4 ms·

I find it telling that RMS explicitly has a problem with LLVM because it helps private companies "as well as us" instead of only helping us. It's literally zero

I find it telling that RMS explicitly has a problem with LLVM because it helps private companies "as well as us" instead of only helping us. It's literally zero-sum for him. He doesn't want companies to benefit in any way from open source. I think there's a big problem with copyright and software -- the goal of copyright is to provide public goods, but the public goods that copyright protects is the source code, not the binary, yet there are no guarantees that the public will ever get the source code. I think if this problem were addressed (e.g. all software that seeks copyright protection must have its source code placed in escrow) then a lot of RMS's legitimate issues with closed source software would be mitigated. I'm sure he would still resent code being closed source, but at least we'd know that in 25 years or whatever the source code would become available to all.

erikpukinskis 13y ago
> He doesn't want companies to benefit in any way from open source. He never said that, and you're really failing to see his point. He doesn't want GCC to be broken up into tiny bits and have each of those pieces replaced by non-copyleft equivalents. Because he doesn't want the hard work of the GCC community to be used as a scaffold for creating a non-free replacement. He is totally happy for companies to use and benefit from GPL'ed software in all the ways the license permits. He is totally happy for companies to use and benefit from non-free open source software (like Klang) however they like. He also has no problem with people forking GCC and splitting it up however they want to. He doesn't think that's a good use of resources, and he thinks it's harmful, but he has no interest in stopping them. What is is not happy for, and what he is standing up against, is companies making changes to his branch of GCC. The GNU project is a group of people maintaining their versions of various Free Software. You can fork any of those projects and make different choices. But within the context of that project, amongst his collaborators he has opinions about what changes to make, and how best to further the goals of the project. And he thinks this change will be bad for the project.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  I'm not sure if Klang is another software project, but if you meant Clang it is not non-free. Because it is not copyleft, its code can be used in things which are non-free. There is a distinction.
chongli 13y ago
No, rms doesn't really care about source code. He cares about user freedom. He wants every user of software to have the same freedom to experiment, modify and redistribute that its original developers had. Placing source code in escrow would not accomplish any of these goals.
- Tloewald 13y ago
  It would accomplish all of these goals in the long run.
  - chongli 13y ago
    I doubt that. Look at all the proprietary software that's abandoned right now. Are you telling me that if all that old source code was suddenly released it'd be every bit as good as software which has been free for the same number of years? Of course not.
joelangeway 13y ago
> It's literally zero-sum for him. Well it is. There are a finite number of consumers of C++ compilers. He is competing for the attention of potential free software advocates.
dllthomas 13y ago
You're conflating "companies" and "creators of proprietary software". There is substantial overlap, but the "other" that RMS opposes is the latter.

erikpukinskis 13y ago

> He doesn't want companies to benefit in any way from open source. He never said that, and you're really failing to see his point. He doesn't want GCC to be broken up into tiny bits and have each of those pieces replaced by non-copyleft equivalents. Because he doesn't want the hard work of the GCC community to be used as a scaffold for creating a non-free replacement. He is totally happy for companies to use and benefit from GPL'ed software in all the ways the license permits. He is totally happy for companies to use and benefit from non-free open source software (like Klang) however they like. He also has no problem with people forking GCC and splitting it up however they want to. He doesn't think that's a good use of resources, and he thinks it's harmful, but he has no interest in stopping them. What is is not happy for, and what he is standing up against, is companies making changes to his branch of GCC. The GNU project is a group of people maintaining their versions of various Free Software. You can fork any of those projects and make different choices. But within the context of that project, amongst his collaborators he has opinions about what changes to make, and how best to further the goals of the project. And he thinks this change will be bad for the project.

dllthomas 13y ago
I'm not sure if Klang is another software project, but if you meant Clang it is not non-free. Because it is not copyleft, its code can be used in things which are non-free. There is a distinction.

chongli 13y ago

No, rms doesn't really care about source code. He cares about user freedom. He wants every user of software to have the same freedom to experiment, modify and redistribute that its original developers had. Placing source code in escrow would not accomplish any of these goals.

Tloewald 13y ago
It would accomplish all of these goals in the long run.
- chongli 13y ago
  I doubt that. Look at all the proprietary software that's abandoned right now. Are you telling me that if all that old source code was suddenly released it'd be every bit as good as software which has been free for the same number of years? Of course not.

joelangeway 13y ago

> It's literally zero-sum for him. Well it is. There are a finite number of consumers of C++ compilers. He is competing for the attention of potential free software advocates.

dllthomas 13y ago

You're conflating "companies" and "creators of proprietary software". There is substantial overlap, but the "other" that RMS opposes is the latter.