5 ms·

Honestly I grow tired of rms and his Ivory-Tower ideals. I'm sure that if I lived in my office, had no family, and someone paid me a salary to do nothing but g

by na85 10y ago

Honestly I grow tired of rms and his Ivory-Tower ideals. I'm sure that if I lived in my office, had no family, and someone paid me a salary to do nothing but give the same talk over and over, then I too would have lots of time to wax poetic about how freedom is more important than actually being able to use the software. But I don't. I have a job, and when I come home I have a family to pay attention to, so I don't have time to hack away at my desktop environment or perhaps my phone's OS. I'll just stick with Android, even though it is not strictly "free", because for me the choice is between nonfree and not having a phone.

aplummer 10y ago
I feel you missed the point of the article, they were finding a middle ground - pointing out proprietary software is sometimes better and that's ok.
BuuQu9hu 10y ago
http://replicant.us/ http://replicant.us/
zimpenfish 10y ago
RMS was "waxing poetic" about freedom long before people were paying him to give the "same talk over and over".
- douche 10y ago
  MIT pretty much paid him to fool around and tickle his fancies for years before that, though. I'm not knocking it, I wish I had that kind of freedom.
pavlov 10y ago
...for me the choice is between nonfree and not having a phone. Surely it would be better to have the free option too? That would just give you one more choice. That's why RMS takes the idealistic position. If no one does it, the available choices inevitably get watered down to "nonfree or nothing at all", as you put it. It's like human rights: the principled stance is important in itself and must avoid the appearance of corporate or government influence. You wouldn't want the American Civil Liberties Union to be controlled by Wal-Mart and ExxonMobil. For the same reason, we shouldn't want open source to be controlled by Google and Facebook.
- na85 10y ago
  Oh, absolutely. If given the choice between free software and functionally equivalent nonfree software, I'll choose the former. But in my line of work, the only real choice is proprietary software. Same for my phone, frankly. I'd love to live in the world rms lives in but most of the time free software just isn't good enough to be a viable option.
  - PeterisP 10y ago
    Even while it's not good enough to be a viable alternative, it does act as competition - it provides a "floor" of price/performance that noone can afford to breach and acts as a (weak, but still) limitation against a particular proprietary product exploiting a de facto monopoly position. Even if now the only real choice is one particular proprietary software package, then you probably can imagine some level of price increase and/or usage restriction where the currently poor free alternative would be worth considering, if you and others put some effort and/or money towards it instead of the proprietary licence - and the proprietary vendor can imagine this as well, so the existence of the free alternative by itself is putting a limit on how much they can exploit the market.
    - na85 10y ago
      Perhaps in some markets, you may be right. In aerospace there are very few free alternatives and most of the clients are large enterprises who can afford multi-thousand dollar license fees.
  - mschaef 10y ago
    > I'd love to live in the world rms lives in but most of the time free software just isn't good enough to be a viable option. I've made this argument before myself, but I wonder how true it really is. The reality is, in 2016, that it's easy to assemble a free software environment that's far above and beyond anything I'd have had access to back when I started computing. It's true that that fit and finish of the best 2016 FOSS software doesn't match the fit and finish of the 2016 proprietary software, but in many ways, it's more than match for 1995 era software. While that may seem like faint praise, it was easily possible to do good, significant work in that kind of environment.

by na85 10y ago

aplummer 10y ago

I feel you missed the point of the article, they were finding a middle ground - pointing out proprietary software is sometimes better and that's ok.

BuuQu9hu 10y ago

http://replicant.us/ http://replicant.us/

zimpenfish 10y ago

RMS was "waxing poetic" about freedom long before people were paying him to give the "same talk over and over".

douche 10y ago
MIT pretty much paid him to fool around and tickle his fancies for years before that, though. I'm not knocking it, I wish I had that kind of freedom.

pavlov 10y ago

...for me the choice is between nonfree and not having a phone. Surely it would be better to have the free option too? That would just give you one more choice. That's why RMS takes the idealistic position. If no one does it, the available choices inevitably get watered down to "nonfree or nothing at all", as you put it. It's like human rights: the principled stance is important in itself and must avoid the appearance of corporate or government influence. You wouldn't want the American Civil Liberties Union to be controlled by Wal-Mart and ExxonMobil. For the same reason, we shouldn't want open source to be controlled by Google and Facebook.

na85 10y ago
Oh, absolutely. If given the choice between free software and functionally equivalent nonfree software, I'll choose the former. But in my line of work, the only real choice is proprietary software. Same for my phone, frankly. I'd love to live in the world rms lives in but most of the time free software just isn't good enough to be a viable option.
- PeterisP 10y ago
  Even while it's not good enough to be a viable alternative, it does act as competition - it provides a "floor" of price/performance that noone can afford to breach and acts as a (weak, but still) limitation against a particular proprietary product exploiting a de facto monopoly position. Even if now the only real choice is one particular proprietary software package, then you probably can imagine some level of price increase and/or usage restriction where the currently poor free alternative would be worth considering, if you and others put some effort and/or money towards it instead of the proprietary licence - and the proprietary vendor can imagine this as well, so the existence of the free alternative by itself is putting a limit on how much they can exploit the market.
  - na85 10y ago
    Perhaps in some markets, you may be right. In aerospace there are very few free alternatives and most of the clients are large enterprises who can afford multi-thousand dollar license fees.
- mschaef 10y ago
  > I'd love to live in the world rms lives in but most of the time free software just isn't good enough to be a viable option. I've made this argument before myself, but I wonder how true it really is. The reality is, in 2016, that it's easy to assemble a free software environment that's far above and beyond anything I'd have had access to back when I started computing. It's true that that fit and finish of the best 2016 FOSS software doesn't match the fit and finish of the 2016 proprietary software, but in many ways, it's more than match for 1995 era software. While that may seem like faint praise, it was easily possible to do good, significant work in that kind of environment.