its goals.
- blazespin 10y ago
danso 10y ago
> There are organizations that proclaim support for free software or the GNU Project, and teach classes in use of nonfree software. It's possible that they do some other things that really support free software, but those classes certainly don't. On the contrary, they work directly against the free software movement by promoting the use of the nonfree software. That increases the magnitude of the practical problem it is our mission to correct. Just to throw out an extreme example for discussion: the Mozilla Foundation would seem to be one of the free-software organizations that RMS critiques. One initiative they've supported is Software Carpentry: http://software-carpentry.org/scf/partners/ http://software-carpentry.org/scf/partners/ One of Software Carpentry's packaged lessons is for MATLAB: http://software-carpentry.org/lessons/ http://software-carpentry.org/lessons/ To be fair, the current MATLAB lesson plan includes asides for how GNU Octave can be used...but the fact that the curriculum is titled "Programming with MATLAB" certainly counts as promotion of non-free software. Edit: by "extreme", I mean that Mozilla is in most people's minds a passionate advocate for free software, and the number of their affiliations with proprietary software lessons is extremely small as far as I can tell. Edit 2: FWIW, RMS's definition of non-free software may be much more expansive than most people's: https://stallman.org/airbnb.html https://stallman.org/airbnb.html > Airbnb requires you to run nonfree software (an app, or Javascript). It puts you in a data base easily available to Big Brother (just like a hotel). JavaScript is many things, but nonfree isn't one of them.
- Svip 10y ago
  Maybe he means the JavaScript code executed on Airbnb's website is not licenced under a free licence and thus nonfree?
  - danso 10y ago
    Yeah that's probably right: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html Ignore my tangent.
  - icen 10y ago
    Here is RMS' piece on nonfree javascript: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap
macmac 10y ago
Which organizations is he talking about?
- quantumtremor 10y ago
  My first guess was RedHat. From skimming through https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/all-courses-exams https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/all-courses-exam..., it seems all of the courses use open source software, that might not be libre. For example I'm guessing some of Puppet's software are not libre.
willvarfar 10y ago
Metacomment: a few years ago anything by RMS would have been jumped on within minutes of posting with lots of comments against him and his principles. Is he now being looked at in a different light by the wider software development community?
- cpach 10y ago
  I don’t have any stats to back this up, but my impression is that most software developers doesn’t care that much about the FSF and RMS. Lots of people use free/libre software, of course. It’s kinda hard to avoid these days :)
- twblalock 10y ago
  I work at a startup that uses a lot of open-source software. I would be willing to bet that fewer than 25% of my colleagues know who RMS is.
- danso 10y ago
  Not sure what timezone you're in but it's about 4AM US Eastern time.
  - willvarfar 10y ago
    Hmm, I asked since my mental model of the 'programming community' that I osmosify by reading comments on these kind of websites detects a slight shift on the RMS popularity front over the last year or so. I feel he's coming in from the cold a bit. I am mostly browsing HN during my european daytime. Lots of people seem to comment on stories during my daytime. Do you mean his detractors are predominantly American? Do you think they have a particular political allegiance too?
    - cocotino 10y ago
      I think people are just tired of criticising him. I personally am against him, but it bores me to discuss the same stuff all over again, especially when it's "meta" as you say and can be deemed off topic. (Not from the US)
Rexxar 10y ago
In the RMS world you are not good if you support some free software. You have to support them exclusively From the link: The basic point of the free software movement is that nonfree software is unjust and should not exist. Personally, I completely disagree with this.
- Sylos 10y ago
  That's not true. He for example thinks it's a good thing that Steam is available on Linux, as it makes it viable for people to come into the Linux world and from there, they usually end up using more free software. Of course, he doesn't like Steam either, and would like to get rid of it eventually, but it's the lesser of two evils for the time being.
  - paulryanrogers 10y ago
    Isn't that why he also supported Gnash to replace Flash: as a form of bridge? Aside: Interesting that Apple's insistence on not supporting Flash became a bigger influence. Albeit motivated more by battery drain than ideology.
- kardos 10y ago
  Think of it like free speech and see if you still disagree.
  - adrianratnapala 10y ago
    Well yes. I support free speech, and also support the ability of people to promise to keep secrets. If you don't think that is a fair analogy, then maybe you can start by explaining how the heck the free-speech to free software analogy works in the first place.
    - kardos 10y ago
      The analogy is that non-free software is akin to censorship. Free speech for everybody is the ideal, in reality we have yet to achieve that (see for example China), and approving of censorship is a step backwards. Free software for everyone is the ideal, we have not reached that goal, and approving of non-free software hinders progress.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I converted this year to using Linux on all of my computers, and with some compatibility of FSF and Apache 2 licenses, this is 'easy' to do (e.g., the community version of IntelliJ is Apache 2, so a decent IDE slips into my mostly GNU based working and writing environment). I like to wear FSF tee shirts, and I feel like I am being true to the cause, even if I do have an iPad and Apple TV to watch Netflix. I am a member of the FSF and I personally feel like it is OK to have these non-free devices around as long as my working and writing environment is libre software.
quitspamming 10y ago
It's articles like this that make it very hard to continue to take RMS seriously, and that is a huge shame. He's brilliant and has contributed so much. Things he created are the reason I get a paycheck. That said, this tribal religious you're-either-100%-with-us-or-you're-against-us and I'm going to "condemn you" ("nor have anything to do with it, nor even talk about it except with condemnation.") attitude makes it almost impossible to be sympathetic to his cause and puts him on the level of other rigid religious fundamentalist radicals. If he IS talking about Red Hat here, as others have theorized, then he is worse than a fanatic, he's a self destructive jerk. Red Hat just recently came out and said despite other companies abandoning GCC for Clang (See Google, Apple, FreeBSD, Android, even the Linux Foundation) they were still investing in GCC. Without GCC there is no more "GNU slash Linux" it's just Linux at that point. There are other C libraries, other userlands, but Linux still needs GCC and Red Hat is backing GCC. Keep condemning allies like Red Hat and soon they'll wonder why they even try to be your friend. As soon as llvm.linuxfoundation.org gets Linux written in C instead of GCC, there will be no more GNU slash Linux or GNU plus Linux or whatever RMS wants it called. FreeBSD, Android, and then Linux will be fully capable of ditching GNU, FSF, and RMS and GPL'd software (save for the kernel which is GPLv2 and only nominally so, they never actually sue for violations like binary blobs) altogether. And who would be sad? Linux didn't "win" because of the philosophical views of RMS. Linux won because it worked. What happens when Linux, and companies like Red Hat, don't need this kind of garbage anymore?

65 points by Tsiolkovsky 10y ago

Or to paraphrase it: All other goals have to bow before the goal of everything being free software as defined by Richard Stallman. I also think that open source is nice, but by far it's not the most important thing there is to software.

cpkpad 10y ago
Or to paraphrase you: "I don't know how to read. Ouch. Big words hurt my brain. I know! It's too complex for me, so I'll mock it."
- legulere 10y ago
  "Even worse, that grants nonfree software legitimacy." ⇒ "nonfree" software has no legitimacy, no matter what. This totally ignores that there might not be free software for that use case, the free software alternative might be worse (very often the case). This article totally ignores those concerns and thus depreciates them as less important. What you're doing is calling me an idiot, you could have at least tried to come up with a counter-argument.
  - PeterisP 10y ago
    The article doesn't ignore those concerns, but it makes an explicit statement that yes, in their opinion "nonfree" software has no legitimacy, no matter what and even then using, creating and improving free software should be done instead of using the better non-free alternative. What counter argument do you want? FSF explicitly states their position, which seems incompatible with your position, so they acknowledge that your position is what they want to fight against, you are their "political enemy" and ask you to not call yourself their ally/supporter or claim FSF endorsement, as some of the targeted companies do. It's a statement of values and goals, which are obviously different for different people and organizations.
    - legulere 10y ago
      > What counter argument do you want? I expect no counter argument or faulty ones if I'm right in my view, and good ones that change my view if I'm wrong. I don't expect to be attacked just by insults without any explanation why I'm supposed to be wrong. I just pointed out with my original comment that the FSF doesn't tolerate other definitions of liberties and doesn't care if it tramples on them on their way to "replace and eliminate"(from this article) everything that doesn't follow their definitions. It also puts its own cause above everything else. This seems pretty extremist and totalitarian to me
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
PeterisP 10y ago
Exactly, to claim that you support FSF, you should support the goal of FSF which is that the four freedoms of software are more important than having more/better/different software without some of those freedoms. As RMS says, "I also think that open source is nice, but by far it's not the most important thing there is to software." is a valid viewpoint but it's against the goals of FSF (not mild support, but opposition), so RMS would kindly ask you to cease claiming any endorsement by FSF in this case.

dcgudeman 10y ago

I really appreciate what RMS has done as far as start a movement that I think has contributed greatly to the human existence but when he says things like "The basic point of the free software movement is that nonfree software is unjust and should not exist." I can't but seriously question his judgment. It's one thing to personally want to use free software, it's another to claim that nonfree software "should not exist". If one person writes nonfree software and another person voluntarily uses it, I don't think anything "wrong" has transpired. People should be free to offer software under whatever terms they desire likewise people should be able to consume software under whatever terms they are willing to agree to.

vertex-four 10y ago
That is the liberal perspective, but one radical perspective would be that unfree software causes significant harm to society as a whole despite individuals having the choice not to use it directly, and so should not exist. Note that radicals don't necessarily support passing laws to get what they want - the goal of most political radicalism is to cause a change in society, not to force society at gunpoint to do something it doesn't want to.
- legulere 10y ago
  One can also see harm that the free software movement causes. RMS tried to prevent emacs from having code completion through clang, modularity in gcc and puts software following his definition of freedom before the software being able to fulfill its task in a good way.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    One could argue that a society in which people cared about free software would not require the free software movement to attempt to protect itself in such a manner, though. You can find many similar examples in other movements where the movement needs to protect itself from integration into the status quo without completing its goals.
blazespin 10y ago

danso 10y ago

> There are organizations that proclaim support for free software or the GNU Project, and teach classes in use of nonfree software. It's possible that they do some other things that really support free software, but those classes certainly don't. On the contrary, they work directly against the free software movement by promoting the use of the nonfree software. That increases the magnitude of the practical problem it is our mission to correct. Just to throw out an extreme example for discussion: the Mozilla Foundation would seem to be one of the free-software organizations that RMS critiques. One initiative they've supported is Software Carpentry: http://software-carpentry.org/scf/partners/ http://software-carpentry.org/scf/partners/ One of Software Carpentry's packaged lessons is for MATLAB: http://software-carpentry.org/lessons/ http://software-carpentry.org/lessons/ To be fair, the current MATLAB lesson plan includes asides for how GNU Octave can be used...but the fact that the curriculum is titled "Programming with MATLAB" certainly counts as promotion of non-free software. Edit: by "extreme", I mean that Mozilla is in most people's minds a passionate advocate for free software, and the number of their affiliations with proprietary software lessons is extremely small as far as I can tell. Edit 2: FWIW, RMS's definition of non-free software may be much more expansive than most people's: https://stallman.org/airbnb.html https://stallman.org/airbnb.html > Airbnb requires you to run nonfree software (an app, or Javascript). It puts you in a data base easily available to Big Brother (just like a hotel). JavaScript is many things, but nonfree isn't one of them.

Svip 10y ago
Maybe he means the JavaScript code executed on Airbnb's website is not licenced under a free licence and thus nonfree?
- danso 10y ago
  Yeah that's probably right: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html Ignore my tangent.
- icen 10y ago
  Here is RMS' piece on nonfree javascript: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap

macmac 10y ago

Which organizations is he talking about?

quantumtremor 10y ago
My first guess was RedHat. From skimming through https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/all-courses-exams https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/all-courses-exam..., it seems all of the courses use open source software, that might not be libre. For example I'm guessing some of Puppet's software are not libre.

willvarfar 10y ago

Metacomment: a few years ago anything by RMS would have been jumped on within minutes of posting with lots of comments against him and his principles. Is he now being looked at in a different light by the wider software development community?

cpach 10y ago
I don’t have any stats to back this up, but my impression is that most software developers doesn’t care that much about the FSF and RMS. Lots of people use free/libre software, of course. It’s kinda hard to avoid these days :)
twblalock 10y ago
I work at a startup that uses a lot of open-source software. I would be willing to bet that fewer than 25% of my colleagues know who RMS is.
danso 10y ago
Not sure what timezone you're in but it's about 4AM US Eastern time.
- willvarfar 10y ago
  Hmm, I asked since my mental model of the 'programming community' that I osmosify by reading comments on these kind of websites detects a slight shift on the RMS popularity front over the last year or so. I feel he's coming in from the cold a bit. I am mostly browsing HN during my european daytime. Lots of people seem to comment on stories during my daytime. Do you mean his detractors are predominantly American? Do you think they have a particular political allegiance too?
  - cocotino 10y ago
    I think people are just tired of criticising him. I personally am against him, but it bores me to discuss the same stuff all over again, especially when it's "meta" as you say and can be deemed off topic. (Not from the US)

Rexxar 10y ago

In the RMS world you are not good if you support some free software. You have to support them exclusively From the link: The basic point of the free software movement is that nonfree software is unjust and should not exist. Personally, I completely disagree with this.

Sylos 10y ago
That's not true. He for example thinks it's a good thing that Steam is available on Linux, as it makes it viable for people to come into the Linux world and from there, they usually end up using more free software. Of course, he doesn't like Steam either, and would like to get rid of it eventually, but it's the lesser of two evils for the time being.
- paulryanrogers 10y ago
  Isn't that why he also supported Gnash to replace Flash: as a form of bridge? Aside: Interesting that Apple's insistence on not supporting Flash became a bigger influence. Albeit motivated more by battery drain than ideology.
kardos 10y ago
Think of it like free speech and see if you still disagree.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  Well yes. I support free speech, and also support the ability of people to promise to keep secrets. If you don't think that is a fair analogy, then maybe you can start by explaining how the heck the free-speech to free software analogy works in the first place.
  - kardos 10y ago
    The analogy is that non-free software is akin to censorship. Free speech for everybody is the ideal, in reality we have yet to achieve that (see for example China), and approving of censorship is a step backwards. Free software for everyone is the ideal, we have not reached that goal, and approving of non-free software hinders progress.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I converted this year to using Linux on all of my computers, and with some compatibility of FSF and Apache 2 licenses, this is 'easy' to do (e.g., the community version of IntelliJ is Apache 2, so a decent IDE slips into my mostly GNU based working and writing environment). I like to wear FSF tee shirts, and I feel like I am being true to the cause, even if I do have an iPad and Apple TV to watch Netflix. I am a member of the FSF and I personally feel like it is OK to have these non-free devices around as long as my working and writing environment is libre software.

quitspamming 10y ago

It's articles like this that make it very hard to continue to take RMS seriously, and that is a huge shame. He's brilliant and has contributed so much. Things he created are the reason I get a paycheck. That said, this tribal religious you're-either-100%-with-us-or-you're-against-us and I'm going to "condemn you" ("nor have anything to do with it, nor even talk about it except with condemnation.") attitude makes it almost impossible to be sympathetic to his cause and puts him on the level of other rigid religious fundamentalist radicals. If he IS talking about Red Hat here, as others have theorized, then he is worse than a fanatic, he's a self destructive jerk. Red Hat just recently came out and said despite other companies abandoning GCC for Clang (See Google, Apple, FreeBSD, Android, even the Linux Foundation) they were still investing in GCC. Without GCC there is no more "GNU slash Linux" it's just Linux at that point. There are other C libraries, other userlands, but Linux still needs GCC and Red Hat is backing GCC. Keep condemning allies like Red Hat and soon they'll wonder why they even try to be your friend. As soon as llvm.linuxfoundation.org gets Linux written in C instead of GCC, there will be no more GNU slash Linux or GNU plus Linux or whatever RMS wants it called. FreeBSD, Android, and then Linux will be fully capable of ditching GNU, FSF, and RMS and GPL'd software (save for the kernel which is GPLv2 and only nominally so, they never actually sue for violations like binary blobs) altogether. And who would be sad? Linux didn't "win" because of the philosophical views of RMS. Linux won because it worked. What happens when Linux, and companies like Red Hat, don't need this kind of garbage anymore?