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Happy birthday to GNU: celebrating 34 years of the free software movement

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Re: Happy birthday to GNU: celebrating 34 years of the free software movement

#31

Post by schoen »

jimmies wrote: post #8
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> insane dedication who is not motivated by money You can say that again. I believe he's pretty far on Asperger's? I view RMS as one pole of the philosophical spectrum of free software (the other being entirely proprietary). An uncompromising absolutist, his views can't survive contact with the real world intact, but they can influence the landscape as he exerts pressure on it. And he has proven visionary and right t…

> An uncompromising absolutist, his views can't survive contact with the real world intact, but they can influence the landscape as he exerts pressure on it. Well, somehow his views survived. GNU happened and is alive today. Billions of people are using it or a variant of it. In fact, GNU/Linux is arguably the most successful OS in the planet. The GNU has projects that power almost every computer and every mobile pho…

> What more you want?

RMS would like for those users to know about their rights and be able to change the software on their individual devices (whether they know enough to do so themselves, or they use some modified third-party build of the software). Even if people think that not many end-users are very interested in these rights or freedoms, RMS would like them to be clearly established and clearly publicized.

Re: Happy birthday to GNU: celebrating 34 years of the free software movement

#32

Post by tjr »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #30
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What more you want? Broader adoption of the GPLv3 and AGPLv3, for one thing. Getting Apple to get over their aversion of the GPL, for another. Ever wondered why macOS shipped with antiquated version of Bash, Emacs, Make...?

> Getting Apple to get over their aversion of the GPL Apple isn't going to join the Free Software Movement. If they do, they will be something entirely different, using the same name. Apple's business model is based on proprietary software, and limiting users.

Apple does sell some proprietary software for a fee, and they give away a lot of proprietary software for no cost. But it seems to me that most of their business model is selling hardware.

I wonder what impact moving to all Free Software would actually have on their business?

Or at least, making all of the software that they don't charge for, Free Software?

Re: Happy birthday to GNU: celebrating 34 years of the free software movement

#34

Post by smith333 »

overcast wrote: post #14

What I always found bizarre about Stallman is the lengths he goes to make himself anonymous(no online purchases, fetching websites remotely and then emailing output). Yet at the same time, he's so prolific publicly in everything he preaches about. https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Exactly that's the point your choose your privacy.

Re: Happy birthday to GNU: celebrating 34 years of the free software movement

#35

Post by thomastjeffery »

tjr wrote: post #32
thomastjeffery wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting Apple to get over their aversion of the GPL Apple isn't going to join the Free Software Movement. If they do, they will be something entirely different, using the same name. Apple's business model is based on proprietary software, and limiting users.

Apple does sell some proprietary software for a fee, and they give away a lot of proprietary software for no cost. But it seems to me that most of their business model is selling hardware. I wonder what impact moving to all Free Software would actually have on their business? Or at least, making all of the software that they don't charge for, Free Software?

> they give away a lot of proprietary software for no cost.

That is explicitly not the definition of free software, which is "free" as in "freedom", not "free beer". The monetary exchange for software copies is a separate topic.

I do wish Stallman picked a less ambiguous word like "libre", but here we are.

> But it seems to me that most of their business model is selling hardware.

That's what I'm talking about. IOS is explicitly designed to be a "walled garden". That design is directly contradictory to free software design. It requires that users are unable to do certain things in IOS, meaning it requires IOS to be proprietary, and irriplaceable.

> I wonder what impact moving to all Free Software would actually have on their business?

That is a good question. Unfortunately, Apple (as it exists today) will quite certainly never show is.

> Or at least, making all of the software that they don't charge for, Free Software?

Any user level software would not be needed for their "walled garden" approach, so there is nothing but Apple's current mindset preventing them from releasing the source. Maybe someday they will realize this, after all, their current open source projects (LLVM/clang, etc.) have certainly flourished.

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