21 ms·

Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction

356 points by Tsiolkovsky 15y ago

recoiledsnake 15y ago
I did attend Stallman's talk once, and it was interesting to say the least. However, there are some problems with the F/OSS type of development in practice. First thing is developers need to put food on the table. In practice, when someone asks "but is it Open Source?" about an application/web app, more of them are interested in the "free as in beer" aspect or in using it in commercial business for free rather than about customizing it and releasing it to the original devs/other users(regardless of the requirements of the license). This happens all the time on HN when new and cool projects are announced. No one is still able to crack the make money while open sourcing something unless the tool is completely tangential to the way the company makes money(see Google/Apple for examples) or tease it as a way to sell the real ability to use it in closed app(see MySQL). Not to mention throwing code over the wall like Google likes to do with Chrome and Android source releases. Not everyone can be Red Hat.But Stallman expects them to be.
- aklofas 15y ago
  See: Mozilla Foundation
  - dangrover 15y ago
    I thought Mozilla gets most of their money from Google searches, which are not powered by OSS.
    - wazoox 15y ago
      Not entirely powered by OSS. Google computers run Linux, many parts of Google infrastructure run on Python, etc.
      - cooldeal 15y ago
        Google got around the spirit of the GPL(there were no web apps when version 2 was written) by never releasing their custom kernel although they profit big time off Linux. The Affero GPL came too late to do any good.
        wazoox 15y ago
        I'm all for AGPL myself, and this isn't about Google's spirit, but Google is undoubtly "powered by OSS", like it or not. You may label it as "profiteering from OSS" if you want, but you can't entirely throw the baby away with the bath water -- think or Android, Go, etc.
  - aklofas 15y ago
    http://www.technobuffalo.com/internet/how-does-the-mozilla-foundation-make-money/ http://www.technobuffalo.com/internet/how-does-the-mozilla-f... While true, your claim that nobody makes money with open source is false. The classic business model of selling IP doesn't work anymore, but there are other models out there. Mozilla being one of them.
    - davidw 15y ago
      I wrote about this a while ago: http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity Open Source Software is not a scarce resource: you cannot sell it. Therefore, you have to sell something associated with it - developers' time, the right to integrate it with proprietary software, or things like that.
      - podperson 15y ago
        But in Stallman's world no proprietary software is allowed.
        davidw 15y ago
        In that sort of world, certain kinds of software would be underproduced. Software by hackers for hackers would probably still exist, but why would you go to the trouble of making something user friendly to sell to people?
        srdev 15y ago
        As I have an interest in video games, the all-FOSS-no-proprietary approach is particularly troublesome. You see very few indie games being done as FOSS, and pretty much zero high-quality big-production games. Proposals for a system of funding game development in a FOSS-only world are.... iffy at best. At worst, everyone makes MMORPGs.
    - cooldeal 15y ago
      >The classic business model of selling IP doesn't work anymore, but there are other models out there. Mozilla being one of them. And iOS will be killed by Android anytime now. Right?
  - cooldeal 15y ago
    Not sure how much the devs are paid if any, but the CEO was taking a cool 400K home every year. Their job was to diversify Mozilla so that it wouldn't depend totally on someone that was making a competing product, and utterly failing at that since multiple years. Last I heard, the IRS was investigating them for claiming deductions as a charitable foundation but funneling money to the Mozilla Corporation. They've only recently started concentrating on paying developers to reduce the memory leaks, bloat etc after Chrome started eating their lunch in a big way. How is this a poster child for a good way to develop good and useful software for the masses? In fact, it seems to exemplify the pitfalls and weakness in the model, if nothing else.
    - aklofas 15y ago
      I have a couple of friends that work at Mozilla. They are indeed getting paid, have always gotten paid, and (in all likelihoods) will continue getting paid. You are probably referring to the Bugs for Cash thing they did. And a quick google search shows that, yes, mozilla has made good on that too. As for the IRS, they were auditing Mozilla's finances. And since when is there an implicit assumption of guilt in an audit?
    - bzbarsky 15y ago
      > Not sure how much the devs are paid if any Well enough that they can hire a few hundred full-time people, apparently, yes? Including some people who should clearly have no shortage of other job offers (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Seward http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Seward ). > Last I heard, the IRS was investigating them The IRS is doing an audit (which is not the same thing as an investigation, by the way). The IRS is also auditing, right this second, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In fact, last I checked, for companies like Apple or Microsoft they had full-time auditors assigned to them on an ongoing basis. As far as the memory leaks thing... That's a developer-driven project, like many other things at Mozilla. Most developers there are not paid to do a specific task; they're paid to do the right thing. Just like Google doesn't hire you for a particular project, by the way.
- davidw 15y ago
  > No one is still able to crack the make money while open sourcing something unless the tool is completely tangential to the way the company makes money That's not entirely true: things like dual licensing, and consulting work, but... it certainly is far more difficult than simply selling a product.
  - technomancy 15y ago
    Depends who you're trying to sell to. It'd be incredibly difficult to sell non-free software to someone like me who values the ability to tweak things.
    - davidw 15y ago
      I'm in the same category. I want free software because I love to be able to hack on stuff. However, I also don't pay a dime for it, at least in terms of cash. I try and 'pay back' bug reports, patches and the like. But we're in a tiny minority...
- Helianthus 15y ago
  Someone needed to keep an idea alive: that a developer's first duty is to freedom, even if presently they need to put food on the table. That's all Stallman needs to do, brandish the whip: "Stallman expects them to be."
- brlewis 15y ago
  No one is still able to crack the make money while open sourcing something unless the tool is completely tangential to the way the company makes money Countless consulting companies do that, but the biggest example is RedHat: http://investors.redhat.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=607350 http://investors.redhat.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=6073...
- lloeki 15y ago
  > No one is still able to crack the make money while open sourcing something unless the tool is completely tangential to the way the company makes money This might not be so much about making money as not losing some. Say you develop a product in Ruby and no fast XML parser exist but you need one. You could start development of such a library, and once it reached some maturity give it to the community, which in return will make all sorts of improvements (from code review to bug fixes to refactorings to translations, etc). Net result: you don't waste so much time on a critical dependency and can concentrate on your product, and so everyone moves forward.
- mithaler 15y ago
  To provide some context on his aims, Stallman sees money as a malign influence; he lives his own life cheaply so he can concentrate on what's important to him, not what money tells him to do. See this transcript: http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt Another thing that Microsoft, well, not just Microsoft, people who don't support free software generally adopt a value system in which the only thing that matters is short-term practical benefits: How much money am I going to make this year? What job can I get done today? Short-term thinking and narrow thinking. Their assumption is that it's ridiculous to imagine that anybody ever might make a sacrifice for the sake of freedom. Obviously, not everyone's priorities are aligned that way. I'm not sure to what extent he expects the same of other people. But I can at least see where he's coming from.
  - cooldeal 15y ago
    For many, the money is not the end goal itself, It's about what you can accomplish with the money. This is a community based on startups, and the founders can identify with this. If they can make a little money on the initial product, they can take it to the next level and serve users better with the money by paying it to others. Make no money and your startup goes to die and no, it's very unlikely that a willing army of hackers will descend on your git if you open source it and make it better for you and others. Instead, you're more likely to get people who are trying to use it for free, and make you feel obligated to support it for them.
    - aklofas 15y ago
      Sounds like someone is mad that his brilliant code didn't get the attention he thought it deserved. There, there. Sorry you're lonely. Maybe your code is just sht?
- eliasmacpherson 15y ago
  I disagree with the making money argument you make, look at rawmaterialsoftware.com and the JUCE library, look at John Carmack's FPS engine releases. You mentioned Redhat. All these businesses make money while at the same time releasing software under the GPL. I'm sure other users can contribute more examples.
  - Arelius 15y ago
    If you are citing John Carmacks engine releases as a way to make money, then you must forget that both, his assets have never been free, and the engine has never been released as GPL while he has been making money off of the product. He is releasing historical code as GPL, which is a far cry from running a business on a truley "free" product.
    - eliasmacpherson 15y ago
      I agree with you, it's a distinction worth making. The software makes money and then releases software as GPL after it has stopped making money. The GPL'd engines have had a secondary influence, increasing demand for future licences of his engine technology. So the act has made them money, just not as their primary source of income. It's not completely tangential to the way the company makes money.
- gujk 15y ago
  You might not like it, but Stallman's life illustrates his view on how to make a living from free software business: set your profit target at $50,000/yr per full time employee, instead of $100k or more, all the way up to CEO.
breck 15y ago
This was more reasonable than his first post and he brought up some interesting points. I'm very happy he clarified.
- podperson 15y ago
  How is it more reasonable? He's comparing Steve Jobs to an infamously corrupt mayor who brutally suppressed anti-Vietnam war protestors and fixed elections to a guy who created products people loved (and was something of a jerk at a personal level, but that's something Stallman should approve of). But oops, he got the quotation slightly wrong. It doesn't change the meaning but better make sure he gets the quotation right. Oh yeah, and Jobs was objectionable not for making computers stylish but for being GOOD at at. If people hadn't liked his computers that would have been OK.
  - alphadogg 15y ago
    Looks like someone completely missed Stallman's point...
  - bitemyapp 15y ago
    He's explaining the source of his words, not comparing them. You're too hysterical to speak with reasonably.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    Software freedom is more important than "products people love".
    - uriel 15y ago
      I'm not a big fan of RMS, but this is a good point, in our current world the freedom to control the software that runs on devices you own is becoming more and more essential, not having that freedom undermines all other freedoms (from privacy to free speech).
    - glhaynes 15y ago
      Not everyone agrees on that. In fact, it's easily arguable that the vast majority disagree.
shrikant 15y ago
What's with the 'ohai' in the URL? The link works even without it, so genuinely curious..
- awj 15y ago
  Probably working around a repost filter.
gavinlynch 15y ago
I don't buy the separation of Stallman insulting Jobs' deeds versus his person being a lighter criticism. You are what you do. And I can dig irreverence, but isn't there a point where--when you are proselytizing about the evil labors of the man who died 24 hours earlier--you're kind of just an asshole? I respect Stallman's contributions in GNU, understand his position on patents and copyleft and his political agenda and feel it's an important part of the discourse (albeit not gospel). But at the same time, he seems like kind of a small, angry man. IMHO.
- dolphenstein 15y ago
  So true! Linus Torvalds had the following to say about Stallman: "I love seeing people who are really passionate about what they do, and many people have something they really care about. It’s just that when that becomes something exclusionary, it often gets ugly. It’s not passion for something, it becomes passion against something else."
  - jhuni 15y ago
    I exclude stabbing myself and I don't think that's ugly. Its in the same vein that I exclude stabbing my computer with crapware from Apple and Microsoft.
- rhizome31 15y ago
  > isn't there a point where--when you are proselytizing about the evil labors of the man who died 24 hours earlier--you're kind of just an asshole? Not when all mainstream media is glorifying the man in question. It was the right thing to do, but probably not very effective. The global reaction to Jobs death has been a particularly spectacular demonstration of connivance between politicians, mass media and corporations.
  - gavinlynch 15y ago
    1) So Stallmans rhetoric serves only as a counter-point to popular culture? 2) I don't think you understand what the word 'connivance' means.
outworlder 15y ago
"He designed them to refuse even to let users install their own choice of applications — and installing free (freedom-respecting) applications is entirely forbidden." Uh... installing free software is forbidden by the GPL, not Apple. Since GPL forbids further restrictions on distributions, there's no way to legally install them in an Apple device, because of the EULA. Since this is already forbidden by the GPL, for Apple it makes (legal) sense to not approve them in the first place. EDIT: Removing comment about the approval process.
- ajross 15y ago
  That's true, but sort of twists the point. The GPL is designed to preserve the freedom (in the sense the FSF has defined -- RMS is nothing if not consistent in that usage) of users to use and modify the software. The EULA and approval process deny that freedom. The net effect is that copyleft apps simply cannot be shipped for iOS, and that is indeed a restriction imposed by the GPL. But that doesn't make iOS software free, either. RMS isn't complaining that Apple dissallows GPL software. He's complaining that they dissallow redistribution of the software on the device even where the authors desire it to be redistributable.
  - outworlder 15y ago
    > The net effect is that copyleft apps simply cannot be shipped for iOS, and that is indeed a restriction imposed by the GPL. But that doesn't make iOS software free, either. That is my point. They both have restrictions. RMS designed the GPL on purpose so that a third party is not able to place additional restrictions. Apple designed its devices so users can only install Apps by agreeing with the EULA first. One of them must relax the restrictions - which one depends on your ideology alone. I tend to side with RMS here > RMS isn't complaining that Apple dissallows GPL software. He's complaining that they dissallow redistribution of the software on the device even where the authors desire it to be redistributable. Eat your cake or have it. With a permissive license, you can install wherever you want, at the expense of "freedom" (for some definition of). Get a strong copyleft license and you cannot install it on some devices, but it will be forever "free". I feel it is shortsighted to blace the blame solely on Apple, while ignoring the ideological war as a whole.
deleted 15y ago
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- mentat 15y ago
  In other words he doesn't feel empathy. Smart people tend to flip the bozo bit on the world. Put simply, that's very dangerous because when your principles are more important than anything else and when you can't see the pain you cause to others, significant human harm is possible if not likely.
  - pork 15y ago
    Actually in a previous HN thread about exactly this (you can pull it out from my comments), someone referenced an interview where stallman mentions that he's slightly autistic. For those who don't know, a lack of empathy is a symptom of autism, so I wouldn't attribute all this to him being malicious or mean.
    - mentat 15y ago
      I wasn't making a judgment about the causes for the lack of empathy but rather what its effects tend to be. Someone who doesn't see people as people is capable of things that others are not. Some of those things are good, other are scary.
      - pork 15y ago
        As someone who has an autistic person in their life, you have to understand that they think differently, and that can often seem scary to us because we value empathy so much in a society. I just think we should cut him some slack in the light of the fact that he very likely can't see it another way. If he were a sociopath, which IS scary, trust me -- we wouldn't know it.
      - ballard 15y ago
        I know someone that worked directly the person in question for several years that is of the opinion the man's a straight out asshole, pure and simple. There's no slack need cutting because he does so willingly. Furthermore, the more controversy his apparent or manufactured personality disorders can conjure up, the more attention he receives as a reward for bad behavior. So, basically, we're part of the problem. I'm rolling my eyes, and moving on with life.
tuckbuck 15y ago
Amen to that !! I believe the cult of Jobs at some point will just dissipate on its own. already i sense a fatigue in the Jobs story,with books,flood of articles,documentaries etc . The Michael Jackson story also went through the same phases.
blinkingled 15y ago
Jobs saw how to make these computers stylish and smooth. That would normally be positive, but not in this case, since it has the paradoxical effect of making their controlling nature seem acceptable. One of the Jobs' supporting argument about integrated approach is that the tight control is what enables them to make the computers "smooth". While there is some amount of truth in that, the other side of it is that it's just marketing cover for Jobs' control freak nature more than anything else - why is Springboard crashing on me 5 times a day if control makes it possible to have great user experience and Apple has full control? Why for another example Apple is letting me install apps that crash routinely if they claim they locked down so they can control the quality of user experience? One of the "revelations" in the biography is that Tim Cook said to Jobs during the Antennagate that there is general impression that Apple is becoming another Microsoft - complacent and arrogant. That gives me some hope that post Jobs there might be at least a pause to Apple's nonsensical lock down policies.
- oemera 15y ago
  Why is it that people always complain about iPhone and iOS but no one can reconstruct these things "issues". I had 4 iPhones till this day with all iOS Versions on the market and I never, ever saw or heard a problem about "springboard is crashing 5 times a day". NEVER.
  - jarek 15y ago
    That is the nature of bug reports. I was baffled by the reports that Android UI is "laggy" because I have never experienced this nor had anyone I know complained about it. That doesn't necessarily mean it is not happening to the reporter.
    - oemera 15y ago
      There are many many Android smartphones with many many different hardware stats. Even with low hardware stats to be cheap at the selling point. I can understand that this can lead to a lot of bug reports but if you have 5 devices and a handful of OS versions this is way better testable and fixable.
astine 15y ago
Stallman is like the Rush Limbaugh of the Free Software movement. It doesn't matter if he occasionally has a point (he does here,) his complete lack of tact and his small-mindedness tend to overshadow his message. He's right, Jobs' life work made him effectively Stallman's enemy, or at least the enemy of Stallman's cause so Stallman's not wrong to express a contrarian view. However, he should at least express some empathy and respect.
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  Comparing Stallman to Limbaugh is unjust. Limbaugh makes millions off of being a small-minded tactless jerk. Stallman is not in it for the money, he's in it to build a better future, whether he's done a good job or not that's up for history to decide.
  - astine 15y ago
    "Comparing Stallman to Limbaugh is unjust." I agree, but I thought that comparing him to Fred Phelps might be a little aggressive.
    - pjscott 15y ago
      Do you honestly believe that RMS is on anything like the level of Fred Phelps, or are you just taking liberties with the truth for the sake of bombast?
      - astine 15y ago
        Both Stallman and Phelps are willing to use the deaths of someone they dislike to promote their views. Both consider their own cause to supersede human feeling or basic practicality. Phelps is more extreme and his message less tolerable, but my point is that for both, their mode of expressing their cause hurts their cause.
        vacri 15y ago
        That is some of the most blatant character assassination I've seen in this thread so far.
dupe123 15y ago
i'm somewhat surprised stallman is even remotely supportive of android.. i thought he thought that anything non gpl was the devil.
- icebraining 15y ago
  No. He thinks they don't do enough to protect the users' freedom, but he still considers them Free Software and acceptable. He has also advocated for them in some cases, particularly for the Ogg Vorbis library.
  - rimantas 15y ago
    I got what the problem is. Stallman does not try to protect anybody's freedom. The freedom he fights for is a product of his imagination and has very little to do with actually users and their freedom. The days when every software users was if not programmer then at least IT guy in some sense are long gone. That model no longer fits the world. Some say they admire the man who stoics to principles, but I think stubborn refusal to notice that the world has changed is just a sign of stupidity and nothing to brag about.
    - icebraining 15y ago
      I never touched a line of Firefox's code, yet I and millions of others benefit immensely from the source being available. Thousands benefit from CyanogenMod despite not having the faintest idea of how it was created. On a different level, non-tech companies and organizations have hired small software companies to develop solutions based on OSS projects that would otherwise have been prohibitively expensive. The belief that only IT people benefit from access to the source is completely incorrect; one may disagree with them, but calling RMS' views obsolete is nonsensical.
      - rimantas 15y ago
        Sad to see that for many OSS = GPL.
shareme 15y ago
Put it this way if the Patriot act was a human dying would you feel pain or joy might illustrate his point better
alecco 15y ago
Yet another Stallman-bashing thread. Flagged.
- bostonpete 15y ago
  You flagged a submission because you didn't like some of the comments people posted about it?
  - alecco 15y ago
    Exactly. These threads bring up the worse behavior of HN. A lot of disgusting personal attacks and insults. - top reply thread somebody posted allegedly private emails (now deleted) - 2nd compares him with Rush Limbaugh - 4th calls him a small angry man - 6th a troll calling GPL not free software And not a single insightful or interesting comment. Hence, flagged. Edit: spelling
    - bostonpete 15y ago
      At the moment, the top four comments in my view (foob, socratic, naner, & dlikhten) are all positive towards Stallman. Edit: I think this is important to note because it means that allowing the topic to get fleshed out may surprise you. The more discussion, the more mature and informed opinions become. Attempting to suppress the topic altogether b/c you don't like some of the comments is the wrong way to go about it IMO.
      - alecco 15y ago
        Unusually it turned around. Anyway, there's nothing new on this thread after the infamous ones the past month.
- pjscott 15y ago
  The problem surrounding Richard Stallman is that any thread involving him tends to devolve into a Stallman-bashing thread. (I've also noticed this happening whenever someone posts anything that Eric Raymond wrote, on any topic whatsoever.) It's dispiriting.
vvpan 15y ago
Let's suppose that Glenn Beck died. What a lot of people, including me, would think is that while we didn't wish for him to die, the world of "politics" is much better off without him. I think this is the way Stallman feels about Jobs. I really don't see why people say that this is "tactless".
- pg 15y ago
  The key is the difference between thinking it and saying it.
  - MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
    If we can't say what we think, then we don't really have freedom, do we? :c
    - YuriNiyazov 15y ago
      I can't figure out if you are serious or not, because that is such a naive statement. But either way, obligatory PG essay link in case you are unfamiliar. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
      - joshes 15y ago
        It would be helpful if you could enumerate the ways in which his/her statement was naive. It seems to be a relatively logical conclusion that being told or influenced not to say something is restrictive of innate freedom of speech, no matter how seemingly innocuous a reasoning established social or cultural norms are (ie. don't criticize the recently deceased, it's tactless).
        pg 15y ago
        It was naive in not seeming to grasp that there are many senses of "can't" and "freedom," and that the sentence could be either true or false depending on which you mean.
TorbjornLunde 15y ago
I think RMS is similar to Jobs in some ways. They are both extremely strong willed individuals that has done a lot but have some pretty serious quirks. While I disagree with his pretty extreme views he is at least consistent in them. Also, even though I'm not a huge FOSS-proponent myself, I think the world is better for having some of them.
padmanabhan01 15y ago
I would rather live in a world where people like Jobs are in charge (iPhones and Mac comes to mind), than the one in which people like Stallman are (unix terminal and command prompts come to mind).
- dhbanes 15y ago
  You're getting there... but next time bring up Hurd.
- barrkel 15y ago
  I'd like to live in a world where neither are in charge, and we have the best of both worlds: beautiful devices that do not have restrictions on how they can be used.
- corford 15y ago
  Really? I spend my life at the CLI and wouldn't have it any other way :)
- bryanlarsen 15y ago
  I think you've gotten to the gist of things here. I vehemently disagree with you, but I believe you are in the majority. It reminds me of this: “Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” -- Benjamin Franklin IMO, you're giving up freedom and getting a lot less than security. As for the other part of your comment: remember that iOS is based on Unix, so a world without Unix is also a world without iOS.
- freemarketteddy 15y ago
  your ignorance is astounding!...your statement is equivalent to saying I want to live in a world with ice cream sandwiches and tasty doughnuts but not in a world with glucose or sugar molecules of any kind!
- mdda 15y ago
  Then be glad that you're in the top n% on a global scale. People in the third world may be able to cobble together a linux box out of our scrap machines, but Apple's philosophy doesn't include that kind of outreach. In fact, if the world was ruled by their choices, the third world would be perpetually reaching up for elegant devices beyond their grasp.
deleted 15y ago
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naner 15y ago
I think there are some interesting similarities between Steve Jobs and Richard Stallman: Both are luminaries in computing with significant impact. Both attracted a cult-like following. Both often will speak their mind irrespective the feelings of others. Both "give a damn" about users, though with completely different ideas about what is important.
- iradik 15y ago
  Stallman is way more philosophical than Jobs. Jobs focus was on building insanely great products. Stallman is focused on promoting a philosophy of sharing. I think they are much more different than they are similar. Both have affected my life in positive ways. Stallman has affected me as a programmer and a thinker. Jobs has affected me through his company's products I would say stallman has had the deeper effect though I type this on an iPhone. Both are zealots who would prefer everyone adopt their world view. I don't think a single view is possible nor is it preferable.
  - brlewis 15y ago
    Emacs is an insanely great product.
- Hitchhiker 15y ago
  I find it exquisitely ironic that RMS is railing on about SJ.. both profess an anti-dogmatic , against 1984 approach. Both ended up creating uniquely dogmatic ecosystems. One exploited it at an unbelievable commercial scale surpassing the beast they rebelled against ( IBM, the 1984 ad ) .. the other has become a very strange priest who keeps railing on against other churches that spawned from the original. I personally admire and respect Steve more.. at least, he had and inspired poetry.. at least, he made Jonathan Ive craft a speech of a life-time[1] at the recent memorial. [1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPUsuY8JZJI&t=2905 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPUsuY8JZJI&t=2905
  - barrkel 15y ago
    I admire Steve more; I wish I had some of his talents. I respect Richard more; the degree to which he doesn't compromise takes more bravery than it looks, IMO. He could have taken the easy way out, and been handsomely rewarded for it, long ago.
deleted 15y ago
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dlikhten 15y ago
I would like to point out, that regardless of your feelings for either person Jobs or Stallman, both is/was very smart people, and what they say/do we should pay attention to. Stallman is right about Jobs' legacy. iOS devices prevent installation of any GPL software. This is blatantly wrong. Most innovations within the last 20 years came from OSS developers creating incredible techniques used by Apple/MS/etc, yet this is being attacked. The shoulders of giants analogy perfectly applies. Except OSS developers don't get patents, the thiefs of OSS do. Unlike Jobs, Stallman's view of the world is towards freedom and I respect him for walking the walk, he is not filthy rich and that is because he does not exploit people. He definitely has views and attitudes that are unpopular, such as his views on reproduction BUT none of those ever take choice away from people, nor do they ever take any freedom away from people. His prediction of the patent war is true. Look at patents today. MS is taking royalties from 50% of android sales. Apple is preventing sales of tablets because they have round corners and the approximate shape of an iPad, and Intellectual Ventures is getting ready to obliterate companies. The legacy of Steve Jobs is anti-freedom.
- kmavm 15y ago
  "Most innovations within the last 20 years came from OSS developers creating incredible techniques used by Apple/MS/etc..." Name one. To take some examples I happen to have first-hand intimacy with: Linux is both original and good, but the original parts are frequently not good, and the good parts are clones of Solaris. Touchscreen happened in iOS first. Modern virtualization happened in VMware's closed-source base first. Modern information retrieval is still a proprietary Google secret. The most important counter-examples I can think of are languages. The "everything is a hash table" descendants of Perl and javascript (in which I include Python, Ruby, and PHP) would not have been viable as commercial products. That said, even javascript began life as a Netscape proprietary implementation, and Perl is mostly a synthesis of ideas present in ksh.
  - colanderman 15y ago
    Touchscreen happened in iOS first. What? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus is just one counterexample of many.
socratic 15y ago
I grew up at a time when people felt very strongly about Windows versus Linux. People would fight amongst themselves on Slashdot and elsewhere about whether it was OK to use Windows, or whether it was possible to do [whatever] on Linux. I guess what I'm wondering is: is OSX/iOS versus Linux/Android the operating system flame war of our time? In this thread, I see almost entirely ad hominem attacks on Stallman. (Not unlike a Daring Fireball thread in reverse.) Is he Glenn Beck or is he Rush Limbaugh? Is he just slightly impractical or is he extremely impractical? What I don't see is any substantial discussion of the OP. At the moment, there are 2/72 comments that mention the iOS App Store at all, which is a major point that Stallman seems to be making here. More generally, is no one worried about what Stallman is worried about? Jobs' explicit stated goal was to destroy the only Linux mobile platform (through patents), and his policies on the App Store and elsewhere were explicitly hostile to Free Software. Had Jobs been successful and perhaps lived another ten years, we might be living in a world with no Free Software on our personal devices at all. Apple laptops with software installed from the Mac App Store to develop iOS apps for the iOS App Store (with both App Stores of course rejecting GPL code). Given that almost all startups rely heavily on Free Software, from emacs to gcc to Xen to Ruby to every poorly constructed library on Github, that would be tremendously negative for the startup ecosystem, no?
- diminish 15y ago
  I - a developer who open sources some code - totally agree, it is sad that, ios app store emerged in 21st century, to control what people can use, for their own safety (and not apple's walled garden dogma); governments in oppressive countries use exact same arguments to filter internet; to protect users (children etc) against evil ... for startups, an apple-minded world would be detrimental.
- ghshephard 15y ago
  The irony is that Stallman can be most closely identified to the heroine in the 1984 commercial, trying to shake up people from their walled gardens of pure idiolatry. (I say this as a happy member of the iPad/iPhone/MacBook Air masses. :-)
- rimantas 15y ago
9999 15y ago
Stallman has once again said exactly what I would expect Stallman to say. I admire(d) and respect(ed) both Stallman and Jobs. Even if their views are diametrically opposed (although I wouldn't say Jobs' position is actually at the complete opposite end of the spectrum), they both managed to advance computing in ways that no one else could have. Although I would expect Stallman to hate what Jobs has done, I wish he would try to understand why people value his work so intensely. Stylish and smooth is only the beginning.
kabdib 15y ago
Years ago I had Stallman personally demand that I quit Apple in protest of something that he felt strongly about. He was obnoxious to the point that I lost all respect for him. The OSS community would do better without Stallman.
- iradik 15y ago
  Wow very interesting. Well you were making closed software :) Did he offer you suggestions on what to do instead? I recall stallman saying if he couldn't develop free software he'd work at a diner. Will never starve.
- flomo 15y ago
  Was this back when Apple was suing everyone over "look and feel"? The FSF was "boycotting" Apple, which as a pragmatic matter, only made it difficult to find tools for A/UX.
- spodek 15y ago
  rms is not a member of the OSS community. He is a (founding) member of the Free Software community. At least that's my understanding.
foob 15y ago
Every time an article involving Richard Stallman gets posted here I cringe as I read through the comments. There are a range of opinions so I don't want to overgeneralize but there are a large number of people here that seem to almost despise Stallman and the FSF. People make fun of him and make comments about how he has a net negative impact on software and computing. It pains me to see so many people, who quite likely rely on emacs, Xcode with gcc, gnu coreutils, or an operating system that would've never been possible without the Free software movement, sit around and ridicule RMS because he eats toe jam or really, really likes parrots. He's had more of a far reaching and positive impact on software than people with such naive views will probably ever realize. What I really wanted to comment about though (I couldn't hold back a short rant...) is how these Steve Jobs comments relate to the E-Parasites Act that was discussed yesterday. I read a lot of great comments there about how we're losing our freedoms incrementally and how this will shape the future. In the US we've seen this ratchet effect taking place to a frightening extent in the last decades both inside of computing and in general. If the US ever ends up in a place where there's widespread censorship on the internet then you can bet that it can trace its ancestry back to the DMCA and something like the E-Parasites act which will allow entire sites to get shut down with lots of room for abuse. Every step we take in that direction makes it easier to keep stepping in that direction. So why don't as many people feel this way about Apple? Because we like their products? Iphones have made it normal to buy a computing device that has artificial restrictions preventing you from running whatever software you want on it. If they had their way then it would have actually been illegal to jailbreak your phone in order to circumvent this. Sure, iphones are really cool but this is a step in a terrifying direction. If it ever becomes illegal to upgrade the RAM in your laptop yourself or to install third party software on it then you can bet that you can trace the ancestry of those laws back to the shifts in public perception of computing freedom caused by companies like Apple. Laws like that might seem laughably extreme now but with every step in that direction they seem less and less so. Stallman sees this and he has dedicated his life to moving us in the opposite direction. He's been hugely successful at this and he's been almost prophetic in his opinions about what we should be worrying about. He was criticizing Apple for trying to take away peoples' freedoms and Steve Jobs for steering the company in this direction. He wasn't condemning him as a person, as he said "My feelings about Jobs as a person are not strong, since I barely knew him." I don't see expressing this view after Steve Jobs' death as being particularly disrespectful. Steve Jobs is known to the majority of people only for his role at Apple. This role is what he was praised for across the internet and in magazines after his death. This role is what Stallman condemned.
seasoup 15y ago
Is there not room in the world for both paid and free software? Why must all software be free, and why must all devices accommodate free software? The free software movement needs to make something as interesting and as compelling as what Apple built instead of just complaining about what Apple built. Make something beautiful and easy to use and people will use it. On a personal level, I don't want free software for my phone. It's too much work for me. I want my phone to just work, I don't want it to have viruses, I don't have the time or inclination to hack around with it and I'm a developer, I don't care as a consumer if that means that "free" software is given the boot from a device to make this happen. For my $: Good design + No Viruses > Free Software That's not true for everyone, and for them Apple isn't the right product.
- orangecat 15y ago
  Why must all software be free, and why must all devices accommodate free software? The question isn't "all", it's "any". If Apple gets their way then jailbreaking "your" iOS device will be a federal crime, and the only significant open-ish alternative will be forcibly removed from the market.
vimalg2 15y ago
RMS would still piss certain people off, if he'd instead said : "I am not the least bit upset SJ is gone. I've always fundamentally disagreed with the movements he spearheaded, to take away the user's freedom." RMS is supposedly autistic, and the lack of empathy is likely a result of that. Taking that into account, there hardly seems cause for all this fuss. Move on.
rickmb 15y ago
Anybody with any knowledge of what both Jobs and RMS have achieved and how their vision has affected our work and our lives can only have respect for both of them. What we do every day would be very different without them. And for fuck's sake, no matter how you feel about RMS as a person and his undiplomatic, uncompromising stance, listen when the man speaks. He's been right more often than not.
- 5hoom 15y ago
  Totally agree, both men are worthy of great respect. Regarding Richard Stallman you can take or leave his personality, but he does take a very long view of the software ecosystem and he has made more than a few prophetic observations ("The Right to Read" foreshadowing widespread DRM comes to mind). I'll always take the time to hear what he has to say.
billpatrianakos 15y ago
His original post should have been more along the lines of this correction. The original had awful timing and was totally tactless. Correction noted, doesn't make thing right, still dislike him very much.
kingsidharth 15y ago
"stylish and smooth" he doesn't understand design.
- thomasgerbe 15y ago
  Pretty much. Crazy. Normal people just care about stuff that works well and is easy to use.
jsz0 15y ago
Stallman should invest some of his time and passion into yelling at OSS developers for consistently failing to build products as usable and trouble-free as Apple's software. Almost no normal person cares about open vs closed. They care about works vs. doesn't work. Most of what Stallman advocates would not work for normal people so his work is just a waste of time until there is a credible OSS alternative to the things and people he hates.
- forensic 15y ago
  You're still equating OSS with RMS when OSS was the enemy of RMS.
  - Peaker 15y ago
    More of an ally camp..
- gujk 15y ago
  He does, and he gets crap for that too. He famously got into an argument about the relative merits of having a child vs working on emacs.
gbog 15y ago
Too many comments here, but I'll still be shouting in the desert: rms is right, having so many tech guys using apple products is harmful for our children, computing is power, power needs separated, we need a separation of powers between hw and s, in the constitution.
- gbog 15y ago
  Edit (dunno why I can't edit this post): "we need a separation of powers between hardware and software, in the constitution."
jfb 15y ago
I spend all day in Emacs, and I used to work for Apple. Who do I root for? (Kidding. I think Stallman makes his point eloquently clear here, and while I disagree, I can't impugn him as a person.)
mark_l_watson 15y ago
Very cool that he is very attentive to important things going on in the world and keeps a political notes log - I didn't know that side of Richard. That was a good link. I also agree with other comments here that the USA is in real jeopardy of losing Internet (and other) freedoms so Richard's life work for software freedom seems relevant right now.
sigzero 15y ago
Like HURD, I applaud Stallman for his vision but not his implementation.

356 points by Tsiolkovsky 15y ago

I did attend Stallman's talk once, and it was interesting to say the least. However, there are some problems with the F/OSS type of development in practice. First thing is developers need to put food on the table. In practice, when someone asks "but is it Open Source?" about an application/web app, more of them are interested in the "free as in beer" aspect or in using it in commercial business for free rather than about customizing it and releasing it to the original devs/other users(regardless of the requirements of the license). This happens all the time on HN when new and cool projects are announced. No one is still able to crack the make money while open sourcing something unless the tool is completely tangential to the way the company makes money(see Google/Apple for examples) or tease it as a way to sell the real ability to use it in closed app(see MySQL). Not to mention throwing code over the wall like Google likes to do with Chrome and Android source releases. Not everyone can be Red Hat.But Stallman expects them to be.

aklofas 15y ago
See: Mozilla Foundation
- dangrover 15y ago
  I thought Mozilla gets most of their money from Google searches, which are not powered by OSS.
  - wazoox 15y ago
    Not entirely powered by OSS. Google computers run Linux, many parts of Google infrastructure run on Python, etc.
    - cooldeal 15y ago
      Google got around the spirit of the GPL(there were no web apps when version 2 was written) by never releasing their custom kernel although they profit big time off Linux. The Affero GPL came too late to do any good.
      - wazoox 15y ago
        I'm all for AGPL myself, and this isn't about Google's spirit, but Google is undoubtly "powered by OSS", like it or not. You may label it as "profiteering from OSS" if you want, but you can't entirely throw the baby away with the bath water -- think or Android, Go, etc.
- aklofas 15y ago
  http://www.technobuffalo.com/internet/how-does-the-mozilla-foundation-make-money/ http://www.technobuffalo.com/internet/how-does-the-mozilla-f... While true, your claim that nobody makes money with open source is false. The classic business model of selling IP doesn't work anymore, but there are other models out there. Mozilla being one of them.
  - davidw 15y ago
    I wrote about this a while ago: http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity Open Source Software is not a scarce resource: you cannot sell it. Therefore, you have to sell something associated with it - developers' time, the right to integrate it with proprietary software, or things like that.
    - podperson 15y ago
      But in Stallman's world no proprietary software is allowed.
      - davidw 15y ago
        In that sort of world, certain kinds of software would be underproduced. Software by hackers for hackers would probably still exist, but why would you go to the trouble of making something user friendly to sell to people?
        srdev 15y ago
        As I have an interest in video games, the all-FOSS-no-proprietary approach is particularly troublesome. You see very few indie games being done as FOSS, and pretty much zero high-quality big-production games. Proposals for a system of funding game development in a FOSS-only world are.... iffy at best. At worst, everyone makes MMORPGs.
  - cooldeal 15y ago
    >The classic business model of selling IP doesn't work anymore, but there are other models out there. Mozilla being one of them. And iOS will be killed by Android anytime now. Right?
- cooldeal 15y ago
  Not sure how much the devs are paid if any, but the CEO was taking a cool 400K home every year. Their job was to diversify Mozilla so that it wouldn't depend totally on someone that was making a competing product, and utterly failing at that since multiple years. Last I heard, the IRS was investigating them for claiming deductions as a charitable foundation but funneling money to the Mozilla Corporation. They've only recently started concentrating on paying developers to reduce the memory leaks, bloat etc after Chrome started eating their lunch in a big way. How is this a poster child for a good way to develop good and useful software for the masses? In fact, it seems to exemplify the pitfalls and weakness in the model, if nothing else.
  - aklofas 15y ago
    I have a couple of friends that work at Mozilla. They are indeed getting paid, have always gotten paid, and (in all likelihoods) will continue getting paid. You are probably referring to the Bugs for Cash thing they did. And a quick google search shows that, yes, mozilla has made good on that too. As for the IRS, they were auditing Mozilla's finances. And since when is there an implicit assumption of guilt in an audit?
  - bzbarsky 15y ago
    > Not sure how much the devs are paid if any Well enough that they can hire a few hundred full-time people, apparently, yes? Including some people who should clearly have no shortage of other job offers (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Seward http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Seward ). > Last I heard, the IRS was investigating them The IRS is doing an audit (which is not the same thing as an investigation, by the way). The IRS is also auditing, right this second, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In fact, last I checked, for companies like Apple or Microsoft they had full-time auditors assigned to them on an ongoing basis. As far as the memory leaks thing... That's a developer-driven project, like many other things at Mozilla. Most developers there are not paid to do a specific task; they're paid to do the right thing. Just like Google doesn't hire you for a particular project, by the way.
davidw 15y ago
> No one is still able to crack the make money while open sourcing something unless the tool is completely tangential to the way the company makes money That's not entirely true: things like dual licensing, and consulting work, but... it certainly is far more difficult than simply selling a product.
- technomancy 15y ago
  Depends who you're trying to sell to. It'd be incredibly difficult to sell non-free software to someone like me who values the ability to tweak things.
  - davidw 15y ago
    I'm in the same category. I want free software because I love to be able to hack on stuff. However, I also don't pay a dime for it, at least in terms of cash. I try and 'pay back' bug reports, patches and the like. But we're in a tiny minority...
Helianthus 15y ago
Someone needed to keep an idea alive: that a developer's first duty is to freedom, even if presently they need to put food on the table. That's all Stallman needs to do, brandish the whip: "Stallman expects them to be."
brlewis 15y ago
No one is still able to crack the make money while open sourcing something unless the tool is completely tangential to the way the company makes money Countless consulting companies do that, but the biggest example is RedHat: http://investors.redhat.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=607350 http://investors.redhat.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=6073...
lloeki 15y ago
> No one is still able to crack the make money while open sourcing something unless the tool is completely tangential to the way the company makes money This might not be so much about making money as not losing some. Say you develop a product in Ruby and no fast XML parser exist but you need one. You could start development of such a library, and once it reached some maturity give it to the community, which in return will make all sorts of improvements (from code review to bug fixes to refactorings to translations, etc). Net result: you don't waste so much time on a critical dependency and can concentrate on your product, and so everyone moves forward.
mithaler 15y ago
To provide some context on his aims, Stallman sees money as a malign influence; he lives his own life cheaply so he can concentrate on what's important to him, not what money tells him to do. See this transcript: http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt Another thing that Microsoft, well, not just Microsoft, people who don't support free software generally adopt a value system in which the only thing that matters is short-term practical benefits: How much money am I going to make this year? What job can I get done today? Short-term thinking and narrow thinking. Their assumption is that it's ridiculous to imagine that anybody ever might make a sacrifice for the sake of freedom. Obviously, not everyone's priorities are aligned that way. I'm not sure to what extent he expects the same of other people. But I can at least see where he's coming from.
- cooldeal 15y ago
  For many, the money is not the end goal itself, It's about what you can accomplish with the money. This is a community based on startups, and the founders can identify with this. If they can make a little money on the initial product, they can take it to the next level and serve users better with the money by paying it to others. Make no money and your startup goes to die and no, it's very unlikely that a willing army of hackers will descend on your git if you open source it and make it better for you and others. Instead, you're more likely to get people who are trying to use it for free, and make you feel obligated to support it for them.
  - aklofas 15y ago
    Sounds like someone is mad that his brilliant code didn't get the attention he thought it deserved. There, there. Sorry you're lonely. Maybe your code is just sht?
eliasmacpherson 15y ago
I disagree with the making money argument you make, look at rawmaterialsoftware.com and the JUCE library, look at John Carmack's FPS engine releases. You mentioned Redhat. All these businesses make money while at the same time releasing software under the GPL. I'm sure other users can contribute more examples.
- Arelius 15y ago
  If you are citing John Carmacks engine releases as a way to make money, then you must forget that both, his assets have never been free, and the engine has never been released as GPL while he has been making money off of the product. He is releasing historical code as GPL, which is a far cry from running a business on a truley "free" product.
  - eliasmacpherson 15y ago
    I agree with you, it's a distinction worth making. The software makes money and then releases software as GPL after it has stopped making money. The GPL'd engines have had a secondary influence, increasing demand for future licences of his engine technology. So the act has made them money, just not as their primary source of income. It's not completely tangential to the way the company makes money.
gujk 15y ago
You might not like it, but Stallman's life illustrates his view on how to make a living from free software business: set your profit target at $50,000/yr per full time employee, instead of $100k or more, all the way up to CEO.

breck 15y ago

This was more reasonable than his first post and he brought up some interesting points. I'm very happy he clarified.

podperson 15y ago
How is it more reasonable? He's comparing Steve Jobs to an infamously corrupt mayor who brutally suppressed anti-Vietnam war protestors and fixed elections to a guy who created products people loved (and was something of a jerk at a personal level, but that's something Stallman should approve of). But oops, he got the quotation slightly wrong. It doesn't change the meaning but better make sure he gets the quotation right. Oh yeah, and Jobs was objectionable not for making computers stylish but for being GOOD at at. If people hadn't liked his computers that would have been OK.
- alphadogg 15y ago
  Looks like someone completely missed Stallman's point...
- bitemyapp 15y ago
  He's explaining the source of his words, not comparing them. You're too hysterical to speak with reasonably.
- jrockway 15y ago
  Software freedom is more important than "products people love".
  - uriel 15y ago
    I'm not a big fan of RMS, but this is a good point, in our current world the freedom to control the software that runs on devices you own is becoming more and more essential, not having that freedom undermines all other freedoms (from privacy to free speech).
  - glhaynes 15y ago
    Not everyone agrees on that. In fact, it's easily arguable that the vast majority disagree.

shrikant 15y ago

What's with the 'ohai' in the URL? The link works even without it, so genuinely curious..

awj 15y ago
Probably working around a repost filter.

gavinlynch 15y ago

I don't buy the separation of Stallman insulting Jobs' deeds versus his person being a lighter criticism. You are what you do. And I can dig irreverence, but isn't there a point where--when you are proselytizing about the evil labors of the man who died 24 hours earlier--you're kind of just an asshole? I respect Stallman's contributions in GNU, understand his position on patents and copyleft and his political agenda and feel it's an important part of the discourse (albeit not gospel). But at the same time, he seems like kind of a small, angry man. IMHO.

dolphenstein 15y ago
So true! Linus Torvalds had the following to say about Stallman: "I love seeing people who are really passionate about what they do, and many people have something they really care about. It’s just that when that becomes something exclusionary, it often gets ugly. It’s not passion for something, it becomes passion against something else."
- jhuni 15y ago
  I exclude stabbing myself and I don't think that's ugly. Its in the same vein that I exclude stabbing my computer with crapware from Apple and Microsoft.
rhizome31 15y ago
> isn't there a point where--when you are proselytizing about the evil labors of the man who died 24 hours earlier--you're kind of just an asshole? Not when all mainstream media is glorifying the man in question. It was the right thing to do, but probably not very effective. The global reaction to Jobs death has been a particularly spectacular demonstration of connivance between politicians, mass media and corporations.
- gavinlynch 15y ago
  1) So Stallmans rhetoric serves only as a counter-point to popular culture? 2) I don't think you understand what the word 'connivance' means.

outworlder 15y ago

"He designed them to refuse even to let users install their own choice of applications — and installing free (freedom-respecting) applications is entirely forbidden." Uh... installing free software is forbidden by the GPL, not Apple. Since GPL forbids further restrictions on distributions, there's no way to legally install them in an Apple device, because of the EULA. Since this is already forbidden by the GPL, for Apple it makes (legal) sense to not approve them in the first place. EDIT: Removing comment about the approval process.

ajross 15y ago
That's true, but sort of twists the point. The GPL is designed to preserve the freedom (in the sense the FSF has defined -- RMS is nothing if not consistent in that usage) of users to use and modify the software. The EULA and approval process deny that freedom. The net effect is that copyleft apps simply cannot be shipped for iOS, and that is indeed a restriction imposed by the GPL. But that doesn't make iOS software free, either. RMS isn't complaining that Apple dissallows GPL software. He's complaining that they dissallow redistribution of the software on the device even where the authors desire it to be redistributable.
- outworlder 15y ago
  > The net effect is that copyleft apps simply cannot be shipped for iOS, and that is indeed a restriction imposed by the GPL. But that doesn't make iOS software free, either. That is my point. They both have restrictions. RMS designed the GPL on purpose so that a third party is not able to place additional restrictions. Apple designed its devices so users can only install Apps by agreeing with the EULA first. One of them must relax the restrictions - which one depends on your ideology alone. I tend to side with RMS here > RMS isn't complaining that Apple dissallows GPL software. He's complaining that they dissallow redistribution of the software on the device even where the authors desire it to be redistributable. Eat your cake or have it. With a permissive license, you can install wherever you want, at the expense of "freedom" (for some definition of). Get a strong copyleft license and you cannot install it on some devices, but it will be forever "free". I feel it is shortsighted to blace the blame solely on Apple, while ignoring the ideological war as a whole.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

mentat 15y ago
In other words he doesn't feel empathy. Smart people tend to flip the bozo bit on the world. Put simply, that's very dangerous because when your principles are more important than anything else and when you can't see the pain you cause to others, significant human harm is possible if not likely.
- pork 15y ago
  Actually in a previous HN thread about exactly this (you can pull it out from my comments), someone referenced an interview where stallman mentions that he's slightly autistic. For those who don't know, a lack of empathy is a symptom of autism, so I wouldn't attribute all this to him being malicious or mean.
  - mentat 15y ago
    I wasn't making a judgment about the causes for the lack of empathy but rather what its effects tend to be. Someone who doesn't see people as people is capable of things that others are not. Some of those things are good, other are scary.
    - pork 15y ago
      As someone who has an autistic person in their life, you have to understand that they think differently, and that can often seem scary to us because we value empathy so much in a society. I just think we should cut him some slack in the light of the fact that he very likely can't see it another way. If he were a sociopath, which IS scary, trust me -- we wouldn't know it.
    - ballard 15y ago
      I know someone that worked directly the person in question for several years that is of the opinion the man's a straight out asshole, pure and simple. There's no slack need cutting because he does so willingly. Furthermore, the more controversy his apparent or manufactured personality disorders can conjure up, the more attention he receives as a reward for bad behavior. So, basically, we're part of the problem. I'm rolling my eyes, and moving on with life.

tuckbuck 15y ago

Amen to that !! I believe the cult of Jobs at some point will just dissipate on its own. already i sense a fatigue in the Jobs story,with books,flood of articles,documentaries etc . The Michael Jackson story also went through the same phases.

blinkingled 15y ago

Jobs saw how to make these computers stylish and smooth. That would normally be positive, but not in this case, since it has the paradoxical effect of making their controlling nature seem acceptable. One of the Jobs' supporting argument about integrated approach is that the tight control is what enables them to make the computers "smooth". While there is some amount of truth in that, the other side of it is that it's just marketing cover for Jobs' control freak nature more than anything else - why is Springboard crashing on me 5 times a day if control makes it possible to have great user experience and Apple has full control? Why for another example Apple is letting me install apps that crash routinely if they claim they locked down so they can control the quality of user experience? One of the "revelations" in the biography is that Tim Cook said to Jobs during the Antennagate that there is general impression that Apple is becoming another Microsoft - complacent and arrogant. That gives me some hope that post Jobs there might be at least a pause to Apple's nonsensical lock down policies.

oemera 15y ago
Why is it that people always complain about iPhone and iOS but no one can reconstruct these things "issues". I had 4 iPhones till this day with all iOS Versions on the market and I never, ever saw or heard a problem about "springboard is crashing 5 times a day". NEVER.
- jarek 15y ago
  That is the nature of bug reports. I was baffled by the reports that Android UI is "laggy" because I have never experienced this nor had anyone I know complained about it. That doesn't necessarily mean it is not happening to the reporter.
  - oemera 15y ago
    There are many many Android smartphones with many many different hardware stats. Even with low hardware stats to be cheap at the selling point. I can understand that this can lead to a lot of bug reports but if you have 5 devices and a handful of OS versions this is way better testable and fixable.

astine 15y ago

Stallman is like the Rush Limbaugh of the Free Software movement. It doesn't matter if he occasionally has a point (he does here,) his complete lack of tact and his small-mindedness tend to overshadow his message. He's right, Jobs' life work made him effectively Stallman's enemy, or at least the enemy of Stallman's cause so Stallman's not wrong to express a contrarian view. However, he should at least express some empathy and respect.

lukeschlather 15y ago
Comparing Stallman to Limbaugh is unjust. Limbaugh makes millions off of being a small-minded tactless jerk. Stallman is not in it for the money, he's in it to build a better future, whether he's done a good job or not that's up for history to decide.
- astine 15y ago
  "Comparing Stallman to Limbaugh is unjust." I agree, but I thought that comparing him to Fred Phelps might be a little aggressive.
  - pjscott 15y ago
    Do you honestly believe that RMS is on anything like the level of Fred Phelps, or are you just taking liberties with the truth for the sake of bombast?
    - astine 15y ago
      Both Stallman and Phelps are willing to use the deaths of someone they dislike to promote their views. Both consider their own cause to supersede human feeling or basic practicality. Phelps is more extreme and his message less tolerable, but my point is that for both, their mode of expressing their cause hurts their cause.
      - vacri 15y ago
        That is some of the most blatant character assassination I've seen in this thread so far.

dupe123 15y ago

i'm somewhat surprised stallman is even remotely supportive of android.. i thought he thought that anything non gpl was the devil.

icebraining 15y ago
No. He thinks they don't do enough to protect the users' freedom, but he still considers them Free Software and acceptable. He has also advocated for them in some cases, particularly for the Ogg Vorbis library.
- rimantas 15y ago
  I got what the problem is. Stallman does not try to protect anybody's freedom. The freedom he fights for is a product of his imagination and has very little to do with actually users and their freedom. The days when every software users was if not programmer then at least IT guy in some sense are long gone. That model no longer fits the world. Some say they admire the man who stoics to principles, but I think stubborn refusal to notice that the world has changed is just a sign of stupidity and nothing to brag about.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    I never touched a line of Firefox's code, yet I and millions of others benefit immensely from the source being available. Thousands benefit from CyanogenMod despite not having the faintest idea of how it was created. On a different level, non-tech companies and organizations have hired small software companies to develop solutions based on OSS projects that would otherwise have been prohibitively expensive. The belief that only IT people benefit from access to the source is completely incorrect; one may disagree with them, but calling RMS' views obsolete is nonsensical.
    - rimantas 15y ago
      Sad to see that for many OSS = GPL.

shareme 15y ago

Put it this way if the Patriot act was a human dying would you feel pain or joy might illustrate his point better

alecco 15y ago

Yet another Stallman-bashing thread. Flagged.

bostonpete 15y ago
You flagged a submission because you didn't like some of the comments people posted about it?
- alecco 15y ago
  Exactly. These threads bring up the worse behavior of HN. A lot of disgusting personal attacks and insults. - top reply thread somebody posted allegedly private emails (now deleted) - 2nd compares him with Rush Limbaugh - 4th calls him a small angry man - 6th a troll calling GPL not free software And not a single insightful or interesting comment. Hence, flagged. Edit: spelling
  - bostonpete 15y ago
    At the moment, the top four comments in my view (foob, socratic, naner, & dlikhten) are all positive towards Stallman. Edit: I think this is important to note because it means that allowing the topic to get fleshed out may surprise you. The more discussion, the more mature and informed opinions become. Attempting to suppress the topic altogether b/c you don't like some of the comments is the wrong way to go about it IMO.
    - alecco 15y ago
      Unusually it turned around. Anyway, there's nothing new on this thread after the infamous ones the past month.
pjscott 15y ago
The problem surrounding Richard Stallman is that any thread involving him tends to devolve into a Stallman-bashing thread. (I've also noticed this happening whenever someone posts anything that Eric Raymond wrote, on any topic whatsoever.) It's dispiriting.

vvpan 15y ago

Let's suppose that Glenn Beck died. What a lot of people, including me, would think is that while we didn't wish for him to die, the world of "politics" is much better off without him. I think this is the way Stallman feels about Jobs. I really don't see why people say that this is "tactless".

pg 15y ago
The key is the difference between thinking it and saying it.
- MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
  If we can't say what we think, then we don't really have freedom, do we? :c
  - YuriNiyazov 15y ago
    I can't figure out if you are serious or not, because that is such a naive statement. But either way, obligatory PG essay link in case you are unfamiliar. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
    - joshes 15y ago
      It would be helpful if you could enumerate the ways in which his/her statement was naive. It seems to be a relatively logical conclusion that being told or influenced not to say something is restrictive of innate freedom of speech, no matter how seemingly innocuous a reasoning established social or cultural norms are (ie. don't criticize the recently deceased, it's tactless).
      - pg 15y ago
        It was naive in not seeming to grasp that there are many senses of "can't" and "freedom," and that the sentence could be either true or false depending on which you mean.

TorbjornLunde 15y ago

I think RMS is similar to Jobs in some ways. They are both extremely strong willed individuals that has done a lot but have some pretty serious quirks. While I disagree with his pretty extreme views he is at least consistent in them. Also, even though I'm not a huge FOSS-proponent myself, I think the world is better for having some of them.

padmanabhan01 15y ago

I would rather live in a world where people like Jobs are in charge (iPhones and Mac comes to mind), than the one in which people like Stallman are (unix terminal and command prompts come to mind).

dhbanes 15y ago
You're getting there... but next time bring up Hurd.
barrkel 15y ago
I'd like to live in a world where neither are in charge, and we have the best of both worlds: beautiful devices that do not have restrictions on how they can be used.
corford 15y ago
Really? I spend my life at the CLI and wouldn't have it any other way :)
bryanlarsen 15y ago
I think you've gotten to the gist of things here. I vehemently disagree with you, but I believe you are in the majority. It reminds me of this: “Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” -- Benjamin Franklin IMO, you're giving up freedom and getting a lot less than security. As for the other part of your comment: remember that iOS is based on Unix, so a world without Unix is also a world without iOS.
freemarketteddy 15y ago
your ignorance is astounding!...your statement is equivalent to saying I want to live in a world with ice cream sandwiches and tasty doughnuts but not in a world with glucose or sugar molecules of any kind!
mdda 15y ago
Then be glad that you're in the top n% on a global scale. People in the third world may be able to cobble together a linux box out of our scrap machines, but Apple's philosophy doesn't include that kind of outreach. In fact, if the world was ruled by their choices, the third world would be perpetually reaching up for elegant devices beyond their grasp.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

naner 15y ago

I think there are some interesting similarities between Steve Jobs and Richard Stallman: Both are luminaries in computing with significant impact. Both attracted a cult-like following. Both often will speak their mind irrespective the feelings of others. Both "give a damn" about users, though with completely different ideas about what is important.

iradik 15y ago
Stallman is way more philosophical than Jobs. Jobs focus was on building insanely great products. Stallman is focused on promoting a philosophy of sharing. I think they are much more different than they are similar. Both have affected my life in positive ways. Stallman has affected me as a programmer and a thinker. Jobs has affected me through his company's products I would say stallman has had the deeper effect though I type this on an iPhone. Both are zealots who would prefer everyone adopt their world view. I don't think a single view is possible nor is it preferable.
- brlewis 15y ago
  Emacs is an insanely great product.
Hitchhiker 15y ago
I find it exquisitely ironic that RMS is railing on about SJ.. both profess an anti-dogmatic , against 1984 approach. Both ended up creating uniquely dogmatic ecosystems. One exploited it at an unbelievable commercial scale surpassing the beast they rebelled against ( IBM, the 1984 ad ) .. the other has become a very strange priest who keeps railing on against other churches that spawned from the original. I personally admire and respect Steve more.. at least, he had and inspired poetry.. at least, he made Jonathan Ive craft a speech of a life-time[1] at the recent memorial. [1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPUsuY8JZJI&t=2905 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPUsuY8JZJI&t=2905
- barrkel 15y ago
  I admire Steve more; I wish I had some of his talents. I respect Richard more; the degree to which he doesn't compromise takes more bravery than it looks, IMO. He could have taken the easy way out, and been handsomely rewarded for it, long ago.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

dlikhten 15y ago

I would like to point out, that regardless of your feelings for either person Jobs or Stallman, both is/was very smart people, and what they say/do we should pay attention to. Stallman is right about Jobs' legacy. iOS devices prevent installation of any GPL software. This is blatantly wrong. Most innovations within the last 20 years came from OSS developers creating incredible techniques used by Apple/MS/etc, yet this is being attacked. The shoulders of giants analogy perfectly applies. Except OSS developers don't get patents, the thiefs of OSS do. Unlike Jobs, Stallman's view of the world is towards freedom and I respect him for walking the walk, he is not filthy rich and that is because he does not exploit people. He definitely has views and attitudes that are unpopular, such as his views on reproduction BUT none of those ever take choice away from people, nor do they ever take any freedom away from people. His prediction of the patent war is true. Look at patents today. MS is taking royalties from 50% of android sales. Apple is preventing sales of tablets because they have round corners and the approximate shape of an iPad, and Intellectual Ventures is getting ready to obliterate companies. The legacy of Steve Jobs is anti-freedom.

kmavm 15y ago
"Most innovations within the last 20 years came from OSS developers creating incredible techniques used by Apple/MS/etc..." Name one. To take some examples I happen to have first-hand intimacy with: Linux is both original and good, but the original parts are frequently not good, and the good parts are clones of Solaris. Touchscreen happened in iOS first. Modern virtualization happened in VMware's closed-source base first. Modern information retrieval is still a proprietary Google secret. The most important counter-examples I can think of are languages. The "everything is a hash table" descendants of Perl and javascript (in which I include Python, Ruby, and PHP) would not have been viable as commercial products. That said, even javascript began life as a Netscape proprietary implementation, and Perl is mostly a synthesis of ideas present in ksh.
- colanderman 15y ago
  Touchscreen happened in iOS first. What? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus is just one counterexample of many.

socratic 15y ago

I grew up at a time when people felt very strongly about Windows versus Linux. People would fight amongst themselves on Slashdot and elsewhere about whether it was OK to use Windows, or whether it was possible to do [whatever] on Linux. I guess what I'm wondering is: is OSX/iOS versus Linux/Android the operating system flame war of our time? In this thread, I see almost entirely ad hominem attacks on Stallman. (Not unlike a Daring Fireball thread in reverse.) Is he Glenn Beck or is he Rush Limbaugh? Is he just slightly impractical or is he extremely impractical? What I don't see is any substantial discussion of the OP. At the moment, there are 2/72 comments that mention the iOS App Store at all, which is a major point that Stallman seems to be making here. More generally, is no one worried about what Stallman is worried about? Jobs' explicit stated goal was to destroy the only Linux mobile platform (through patents), and his policies on the App Store and elsewhere were explicitly hostile to Free Software. Had Jobs been successful and perhaps lived another ten years, we might be living in a world with no Free Software on our personal devices at all. Apple laptops with software installed from the Mac App Store to develop iOS apps for the iOS App Store (with both App Stores of course rejecting GPL code). Given that almost all startups rely heavily on Free Software, from emacs to gcc to Xen to Ruby to every poorly constructed library on Github, that would be tremendously negative for the startup ecosystem, no?

diminish 15y ago
I - a developer who open sources some code - totally agree, it is sad that, ios app store emerged in 21st century, to control what people can use, for their own safety (and not apple's walled garden dogma); governments in oppressive countries use exact same arguments to filter internet; to protect users (children etc) against evil ... for startups, an apple-minded world would be detrimental.
ghshephard 15y ago
The irony is that Stallman can be most closely identified to the heroine in the 1984 commercial, trying to shake up people from their walled gardens of pure idiolatry. (I say this as a happy member of the iPad/iPhone/MacBook Air masses. :-)
rimantas 15y ago

9999 15y ago

Stallman has once again said exactly what I would expect Stallman to say. I admire(d) and respect(ed) both Stallman and Jobs. Even if their views are diametrically opposed (although I wouldn't say Jobs' position is actually at the complete opposite end of the spectrum), they both managed to advance computing in ways that no one else could have. Although I would expect Stallman to hate what Jobs has done, I wish he would try to understand why people value his work so intensely. Stylish and smooth is only the beginning.

kabdib 15y ago

Years ago I had Stallman personally demand that I quit Apple in protest of something that he felt strongly about. He was obnoxious to the point that I lost all respect for him. The OSS community would do better without Stallman.

iradik 15y ago
Wow very interesting. Well you were making closed software :) Did he offer you suggestions on what to do instead? I recall stallman saying if he couldn't develop free software he'd work at a diner. Will never starve.
flomo 15y ago
Was this back when Apple was suing everyone over "look and feel"? The FSF was "boycotting" Apple, which as a pragmatic matter, only made it difficult to find tools for A/UX.
spodek 15y ago
rms is not a member of the OSS community. He is a (founding) member of the Free Software community. At least that's my understanding.

foob 15y ago

Every time an article involving Richard Stallman gets posted here I cringe as I read through the comments. There are a range of opinions so I don't want to overgeneralize but there are a large number of people here that seem to almost despise Stallman and the FSF. People make fun of him and make comments about how he has a net negative impact on software and computing. It pains me to see so many people, who quite likely rely on emacs, Xcode with gcc, gnu coreutils, or an operating system that would've never been possible without the Free software movement, sit around and ridicule RMS because he eats toe jam or really, really likes parrots. He's had more of a far reaching and positive impact on software than people with such naive views will probably ever realize. What I really wanted to comment about though (I couldn't hold back a short rant...) is how these Steve Jobs comments relate to the E-Parasites Act that was discussed yesterday. I read a lot of great comments there about how we're losing our freedoms incrementally and how this will shape the future. In the US we've seen this ratchet effect taking place to a frightening extent in the last decades both inside of computing and in general. If the US ever ends up in a place where there's widespread censorship on the internet then you can bet that it can trace its ancestry back to the DMCA and something like the E-Parasites act which will allow entire sites to get shut down with lots of room for abuse. Every step we take in that direction makes it easier to keep stepping in that direction. So why don't as many people feel this way about Apple? Because we like their products? Iphones have made it normal to buy a computing device that has artificial restrictions preventing you from running whatever software you want on it. If they had their way then it would have actually been illegal to jailbreak your phone in order to circumvent this. Sure, iphones are really cool but this is a step in a terrifying direction. If it ever becomes illegal to upgrade the RAM in your laptop yourself or to install third party software on it then you can bet that you can trace the ancestry of those laws back to the shifts in public perception of computing freedom caused by companies like Apple. Laws like that might seem laughably extreme now but with every step in that direction they seem less and less so. Stallman sees this and he has dedicated his life to moving us in the opposite direction. He's been hugely successful at this and he's been almost prophetic in his opinions about what we should be worrying about. He was criticizing Apple for trying to take away peoples' freedoms and Steve Jobs for steering the company in this direction. He wasn't condemning him as a person, as he said "My feelings about Jobs as a person are not strong, since I barely knew him." I don't see expressing this view after Steve Jobs' death as being particularly disrespectful. Steve Jobs is known to the majority of people only for his role at Apple. This role is what he was praised for across the internet and in magazines after his death. This role is what Stallman condemned.

seasoup 15y ago

Is there not room in the world for both paid and free software? Why must all software be free, and why must all devices accommodate free software? The free software movement needs to make something as interesting and as compelling as what Apple built instead of just complaining about what Apple built. Make something beautiful and easy to use and people will use it. On a personal level, I don't want free software for my phone. It's too much work for me. I want my phone to just work, I don't want it to have viruses, I don't have the time or inclination to hack around with it and I'm a developer, I don't care as a consumer if that means that "free" software is given the boot from a device to make this happen. For my $: Good design + No Viruses > Free Software That's not true for everyone, and for them Apple isn't the right product.

orangecat 15y ago
Why must all software be free, and why must all devices accommodate free software? The question isn't "all", it's "any". If Apple gets their way then jailbreaking "your" iOS device will be a federal crime, and the only significant open-ish alternative will be forcibly removed from the market.

vimalg2 15y ago

RMS would still piss certain people off, if he'd instead said : "I am not the least bit upset SJ is gone. I've always fundamentally disagreed with the movements he spearheaded, to take away the user's freedom." RMS is supposedly autistic, and the lack of empathy is likely a result of that. Taking that into account, there hardly seems cause for all this fuss. Move on.

rickmb 15y ago

Anybody with any knowledge of what both Jobs and RMS have achieved and how their vision has affected our work and our lives can only have respect for both of them. What we do every day would be very different without them. And for fuck's sake, no matter how you feel about RMS as a person and his undiplomatic, uncompromising stance, listen when the man speaks. He's been right more often than not.

5hoom 15y ago
Totally agree, both men are worthy of great respect. Regarding Richard Stallman you can take or leave his personality, but he does take a very long view of the software ecosystem and he has made more than a few prophetic observations ("The Right to Read" foreshadowing widespread DRM comes to mind). I'll always take the time to hear what he has to say.

billpatrianakos 15y ago

His original post should have been more along the lines of this correction. The original had awful timing and was totally tactless. Correction noted, doesn't make thing right, still dislike him very much.

kingsidharth 15y ago

"stylish and smooth" he doesn't understand design.

thomasgerbe 15y ago
Pretty much. Crazy. Normal people just care about stuff that works well and is easy to use.

jsz0 15y ago

Stallman should invest some of his time and passion into yelling at OSS developers for consistently failing to build products as usable and trouble-free as Apple's software. Almost no normal person cares about open vs closed. They care about works vs. doesn't work. Most of what Stallman advocates would not work for normal people so his work is just a waste of time until there is a credible OSS alternative to the things and people he hates.

forensic 15y ago
You're still equating OSS with RMS when OSS was the enemy of RMS.
- Peaker 15y ago
  More of an ally camp..
gujk 15y ago
He does, and he gets crap for that too. He famously got into an argument about the relative merits of having a child vs working on emacs.

gbog 15y ago

Too many comments here, but I'll still be shouting in the desert: rms is right, having so many tech guys using apple products is harmful for our children, computing is power, power needs separated, we need a separation of powers between hw and s, in the constitution.

gbog 15y ago
Edit (dunno why I can't edit this post): "we need a separation of powers between hardware and software, in the constitution."

jfb 15y ago

I spend all day in Emacs, and I used to work for Apple. Who do I root for? (Kidding. I think Stallman makes his point eloquently clear here, and while I disagree, I can't impugn him as a person.)

mark_l_watson 15y ago

Very cool that he is very attentive to important things going on in the world and keeps a political notes log - I didn't know that side of Richard. That was a good link. I also agree with other comments here that the USA is in real jeopardy of losing Internet (and other) freedoms so Richard's life work for software freedom seems relevant right now.

sigzero 15y ago

Like HURD, I applaud Stallman for his vision but not his implementation.