3 ms·
> Say what you want about rms but he indeed has a talent of ruining a successful (and free) software project with his religious views (Gnome vs KDE, Guile vs Tc
by pengaru 4y ago
> Say what you want about rms but he indeed has a talent of ruining a successful (and free) software project with his religious views (Gnome vs KDE, Guile vs Tcl, the list goes on)...
To blame rms of all people for what you've described demonstrates a lack of understanding his scope of influence and participation in gnome especially in this era.
I can get behind blaming rms for gcc's missed opportunities, ultimately ceding its dominant position to clang/llvm. He clearly overplayed his hand there.
But when it comes to gnome I recall little more than mailing list bickering over gnome being a GNU project or not and what the G in GNOME stands for. Perhaps my memory is failing here, but it feels crediting rms with anything more than wasting a bit of gnome devs time and frustration would be overstating it. Not that any FOSS devs need more of that with how entitled and obnoxious users already can be, but they tend to have developed thick enough skin to ignore rms's aspy silliness.
Can you provide any examples to the contrary?
- Postosuchus 4y agoMy memory might be failing me but the whole raison d'être for GNOME project was the call by RMS. The premise was as follows: Qt was not truly free (despite promises by TrollTech at the time to address) and thus KDE could not be considered free desktop software.
- pengaru 4y agorms wasn't alone in this view that a non-gpl DE was unacceptable at the time. Also don't forget we're talking about an era where C++ was still largely despised for being a terrible and poorly supported language. The folks working on gtk/gnome were going to be living in C regardless of what fell out of rms.