6 ms·

Yet another reason why I'm not a fan of Richard Stallman. Most of the decisions he made over the past 25 years have been self-defeating and led directly to the

Yet another reason why I'm not a fan of Richard Stallman. Most of the decisions he made over the past 25 years have been self-defeating and led directly to the decline of the influence of his own movement. It's not that "the GCC project" avoided that for ideological reason, Stallman was personally a veto on that issue for years, and his personal objection led to several people quitting the project for LLVM, with a couple saying as much directly to him. https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00091.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00... (both threads are interesting reading in their entirety, not just those specific emails)

knowknow 2y ago
Kind like how GPL 3 makes it infeasible for most companies to use/support free software. At least Stallman gets to feel morally superior though
- dralley 2y ago
  And Free Software does not benefit from a morass of mutually-incompatible copyleft licenses that may as well have been proprietary since you can't use them together. None of the permissive licenses have this problem.
  - gkbrk 2y ago
    Which open-source licenses can't be used together?
    - dralley 2y ago
      GPLv2 and GPLv3, for one example... It's sad when two licenses from the same organization are incompatible. GPLv2 and Apache.
      - teddyh 2y ago
        The number of significant software projects which are licensed as GPLv2-only, and which are therefore incompatible with GPLv3, can probably be counted on one hand. Normal GPLv2 projects are licensed – as instructed by the text in the license itself – as “GPLv2 or later”. Which means that any normal GPLv2-licensed software can be relicensed to GPLv3, and can therefore be combined with any other GPLv3-licensed program without any issue whatsoever.
        gus_massa 2y ago
        For GPL v2 only, let's start the list with Linux and Git... The "or later" has been used in creative ways, like relicencing all the Wikipedia content, or the Affero to AGPL transition. Nothing shady, but unexpected. Do you trust RMS to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence? I do, but he is not longer in the FSF. Do you trust the current members of the FSF to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence? I don't know them. Do you trust the future members of the FSF to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence???
        CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
        >Do you trust RMS to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence? I do, but he is not longer in the FSF. Yes he is: https://www.fsf.org/about/staff-and-board https://www.fsf.org/about/staff-and-board
        ndiddy 2y ago
        Section 14 of the GPL says "The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns." Given that the preamble to the GPL explicitly says "the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users", I don't think that a judge would find that a hypothetical GPLv4 that was basically MIT or something is "similar in spirit" to the present version. If you're worried about the other direction (i.e. a hypothetical GPLv4 that had some bizarre restriction like "all users must donate to the FSF"), the "or any later version" means that as long as you don't decide to update the license you use yourself, people can continue to use it under the GPLv2 or v3 indefinitely.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  Honestly at least Linus has his head in the right place
kstrauser 2y ago
I think that's an unreasonable lens for viewing his work. Of course he values purity over practicality. That's his entire platform. His decision making process always prioritizes supporting Free Software over proprietary efforts, pragmatism be damned. Expecting Stallman to make life easier for commercial vendors is like expecting PETA to recommend a good foie gras farm. That's not what they do.
- dralley 2y ago
  >Expecting Stallman to make life easier for commercial vendors is like expecting PETA to recommend a good foie gras farm. That's not what they do. He threw open-source developers under the bus in the process. As a result approximately nobody writes GCC plugins, open source or otherwise.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Alternatively, if you join a Stallman-led Free Software project and hope he'll accept your ideas for making life easier for proprietary vendors, you're gonna have a bad time. I mean, the GNU Emacs FAQ for MS Windows (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/efaq-w32.html#Why-Emacs-on-Windows https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/efaq-w32...) says: > It is not our goal to “help Windows users” by making text editing on Windows more convenient. We aim to replace proprietary software, not to enhance it. So why support GNU Emacs on Windows? > We hope that the experience of using GNU Emacs on Windows will give programmers a taste of freedom, and that this will later inspire them to move to a free operating system such as GNU/Linux. That is the main valid reason to support free applications on nonfree operating systems. RMS has been exceedingly clear about his views for decades. At this point it's hard to be surprised that he’ll make a pro-Free Software decision every time, without fail. That doesn't mean you have to agree with his decisions, of course! But to be shocked or disappointed by them is a sign of not understanding his platform.
    - School-Cotton 2y ago
      But the person you're responding to never said he was shocked or disappointed by the views; he just said the views are bad/counterproductive.
cherryteastain 2y ago
Without GNU, GPL and Richard Stallman, FOSS would not exist in the first place. The GPL forced companies to make FOSS a thing, whether they liked it or not.
- azinman2 2y ago
  And then the world started moving on, with other licenses that gave even more freedom and flexibility. It was a great start, but you need to adapt or you perish.
  - anthk 2y ago
    When VSCode et all beging shipping DRM and who knows what in their extensions, then we'll se what with happens with these half-shareware semilibre projects. Specially when propietary dependencies kill thousands of projects at once.
    - spookie 2y ago
      Well, you are already unable to get most of the functionality out of vscode without Microsoft's extension store. I, for one, am happy that there are still a couple of people here and there that you can really trust on this stuff.
  - trelane 2y ago
    > other licenses that gave even more freedom and flexibility That gave vendors more freedom and flexibility (to lock their software away from their customers.) As usual, customers got less freedom and flexibility.
    - azinman2 2y ago
      I disagree. They got software that’s open under a different license that otherwise would have just been purely proprietary, or not created at all (due to the compounding effects of open source)
JoshTriplett 2y ago
Don't forget that the LLVM folks actually went to GNU and offered it to them, and they failed to pay attention and respond. (It's not even that they responded negatively; they just dropped it on the floor completely.) There's an alternate history where LLVM was a GNU project. With the benefit of hindsight, I'm glad that that didn't happen, even though I have mixed feelings about LLVM being permissively licensed.
- alienthrowaway 2y ago
  Gcc is the flagship of the GNU Project - allowing an endrun of the the spirit of the GPL in gcc was never going to happen. The project paid more attention than you give them credit for because allowing closed source plugins and improvements that use gcc as a frontend is anathema to Free software. There's an impedance mismatch between people who think gcc should have maximized user utility vs. the actual GNU philosophy. The actions of the gcc project make a lot of sense if you consider the FSF/GNU are monomaniacal about maximizing users freedoms, and not popularity, momentum or other ego-stroking metric.
  - JoshTriplett 2y ago
    Whether you care about number of users or not, there's value in considering whether what you're doing is actually advancing the cause of Free Software or not. GCC today has a very interesting license term, the GCC Runtime Library Exception, that makes the use of runtime libraries like libgcc free if-and-only-if you use an entirely Free Software toolchain to compile your code with; otherwise, you're subject to the terms of the GPL on libgcc and similar. That is a sensible pragmatic term, and if they'd come up with that term many years ago, they could have shipped libgccjit and other ways to plug into GCC years ago, and the programming language renaissance that arose due to LLVM might have been built atop GCC instead. That would have been a net win for user freedoms. Instead, because they were so afraid of someone using an intermediate representation to work around GCC's license, and didn't do anything to solve that problem, LLVM is now the primary infrastructure people build new languages around, and GCC lost a huge amount of its relevance, and people now have less software freedom as a result.
  - 2y ago

knowknow 2y ago

Kind like how GPL 3 makes it infeasible for most companies to use/support free software. At least Stallman gets to feel morally superior though

dralley 2y ago
And Free Software does not benefit from a morass of mutually-incompatible copyleft licenses that may as well have been proprietary since you can't use them together. None of the permissive licenses have this problem.
- gkbrk 2y ago
  Which open-source licenses can't be used together?
  - dralley 2y ago
    GPLv2 and GPLv3, for one example... It's sad when two licenses from the same organization are incompatible. GPLv2 and Apache.
    - teddyh 2y ago
      The number of significant software projects which are licensed as GPLv2-only, and which are therefore incompatible with GPLv3, can probably be counted on one hand. Normal GPLv2 projects are licensed – as instructed by the text in the license itself – as “GPLv2 or later”. Which means that any normal GPLv2-licensed software can be relicensed to GPLv3, and can therefore be combined with any other GPLv3-licensed program without any issue whatsoever.
      - gus_massa 2y ago
        For GPL v2 only, let's start the list with Linux and Git... The "or later" has been used in creative ways, like relicencing all the Wikipedia content, or the Affero to AGPL transition. Nothing shady, but unexpected. Do you trust RMS to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence? I do, but he is not longer in the FSF. Do you trust the current members of the FSF to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence? I don't know them. Do you trust the future members of the FSF to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence???
        CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
        >Do you trust RMS to avoid doing shady things in the later GPL licence? I do, but he is not longer in the FSF. Yes he is: https://www.fsf.org/about/staff-and-board https://www.fsf.org/about/staff-and-board
        ndiddy 2y ago
        Section 14 of the GPL says "The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns." Given that the preamble to the GPL explicitly says "the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users", I don't think that a judge would find that a hypothetical GPLv4 that was basically MIT or something is "similar in spirit" to the present version. If you're worried about the other direction (i.e. a hypothetical GPLv4 that had some bizarre restriction like "all users must donate to the FSF"), the "or any later version" means that as long as you don't decide to update the license you use yourself, people can continue to use it under the GPLv2 or v3 indefinitely.
raverbashing 2y ago
Honestly at least Linus has his head in the right place

kstrauser 2y ago

I think that's an unreasonable lens for viewing his work. Of course he values purity over practicality. That's his entire platform. His decision making process always prioritizes supporting Free Software over proprietary efforts, pragmatism be damned. Expecting Stallman to make life easier for commercial vendors is like expecting PETA to recommend a good foie gras farm. That's not what they do.

dralley 2y ago
>Expecting Stallman to make life easier for commercial vendors is like expecting PETA to recommend a good foie gras farm. That's not what they do. He threw open-source developers under the bus in the process. As a result approximately nobody writes GCC plugins, open source or otherwise.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Alternatively, if you join a Stallman-led Free Software project and hope he'll accept your ideas for making life easier for proprietary vendors, you're gonna have a bad time. I mean, the GNU Emacs FAQ for MS Windows (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/efaq-w32.html#Why-Emacs-on-Windows https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/efaq-w32...) says: > It is not our goal to “help Windows users” by making text editing on Windows more convenient. We aim to replace proprietary software, not to enhance it. So why support GNU Emacs on Windows? > We hope that the experience of using GNU Emacs on Windows will give programmers a taste of freedom, and that this will later inspire them to move to a free operating system such as GNU/Linux. That is the main valid reason to support free applications on nonfree operating systems. RMS has been exceedingly clear about his views for decades. At this point it's hard to be surprised that he’ll make a pro-Free Software decision every time, without fail. That doesn't mean you have to agree with his decisions, of course! But to be shocked or disappointed by them is a sign of not understanding his platform.
  - School-Cotton 2y ago
    But the person you're responding to never said he was shocked or disappointed by the views; he just said the views are bad/counterproductive.

cherryteastain 2y ago

Without GNU, GPL and Richard Stallman, FOSS would not exist in the first place. The GPL forced companies to make FOSS a thing, whether they liked it or not.

azinman2 2y ago
And then the world started moving on, with other licenses that gave even more freedom and flexibility. It was a great start, but you need to adapt or you perish.
- anthk 2y ago
  When VSCode et all beging shipping DRM and who knows what in their extensions, then we'll se what with happens with these half-shareware semilibre projects. Specially when propietary dependencies kill thousands of projects at once.
  - spookie 2y ago
    Well, you are already unable to get most of the functionality out of vscode without Microsoft's extension store. I, for one, am happy that there are still a couple of people here and there that you can really trust on this stuff.
- trelane 2y ago
  > other licenses that gave even more freedom and flexibility That gave vendors more freedom and flexibility (to lock their software away from their customers.) As usual, customers got less freedom and flexibility.
  - azinman2 2y ago
    I disagree. They got software that’s open under a different license that otherwise would have just been purely proprietary, or not created at all (due to the compounding effects of open source)

JoshTriplett 2y ago

Don't forget that the LLVM folks actually went to GNU and offered it to them, and they failed to pay attention and respond. (It's not even that they responded negatively; they just dropped it on the floor completely.) There's an alternate history where LLVM was a GNU project. With the benefit of hindsight, I'm glad that that didn't happen, even though I have mixed feelings about LLVM being permissively licensed.

alienthrowaway 2y ago
Gcc is the flagship of the GNU Project - allowing an endrun of the the spirit of the GPL in gcc was never going to happen. The project paid more attention than you give them credit for because allowing closed source plugins and improvements that use gcc as a frontend is anathema to Free software. There's an impedance mismatch between people who think gcc should have maximized user utility vs. the actual GNU philosophy. The actions of the gcc project make a lot of sense if you consider the FSF/GNU are monomaniacal about maximizing users freedoms, and not popularity, momentum or other ego-stroking metric.
- JoshTriplett 2y ago
  Whether you care about number of users or not, there's value in considering whether what you're doing is actually advancing the cause of Free Software or not. GCC today has a very interesting license term, the GCC Runtime Library Exception, that makes the use of runtime libraries like libgcc free if-and-only-if you use an entirely Free Software toolchain to compile your code with; otherwise, you're subject to the terms of the GPL on libgcc and similar. That is a sensible pragmatic term, and if they'd come up with that term many years ago, they could have shipped libgccjit and other ways to plug into GCC years ago, and the programming language renaissance that arose due to LLVM might have been built atop GCC instead. That would have been a net win for user freedoms. Instead, because they were so afraid of someone using an intermediate representation to work around GCC's license, and didn't do anything to solve that problem, LLVM is now the primary infrastructure people build new languages around, and GCC lost a huge amount of its relevance, and people now have less software freedom as a result.
- 2y ago