9 ms·

RMS doesn't care about "open source", something he will gladly remind you of if you use that phrase in his presence. His position in this matter is long-standi

by dmm 12y ago

RMS doesn't care about "open source", something he will gladly remind you of if you use that phrase in his presence. His position in this matter is long-standing and consistent with his principles. That's how you have to understand him: a man of principles surrounded by enemies. Look at OS X, why does it use such an ancient version of Bash? Why is apple so afraid of the GPLv3? It's not just an oversight. The GPLv3 provides strong patent protection for its users and Apple uses patents as a weapon. An example of this powerful weapon was Apple's conspiracy to suppress wages by threatening companies who poached Apple employees with patent suits. Imagine you make a tool and someone proposes making a change to that tool that would be potentially useful to slavers, people who enslave other people. This makes you hesitate. Pointing out that people already use similar tools for slavery probably wouldn't make you change your mind.

forrestthewoods 12y ago
"enemies" or merely people who politely disagree with his definition of free?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
krapp 12y ago
>a man of principles surrounded by enemies. Or a zealot who sees enemies everywhere.
- asuffield 12y ago
  Neither of the above. It's no secret what RMS is doing here, and he's fully aware of the context and way in which he is perceived. Some people like to think that he doesn't care, and they have it almost exactly backwards. The most extreme person on any issue is always ridiculed and disregarded by a large chunk of any community, regardless of whether this is correct or not. People like middle things. RMS's objective is to be the most extreme person, and to drag that position so far over that no other free software effort can be ridiculed or ignored in this fashion. You haven't chosen to be the middle ground here. RMS has chosen to make you the middle ground, because that's where he wanted it to be, so he hiked all the way over there to plant his flag in order to move the middle. A few decades later, it looks like that worked.
  - dankohn1 12y ago
    I've never before heard the theory that Richard Stallman is consciously trying to move the Overton Window. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window The Occam's Razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor explanation is that Stallman genuinely believes his positions are correct.
    - nullc 12y ago
      The FSF as an window moving org is a view I heard expressly presented at their annual members conference a number of years ago. At the time the discussion, I believe, was in the context of the very active "defective by design" campaign, and in response to some views that a more moderate response to DRM (like that taken by other groups like the EFF) might be more effective. This isn't incompatible with earnestly believing the views. All of us hold principles that exist on a spectrum and can pragmatically decide how we apply them without necessarily compromising them, in order to optimize for progress of certain kinds on certain time-frames with certain costs. An example of this, RMS's positions have become stronger as free software as matured: IIRC GNU was originally developed on Sun boxes; but RMS would never use an outright proprietary OS today. Early free software system he used had non-free firmware or other blobs, but he advocates strongly against that today. There are a set of strong ideals, sure, but the amount of compromise someone holding them should optimally take depends on the overall state of the world and their position to influence it. The notion of software freedom as a human rights issue can be quite foreign to people and without someone taking it very seriously some, especially those who have mostly regarded technology as a black box, can too easily dismiss it.
      - 317070 12y ago
        Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. - Hanlon's Razor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor It is not that his doing didn't turn out to be intelligent, but his intent almost certainly wasn't.
      - 12y ago
- easytiger 12y ago
  without the zealots the pograms of distributed piss taking will find you
AbosulteAb 12y ago
It's surprising that this still needs to be said. Slavery is alive and well and it comes from our computers especially from Apple Macs. Apple is not only pushing for slavery in China in their factories, but enlsaving the world world with their hardware/softwre. The slavery in America from 200 years ago is only a minor incident compared to what is happening today and it's so obvious.
bollockitis 12y ago
> Imagine you make a tool and someone proposes making a change to that tool that would be potentially useful to slavers, people who enslave other people. This makes you hesitate. Pointing out that people already use similar tools for slavery probably wouldn't make you change your mind. I know you're being hyperbolic here to represent RMS's take on the issue (or at least that's how I'm reading it), but I'm not sure the analogy makes sense. If I were to reinterpret it using the same terms, the counter-argument isn't that "people already use similar tools for slavery", it is that "slavers" wouldn't care what you did with your tool because they're already having no trouble commiting their crimes with similar tools, and your new tool could be used in perfectly legitimate ways to support your own position which includes combating slavery.
FeeTinesAMady 12y ago
His position doesn't make any sense, though. It only made sense as long as LLVM didn't exist, but now that it does, it only hurts GCC. Anybody who wants to incorporate Clang or LLVM into a proprietary project already can, so absolutely nothing is gained by crippling GCC to make it less useful to those people. All this is covered in the letter, in fact. If his principles lead him to completely ignore the real world impact of his decisions, his principles are not good ones, and not something to be admired.
- saurik 12y ago
  I do not believe you can claim that Stallman does not understand the real world impacts of license decisions in complex software ecosystems: the LGPL is an example, which is designed to be used when entering a realm with existing high-quality commercial competition, and in the case of Ogg Vorbis Stallman actually recommended the use of a BSD license as it made more sense as the real battle was against MP3, not between implementations of Vorbis. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3 http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3
  - FeeTinesAMady 12y ago
    I'm not saying, though, that he's unaware of the real world impacts. I'm saying that he doesn't care about them (in this case). He is a smart man, and a visionary, and believe it or not, I have a great deal of respect for him, in large part because of how prophetic he's been regarding some of the troubling developments of recent years. That said, he doesn't appear to care about the impact of this decision, which is to drive everyone to clang/llvm. If no one forks gcc to keep it from becoming technically inferior, then in ten years, we'll just have another open source compiler monoculture, but this time it will be clang/llvm. (Edit: forgot an important word.)
    - wolfgke 12y ago
      I rather have the impression that the development of IDEs ran past Mr Stallman - he didn't witness the development in refactoring, code completion etc. since these features are essentially implement in commercial IDEs (which he despises). So he just doesn't know anything about how useful (or not) these features are. He learned and did programming "in the old way" and sticked to that.
igravious 12y ago
RMS is unwavering. He is an ethical fixed point combinator if you will, the fixed point combinator of FOSS. Like a lighthouse on a rocky shore he'll perpetually shine his light to keep you away from the rocks of proprietary software. I'm not even sure how much of this is tongue in cheek.
vec 12y ago
> Imagine you make a tool and someone proposes making a change to that tool that would be potentially useful to slavers, people who enslave other people. This makes you hesitate. No, it really doesn't. "Bad people might use it to do something I don't approve of" is a terrible rationale for not creating something, mostly because it's almost always true. Strong crypto is great for terrorists. Psychology research is wonderful for propagandists in dictatorships. Unlocked cell phones are very useful for drug trafficking rings. If we, as a species, refused to innovate when we weren't sure of the consequences, we would still be arguing about whether fire was a good idea.
- omega_rythm 12y ago
  This may sound like a reductio at absurdum, but if that innovation threaten your ability to survive, you will be very reluctant to research it, won't you? Gcc has been the very foundation of gnu, it's the cornerstone of the whole ecosystem: you cannot run Linux (or hurd) without compiling it first. Imagine you'd be commissioned to the fabrication of a virus immune to all known forms of treatments for the purpose of using it to hotpatch cancerous cells. Obviously this tech could have much more dangerous applications, and without a way to disable it, noone would stand a chance. In that scenario, wouldn't you try to reduce this virus' immunity to the minimum needed for its planned usage?
- Houshalter 12y ago
  Being used for bad purposes is different than having a net negative effect. E.g. if you are making weapons or something like that. A lot of people do this. Some people do refuse to work on military technologies. Even Google declared it wouldn't produce anything for the military with the robotics startups it's acquired. Some of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan project later regretted it. If you really do believe the thing you are working on will have a net negative effect on the world than maybe you shouldn't work on it.
  - anon1385 12y ago
    Military weapons have few non-violent uses. ASTs have many uses other than assisting proprietary IDEs (for example, allowing emacs to complete with proprietary IDEs on a level playing field). It's more akin to refusing to manufacture kitchen knives and forcing all the chefs in your kitchen to chop things with spoons. Even though anybody who wants to stab people already has easy access to very big and sharp knives just by stepping into any other kitchen in the world. Also lots of your chefs keep sneaking over to the kitchen over the road to chop things and no newly trained chef wants to work in your kitchen because they think only chopping with spoons is stupid and only done by crazy religious old men with big beards. OK this metaphor is getting pretty stretched now.
pakled_engineer 12y ago
The maintainers of pf (bsd license) were once hosed by Apple, understandable that rms doesn't want to enable easy future gcc front end proprietary software. Henning Brauer: "We have no problem with them using our code but we do not appreciate that they subjected it to the Apple Public Source License. They introduce some interesting ideas such as a ref count of how many times PF has been enabled or disabled but we are unable to use their implementation. Furthermore, the Apple Public Source License introduces contract law to an environment that only relied on copyright law. This is unfortunate."
- jacobolus 12y ago
  I think “hosed by Apple” is an unjustified summary. More like, “the maintainers of pf released their code under a very permissive license, and then one or more of them was unhappy when someone else took their license terms at face value and used their code in strict accordance with those terms.” If what the pf maintainers really wanted was to use a GPLv2 type license, and instead they used BSD, and now are unhappy about the consequences, I can’t see how that’s Apple’s fault.
  - gonzo 12y ago
    This. Henning doesn't understand licensing very well.
vor_ 12y ago
> Look at OS X, why does it use such an ancient version of Bash? Why is apple so afraid of the GPLv3? It's not just an oversight. The GPLv3 provides strong patent protection for its users and Apple uses patents as a weapon. An example of this powerful weapon was Apple's conspiracy to suppress wages by threatening companies who poached Apple employees with patent suits. The Linux kernel developers also oppose the GPLv3. Are they enemies as well?
- bhrgunatha 12y ago
  dmm didn't say anyone and everyone opposing GPLv3 are bad, he's just giving an example of how NOT using GPLv3 can be used to punish or coerce behaviour against the principles RMS stands for.
- illumen 12y ago
  Yes.
- Perdition 12y ago
  To RMS? Probably. The majority of programmers use free software for practical reasons and are willing to "compromise" with the desires of proprietary software companies. For RMS free software is an ideological struggle. In his ideal world proprietary software wouldn't exist.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    Its important to note, also, that for RMS the struggle is against non-free software, which is at times in conflict with what people who see free software as an ideological struggle to promote free software would view as desirable. Its not just that its an ideological struggle for RMS, its what RMS sees that struggle as being about which can divide hi from others.
    - bilog 12y ago
      The problem is that the only way to win against non-free software is to provide viable free-software alternatives. Free software cannot win on ideology alone, it _has_ to provide the features users need.
DannyBee 12y ago
"The GPLv3 provides strong patent protection for its users and Apple uses patents as a weapon" First, GPLv3's patent provisions are not particularly strong compared to other open source licenses. Second, this has nothing to do with anything, and certainly isn't a reason for Apple avoidance of GPLv3. Apple was almost unilaterally concerned with the installation information requirements in GPLv3 (that would require providing signing keys and allowing modifications/reverse engineering), not the patent provisions. They said so, multiple times in the various working groups/mailing lists/etc for GPLv3. Heck, APSL, The Apple Public Source License, version 2.0, which apple released tons of source under, predates GPLv3 by 4 years (2003 vs 2007), and happily grants patents. http://www.opensource.apple.com/license/apsl/ http://www.opensource.apple.com/license/apsl/ Apple, for the record, was willing to give the GCC project all of the code to LLVM under the GPL and non-assert any patents (and to my knowledge, Apple has not filed patents on any part of LLVM that they have contributed to publicly) Apple has also contributed to tons of Apache licensed code and similar code that requires contributors grant patent licenses. I work for Google, and have personally seen them contribute code to our projects with patent licenses (though admittedly, not as much as they used to). Additionally, I worked on both LLVM and GCC, and was involved directly in the various plans WRT to LLVM and GCC merging. Same with GPLv3 stuff, etc. There are plenty of things to rake Apple over the coals over, and plenty of reasons why Apple disliked GPLv3, but what you cite simply isn't one of them.
- kordless 12y ago
  > rake Apple over the coals over You spend a lot of time negating dmm's comments about Apple, when most of his post was about pools of power controlling or attempting to control a given bit of software. Granted, Apple spends a bit of time doing this very thing quite frequently and most people seem cool with it (because it's so easy!), so I'm curious why you are so set on defending it?
  - DannyBee 12y ago
    Because misinformation is misinformation, and i'm not a fan of sitting by and letting it drop, whether it's happening to me, my colleagues, or even companies i don't particularly like personally, but happen to know facts about. Particularly when this is used as the lead-in and part of a strategy of supporting an argument. In fact, i'll point out that RMS is actually very good about this stuff himself. If his position is based on factually incorrect info, and you correct it, he will often immediately change his position.
tzs 12y ago
> Imagine you make a tool and someone proposes making a change to that tool that would be potentially useful to slavers, people who enslave other people. This makes you hesitate. Pointing out that people already use similar tools for slavery probably wouldn't make you change your mind. In this case, though, the tool is trivial to make. Any "slaver" that wants it can easily make it themselves. Foregoing making and using that tool for use in Emacs does nothing whatsoever to impede, dissuade, or discourage "slavers" from getting the tool. It just makes it much harder to give Emacs some features that many of its competitors have.
bilog 12y ago
> RMS doesn't care about "open source" Apparently, he also doesn't care about free software enough either, since he apparently prefers users to switch to something they can _use_ than allow provision of the functionality they need, on the basis that the same functionality could be used by non-free software.

by dmm 12y ago

forrestthewoods 12y ago

"enemies" or merely people who politely disagree with his definition of free?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

krapp 12y ago

>a man of principles surrounded by enemies. Or a zealot who sees enemies everywhere.

asuffield 12y ago
Neither of the above. It's no secret what RMS is doing here, and he's fully aware of the context and way in which he is perceived. Some people like to think that he doesn't care, and they have it almost exactly backwards. The most extreme person on any issue is always ridiculed and disregarded by a large chunk of any community, regardless of whether this is correct or not. People like middle things. RMS's objective is to be the most extreme person, and to drag that position so far over that no other free software effort can be ridiculed or ignored in this fashion. You haven't chosen to be the middle ground here. RMS has chosen to make you the middle ground, because that's where he wanted it to be, so he hiked all the way over there to plant his flag in order to move the middle. A few decades later, it looks like that worked.
- dankohn1 12y ago
  I've never before heard the theory that Richard Stallman is consciously trying to move the Overton Window. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window The Occam's Razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor explanation is that Stallman genuinely believes his positions are correct.
  - nullc 12y ago
    The FSF as an window moving org is a view I heard expressly presented at their annual members conference a number of years ago. At the time the discussion, I believe, was in the context of the very active "defective by design" campaign, and in response to some views that a more moderate response to DRM (like that taken by other groups like the EFF) might be more effective. This isn't incompatible with earnestly believing the views. All of us hold principles that exist on a spectrum and can pragmatically decide how we apply them without necessarily compromising them, in order to optimize for progress of certain kinds on certain time-frames with certain costs. An example of this, RMS's positions have become stronger as free software as matured: IIRC GNU was originally developed on Sun boxes; but RMS would never use an outright proprietary OS today. Early free software system he used had non-free firmware or other blobs, but he advocates strongly against that today. There are a set of strong ideals, sure, but the amount of compromise someone holding them should optimally take depends on the overall state of the world and their position to influence it. The notion of software freedom as a human rights issue can be quite foreign to people and without someone taking it very seriously some, especially those who have mostly regarded technology as a black box, can too easily dismiss it.
    - 317070 12y ago
      Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. - Hanlon's Razor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor It is not that his doing didn't turn out to be intelligent, but his intent almost certainly wasn't.
    - 12y ago
easytiger 12y ago
without the zealots the pograms of distributed piss taking will find you

AbosulteAb 12y ago

It's surprising that this still needs to be said. Slavery is alive and well and it comes from our computers especially from Apple Macs. Apple is not only pushing for slavery in China in their factories, but enlsaving the world world with their hardware/softwre. The slavery in America from 200 years ago is only a minor incident compared to what is happening today and it's so obvious.

bollockitis 12y ago

> Imagine you make a tool and someone proposes making a change to that tool that would be potentially useful to slavers, people who enslave other people. This makes you hesitate. Pointing out that people already use similar tools for slavery probably wouldn't make you change your mind. I know you're being hyperbolic here to represent RMS's take on the issue (or at least that's how I'm reading it), but I'm not sure the analogy makes sense. If I were to reinterpret it using the same terms, the counter-argument isn't that "people already use similar tools for slavery", it is that "slavers" wouldn't care what you did with your tool because they're already having no trouble commiting their crimes with similar tools, and your new tool could be used in perfectly legitimate ways to support your own position which includes combating slavery.

FeeTinesAMady 12y ago

His position doesn't make any sense, though. It only made sense as long as LLVM didn't exist, but now that it does, it only hurts GCC. Anybody who wants to incorporate Clang or LLVM into a proprietary project already can, so absolutely nothing is gained by crippling GCC to make it less useful to those people. All this is covered in the letter, in fact. If his principles lead him to completely ignore the real world impact of his decisions, his principles are not good ones, and not something to be admired.

saurik 12y ago
I do not believe you can claim that Stallman does not understand the real world impacts of license decisions in complex software ecosystems: the LGPL is an example, which is designed to be used when entering a realm with existing high-quality commercial competition, and in the case of Ogg Vorbis Stallman actually recommended the use of a BSD license as it made more sense as the real battle was against MP3, not between implementations of Vorbis. http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3 http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3
- FeeTinesAMady 12y ago
  I'm not saying, though, that he's unaware of the real world impacts. I'm saying that he doesn't care about them (in this case). He is a smart man, and a visionary, and believe it or not, I have a great deal of respect for him, in large part because of how prophetic he's been regarding some of the troubling developments of recent years. That said, he doesn't appear to care about the impact of this decision, which is to drive everyone to clang/llvm. If no one forks gcc to keep it from becoming technically inferior, then in ten years, we'll just have another open source compiler monoculture, but this time it will be clang/llvm. (Edit: forgot an important word.)
  - wolfgke 12y ago
    I rather have the impression that the development of IDEs ran past Mr Stallman - he didn't witness the development in refactoring, code completion etc. since these features are essentially implement in commercial IDEs (which he despises). So he just doesn't know anything about how useful (or not) these features are. He learned and did programming "in the old way" and sticked to that.

igravious 12y ago

RMS is unwavering. He is an ethical fixed point combinator if you will, the fixed point combinator of FOSS. Like a lighthouse on a rocky shore he'll perpetually shine his light to keep you away from the rocks of proprietary software. I'm not even sure how much of this is tongue in cheek.

vec 12y ago

> Imagine you make a tool and someone proposes making a change to that tool that would be potentially useful to slavers, people who enslave other people. This makes you hesitate. No, it really doesn't. "Bad people might use it to do something I don't approve of" is a terrible rationale for not creating something, mostly because it's almost always true. Strong crypto is great for terrorists. Psychology research is wonderful for propagandists in dictatorships. Unlocked cell phones are very useful for drug trafficking rings. If we, as a species, refused to innovate when we weren't sure of the consequences, we would still be arguing about whether fire was a good idea.

omega_rythm 12y ago
This may sound like a reductio at absurdum, but if that innovation threaten your ability to survive, you will be very reluctant to research it, won't you? Gcc has been the very foundation of gnu, it's the cornerstone of the whole ecosystem: you cannot run Linux (or hurd) without compiling it first. Imagine you'd be commissioned to the fabrication of a virus immune to all known forms of treatments for the purpose of using it to hotpatch cancerous cells. Obviously this tech could have much more dangerous applications, and without a way to disable it, noone would stand a chance. In that scenario, wouldn't you try to reduce this virus' immunity to the minimum needed for its planned usage?
Houshalter 12y ago
Being used for bad purposes is different than having a net negative effect. E.g. if you are making weapons or something like that. A lot of people do this. Some people do refuse to work on military technologies. Even Google declared it wouldn't produce anything for the military with the robotics startups it's acquired. Some of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan project later regretted it. If you really do believe the thing you are working on will have a net negative effect on the world than maybe you shouldn't work on it.
- anon1385 12y ago
  Military weapons have few non-violent uses. ASTs have many uses other than assisting proprietary IDEs (for example, allowing emacs to complete with proprietary IDEs on a level playing field). It's more akin to refusing to manufacture kitchen knives and forcing all the chefs in your kitchen to chop things with spoons. Even though anybody who wants to stab people already has easy access to very big and sharp knives just by stepping into any other kitchen in the world. Also lots of your chefs keep sneaking over to the kitchen over the road to chop things and no newly trained chef wants to work in your kitchen because they think only chopping with spoons is stupid and only done by crazy religious old men with big beards. OK this metaphor is getting pretty stretched now.

pakled_engineer 12y ago

The maintainers of pf (bsd license) were once hosed by Apple, understandable that rms doesn't want to enable easy future gcc front end proprietary software. Henning Brauer: "We have no problem with them using our code but we do not appreciate that they subjected it to the Apple Public Source License. They introduce some interesting ideas such as a ref count of how many times PF has been enabled or disabled but we are unable to use their implementation. Furthermore, the Apple Public Source License introduces contract law to an environment that only relied on copyright law. This is unfortunate."

jacobolus 12y ago
I think “hosed by Apple” is an unjustified summary. More like, “the maintainers of pf released their code under a very permissive license, and then one or more of them was unhappy when someone else took their license terms at face value and used their code in strict accordance with those terms.” If what the pf maintainers really wanted was to use a GPLv2 type license, and instead they used BSD, and now are unhappy about the consequences, I can’t see how that’s Apple’s fault.
- gonzo 12y ago
  This. Henning doesn't understand licensing very well.

vor_ 12y ago

> Look at OS X, why does it use such an ancient version of Bash? Why is apple so afraid of the GPLv3? It's not just an oversight. The GPLv3 provides strong patent protection for its users and Apple uses patents as a weapon. An example of this powerful weapon was Apple's conspiracy to suppress wages by threatening companies who poached Apple employees with patent suits. The Linux kernel developers also oppose the GPLv3. Are they enemies as well?

bhrgunatha 12y ago
dmm didn't say anyone and everyone opposing GPLv3 are bad, he's just giving an example of how NOT using GPLv3 can be used to punish or coerce behaviour against the principles RMS stands for.
illumen 12y ago
Yes.
Perdition 12y ago
To RMS? Probably. The majority of programmers use free software for practical reasons and are willing to "compromise" with the desires of proprietary software companies. For RMS free software is an ideological struggle. In his ideal world proprietary software wouldn't exist.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  Its important to note, also, that for RMS the struggle is against non-free software, which is at times in conflict with what people who see free software as an ideological struggle to promote free software would view as desirable. Its not just that its an ideological struggle for RMS, its what RMS sees that struggle as being about which can divide hi from others.
  - bilog 12y ago
    The problem is that the only way to win against non-free software is to provide viable free-software alternatives. Free software cannot win on ideology alone, it _has_ to provide the features users need.

DannyBee 12y ago

"The GPLv3 provides strong patent protection for its users and Apple uses patents as a weapon" First, GPLv3's patent provisions are not particularly strong compared to other open source licenses. Second, this has nothing to do with anything, and certainly isn't a reason for Apple avoidance of GPLv3. Apple was almost unilaterally concerned with the installation information requirements in GPLv3 (that would require providing signing keys and allowing modifications/reverse engineering), not the patent provisions. They said so, multiple times in the various working groups/mailing lists/etc for GPLv3. Heck, APSL, The Apple Public Source License, version 2.0, which apple released tons of source under, predates GPLv3 by 4 years (2003 vs 2007), and happily grants patents. http://www.opensource.apple.com/license/apsl/ http://www.opensource.apple.com/license/apsl/ Apple, for the record, was willing to give the GCC project all of the code to LLVM under the GPL and non-assert any patents (and to my knowledge, Apple has not filed patents on any part of LLVM that they have contributed to publicly) Apple has also contributed to tons of Apache licensed code and similar code that requires contributors grant patent licenses. I work for Google, and have personally seen them contribute code to our projects with patent licenses (though admittedly, not as much as they used to). Additionally, I worked on both LLVM and GCC, and was involved directly in the various plans WRT to LLVM and GCC merging. Same with GPLv3 stuff, etc. There are plenty of things to rake Apple over the coals over, and plenty of reasons why Apple disliked GPLv3, but what you cite simply isn't one of them.

kordless 12y ago
> rake Apple over the coals over You spend a lot of time negating dmm's comments about Apple, when most of his post was about pools of power controlling or attempting to control a given bit of software. Granted, Apple spends a bit of time doing this very thing quite frequently and most people seem cool with it (because it's so easy!), so I'm curious why you are so set on defending it?
- DannyBee 12y ago
  Because misinformation is misinformation, and i'm not a fan of sitting by and letting it drop, whether it's happening to me, my colleagues, or even companies i don't particularly like personally, but happen to know facts about. Particularly when this is used as the lead-in and part of a strategy of supporting an argument. In fact, i'll point out that RMS is actually very good about this stuff himself. If his position is based on factually incorrect info, and you correct it, he will often immediately change his position.

tzs 12y ago

> Imagine you make a tool and someone proposes making a change to that tool that would be potentially useful to slavers, people who enslave other people. This makes you hesitate. Pointing out that people already use similar tools for slavery probably wouldn't make you change your mind. In this case, though, the tool is trivial to make. Any "slaver" that wants it can easily make it themselves. Foregoing making and using that tool for use in Emacs does nothing whatsoever to impede, dissuade, or discourage "slavers" from getting the tool. It just makes it much harder to give Emacs some features that many of its competitors have.

bilog 12y ago

> RMS doesn't care about "open source" Apparently, he also doesn't care about free software enough either, since he apparently prefers users to switch to something they can _use_ than allow provision of the functionality they need, on the basis that the same functionality could be used by non-free software.