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> his personal views (which I do not support) and eccentricity Oh wow. That's some downplaying of the actual issue, which I won't make explicit because it's ab

> his personal views (which I do not support) and eccentricity Oh wow. That's some downplaying of the actual issue, which I won't make explicit because it's absolutely disgusting. The guy made himself and his foundation untouchable for anyone with a reputation to lose, leading to a lot of effort going into "de-GNU-ification" of technology stacks. > Stallman has been a positive force It's very hard to make this kind of argument for anything he has done in the last 15 years. Two quick points: The version of the GPL that continues to enable the success of Linux is one that Stallman now explicitly disapproves of. And you might have noticed not a single one of the recent successful programming languages uses GCC as the default backend -- there's a whole history of Stallman intervention in the project and resulting idiotic architecture decisions behind why that's the case.

zajio1am 3y ago
> leading to a lot of effort going into "de-GNU-ification" of technology stacks. De-GNU-ification was mostly about GPLv3, not Stallman. Some of this was pushed by Apple, so they can use free software without copyleft requirements.
- arp242 3y ago
  Technical issues were another reason; Stallman intentionally made GCC worse to prevent possible abuse (mostly based on unfounded fears, IMHO), some GNU tools are not well suited for all environments ("bloated", for lack of a better term), and there have been some governance issues (e.g. GNU libc was notorious for a long time, but also copyright assignments to the FSF, bad technical decisions being made for purely ideological reasons). Also, Apple pretty much proposed to transfer LLVM to the FSF: "If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these details."[1] which was basically just ignored. That was in 2005 before GPLv3, but it shows that Apple wasn't against copyleft out of principle and that a small bit of pragmatism would have prevented the alienation of Apple, as well as many other organisations and people. All that for the very small benefit the controversial clauses in GPLv3 give us. Well done people. [1]: https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html
modo_mario 3y ago
>there's a whole history of Stallman intervention in the project and resulting idiotic architecture decisions behind why that's the case. Could you expand on this? I still see him in a somewhat positive light because whilst his aspergers makes him not an optimal face to an organization his dogmatism regarding free software and the FSF's efforts in court and elsewhere have proven largely a good thing imo and I don't really fault him for his corporate opponents that stem from that. Meanwhile a lot of the accusations turned out weirdly fabricated which left me a bit of a bad taste, inconsequential or were regarding statements he'd apologized for and publicly changed his views on with explanation as to why and how.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Stallman can be blamed for the rise of Clang, basically. He for instance prominently refused to have GCC dump the full AST because of concerns of what people might do with that which could infringe on software freedom: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00015.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00... And that sort of thing suddenly made the non-GPL competition relevant and better. Now LLVM isn't a tragedy by any means, it's an excellent piece of software. But here we can see Stallman sabotaging his own mission, and resulting in alternatives to GCC being popularized, and written under licenses less favorable to FSF's mission.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    I'm sure he is just playing the long game.

zajio1am 3y ago

> leading to a lot of effort going into "de-GNU-ification" of technology stacks. De-GNU-ification was mostly about GPLv3, not Stallman. Some of this was pushed by Apple, so they can use free software without copyleft requirements.

arp242 3y ago
Technical issues were another reason; Stallman intentionally made GCC worse to prevent possible abuse (mostly based on unfounded fears, IMHO), some GNU tools are not well suited for all environments ("bloated", for lack of a better term), and there have been some governance issues (e.g. GNU libc was notorious for a long time, but also copyright assignments to the FSF, bad technical decisions being made for purely ideological reasons). Also, Apple pretty much proposed to transfer LLVM to the FSF: "If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these details."[1] which was basically just ignored. That was in 2005 before GPLv3, but it shows that Apple wasn't against copyleft out of principle and that a small bit of pragmatism would have prevented the alienation of Apple, as well as many other organisations and people. All that for the very small benefit the controversial clauses in GPLv3 give us. Well done people. [1]: https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html

modo_mario 3y ago

>there's a whole history of Stallman intervention in the project and resulting idiotic architecture decisions behind why that's the case. Could you expand on this? I still see him in a somewhat positive light because whilst his aspergers makes him not an optimal face to an organization his dogmatism regarding free software and the FSF's efforts in court and elsewhere have proven largely a good thing imo and I don't really fault him for his corporate opponents that stem from that. Meanwhile a lot of the accusations turned out weirdly fabricated which left me a bit of a bad taste, inconsequential or were regarding statements he'd apologized for and publicly changed his views on with explanation as to why and how.

dale_glass 3y ago
Stallman can be blamed for the rise of Clang, basically. He for instance prominently refused to have GCC dump the full AST because of concerns of what people might do with that which could infringe on software freedom: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00015.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00... And that sort of thing suddenly made the non-GPL competition relevant and better. Now LLVM isn't a tragedy by any means, it's an excellent piece of software. But here we can see Stallman sabotaging his own mission, and resulting in alternatives to GCC being popularized, and written under licenses less favorable to FSF's mission.
- detourdog 3y ago
  I'm sure he is just playing the long game.