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"I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreati

"I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people." Thank God Stallman helped all of those sick kids with Malaria in Africa with by giving them GIMP and GCC. Way better than the billions of dollars and thousands of vaccinations Bill and Melinda Gates gave to them. In all seriousness, if we're going to argue the ethics of charging for software,at the end of the day who has done more good? Bill Gates who made himself rich, gave thousands of people jobs, created products that made the lives of millions of other people easier (all snarking about Windows and Office aside, they ultimately made computing more accessible to everyone), and has created the world's most well-funded charity which actually goes out and does good, like giving vaccinations to sick kids around the planet. When I compare the more calculus of capitalism and propreitary software against Stallman's dogmatism, it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good.

kiba 16y ago
When I compare the more calculus of capitalism and propreitary software against Stallman's dogmatism, it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good. Free software have nothing to do much with capitalism. Stallman probably agree with the idea of competition improving life. What he disagree with is what he called combat.(Or what I least remember from reading one of his essay) Rather than improve over your competitors and sell great stuff to customers, you seek to annihilate your competitors by unethical means and gain control over your customers.
- rick888 16y ago
  "Free software have nothing to do much with capitalism." So why does the GPL make it so difficult to make any kind of money. Many of the supporters are also against any and all forms of commercial software. "What he disagree with is what he called combat.(Or what I least remember from reading one of his essay) Rather than improve over your competitors and sell great stuff to customers, you seek to annihilate your competitors by unethical means and gain control over your customers." His answer to this is to force everybody to the same level (IE: as soon as a company improves their software, all competitors should get those improvements).
  - kiba 16y ago
    So why does the GPL make it so difficult to make any kind of money. Many of the supporters are also against any and all forms of commercial software. How many Free software supporters did you count said they're explicitly against profiting from software? Beside, if GPL make it difficult to earn money, than it's a pure side effect.
    - rick888 16y ago
      "How many Free software supporters did you count said they're explicitly against profiting from software?" Do I really need to keep count? Look at any discussion involving the GPL. "Beside, if GPL make it difficult to earn money, than it's a pure side effect." A side effect? I just don't believe it. Stallman and many people from the community are very focal about being anti-corporation and anti-profit. If you can't see this, then I don't know what to tell you.
      - kiba 16y ago
        Do I really need to keep count? Look at any discussion involving the GPL. I have not detect any anti-business bias in the discussion where I was involved. I didn't hear free supporters hating the profit motives in the time I been around. A side effect? I just don't believe it. Stallman and many people from the community are very focal about being anti-corporation and anti-profit. If you can't see this, then I don't know what to tell you. The FSF sold software packages in the past. Stallman keep saying that he isn't opposed to software developers not being able to make a living. Ever consider that your views of the world might be colored about what you think you see in Stallman and the others? Now, it seem that you and I hold the same views about business and the profit motives. The only difference is that I don't see free software as antagonist to the profit motives and the ability to make a living, partly because I actually try to make money off free software and free content.
  - aardvark 16y ago
    Red Hat is making pretty good money supporting GPL'd software, over $700 million in FY 2010.
koeselitz 16y ago
You're comparing apples and oranges, I think. Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or uninformed; but what does that have to do with software? Or freedom? Their being tremendous philanthropists has little to nothing to do with whether or not the way they earned their money is ethical -- and I hope that, in this day and age, it's clear that it's not only possible but easy to get money in a way that isn't ethical. You can mock RMS's contributions all you want, but the fact is that he has done a good deal for the world. He created the basis and licensing for the operating system that's been on more devices than any other operating system that's ever existed, that's run on more processors than any other operating system that's ever existed. This thing he started is the basis for the bulk of the internet, for the architecture that runs web sites; people don't give it this credit often enough, but Gnu/Linux in many ways has made the modern technological world possible, and without things like GCC and the standard utilities, it would have died a sad death in 1991. Heck, just for his work on Gnu AWK alone, I think Richard Stallman deserves a few geek medals. And finally, his Gnu Public License and its derivatives (the Apache License et al) have been instrumental in filling the world with an open architecture that makes many of the amazing things we're able to do now possible. It is possible to admire Bill Gates for his humanitarian work while believing that much of his Microsoft legacy has been bad for software and for freedom in general. I know Stallman can seem like a cranky old man, but he's more careful and thoughtful than you're giving him credit for. When people ask him whether Microsoft (or any company) is "evil," he usually says that you can't say that a whole company is evil, and you have to think about particular things they've done. I believe that his argument that some of Microsoft's business practices are unethical is sound; and while I think Bill and Melinda Gates are wonderful philanthropists, that doesn't mean that I have to think that they're great for software, too.
- avar 16y ago
  > Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or uninformed. Their foundation has done a lot of good, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Why does it have all that money in the first place? Well, mostly because Microsoft managed to work itself into a monopoly position with dirty tactics, and the proliferation of their own proprietary file formats. This meant that millions of people and organizations had to pay the Microsoft tax, which was later used to start the B&M Gates Foundation. How many millions of US$ would those people have donated to charity if their budgets hadn't been constrained by purchasing Microsoft software? Some of them were probably African countries that could have used that money to buy vaccines 10 years ago. Don't get me wrong, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing some good work now, but to only look at their current donations is to only see the tip of the iceberg.
nphase 16y ago
When I compare the more calculus of capitalism and propreitary software against Stallman's dogmatism, it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good. That's what I've always believed - if you want to do any sort of significant and impactful good in this world, you have to have capital. I can't help but give Gates the nod here when it comes to the greater good.
Qz 16y ago
it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good. It's a mighty big leap from the charity of Bill Gates to the essential moral quality of capitalism.
ynniv 16y ago
it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good. That is a heavy statement, and highly contextual. I expect it to be popular in this forum where people view technology as a way to make life better, but keep in mind that strong control over technology can do amazing evil more easily than it can meager good. Gates' philanthropy may appeal to you, but only because as individuals we cannot fathom the whole of an industry. Imagine that for every dollar of aid sent to Africa, one thousand dollars have been spent on extravagance and inefficiency. Maybe not by Gates himself, but certainly by the whole of the industry he profited from. The last ten years of technological progress have largely been run on Linux, mostly as a cost saving tool but also due to the merits of Linux. The efficiency gains are enormous, much larger than if every computer needed a buggy, licensed copy of Windows that automatically updated in the middle of your slideshow (happened in the office yesterday). Compare the revenue that Microsoft would have made to the idea that an operating system could be free-as-in-beer, and you might have a different perspective of the meager billions that Gates has put to good use. We detonate more of our tax money in anger every year than he will ever use to help the poor and needy.
- jodrellblank 16y ago
  Fundamental attribution error - rebooting in the middle of a presentation is not an inherent property in Windows. You could have configured Windows Update to not do that. (I'm guessing it was "do it x minutes after bootup", or similar). Especially in a discussion mentioning Linux, configuring a piece of software to behave how you want should be a basic sort of thing to do. The efficiency gains are enormous It was so much more efficient the other day when I had to cobble together a bash script to poll MySQL to show running queries, then realise it wasn't running fast enough, switch on query logging, find a reference telling me SIGHUP doesn't cause MySQL to reload config files, restart the database, run some tests, disable the logging, restar the database again. I was so pleased I couldn't just open SQL Server Profiler/Tracer and see live database activity in a couple of mouse clicks and no restarts. The efficiency gains are arguable and situation (and person) dependent.
- coliveira 16y ago
  Most of the new technology has been run on Linux because Linux is an operating system for programmers. Windows is an operating system for consumers. These are different concepts, that explain why programmers love Linux so much, and why normal people hate it and use Windows/MacOS instead.
mmphosis 16y ago
I think that Gate's work of software and philanthropy has been both beneficial and detrimental. Call me a sick kid, but I would deeply question some of the so-called "philanthropy" of the Gates Foundation. http://www.lavidalocavore.org/diary/3059/gates-foundation-monsanto http://www.lavidalocavore.org/diary/3059/gates-foundation-mo... Stallman has given us GCC which is free in the many senses of the word free. The Microsoft C compiler has been good too, but it comes with strings attached, just like vaccinations and bio-tech. "Alone, I have seen many marvellous things, none of which are true."
- statictype 16y ago
  The Microsoft C compiler has been good too, but it comes with strings attached, just like vaccinations and bio-tech. What are these strings?
  - smcl 16y ago
    Before you can sit down and use VC++ you need to have already shelled out money for a windows license.
poet 16y ago
Let's put aside the specific instance of Gates/Stallman and extend your argument to the general case. People in the philanthropic-billionaire camp usually only exist in countries with basic rights that roughly approximate those in the civil liberty camp. Consider the wealthiest charitable foundations [1]. The only outlier is a foundation from the UAE (whose endowment is a relatively small percentage of the sum). This is only a basic analysis, but I hope you get the gist of my argument: you can't naively separate the contributions of businessmen and civil rights activists; it is a mutualistic relationship. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_charitable_foundations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_charitable_f...
- isamuel 16y ago
  I don't know, but it seems more likely to me that the causal relationship runs in the other direction: a society is likely to become more free as the median resident becomes more prosperous.
  - jbooth 16y ago
    Well, in that case, you're stubbornly wrong about things. The US was and is far more liberal than most countries, and prosperity has followed liberalism (not democrat/republican liberalism, dictator/freedom liberalism) in every case where freedom has been allowed to prosper.
dman 16y ago
While I might not agree with Stallman on a lot of things he is my hero for championing the cause of a computer where you can understand things on most layers of the stack. Comprehensibility of the underlying system is an important side effect of Free as in freedom.
- SkyMarshal 16y ago
  Agreed. I've learned much more about computers and computing using Linux for a relatively short time than from years of Windows. Such a gift.
SkyMarshal 16y ago
When RMS made his decision, BG was just another robber baron. Nobody knew what BG would do with his money back then. It's only in hindsight that we know he became a great philanthropist. EG, we can't judge RMS's decision then based on what BG later became.
moxiemk1 16y ago
Stallman's words are framed by his belief that freedom (as he defines it) is more important than doing the job. That is why he isn't giving proprietary vaccines to sick children.
patrickaljord 16y ago
> Thank God Stallman helped all of those sick kids with Malaria in Africa with by giving them GIMP and GCC. >Way better than the billions of dollars and thousands of vaccinations Bill and Melinda Gates gave to them. RMS and the free and open source community have given way more billions of dollars and jobs that Gates ever has. Let me explain. Many governments have switched to Gnu/Linux and are saving billions of dollars each year for the last ten years such as Brazil ($1 billion per year http://www.brazzil.com/2004/html/articles/mar04/p107mar04.htm http://www.brazzil.com/2004/html/articles/mar04/p107mar04.ht...). Given that many governments have switched to gnu/linux and free and open software, that's billions of dollar saved each year for the last 5 to ten years. Those are billions that can be spent on health, education, employment and more, it's an invaluable gift to humanity. I know Bill Gates fortune doesn't exceed $50 billions so I'll let you do the math. RMS and the free software world have given way more to the world than Bill Gates ever will. And Free Software will continue to give while Bill's fortunes will soon be over. > In all seriousness, if we're going to argue the ethics of charging for software,at the end of the day who has done more good? See above. > Bill Gates who made himself rich, gave thousands of people jobs, created products that made the lives of millions of other people easier Free and Open Source software give millions of jobs too. I'd say even more especially with the internet. Do you think Google could have been done without Gnu/Linux when they needed to install thousands of servers and didn't have yet the money to pay licenses? How about the internet? It's all free/open source software, a way bigger revolution than the PC which was a boring work machine before for most people. > When I compare the more calculus of capitalism and propreitary software against Stallman's dogmatism, it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good Well, think and try to calculate again. Gates' done way less.
- tzs 16y ago
  Dead people can't use free software. Nothing you've cited comes anywhere near matching or exceeding the good the Gates Foundation as done with its global health initiatives.
- rick888 16y ago
  "Many governments have switched to Gnu/Linux and are saving billions of dollars each year for the last ten years such as Brazil" It's funny how you can make the argument about money that "would have been spent". Many open source zealots (and Stallman himself) talk about how the software industry can't equate piracy to dollars people would have spent. Why should this be any different? Software licenses are also a very small part of the entire cost. The biggest costs are support (this is how most open source companies make their money). Even if governments had saved as much money as you want us to believe, I seriously doubt it would go into healthcare, education, and employment. "Do you think Google could have been done without Gnu/Linux when they needed to install thousands of servers and didn't have yet the money to pay licenses?" There are other variants of unix that have even less restrictive licenses. BSD comes to mind. Gnu/Linux was a means to an end. "It's all free/open source software, a way bigger revolution than the PC which was a boring work machine before for most people." Most users don't use a variant of linux on their desktop. Microsoft brought computers in every home and made computers "interesting". "Well, think and try to calculate again. Gates' done way less." Gates has proof that he has helped the poor with billions of dollars. Stallman has possibilities and no direct proof of anything.
jodrellblank 16y ago
In all seriousness, if we're going to argue the ethics of charging for software Which RMS isn't, he's arguing the ethics of restricting freedom. Which means he'd probably disagree with your claim "[Microsoft] created products that made the lives of millions of other people easier" and frame it as a negative not a positive. Bill Gates made his money restricting the freedom of hundreds of millions of people, from which he bought a huge house and then gave some of the remainder back to the world. Freedom is nothing without survival, but stealing freedom from some to buy survival for others, at a personal profit, is not clear cut moral or good.
jacquesm 16y ago
I respectfully very much disagree with your assessment. The only reason you can write that is because there is a dollar value attached to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, which in turn allows you to measure how much money is being pumped in to those projects. But the effects of open source on the way the third world is operating are much harder to quantify, it could very well outweigh the effects of the money that goes in to helping those sick kids with Malaria, by enabling a solution to the problems around them rather than just curing a disease they've got. Both are good, both have a place in this world, don't take the easy way out and use the money as the yardstick, and no, capitalism is not more or less moral than open source and does not do more good, after all for every Bill Gates there are lots of Larry Ellissons.
Retric 16y ago
Bill G cost the world far far more than he donated. Lost productivity in the first world = less money = less giving. But, 30 billion in chump change is a lot easier to locate than 100's of billions in economic harm. PS: Consider how much time/money was wasted because IE tried to avoid standards compliance. IMO, the world would have been far better off if MS had spent an extra billion making better software and Bill never donated a single cent.
elblanco 16y ago
"I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people." Bang! Nailed it. This I think is the source of all problems in the friction between open source philosophies and the general populace. At his heart, RMS is an economic theorist, not a social or technological one. This is because software takes time to make, and time = money. Yet he continuously fails to understand this because he's never personally had to feed himself with the fruit of his daily labors. In RMS's mind, making money from your effort = mistreating people. The analogies between RMS and various communist thinkers all derive from the simple fact that none of them ever had to feed themselves in that way and simply don't understand how basic economics work and all come up with various economic ideals that simply aren't modeled on how the world works. By his model, all people have to do is write software, give away all their labor for free to be "ethical" and then feed themselves off of reward payouts and speaking engagement fees (or some other mysterious source of money RMS has left unspecified because he simply doesn't know how people actually make money in the real world). This is clearly a model that doesn't scale beyond maybe a few dozen people on the planet. The rest of us need to eat, arguing that we are bad people because we demand our supper after a day of work is what makes RMS's arguments ultimately unethical. He would rather people starve to death than charge for software -- this is ultimately what his equation balances out to. If I ignore this type of prattling nonsense, I have to say that RMS has been on the balance a force for good in the world. But he's fantastically out of touch and seems perfectly oblivious to it. Now, if he changed his message and said "it's a good and useful thing, it's 'nice' for people to release free software, and we all can benefit from sharing and pooling our labor together" I don't think anybody would have a problem with him. But like many here have said, RMS represents the extremist goal posts of the idea, and on the balance, that is a good thing, just so long as everybody is aware that a world at the end of the field is not one conducive to people eating.

kiba 16y ago

When I compare the more calculus of capitalism and propreitary software against Stallman's dogmatism, it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good. Free software have nothing to do much with capitalism. Stallman probably agree with the idea of competition improving life. What he disagree with is what he called combat.(Or what I least remember from reading one of his essay) Rather than improve over your competitors and sell great stuff to customers, you seek to annihilate your competitors by unethical means and gain control over your customers.

rick888 16y ago
"Free software have nothing to do much with capitalism." So why does the GPL make it so difficult to make any kind of money. Many of the supporters are also against any and all forms of commercial software. "What he disagree with is what he called combat.(Or what I least remember from reading one of his essay) Rather than improve over your competitors and sell great stuff to customers, you seek to annihilate your competitors by unethical means and gain control over your customers." His answer to this is to force everybody to the same level (IE: as soon as a company improves their software, all competitors should get those improvements).
- kiba 16y ago
  So why does the GPL make it so difficult to make any kind of money. Many of the supporters are also against any and all forms of commercial software. How many Free software supporters did you count said they're explicitly against profiting from software? Beside, if GPL make it difficult to earn money, than it's a pure side effect.
  - rick888 16y ago
    "How many Free software supporters did you count said they're explicitly against profiting from software?" Do I really need to keep count? Look at any discussion involving the GPL. "Beside, if GPL make it difficult to earn money, than it's a pure side effect." A side effect? I just don't believe it. Stallman and many people from the community are very focal about being anti-corporation and anti-profit. If you can't see this, then I don't know what to tell you.
    - kiba 16y ago
      Do I really need to keep count? Look at any discussion involving the GPL. I have not detect any anti-business bias in the discussion where I was involved. I didn't hear free supporters hating the profit motives in the time I been around. A side effect? I just don't believe it. Stallman and many people from the community are very focal about being anti-corporation and anti-profit. If you can't see this, then I don't know what to tell you. The FSF sold software packages in the past. Stallman keep saying that he isn't opposed to software developers not being able to make a living. Ever consider that your views of the world might be colored about what you think you see in Stallman and the others? Now, it seem that you and I hold the same views about business and the profit motives. The only difference is that I don't see free software as antagonist to the profit motives and the ability to make a living, partly because I actually try to make money off free software and free content.
- aardvark 16y ago
  Red Hat is making pretty good money supporting GPL'd software, over $700 million in FY 2010.

koeselitz 16y ago

You're comparing apples and oranges, I think. Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or uninformed; but what does that have to do with software? Or freedom? Their being tremendous philanthropists has little to nothing to do with whether or not the way they earned their money is ethical -- and I hope that, in this day and age, it's clear that it's not only possible but easy to get money in a way that isn't ethical. You can mock RMS's contributions all you want, but the fact is that he has done a good deal for the world. He created the basis and licensing for the operating system that's been on more devices than any other operating system that's ever existed, that's run on more processors than any other operating system that's ever existed. This thing he started is the basis for the bulk of the internet, for the architecture that runs web sites; people don't give it this credit often enough, but Gnu/Linux in many ways has made the modern technological world possible, and without things like GCC and the standard utilities, it would have died a sad death in 1991. Heck, just for his work on Gnu AWK alone, I think Richard Stallman deserves a few geek medals. And finally, his Gnu Public License and its derivatives (the Apache License et al) have been instrumental in filling the world with an open architecture that makes many of the amazing things we're able to do now possible. It is possible to admire Bill Gates for his humanitarian work while believing that much of his Microsoft legacy has been bad for software and for freedom in general. I know Stallman can seem like a cranky old man, but he's more careful and thoughtful than you're giving him credit for. When people ask him whether Microsoft (or any company) is "evil," he usually says that you can't say that a whole company is evil, and you have to think about particular things they've done. I believe that his argument that some of Microsoft's business practices are unethical is sound; and while I think Bill and Melinda Gates are wonderful philanthropists, that doesn't mean that I have to think that they're great for software, too.

avar 16y ago
> Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or uninformed. Their foundation has done a lot of good, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Why does it have all that money in the first place? Well, mostly because Microsoft managed to work itself into a monopoly position with dirty tactics, and the proliferation of their own proprietary file formats. This meant that millions of people and organizations had to pay the Microsoft tax, which was later used to start the B&M Gates Foundation. How many millions of US$ would those people have donated to charity if their budgets hadn't been constrained by purchasing Microsoft software? Some of them were probably African countries that could have used that money to buy vaccines 10 years ago. Don't get me wrong, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing some good work now, but to only look at their current donations is to only see the tip of the iceberg.

nphase 16y ago

When I compare the more calculus of capitalism and propreitary software against Stallman's dogmatism, it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good. That's what I've always believed - if you want to do any sort of significant and impactful good in this world, you have to have capital. I can't help but give Gates the nod here when it comes to the greater good.

Qz 16y ago

it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good. It's a mighty big leap from the charity of Bill Gates to the essential moral quality of capitalism.

ynniv 16y ago

it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good. That is a heavy statement, and highly contextual. I expect it to be popular in this forum where people view technology as a way to make life better, but keep in mind that strong control over technology can do amazing evil more easily than it can meager good. Gates' philanthropy may appeal to you, but only because as individuals we cannot fathom the whole of an industry. Imagine that for every dollar of aid sent to Africa, one thousand dollars have been spent on extravagance and inefficiency. Maybe not by Gates himself, but certainly by the whole of the industry he profited from. The last ten years of technological progress have largely been run on Linux, mostly as a cost saving tool but also due to the merits of Linux. The efficiency gains are enormous, much larger than if every computer needed a buggy, licensed copy of Windows that automatically updated in the middle of your slideshow (happened in the office yesterday). Compare the revenue that Microsoft would have made to the idea that an operating system could be free-as-in-beer, and you might have a different perspective of the meager billions that Gates has put to good use. We detonate more of our tax money in anger every year than he will ever use to help the poor and needy.

jodrellblank 16y ago
Fundamental attribution error - rebooting in the middle of a presentation is not an inherent property in Windows. You could have configured Windows Update to not do that. (I'm guessing it was "do it x minutes after bootup", or similar). Especially in a discussion mentioning Linux, configuring a piece of software to behave how you want should be a basic sort of thing to do. The efficiency gains are enormous It was so much more efficient the other day when I had to cobble together a bash script to poll MySQL to show running queries, then realise it wasn't running fast enough, switch on query logging, find a reference telling me SIGHUP doesn't cause MySQL to reload config files, restart the database, run some tests, disable the logging, restar the database again. I was so pleased I couldn't just open SQL Server Profiler/Tracer and see live database activity in a couple of mouse clicks and no restarts. The efficiency gains are arguable and situation (and person) dependent.
coliveira 16y ago
Most of the new technology has been run on Linux because Linux is an operating system for programmers. Windows is an operating system for consumers. These are different concepts, that explain why programmers love Linux so much, and why normal people hate it and use Windows/MacOS instead.

mmphosis 16y ago

I think that Gate's work of software and philanthropy has been both beneficial and detrimental. Call me a sick kid, but I would deeply question some of the so-called "philanthropy" of the Gates Foundation. http://www.lavidalocavore.org/diary/3059/gates-foundation-monsanto http://www.lavidalocavore.org/diary/3059/gates-foundation-mo... Stallman has given us GCC which is free in the many senses of the word free. The Microsoft C compiler has been good too, but it comes with strings attached, just like vaccinations and bio-tech. "Alone, I have seen many marvellous things, none of which are true."

statictype 16y ago
The Microsoft C compiler has been good too, but it comes with strings attached, just like vaccinations and bio-tech. What are these strings?
- smcl 16y ago
  Before you can sit down and use VC++ you need to have already shelled out money for a windows license.

poet 16y ago

Let's put aside the specific instance of Gates/Stallman and extend your argument to the general case. People in the philanthropic-billionaire camp usually only exist in countries with basic rights that roughly approximate those in the civil liberty camp. Consider the wealthiest charitable foundations [1]. The only outlier is a foundation from the UAE (whose endowment is a relatively small percentage of the sum). This is only a basic analysis, but I hope you get the gist of my argument: you can't naively separate the contributions of businessmen and civil rights activists; it is a mutualistic relationship. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_charitable_foundations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_charitable_f...

isamuel 16y ago
I don't know, but it seems more likely to me that the causal relationship runs in the other direction: a society is likely to become more free as the median resident becomes more prosperous.
- jbooth 16y ago
  Well, in that case, you're stubbornly wrong about things. The US was and is far more liberal than most countries, and prosperity has followed liberalism (not democrat/republican liberalism, dictator/freedom liberalism) in every case where freedom has been allowed to prosper.

dman 16y ago

While I might not agree with Stallman on a lot of things he is my hero for championing the cause of a computer where you can understand things on most layers of the stack. Comprehensibility of the underlying system is an important side effect of Free as in freedom.

SkyMarshal 16y ago
Agreed. I've learned much more about computers and computing using Linux for a relatively short time than from years of Windows. Such a gift.

SkyMarshal 16y ago

When RMS made his decision, BG was just another robber baron. Nobody knew what BG would do with his money back then. It's only in hindsight that we know he became a great philanthropist. EG, we can't judge RMS's decision then based on what BG later became.

moxiemk1 16y ago

Stallman's words are framed by his belief that freedom (as he defines it) is more important than doing the job. That is why he isn't giving proprietary vaccines to sick children.

patrickaljord 16y ago

> Thank God Stallman helped all of those sick kids with Malaria in Africa with by giving them GIMP and GCC. >Way better than the billions of dollars and thousands of vaccinations Bill and Melinda Gates gave to them. RMS and the free and open source community have given way more billions of dollars and jobs that Gates ever has. Let me explain. Many governments have switched to Gnu/Linux and are saving billions of dollars each year for the last ten years such as Brazil ($1 billion per year http://www.brazzil.com/2004/html/articles/mar04/p107mar04.htm http://www.brazzil.com/2004/html/articles/mar04/p107mar04.ht...). Given that many governments have switched to gnu/linux and free and open software, that's billions of dollar saved each year for the last 5 to ten years. Those are billions that can be spent on health, education, employment and more, it's an invaluable gift to humanity. I know Bill Gates fortune doesn't exceed $50 billions so I'll let you do the math. RMS and the free software world have given way more to the world than Bill Gates ever will. And Free Software will continue to give while Bill's fortunes will soon be over. > In all seriousness, if we're going to argue the ethics of charging for software,at the end of the day who has done more good? See above. > Bill Gates who made himself rich, gave thousands of people jobs, created products that made the lives of millions of other people easier Free and Open Source software give millions of jobs too. I'd say even more especially with the internet. Do you think Google could have been done without Gnu/Linux when they needed to install thousands of servers and didn't have yet the money to pay licenses? How about the internet? It's all free/open source software, a way bigger revolution than the PC which was a boring work machine before for most people. > When I compare the more calculus of capitalism and propreitary software against Stallman's dogmatism, it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good Well, think and try to calculate again. Gates' done way less.

tzs 16y ago
Dead people can't use free software. Nothing you've cited comes anywhere near matching or exceeding the good the Gates Foundation as done with its global health initiatives.
rick888 16y ago
"Many governments have switched to Gnu/Linux and are saving billions of dollars each year for the last ten years such as Brazil" It's funny how you can make the argument about money that "would have been spent". Many open source zealots (and Stallman himself) talk about how the software industry can't equate piracy to dollars people would have spent. Why should this be any different? Software licenses are also a very small part of the entire cost. The biggest costs are support (this is how most open source companies make their money). Even if governments had saved as much money as you want us to believe, I seriously doubt it would go into healthcare, education, and employment. "Do you think Google could have been done without Gnu/Linux when they needed to install thousands of servers and didn't have yet the money to pay licenses?" There are other variants of unix that have even less restrictive licenses. BSD comes to mind. Gnu/Linux was a means to an end. "It's all free/open source software, a way bigger revolution than the PC which was a boring work machine before for most people." Most users don't use a variant of linux on their desktop. Microsoft brought computers in every home and made computers "interesting". "Well, think and try to calculate again. Gates' done way less." Gates has proof that he has helped the poor with billions of dollars. Stallman has possibilities and no direct proof of anything.

jodrellblank 16y ago

In all seriousness, if we're going to argue the ethics of charging for software Which RMS isn't, he's arguing the ethics of restricting freedom. Which means he'd probably disagree with your claim "[Microsoft] created products that made the lives of millions of other people easier" and frame it as a negative not a positive. Bill Gates made his money restricting the freedom of hundreds of millions of people, from which he bought a huge house and then gave some of the remainder back to the world. Freedom is nothing without survival, but stealing freedom from some to buy survival for others, at a personal profit, is not clear cut moral or good.

jacquesm 16y ago

I respectfully very much disagree with your assessment. The only reason you can write that is because there is a dollar value attached to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, which in turn allows you to measure how much money is being pumped in to those projects. But the effects of open source on the way the third world is operating are much harder to quantify, it could very well outweigh the effects of the money that goes in to helping those sick kids with Malaria, by enabling a solution to the problems around them rather than just curing a disease they've got. Both are good, both have a place in this world, don't take the easy way out and use the money as the yardstick, and no, capitalism is not more or less moral than open source and does not do more good, after all for every Bill Gates there are lots of Larry Ellissons.

Retric 16y ago

Bill G cost the world far far more than he donated. Lost productivity in the first world = less money = less giving. But, 30 billion in chump change is a lot easier to locate than 100's of billions in economic harm. PS: Consider how much time/money was wasted because IE tried to avoid standards compliance. IMO, the world would have been far better off if MS had spent an extra billion making better software and Bill never donated a single cent.

elblanco 16y ago

"I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people." Bang! Nailed it. This I think is the source of all problems in the friction between open source philosophies and the general populace. At his heart, RMS is an economic theorist, not a social or technological one. This is because software takes time to make, and time = money. Yet he continuously fails to understand this because he's never personally had to feed himself with the fruit of his daily labors. In RMS's mind, making money from your effort = mistreating people. The analogies between RMS and various communist thinkers all derive from the simple fact that none of them ever had to feed themselves in that way and simply don't understand how basic economics work and all come up with various economic ideals that simply aren't modeled on how the world works. By his model, all people have to do is write software, give away all their labor for free to be "ethical" and then feed themselves off of reward payouts and speaking engagement fees (or some other mysterious source of money RMS has left unspecified because he simply doesn't know how people actually make money in the real world). This is clearly a model that doesn't scale beyond maybe a few dozen people on the planet. The rest of us need to eat, arguing that we are bad people because we demand our supper after a day of work is what makes RMS's arguments ultimately unethical. He would rather people starve to death than charge for software -- this is ultimately what his equation balances out to. If I ignore this type of prattling nonsense, I have to say that RMS has been on the balance a force for good in the world. But he's fantastically out of touch and seems perfectly oblivious to it. Now, if he changed his message and said "it's a good and useful thing, it's 'nice' for people to release free software, and we all can benefit from sharing and pooling our labor together" I don't think anybody would have a problem with him. But like many here have said, RMS represents the extremist goal posts of the idea, and on the balance, that is a good thing, just so long as everybody is aware that a world at the end of the field is not one conducive to people eating.