5 ms·

Well, not the best way to expand your horizon. When he would use things like the iPad from time to time, he would understand that convenience is the biggest th

by sek 15y ago

Well, not the best way to expand your horizon. When he would use things like the iPad from time to time, he would understand that convenience is the biggest threat to open source. Nobody cares how free Stallman's device really is. When he would speak for better open source devices, he would actually make progress. Right now is Shuttleworth advancing the free software movement to be accessible for everyone. Reminds me of these ultra leftists, who declare their own government and live without electricity and fresh water. What do they achieve in the big picture? They do this just to feel better themself. Linus Torvalds is the man who made everything possible. Google/Facebook would never have existed with a Hurd kernel and Git is now the big accelerator of open source. Stallman started it, but what did he achieve significant in the last 20 years?

thurn 15y ago
Google and Facebook would never exist the way they do today without the free software movement. Both of them rely on a huge stack of open-source technology. Stallman's ideas are what makes it possible for a college kid to run a web startup today essentially for free.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- lazerwalker 15y ago
  I think sek's post was more along the lines of "but what has he done for me lately?" Right now, for every piece of open software that has enabled all kinds of world-changing good things, there's a dozen situations where open software is not a viable solution when compared to the closed alternatives for a wide variety of reasons, unless you're explicitly choosing to use only open software as a show of support for an ideological cause. What frustrates me about Stallman is that he spends his time lecturing people about why they're bad people for not using open software, instead of actively working to make open software a more appealing solution more of the time.
  - ebiester 15y ago
    Someone needs to set the edge of the Overton window.
  - tikhonj 15y ago
    Have you ever listened to his talks? I have read a bunch of what he has written (mostly transcripts of talks) and did not get that impression. His main point is not that you are a "bad person" for using proprietary software--rather, it's more like you are the victim. Now, he does believe you should not use proprietary software, but because it's abusive and takes away your rights. Finally, I could see getting the impression that people publishing proprietary software are "bad", but that's a different story altogether. Also, we're mostly developers here. Barring a few fields (things like .NET and iOS), free software is the best option for development. So while an artist using exclusively free software may be making a sacrifice, I have actually been much more productive on Linux/Emacs than I ever was on OS X or Windows. It's really a win-win situation.
- pooriaazimi 15y ago
  But... (open source != FSF) Stallman's ideas are what makes it possible for a college kid to run a web startup today essentially for free. With lots and lots of limitations the GPL license imposes on him... I think the world would be a better place with less GPL and more BSD/Apache/... - He did great things, but many of his ideas are old and frankly, ridiculous. I submitted this link a while back that has a great discussion about what people think of GPS's limitations: 'Why you should use a BSD style license for your Open Source Project' http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3402346 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3402346
  - dalke 15y ago
    What limitations does the GPL license place on a web startup? AGPL, yes, but GPL?
    - xorglorb 15y ago
      If you ever license a product to another company (ie. GitHub FI), you have to be GPL compliant.
      - pquerna 15y ago
        And during an acquisition GPL'ed software dependencies is at the very least a yellow flag to be fully investigated....
    - pooriaazimi 15y ago
      Read the linked HN discussion (and also the original FreeBSD.org article). As an example, You can't (technically) use GPL'd code inside your iOS application. GPL is not the greatest license, that's why they created LGPL (to remove some of its stupid restrictions) and even that wasn't enough...
      - nknight 15y ago
        > You can't (technically) use GPL'd code inside your iOS application. Web startups don't generally build iOS apps, they build web apps. > GPL is not the greatest license, that's why they created LGPL (to remove some of its stupid restrictions) and even that wasn't enough... Enough for whom? Microsoft? I know it's hard to believe, but some people do not have "allow companies to benefit from my work without giving back anything in return" as their top priority.
- dalke 15y ago
  As the FSF would point out, the free software movement is different from open source. If there was no free software movement, or a prohibition on GPL'ed software, then Google could have used other open source tools (eg, *BSD) instead. One serious concern in the FSF seems to be that a large, programmer-centric company like Google could rewrite most free software, should the license not be compatible with the business model. Eg, the recent brouhaha on a non-GPL replacement for BusyBox and a comment about Google's goal of "reducing the amount of GPL software in user-space for Android devices."
  - natesm 15y ago
    > As the FSF would point out, the free software movement is different from open source. They point this out and it's philosophically true, but are there actually any licenses that meet the definition of "open source" but not the definition of "free software" (or vise versa)? All of the ones that people actually use (GPL, LGPL, BSD, MIT, ISC, and Apache, I think that basically covers it) appear to pass both DFSG and OSI definitions.
    - dalke 15y ago
      Going through the list of licenses which the FSF considers not-free but which are listed on opensource.org as "open source": NASA Open Source Agreement 1.3 (NASA 1.3), Reciprocal Public License (RPL 1.5). I'm hard pressed to think of something which can be considered free software but not open source. My point though is that you commingled the free software movement with open source efforts. Google etc. could have implemented what they needed from various open source projects which existed at the time but were not part of the free software development. The major exception, of course, being gcc. It's only now with LLVM that gcc has a serious open source alternative. (I assign that term carefully; LLVM is not part of the free software movement.)
      - Shamanmuni 15y ago
        Your distinctions in reality are pretty meaningless, you can be an open source guy using the GPL (look at Linus) or a free software guy using BSD. Both movements overlap enourmously, and the differences between them are very small compared to the rest of the software ecosystem. I wish we could stop all the silly infighting and see that we are all heading in the same direction.
_delirium 15y ago
I don't think there's anything new there conceptually; Stallman is quite aware that convenience is one way that proprietary software wins over users, because that was also true in the 1980s. What benefit would there be if RMS used an iPad? He's not a UI designer for any GNU software, so he doesn't really need to do it for field research. The main software he's involved with at all (mainly GNU Emacs these days, afaik) is not really targeted at the same demographic as the iPad anyway.
Aloha 15y ago
What of BSD? The stack /can/ be the same even.
middayc 15y ago
So what, he can use whatever He wants. What's wrong with doing things "just to to feel better"? Or is it only OK when you consume more to feel better, not consume less to feel better? (not to even start with "what did he achieve ..in 20 y")
igorgue 15y ago
"Stallman was responsible for contributing many necessary tools, including a text editor (Emacs), compiler (GCC), debugger (gdb), and a build automator (gmake)." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman Ignorance is incredible sometimes. We own both, Stallman and Torvalds a lot. I'm pretty sure Torvalds would tell you that he wouldn't make Linux without Stallman's work, in fact that's why Linux is GPL.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
apaitch 15y ago
Open source software and free software are two different things, and Stallman is an advocate for the latter (as well as the former). I think that's an important point, and one which people tend to miss.
onli 15y ago
>When he would use things like the iPad from time to time, he would understand that convenience is the biggest threat to open source. I remember him saying that. Sorry, about FOSS, of course.
bkirwi 15y ago
Saying Torvalds 'made everything possible' is technically true, but a bit misleading. If there was no Linux kernel, the free software project would have taken much longer, but without the GNU userspace the kernel would have been not much more than a curiosity. There's still more GNU code in your average Linux distro than anything else.[0] People forget how much impact the lunatic fringe have on the rest of us. Before the free software movement, it would have seemed insane for a company to give away their code for free -- there was no precedent for it. When you shift the extremes, you also change what counts as being 'moderate'. Would anyone have taken Canonical's business model seriously twenty years ago? TL;DR: We need people like Stallman to make the rest of us look less crazy. [0] http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
elwin 15y ago
I don't think RMS could advance the Free software movement by using a more normal setup. There are already plenty of people who think open source is sort of cool, and install it on their MacBook Pros when it's convenient, and sometimes help develop it. And they're better at making Free software accessible for everyone than RMS could be. They don't need his help. He contributes more by disturbing our perspectives in a way that no one else does.
gioele 15y ago
> Linus Torvalds is the man who made everything possible. Not to detract from the men, but he used the GNU C Compiler to compile its kernel, as well as the GNU bash shell, the GNU linker and so on... Since its inception, the free software movement created a network of hackers and GPL programs that was well established by the time Torvalds started its kernel. Without that network, Linux and many other "groundwork" programs would not even been possible in the first place.
tikhonj 15y ago
Actually, I can't help thinking a much larger issue is marketing and fashion. Nobody except a few large proprietary software companies (Apple, Microsoft) have enough leverage to market heavily to average consumers. Most people do not make heavily researched, purely rational decisions about what to buy: they just get whatever they saw in an ad or whatever is in the store. In both cases, thanks to the obscene amount of money Apple and Microsoft put into distribution and advertising (as well as some monopolistic behavior), the most readily available computers run either Mac OS or Windows. Ubunutu is, in large part, successful because they at least have some marketing. If they managed to get Ubunutu laptops into stores, people would probably buy them. But then Microsoft would go out of its way to crush them (witness the Linux netbooks of a little while ago). Stallman did write some brilliant software some time ago. Now, unlike Linus, he is concentrating on social issues of free software rather than on programming. And his advocacy has doubtlessly increased the use of the GPL, which has had some very concrete beneficial effects. For example, my understanding is that WebKit is largely free because it was originally forked from KHTML.
- Xuzz 15y ago
  That's true for WebCore (the WebKit rendering engine), yes. But WebKit itself, actually, is BSD licensed and released just because Apple decided to release it. (About a year or so after WebKit was first publicly released, though, I think.)
rat87 15y ago
"When he would use things like the iPad from time to time, he would understand that convenience is the biggest threat to open source. Nobody cares how free Stallman's device really is. When he would speak for better open source devices, he would actually make progress. Right now is Shuttleworth advancing the free software movement to be accessible for everyone." I'm pretty sure he understands in his rude comments after Job's death he said: “Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died. and "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." I think Stallman knows he just don't care much about it for personal use. The FSF does list Gnash — the free software Flash player Free software replacement for Skype Free software video editing software Free Google Earth Replacement Help GNU/Linux distributions be committed to freedom as top priorities people should donate time and money too. The distros and stuff like android is where a lot of ease of use stuff happens and that is why the FSF lists ( Help GNU/Linux distributions be committed to freedom) and a 100% foss android named replicant under the under the reverse engineering priorities list .

by sek 15y ago

thurn 15y ago

Google and Facebook would never exist the way they do today without the free software movement. Both of them rely on a huge stack of open-source technology. Stallman's ideas are what makes it possible for a college kid to run a web startup today essentially for free.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
lazerwalker 15y ago
I think sek's post was more along the lines of "but what has he done for me lately?" Right now, for every piece of open software that has enabled all kinds of world-changing good things, there's a dozen situations where open software is not a viable solution when compared to the closed alternatives for a wide variety of reasons, unless you're explicitly choosing to use only open software as a show of support for an ideological cause. What frustrates me about Stallman is that he spends his time lecturing people about why they're bad people for not using open software, instead of actively working to make open software a more appealing solution more of the time.
- ebiester 15y ago
  Someone needs to set the edge of the Overton window.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  Have you ever listened to his talks? I have read a bunch of what he has written (mostly transcripts of talks) and did not get that impression. His main point is not that you are a "bad person" for using proprietary software--rather, it's more like you are the victim. Now, he does believe you should not use proprietary software, but because it's abusive and takes away your rights. Finally, I could see getting the impression that people publishing proprietary software are "bad", but that's a different story altogether. Also, we're mostly developers here. Barring a few fields (things like .NET and iOS), free software is the best option for development. So while an artist using exclusively free software may be making a sacrifice, I have actually been much more productive on Linux/Emacs than I ever was on OS X or Windows. It's really a win-win situation.
pooriaazimi 15y ago
But... (open source != FSF) Stallman's ideas are what makes it possible for a college kid to run a web startup today essentially for free. With lots and lots of limitations the GPL license imposes on him... I think the world would be a better place with less GPL and more BSD/Apache/... - He did great things, but many of his ideas are old and frankly, ridiculous. I submitted this link a while back that has a great discussion about what people think of GPS's limitations: 'Why you should use a BSD style license for your Open Source Project' http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3402346 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3402346
- dalke 15y ago
  What limitations does the GPL license place on a web startup? AGPL, yes, but GPL?
  - xorglorb 15y ago
    If you ever license a product to another company (ie. GitHub FI), you have to be GPL compliant.
    - pquerna 15y ago
      And during an acquisition GPL'ed software dependencies is at the very least a yellow flag to be fully investigated....
  - pooriaazimi 15y ago
    Read the linked HN discussion (and also the original FreeBSD.org article). As an example, You can't (technically) use GPL'd code inside your iOS application. GPL is not the greatest license, that's why they created LGPL (to remove some of its stupid restrictions) and even that wasn't enough...
    - nknight 15y ago
      > You can't (technically) use GPL'd code inside your iOS application. Web startups don't generally build iOS apps, they build web apps. > GPL is not the greatest license, that's why they created LGPL (to remove some of its stupid restrictions) and even that wasn't enough... Enough for whom? Microsoft? I know it's hard to believe, but some people do not have "allow companies to benefit from my work without giving back anything in return" as their top priority.
dalke 15y ago
As the FSF would point out, the free software movement is different from open source. If there was no free software movement, or a prohibition on GPL'ed software, then Google could have used other open source tools (eg, *BSD) instead. One serious concern in the FSF seems to be that a large, programmer-centric company like Google could rewrite most free software, should the license not be compatible with the business model. Eg, the recent brouhaha on a non-GPL replacement for BusyBox and a comment about Google's goal of "reducing the amount of GPL software in user-space for Android devices."
- natesm 15y ago
  > As the FSF would point out, the free software movement is different from open source. They point this out and it's philosophically true, but are there actually any licenses that meet the definition of "open source" but not the definition of "free software" (or vise versa)? All of the ones that people actually use (GPL, LGPL, BSD, MIT, ISC, and Apache, I think that basically covers it) appear to pass both DFSG and OSI definitions.
  - dalke 15y ago
    Going through the list of licenses which the FSF considers not-free but which are listed on opensource.org as "open source": NASA Open Source Agreement 1.3 (NASA 1.3), Reciprocal Public License (RPL 1.5). I'm hard pressed to think of something which can be considered free software but not open source. My point though is that you commingled the free software movement with open source efforts. Google etc. could have implemented what they needed from various open source projects which existed at the time but were not part of the free software development. The major exception, of course, being gcc. It's only now with LLVM that gcc has a serious open source alternative. (I assign that term carefully; LLVM is not part of the free software movement.)
    - Shamanmuni 15y ago
      Your distinctions in reality are pretty meaningless, you can be an open source guy using the GPL (look at Linus) or a free software guy using BSD. Both movements overlap enourmously, and the differences between them are very small compared to the rest of the software ecosystem. I wish we could stop all the silly infighting and see that we are all heading in the same direction.

_delirium 15y ago

I don't think there's anything new there conceptually; Stallman is quite aware that convenience is one way that proprietary software wins over users, because that was also true in the 1980s. What benefit would there be if RMS used an iPad? He's not a UI designer for any GNU software, so he doesn't really need to do it for field research. The main software he's involved with at all (mainly GNU Emacs these days, afaik) is not really targeted at the same demographic as the iPad anyway.

Aloha 15y ago

What of BSD? The stack /can/ be the same even.

middayc 15y ago

So what, he can use whatever He wants. What's wrong with doing things "just to to feel better"? Or is it only OK when you consume more to feel better, not consume less to feel better? (not to even start with "what did he achieve ..in 20 y")

igorgue 15y ago

"Stallman was responsible for contributing many necessary tools, including a text editor (Emacs), compiler (GCC), debugger (gdb), and a build automator (gmake)." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman Ignorance is incredible sometimes. We own both, Stallman and Torvalds a lot. I'm pretty sure Torvalds would tell you that he wouldn't make Linux without Stallman's work, in fact that's why Linux is GPL.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

apaitch 15y ago

Open source software and free software are two different things, and Stallman is an advocate for the latter (as well as the former). I think that's an important point, and one which people tend to miss.

onli 15y ago

>When he would use things like the iPad from time to time, he would understand that convenience is the biggest threat to open source. I remember him saying that. Sorry, about FOSS, of course.

bkirwi 15y ago

Saying Torvalds 'made everything possible' is technically true, but a bit misleading. If there was no Linux kernel, the free software project would have taken much longer, but without the GNU userspace the kernel would have been not much more than a curiosity. There's still more GNU code in your average Linux distro than anything else.[0] People forget how much impact the lunatic fringe have on the rest of us. Before the free software movement, it would have seemed insane for a company to give away their code for free -- there was no precedent for it. When you shift the extremes, you also change what counts as being 'moderate'. Would anyone have taken Canonical's business model seriously twenty years ago? TL;DR: We need people like Stallman to make the rest of us look less crazy. [0] http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html

elwin 15y ago

I don't think RMS could advance the Free software movement by using a more normal setup. There are already plenty of people who think open source is sort of cool, and install it on their MacBook Pros when it's convenient, and sometimes help develop it. And they're better at making Free software accessible for everyone than RMS could be. They don't need his help. He contributes more by disturbing our perspectives in a way that no one else does.

gioele 15y ago

> Linus Torvalds is the man who made everything possible. Not to detract from the men, but he used the GNU C Compiler to compile its kernel, as well as the GNU bash shell, the GNU linker and so on... Since its inception, the free software movement created a network of hackers and GPL programs that was well established by the time Torvalds started its kernel. Without that network, Linux and many other "groundwork" programs would not even been possible in the first place.

tikhonj 15y ago

Actually, I can't help thinking a much larger issue is marketing and fashion. Nobody except a few large proprietary software companies (Apple, Microsoft) have enough leverage to market heavily to average consumers. Most people do not make heavily researched, purely rational decisions about what to buy: they just get whatever they saw in an ad or whatever is in the store. In both cases, thanks to the obscene amount of money Apple and Microsoft put into distribution and advertising (as well as some monopolistic behavior), the most readily available computers run either Mac OS or Windows. Ubunutu is, in large part, successful because they at least have some marketing. If they managed to get Ubunutu laptops into stores, people would probably buy them. But then Microsoft would go out of its way to crush them (witness the Linux netbooks of a little while ago). Stallman did write some brilliant software some time ago. Now, unlike Linus, he is concentrating on social issues of free software rather than on programming. And his advocacy has doubtlessly increased the use of the GPL, which has had some very concrete beneficial effects. For example, my understanding is that WebKit is largely free because it was originally forked from KHTML.

Xuzz 15y ago
That's true for WebCore (the WebKit rendering engine), yes. But WebKit itself, actually, is BSD licensed and released just because Apple decided to release it. (About a year or so after WebKit was first publicly released, though, I think.)

rat87 15y ago

"When he would use things like the iPad from time to time, he would understand that convenience is the biggest threat to open source. Nobody cares how free Stallman's device really is. When he would speak for better open source devices, he would actually make progress. Right now is Shuttleworth advancing the free software movement to be accessible for everyone." I'm pretty sure he understands in his rude comments after Job's death he said: “Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died. and "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." I think Stallman knows he just don't care much about it for personal use. The FSF does list Gnash — the free software Flash player Free software replacement for Skype Free software video editing software Free Google Earth Replacement Help GNU/Linux distributions be committed to freedom as top priorities people should donate time and money too. The distros and stuff like android is where a lot of ease of use stuff happens and that is why the FSF lists ( Help GNU/Linux distributions be committed to freedom) and a 100% foss android named replicant under the under the reverse engineering priorities list .