7 ms·

ESR seems a bit over the line with this mail, but what never ceases to amaze me is how RMS is disconnected with the present technology: >From its name, I guess

ESR seems a bit over the line with this mail, but what never ceases to amaze me is how RMS is disconnected with the present technology: >From its name, I guess that LLDB is a noncopylefted debugger and that some might intend it to replace GDB. But I don't know if that is so. This is just one of many, in the recent arguments he has stated several times that he doesn't understand how automated code refactoring works, he has not experience with IDEs, and things of the like. Beside the ideological point, he does not seem a person capable of steering important projects, at least when it comes to compiler technology. He just doesn't know enough anymore.

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
It's not just that his knowledge is outdated, it's also that his philosophical principles will always take precedence over everything else, which includes sound and/or pragmatic technological decisions. I'm not fond of esr in general but he's spot on with this post.
- nailer 12y ago
  > it's also that his philosophical principles will always take precedence over everything else Exactly. I respect RMS, and his position that proprietary software is immoral, but I also know that position won't be shared by many (maybe even most) of the people who care about free software.
- josteink 12y ago
  > It's not just that his knowledge is outdated, it's also that his philosophical principles will always take precedence over everything else To be fair to RMS he has tried to consider opposing views in the past when he can see and understand the need behind the proposition. In this case the problem is that RMS doesn't know enough C++/Java/C#-style OO programming, and can't understand why you would need refactoring tools to rename a method, because in his C-style world a search and replace should be sufficient. And because he doesn't see the need himself, he wont consider it a valid use-case which GNU/GCC/Emacs needs to support. This already has lead to chilling effects: People have stopped working on adding GCC-based support for auto-completion and similar functionality. RMS may be stubborn, but he's not stupid: He sees adding the proposed LLDB/LLVM-based functionality as a direct consequence of this, and bypassing his "authoriity" on the GCC-issue and thus an "attack" on GCC and the goals of GNU/FCC itself. In my mind, he is obviously right that people are side-stepping his judgement, but he is wrong that this is an attack on free software: People just want to make Emacs better, and he is vigorously fighting them to make it not happen. And now we have RMS fighting to artificially limit free software, in his mind to preserve it. I'm not sure how long this has been going on now... A decade? To me forking core GNU projects to leave RMS out just in order to get things done is increasingly looking like the only option.
  - hga 12y ago
    "People just want to make Emacs better, and he is vigorously denying people the features they ask for." And while I have as of yet no opinion on the concept, a lot of people believe he's hypocritical for supporting non-free OSes in GCC and Gnu Emacs.
    - thoth 12y ago
      I believe the explanation here is that the FSF/GNU is willing to support their tools on non-free OSes as long as those tools work the same as the do on free OSes, and in particular, don't work "better" as compared to the free version because the non-free OS provides additional services somehow. They don't want their tools to be superior or have better functionality on a non-free OS. For example, emacs wouldn't take a patch that hooked into speech recognition provided by the OS, unless that was also available on a free OS. And say Microsoft or Apple provided powerful functionality for debuggers via a system api (and this same functionality isn't on a free OS) - gdb would not take a patch that used it.
  - noselasd 12y ago
    >and can't understand why you would need refactoring tools >to rename a method, because in his C-style world a search >and replace should be sufficient. Is that really the underlying reason, or are you making it up ? From what I've seen, he doesn't want to expose internals of GPL software such that non-free software can be built on top of it, which is a fair stance to take - even if you and I might disagree to it as it as a consequence might prevent our life to be easier/better - at least in the short term.
    - eropple 12y ago
      The direct and inescapable consequence of this is that he makes things more difficult for other GPL (and non-GPL-but-free) software, just because maybe some closed-source software might do something with it in a day and age when they can already just use clang. Dying on this hill makes him a bad steward of the projects other people have entrusted him with (and fortunately the maintainer of the Emacs debugger stuff is ignoring him), while also making everybody else's lives suck a little more.
- the_af 12y ago
  Note this is explicitly RMS' philosophy, which hasn't changed. For him, freedom takes precedence over technological quality. He has been saying this for ages, for example when he explained that Open Source (as represented by Eric Raymond) and Free Software (as represented by the FSF) have very different goals. If you accept that RMS' worldview is about freedom, even if it sometimes means sacrificing some technological advantages, you'll see his position is consistent and reasonable.
  - amyjess 12y ago
    The problem is that the number of users is directly proportional to technological quality. People use gcc over non-copyleft compilers because they perceive it as technically superior. People use emacs over non-copyleft editors because they perceive it as technically superior. Sacrificing technological quality to fulfill an agenda will actually have the opposite effect, because it'll drive users to non-copyleft solutions in order to get the better piece of software. It's not just the number of users, either. When your software is dominant, you're in control. You get to have a say in the direction of the technology, and you get to prevent the lesser players from having their say. By sacrificing technological quality for ideological purity, RMS is giving up both his userbase and his dominant position he can use to prevent non-free software from taking over.
  - zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
    His position is certainly consistent but definitely not reasonable.
- maxlybbert 12y ago
  Yes, this is a perfect example of the difference between open source and free software. I remember Stallman saying something along the lines of "even if it weren't as good as proprietary software, it would be important for people to use free software" over a decade ago. The fact that releasing the source code, and allowing people to modify it, leads to high quality software is a nice perk as far as he's concerned; but it's not the reason for the FSF. The FSF exists so that programmers aren't helpless when their system breaks. Raymond's arguments, on the other hand are all about which compiler or debugger is better, assuming the compilers and debuggers being compared are open source.
rayiner 12y ago
We're talking about a C compiler and debugger. Lots of very technically knowledgable people shun IDEs and automated refactoring in that space.
- Tomte 12y ago
  Sure, that's a valid choice. But when you're implementing a language ecosystem, proud ignorance of other peoples' usage patterns is just embarassing.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    Is RMS still involved with gcc at all? (Non-philosophically?)
    - ekianjo 12y ago
      He claims not doing any development himself for several years now, so I guess this means no.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    Does proud ignorance of IDEs indicate that RMS may be impolitic or undiplomatic? Yes. Does it indicate he "is disconnected with the present technology?" In the world of C/C++, I don't think being willfully ignorant of IDEs and automated refactoring means you are out of date in your technical knowledge, as the grandparent post implied.
    - eropple 12y ago
      I do. There's a reason that CLion is becoming a thing (can't happen fast enough) and Visual Assist has been a de facto standard in C++ development on Windows for years. The tools exist, they just don't exist in Emacs.
- coldtea 12y ago
  Not that many. Except if Windows C++ developers (most of which use VS) don't qualify as "technically knowledgable people". And who is doing the judging?
weenie 12y ago
You have to realize that RMS's goal isn't to "steer important projects", and you should give him more credit in that he probably could be "connected with the present technology" if he wanted to. The fact that "he doesn't know enough anymore" doesn't say much about Stallman; instead it says a lot about how his goal of making sure software is libre has been shoved aside by everyone else for other priorities. Also, RMS is one of the most humble people on the scene, and will freely admit to not knowing something until he lives and breathes it.
- hga 12y ago
  "You have to realize that RMS's goal isn't to 'steer important projects'" Not as such, but as long as he's doing it for so many marque GNU/FSF projects....
  - weenie 12y ago
    Out of necessity and as a means to an end, because nobody else sharing his philosophy is willing to do it.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Out of necessity and as a means to an end, because nobody else sharing his philosophy is willing to do it. I think that's a pretty striking description of failure in promoting an ideology.
      - hga 12y ago
        Or at least his interpretation of that ideology. I'd be really surprised if most of the people working on these marque GNU/FSF projects weren't happy with GPL/copyleft, at least for these "complete" programs (as opposed to libraries like the GPLed GNU Scientific Library).
      - 59nadir 12y ago
        > I think that's a pretty striking description of failure in promoting an ideology. Are you actually saying you think the FSF have failed?
pnathan 12y ago
ear periodically shoves his oar into the FSF world, occasionally with faint malice about the whole business. He really isn't into Free software as much as he is into Open software. You can't read him as a disinterested techie and come away with correct views.
lultimouomo 12y ago
I think the many replies that point out that you don't need an IDE or code refactoring if you are a real programmer miss that my point is not that you need to use advanced tools to develop a compiler, is that you need to write a compiler that supports those tools for the people who like to use them. And to write such compiler, you must as a minimum know what refactoring tools and IDEs are. Also, I'm sure you always get naming and signatures right at the first try, foreseeing every possible evolution of the system. I don't, and since I don't like my programs to turn into huge piles of horror, I enjoy refactoring tools a lot.
copsarebastards 12y ago
Saying Stallman isn't qualified to steer major projects because he isn't familiar with IDEs is a pretty weird point to make. Emacs is a far more advanced environment than any IDE I have used, and often the so-called "features" of IDEs are to deal with self-created problems: Java/C# build tooling in IDEs, for example, is there to deal with the fact that the build processes for these languages is massively overcomplicated. I can't speak for Stallman, but I am confident that I'm accurately representing the opinions of a lot of Emacs users when I say that IDEs provide a leaky abstraction over systemic design problems rather than solving them.

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

It's not just that his knowledge is outdated, it's also that his philosophical principles will always take precedence over everything else, which includes sound and/or pragmatic technological decisions. I'm not fond of esr in general but he's spot on with this post.

nailer 12y ago
> it's also that his philosophical principles will always take precedence over everything else Exactly. I respect RMS, and his position that proprietary software is immoral, but I also know that position won't be shared by many (maybe even most) of the people who care about free software.
josteink 12y ago
> It's not just that his knowledge is outdated, it's also that his philosophical principles will always take precedence over everything else To be fair to RMS he has tried to consider opposing views in the past when he can see and understand the need behind the proposition. In this case the problem is that RMS doesn't know enough C++/Java/C#-style OO programming, and can't understand why you would need refactoring tools to rename a method, because in his C-style world a search and replace should be sufficient. And because he doesn't see the need himself, he wont consider it a valid use-case which GNU/GCC/Emacs needs to support. This already has lead to chilling effects: People have stopped working on adding GCC-based support for auto-completion and similar functionality. RMS may be stubborn, but he's not stupid: He sees adding the proposed LLDB/LLVM-based functionality as a direct consequence of this, and bypassing his "authoriity" on the GCC-issue and thus an "attack" on GCC and the goals of GNU/FCC itself. In my mind, he is obviously right that people are side-stepping his judgement, but he is wrong that this is an attack on free software: People just want to make Emacs better, and he is vigorously fighting them to make it not happen. And now we have RMS fighting to artificially limit free software, in his mind to preserve it. I'm not sure how long this has been going on now... A decade? To me forking core GNU projects to leave RMS out just in order to get things done is increasingly looking like the only option.
- hga 12y ago
  "People just want to make Emacs better, and he is vigorously denying people the features they ask for." And while I have as of yet no opinion on the concept, a lot of people believe he's hypocritical for supporting non-free OSes in GCC and Gnu Emacs.
  - thoth 12y ago
    I believe the explanation here is that the FSF/GNU is willing to support their tools on non-free OSes as long as those tools work the same as the do on free OSes, and in particular, don't work "better" as compared to the free version because the non-free OS provides additional services somehow. They don't want their tools to be superior or have better functionality on a non-free OS. For example, emacs wouldn't take a patch that hooked into speech recognition provided by the OS, unless that was also available on a free OS. And say Microsoft or Apple provided powerful functionality for debuggers via a system api (and this same functionality isn't on a free OS) - gdb would not take a patch that used it.
- noselasd 12y ago
  >and can't understand why you would need refactoring tools >to rename a method, because in his C-style world a search >and replace should be sufficient. Is that really the underlying reason, or are you making it up ? From what I've seen, he doesn't want to expose internals of GPL software such that non-free software can be built on top of it, which is a fair stance to take - even if you and I might disagree to it as it as a consequence might prevent our life to be easier/better - at least in the short term.
  - eropple 12y ago
    The direct and inescapable consequence of this is that he makes things more difficult for other GPL (and non-GPL-but-free) software, just because maybe some closed-source software might do something with it in a day and age when they can already just use clang. Dying on this hill makes him a bad steward of the projects other people have entrusted him with (and fortunately the maintainer of the Emacs debugger stuff is ignoring him), while also making everybody else's lives suck a little more.
the_af 12y ago
Note this is explicitly RMS' philosophy, which hasn't changed. For him, freedom takes precedence over technological quality. He has been saying this for ages, for example when he explained that Open Source (as represented by Eric Raymond) and Free Software (as represented by the FSF) have very different goals. If you accept that RMS' worldview is about freedom, even if it sometimes means sacrificing some technological advantages, you'll see his position is consistent and reasonable.
- amyjess 12y ago
  The problem is that the number of users is directly proportional to technological quality. People use gcc over non-copyleft compilers because they perceive it as technically superior. People use emacs over non-copyleft editors because they perceive it as technically superior. Sacrificing technological quality to fulfill an agenda will actually have the opposite effect, because it'll drive users to non-copyleft solutions in order to get the better piece of software. It's not just the number of users, either. When your software is dominant, you're in control. You get to have a say in the direction of the technology, and you get to prevent the lesser players from having their say. By sacrificing technological quality for ideological purity, RMS is giving up both his userbase and his dominant position he can use to prevent non-free software from taking over.
- zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  His position is certainly consistent but definitely not reasonable.
maxlybbert 12y ago
Yes, this is a perfect example of the difference between open source and free software. I remember Stallman saying something along the lines of "even if it weren't as good as proprietary software, it would be important for people to use free software" over a decade ago. The fact that releasing the source code, and allowing people to modify it, leads to high quality software is a nice perk as far as he's concerned; but it's not the reason for the FSF. The FSF exists so that programmers aren't helpless when their system breaks. Raymond's arguments, on the other hand are all about which compiler or debugger is better, assuming the compilers and debuggers being compared are open source.

rayiner 12y ago

We're talking about a C compiler and debugger. Lots of very technically knowledgable people shun IDEs and automated refactoring in that space.

Tomte 12y ago
Sure, that's a valid choice. But when you're implementing a language ecosystem, proud ignorance of other peoples' usage patterns is just embarassing.
- danieldk 12y ago
  Is RMS still involved with gcc at all? (Non-philosophically?)
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    He claims not doing any development himself for several years now, so I guess this means no.
- rayiner 12y ago
  Does proud ignorance of IDEs indicate that RMS may be impolitic or undiplomatic? Yes. Does it indicate he "is disconnected with the present technology?" In the world of C/C++, I don't think being willfully ignorant of IDEs and automated refactoring means you are out of date in your technical knowledge, as the grandparent post implied.
  - eropple 12y ago
    I do. There's a reason that CLion is becoming a thing (can't happen fast enough) and Visual Assist has been a de facto standard in C++ development on Windows for years. The tools exist, they just don't exist in Emacs.
coldtea 12y ago
Not that many. Except if Windows C++ developers (most of which use VS) don't qualify as "technically knowledgable people". And who is doing the judging?

weenie 12y ago

You have to realize that RMS's goal isn't to "steer important projects", and you should give him more credit in that he probably could be "connected with the present technology" if he wanted to. The fact that "he doesn't know enough anymore" doesn't say much about Stallman; instead it says a lot about how his goal of making sure software is libre has been shoved aside by everyone else for other priorities. Also, RMS is one of the most humble people on the scene, and will freely admit to not knowing something until he lives and breathes it.

hga 12y ago
"You have to realize that RMS's goal isn't to 'steer important projects'" Not as such, but as long as he's doing it for so many marque GNU/FSF projects....
- weenie 12y ago
  Out of necessity and as a means to an end, because nobody else sharing his philosophy is willing to do it.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Out of necessity and as a means to an end, because nobody else sharing his philosophy is willing to do it. I think that's a pretty striking description of failure in promoting an ideology.
    - hga 12y ago
      Or at least his interpretation of that ideology. I'd be really surprised if most of the people working on these marque GNU/FSF projects weren't happy with GPL/copyleft, at least for these "complete" programs (as opposed to libraries like the GPLed GNU Scientific Library).
    - 59nadir 12y ago
      > I think that's a pretty striking description of failure in promoting an ideology. Are you actually saying you think the FSF have failed?

pnathan 12y ago

ear periodically shoves his oar into the FSF world, occasionally with faint malice about the whole business. He really isn't into Free software as much as he is into Open software. You can't read him as a disinterested techie and come away with correct views.

lultimouomo 12y ago

I think the many replies that point out that you don't need an IDE or code refactoring if you are a real programmer miss that my point is not that you need to use advanced tools to develop a compiler, is that you need to write a compiler that supports those tools for the people who like to use them. And to write such compiler, you must as a minimum know what refactoring tools and IDEs are. Also, I'm sure you always get naming and signatures right at the first try, foreseeing every possible evolution of the system. I don't, and since I don't like my programs to turn into huge piles of horror, I enjoy refactoring tools a lot.

copsarebastards 12y ago

Saying Stallman isn't qualified to steer major projects because he isn't familiar with IDEs is a pretty weird point to make. Emacs is a far more advanced environment than any IDE I have used, and often the so-called "features" of IDEs are to deal with self-created problems: Java/C# build tooling in IDEs, for example, is there to deal with the fact that the build processes for these languages is massively overcomplicated. I can't speak for Stallman, but I am confident that I'm accurately representing the opinions of a lot of Emacs users when I say that IDEs provide a leaky abstraction over systemic design problems rather than solving them.