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Agreed. It's very rare these days to find people who are willing to stick to their principles; we should respect those who do, rather than criticize them for no

Agreed. It's very rare these days to find people who are willing to stick to their principles; we should respect those who do, rather than criticize them for not compromising on their principles[0]. From your linked post: > You are crossposting to two public project lists of the GNU project with inflammatory language and mischaracterizations. You have been involved with the GNU project long enough to be well aware that this kind of crowbar approach does not lead to much more than headlines about Free Software infighting. ESR is doing little more than trolling here. He knows exactly where the FSF stands, and he knows exactly why that's not going to change (asking the FSF to do something that they believe hinders free software is like asking MADD to open a drive-through liquor store). The FSF has always been very clear that they see the "open source" movement as complementary to (though not the same as) the free software movement, fighting for similar goals but for different reasons[1]. It's sad to see ESR, an "open source" advocate, actively try to fan the flames. Nobody wins from this. Except advocates of closed, proprietary software. [0] Of course, ESR knows exactly what he's doing here - the issue is that he disagrees with their principles, but instead of debating those, he'd rather attack them for executing on their principles rather than executing on his principles. It's a cheap rhetorical trick and a rather low move. [1] "We don't think of the Open Source movement as an enemy. The enemy is proprietary software.", from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.en..... (Don't be fooled by the title - the content of the article is very even-keeled).

frezik 13y ago
Seems like ESR is still fighting the Open Source vs Free Software battle of the late 90s. It hasn't dawned on him yet that everyone else thinks that there's little purpose in cannibalizing the movement over minor philosophical differences.
- cwyers 13y ago
  By "everybody else" I think you're excluding the people who run the Free Software Foundation, in other words the very people ESR was addressing.
  - frezik 13y ago
    Not really. Even RMS only mentions the distinction in passing. The fight has simply gone out of this one for everyone who isn't ESR, probably because the late 90s was the last time he was relevant.
oso2k 13y ago
For one, ESR isn't asking that the FSF change (directly). He's asking that FSF change with respect to GCC and the audience it serves. There's many developers, and especially young developers, that feel the GPL & FSF are "over-principled". I think we can all agree that "Open Source" has largely won. But if you ask about "Free Software," and take github as data point, I'd say "Free Software" is losing, and is losing because, like proprietary software, it's "over-principled". Young people everywhere, "feel" like content, many forms of "public" data, and the tools to use, create, play, view, and store such content & data ought to be "free as in beer" (or close to it) based on the principle that the effort to copy & transfer data, content, binary, and source is "almost free". Whether there is a restriction in creating plug-ins, linking or modifying code (as in the GPL/Free Software), or copying binaries and/or content as in proprietary software, these are still restrictions. This is the reason why I prefer the more permissive licenses for my works like the BSD and MIT licenses. Essentially, my work is a gift, in the purist sense, to the entire universe. To place restrictions on my gift is to have given the world a poison and not a gift. The reason why is easier to understand when you consider the quote by Jim Warren from a 1976 ACM Programming Language newsletter [1], referencing Bill Gates' famous letter to the Homebrew Computing Club, "There is a viable alternative to the problems raised by Bill Gates in his irate letter to computer hobbyists concerning 'ripping off' software. When software is free, or so inexpensive that it's easier to pay for it than to duplicate it, then it won't be 'stolen'." Said another way, people will continue to do the "wrong" thing so long as it takes less effort than to do the "right" thing. In my mind, we should be incentivizing the "right" things, like openness, sharing, technical merit, and capability. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC#An_early_free_software_project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC#An_early_free_softwa...
- belorn 13y ago
  The data made over repositories like Google code, debian and similar places where entries has some form of minimum standard, GPL licenses are a strong majority, and is increasingly used. So young people are either not serious enough to warrant inclusion in the 40 000 list of programs in Debian (doubtful), or your assumptions are incorrect. > To place restrictions on my gift is to have given the world a poison and not a gift. Next time you gift a beer to a friend, I hope you will allow them to hit you with it. Adding restriction on hitting you with the beer is the same as putting poison in the beer which would kill your friend.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> It's very rare these days to find people who are willing to stick to their principles; we should respect those who do, rather than criticize them for not compromising on their principles Why should I respect someone for sticking with principles that are misguided? The whole idea that "sticking to principles" is a virtue independent of the merits of the principles involved is perverse. Its even more perverse when the "principles" being stuck too are tactical judgments about how to best acheive strategic aims, and they are being stuck too even when they are operating against the strategic aims -- which is, precisely, the charge ESR is levelling against the anti-plugin policy vis-a-vis the stated goals of the FSF with regard to GCC. > asking the FSF to do something that they believe hinders free software is like asking MADD to open a drive-through liquor store ESR's argument is that FSF is wrong that this hinders free software, and in fact that FSF's status quo approach inhibits the FSF's stated goals for GCC.
- calroc 13y ago
  Can we be sure these principles are misguided if no one sticks to them?
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    Whether principles are misguided or not is a subjective, not an objective, question. Its not something you can "be sure of". OTOH, if no one sticks to them, that would be evidence against them being widely viewed as important principles.
- mcguire 13y ago
  "the 'principles' being stuck too are tactical judgments about how to best acheive strategic aims, and they are being stuck too even when they are operating against the strategic aims -- which is, precisely, the charge ESR is levelling against the anti-plugin policy vis-a-vis the stated goals of the FSF with regard to GCC." I believe ESR is wrong. In years past, there was BSD unix, a modified version of the unix shipped from Bell Labs. The BSD changes were theoretically "free", in that if you had a license from AT&T (which were easy to get, since at the time AT&T couldn't sell software), you could do anything you wanted with them. What people did was to fork BSD, take their modifications proprietary, and create Solaris (well, SunOS), HP-UX, AIX, Irix, and a fair-sized stack of others that did even worse in the marketplace. The end result of that was fragmentation in the Unix ecosystem, which was bad on many levels. (One example: Don't like autoconf/automake/libtool? Guess where the necessity of those came from?) Or, how about Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso's response to ESR: "The FSF sure can prevent it, and proprietary compilers still thrive. Here is one that particularly bugs me as an Octave developer: we routinely see people being lured to use Nvidia's non-free nvcc for GPU computing, which they gleefully admit is based on clang and LLVM. And there is Xcode, of course, completely non-free and completely based on clang and LLVM. "The fact that these non-free tools are not based on gcc are a testament to how proprietary software developers cannot plug into gcc, and how clang is fostering non-free software. "The nvidia situation is particularly dire becuase today, free GPU computing is almost nonexistent. It's almost all based on CUDA and nvidia's massive pro-CUDA marketing campaign. Even most OpenCL implementations are non-free, and the scant few free implementations of OpenCL that exist are not fully functional." So we have several examples of ESR's approaches failing. On the other hand, the GPL does a pretty successful job of preventing the kind of fragmentation that damages ESR's "hacker community". And part of the reason it does is the FSF's dogmatic stance.

frezik 13y ago

Seems like ESR is still fighting the Open Source vs Free Software battle of the late 90s. It hasn't dawned on him yet that everyone else thinks that there's little purpose in cannibalizing the movement over minor philosophical differences.

cwyers 13y ago
By "everybody else" I think you're excluding the people who run the Free Software Foundation, in other words the very people ESR was addressing.
- frezik 13y ago
  Not really. Even RMS only mentions the distinction in passing. The fight has simply gone out of this one for everyone who isn't ESR, probably because the late 90s was the last time he was relevant.

oso2k 13y ago

For one, ESR isn't asking that the FSF change (directly). He's asking that FSF change with respect to GCC and the audience it serves. There's many developers, and especially young developers, that feel the GPL & FSF are "over-principled". I think we can all agree that "Open Source" has largely won. But if you ask about "Free Software," and take github as data point, I'd say "Free Software" is losing, and is losing because, like proprietary software, it's "over-principled". Young people everywhere, "feel" like content, many forms of "public" data, and the tools to use, create, play, view, and store such content & data ought to be "free as in beer" (or close to it) based on the principle that the effort to copy & transfer data, content, binary, and source is "almost free". Whether there is a restriction in creating plug-ins, linking or modifying code (as in the GPL/Free Software), or copying binaries and/or content as in proprietary software, these are still restrictions. This is the reason why I prefer the more permissive licenses for my works like the BSD and MIT licenses. Essentially, my work is a gift, in the purist sense, to the entire universe. To place restrictions on my gift is to have given the world a poison and not a gift. The reason why is easier to understand when you consider the quote by Jim Warren from a 1976 ACM Programming Language newsletter [1], referencing Bill Gates' famous letter to the Homebrew Computing Club, "There is a viable alternative to the problems raised by Bill Gates in his irate letter to computer hobbyists concerning 'ripping off' software. When software is free, or so inexpensive that it's easier to pay for it than to duplicate it, then it won't be 'stolen'." Said another way, people will continue to do the "wrong" thing so long as it takes less effort than to do the "right" thing. In my mind, we should be incentivizing the "right" things, like openness, sharing, technical merit, and capability. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC#An_early_free_software_project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC#An_early_free_softwa...

belorn 13y ago
The data made over repositories like Google code, debian and similar places where entries has some form of minimum standard, GPL licenses are a strong majority, and is increasingly used. So young people are either not serious enough to warrant inclusion in the 40 000 list of programs in Debian (doubtful), or your assumptions are incorrect. > To place restrictions on my gift is to have given the world a poison and not a gift. Next time you gift a beer to a friend, I hope you will allow them to hit you with it. Adding restriction on hitting you with the beer is the same as putting poison in the beer which would kill your friend.

dragonwriter 13y ago

> It's very rare these days to find people who are willing to stick to their principles; we should respect those who do, rather than criticize them for not compromising on their principles Why should I respect someone for sticking with principles that are misguided? The whole idea that "sticking to principles" is a virtue independent of the merits of the principles involved is perverse. Its even more perverse when the "principles" being stuck too are tactical judgments about how to best acheive strategic aims, and they are being stuck too even when they are operating against the strategic aims -- which is, precisely, the charge ESR is levelling against the anti-plugin policy vis-a-vis the stated goals of the FSF with regard to GCC. > asking the FSF to do something that they believe hinders free software is like asking MADD to open a drive-through liquor store ESR's argument is that FSF is wrong that this hinders free software, and in fact that FSF's status quo approach inhibits the FSF's stated goals for GCC.

calroc 13y ago
Can we be sure these principles are misguided if no one sticks to them?
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  Whether principles are misguided or not is a subjective, not an objective, question. Its not something you can "be sure of". OTOH, if no one sticks to them, that would be evidence against them being widely viewed as important principles.
mcguire 13y ago
"the 'principles' being stuck too are tactical judgments about how to best acheive strategic aims, and they are being stuck too even when they are operating against the strategic aims -- which is, precisely, the charge ESR is levelling against the anti-plugin policy vis-a-vis the stated goals of the FSF with regard to GCC." I believe ESR is wrong. In years past, there was BSD unix, a modified version of the unix shipped from Bell Labs. The BSD changes were theoretically "free", in that if you had a license from AT&T (which were easy to get, since at the time AT&T couldn't sell software), you could do anything you wanted with them. What people did was to fork BSD, take their modifications proprietary, and create Solaris (well, SunOS), HP-UX, AIX, Irix, and a fair-sized stack of others that did even worse in the marketplace. The end result of that was fragmentation in the Unix ecosystem, which was bad on many levels. (One example: Don't like autoconf/automake/libtool? Guess where the necessity of those came from?) Or, how about Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso's response to ESR: "The FSF sure can prevent it, and proprietary compilers still thrive. Here is one that particularly bugs me as an Octave developer: we routinely see people being lured to use Nvidia's non-free nvcc for GPU computing, which they gleefully admit is based on clang and LLVM. And there is Xcode, of course, completely non-free and completely based on clang and LLVM. "The fact that these non-free tools are not based on gcc are a testament to how proprietary software developers cannot plug into gcc, and how clang is fostering non-free software. "The nvidia situation is particularly dire becuase today, free GPU computing is almost nonexistent. It's almost all based on CUDA and nvidia's massive pro-CUDA marketing campaign. Even most OpenCL implementations are non-free, and the scant few free implementations of OpenCL that exist are not fully functional." So we have several examples of ESR's approaches failing. On the other hand, the GPL does a pretty successful job of preventing the kind of fragmentation that damages ESR's "hacker community". And part of the reason it does is the FSF's dogmatic stance.