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He has a point. Given the number of times Google or Yahoo! or other random company has turned up at a hack day, said "build stuff against our APIs!" and then sa

He has a point. Given the number of times Google or Yahoo! or other random company has turned up at a hack day, said "build stuff against our APIs!" and then said APIs disappear six months later because someone in Silicon Valley had a meeting and said that they need to pivot or iterate or something... it's kind of ridiculous. (I mean, I don't expect any different: they are commercial organisations, they are there to make a profit.) But then, my current non-work hacking is mostly building against APIs that are open in the sense of being peer-driven community projects that produce open data and are hosted on open source software (OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia etc.). It's often more work, but you are playing in a free ecosystem rather than a vendor-controlled walled garden. If open data services go away, you buy some hosting and load up the last data dump...

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belorn 14y ago
Writing a program to a closed API is like writing a mod to a online game. At any time, that program can be made useless forever. Of course, if there are multiple implementation of the same API, or architecture to swap API's, this would be different. Exception cases exist, but in the general case, one should be careful to lock the programs fate together with the API.
sneak 14y ago
That's what all of these articles about RMS kind of approximately indicate - he has a point, and his point being completely unassailably valid doesn't detract whatsoever from his being a despicable human being.
- tommorris 14y ago
  Sure, and I think that it's a great example of where RMS and other more fundamentalist free software people could engage. Go along to hack days and show the things that the free software community are working on. Not everyone is going to go along with Stallman's free software puritanism. But a lot of those people produce free and open source software, or would be willing to help.
- belorn 14y ago
  Isn't the word "despicable human being" just a tiny bit hyperbole and untrue? Has he hurt anyone? killed? imprisoned? injured? threatened? Stalked? preyed upon? or been in general mean to someone? If being of a different opinion and expressing it is enough to be labeled despicable human being, I don't know if I would call that fair. For me, that's like calling Linus an despicable human being for criticizing Gnome 3. It's a really strange use of the word despicable.

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belorn 14y ago

Writing a program to a closed API is like writing a mod to a online game. At any time, that program can be made useless forever. Of course, if there are multiple implementation of the same API, or architecture to swap API's, this would be different. Exception cases exist, but in the general case, one should be careful to lock the programs fate together with the API.

sneak 14y ago

That's what all of these articles about RMS kind of approximately indicate - he has a point, and his point being completely unassailably valid doesn't detract whatsoever from his being a despicable human being.

tommorris 14y ago
Sure, and I think that it's a great example of where RMS and other more fundamentalist free software people could engage. Go along to hack days and show the things that the free software community are working on. Not everyone is going to go along with Stallman's free software puritanism. But a lot of those people produce free and open source software, or would be willing to help.
belorn 14y ago
Isn't the word "despicable human being" just a tiny bit hyperbole and untrue? Has he hurt anyone? killed? imprisoned? injured? threatened? Stalked? preyed upon? or been in general mean to someone? If being of a different opinion and expressing it is enough to be labeled despicable human being, I don't know if I would call that fair. For me, that's like calling Linus an despicable human being for criticizing Gnome 3. It's a really strange use of the word despicable.