5 ms·

Despite the inflexibility of RMS' arguments (they grate on me as much as anyone) I feel like his position on continuing to develop GCC without modern features l

by Aqueous 12y ago

Despite the inflexibility of RMS' arguments (they grate on me as much as anyone) I feel like his position on continuing to develop GCC without modern features like a fully exposed AST is necessary to keep the "moderate" position where it is. In other words, RMS' radical position is necessary for 'moderate' LLVM to exist. Otherwise we'd still be living in the Borland/Metrowerks/Microsoft world of the 90s - proprietary toolsets developed by private companies with absolutely no intention or incentive to share their code. In polisci there is a concept called the "Overton window." If a once-extremely radical position is held and promoted by any significant number of people, it shifts the entire conversation in that direction so that the formerly radical position seems more moderate. That's why RMS is very necessary. He shifts the Overton Window towards what most of us consider the "reasonable" position.

dekhn 12y ago
Similarly in negotiating there is a term 'blue sky proposal' which is so extreme that people end up shifting their acceptable terms.
- danielweber 12y ago
  There is also overplaying your hand and making the other person leave the room.
cynicalkane 12y ago
This is false--people are just as likely to respond to opposing arguments with rejection and ideological hardening. This is replicated in psychological studies. In my personal experience, the less the opposing position acknowledges the values of its opponents, the more likely it is to be rejected. Most people reason by mood affiliation and use argumentation as a social tool, so this should not be a surprise. I think the "Overton window" is confusing cause and effect; it's the nature of reasonable positions to generate unreasonable fanatics at the tail ends. But if you pay attention to the loud fanatics at a given point of time, you find most of them do not shift any window but instead fall into irrelevance. I think that as RMS's software becomes less important, people will care less about what he has to say.
- Aqueous 12y ago
  Sure - "The loud fanatics" who have no following certainly drop into irrelevance. I think if what you say were completely true we would not have had any movement forward on positions that were considered radical just 10 - 20 years ago - like same-sex marriage. It is only because certain people with large followings - Andrew Sullivan and others - began making a vocal argument for gay marriage, which wasn't even considered a mainstream position until very recently, that it is now the law of the land in so many states. Radicals have to be able to articulate their position in a way that is compelling and reasonable to a significant number of people in order for there to be a shift. But I think political progress is largely explained by this phenomenon.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - pjc50 12y ago
      It very much was and is contrary to plenty of people's beliefs, it's just that the number of people who hold those beliefs has changed. For example in the very recent Alabama decision the people publicly opposing it explicitly say it's against their beliefs.
  - leovonl 12y ago
    There's an enormous difference between having an opinion which is not aligned with mainstream and being a radical. The radical usually wants the world to convert to his/hers own views, which is why they tend to get closed minded and hard to talk with as they get older.
    - RodericDay 12y ago
      "I'll say nothing against him. At one time the whites in the United States called him a racialist, and extremist, and a Communist. Then the Black Muslims came along and the whites thanked the Lord for Martin Luther King."
    - 12y ago
nawitus 12y ago
That might have been true in the past, but I don't see it being true these days. Lots of companies are only now figuring out the benefits of free software. Just look at Microsoft for one example.
- davexunit 12y ago
  But they only see the technical benefits of Open Source, not the ethical benefits of Free Software. This means that we'll continue to see the spread of the "Open Source almost everything" methodology, which leads to a world where libraries are free, but the applications built from them are not. The developer gets freedom, but the user doesn't.
- dekhn 12y ago
  Some of the older network tools in Windows (nslookup, etc) are actually dervied from BSD. That was done... 20 years ago now?
  - hga 12y ago
    The whole TCP/IP stack came from BSD. It was already pretty much the standard one. So back to August 1994 per Wikipedia and my rough memory.
rjzzleep 12y ago
as crazy as RMS may sound in his exchanges usually don't forget that some people didn't read past the first messages. read another message RMS responded here https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00594.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00... that's in response to the offer llvm made to give hand the copyright over to the FSF and integrate llvm to gcc. I had long been wondering why there was a llvm-gcc on apple machines a couple revisions back. basically he claims he didn't see the original llvm offer: >> "If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, >> I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the >> copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these >> details." > I am stunned to see that we had this offer. > Now, based on hindsight, I wish we had accepted it. >If I had seen it back then, I would not have had the benefit of > hindsight, but it would clearly have been a real possibility. Nothing > would have ruled it out. > I wish I had known about the offer.

by Aqueous 12y ago

dekhn 12y ago

Similarly in negotiating there is a term 'blue sky proposal' which is so extreme that people end up shifting their acceptable terms.

danielweber 12y ago
There is also overplaying your hand and making the other person leave the room.

cynicalkane 12y ago

This is false--people are just as likely to respond to opposing arguments with rejection and ideological hardening. This is replicated in psychological studies. In my personal experience, the less the opposing position acknowledges the values of its opponents, the more likely it is to be rejected. Most people reason by mood affiliation and use argumentation as a social tool, so this should not be a surprise. I think the "Overton window" is confusing cause and effect; it's the nature of reasonable positions to generate unreasonable fanatics at the tail ends. But if you pay attention to the loud fanatics at a given point of time, you find most of them do not shift any window but instead fall into irrelevance. I think that as RMS's software becomes less important, people will care less about what he has to say.

Aqueous 12y ago
Sure - "The loud fanatics" who have no following certainly drop into irrelevance. I think if what you say were completely true we would not have had any movement forward on positions that were considered radical just 10 - 20 years ago - like same-sex marriage. It is only because certain people with large followings - Andrew Sullivan and others - began making a vocal argument for gay marriage, which wasn't even considered a mainstream position until very recently, that it is now the law of the land in so many states. Radicals have to be able to articulate their position in a way that is compelling and reasonable to a significant number of people in order for there to be a shift. But I think political progress is largely explained by this phenomenon.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - pjc50 12y ago
    It very much was and is contrary to plenty of people's beliefs, it's just that the number of people who hold those beliefs has changed. For example in the very recent Alabama decision the people publicly opposing it explicitly say it's against their beliefs.
- leovonl 12y ago
  There's an enormous difference between having an opinion which is not aligned with mainstream and being a radical. The radical usually wants the world to convert to his/hers own views, which is why they tend to get closed minded and hard to talk with as they get older.
  - RodericDay 12y ago
    "I'll say nothing against him. At one time the whites in the United States called him a racialist, and extremist, and a Communist. Then the Black Muslims came along and the whites thanked the Lord for Martin Luther King."
  - 12y ago

nawitus 12y ago

That might have been true in the past, but I don't see it being true these days. Lots of companies are only now figuring out the benefits of free software. Just look at Microsoft for one example.

davexunit 12y ago
But they only see the technical benefits of Open Source, not the ethical benefits of Free Software. This means that we'll continue to see the spread of the "Open Source almost everything" methodology, which leads to a world where libraries are free, but the applications built from them are not. The developer gets freedom, but the user doesn't.
dekhn 12y ago
Some of the older network tools in Windows (nslookup, etc) are actually dervied from BSD. That was done... 20 years ago now?
- hga 12y ago
  The whole TCP/IP stack came from BSD. It was already pretty much the standard one. So back to August 1994 per Wikipedia and my rough memory.

rjzzleep 12y ago

as crazy as RMS may sound in his exchanges usually don't forget that some people didn't read past the first messages. read another message RMS responded here https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00594.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00... that's in response to the offer llvm made to give hand the copyright over to the FSF and integrate llvm to gcc. I had long been wondering why there was a llvm-gcc on apple machines a couple revisions back. basically he claims he didn't see the original llvm offer: >> "If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, >> I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the >> copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these >> details." > I am stunned to see that we had this offer. > Now, based on hindsight, I wish we had accepted it. >If I had seen it back then, I would not have had the benefit of > hindsight, but it would clearly have been a real possibility. Nothing > would have ruled it out. > I wish I had known about the offer.