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Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

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Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#101

Post by poet »

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #60

"I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people." Thank God Stallman helped all of those sick kids with Malaria in Africa with by giving them GIMP and GCC. Way better than the billions of dollars and thousands of vaccinations Bill and Melinda Gates gave to them. In all seriousness, if we're going…

Let's put aside the specific instance of Gates/Stallman and extend your argument to the general case. People in the philanthropic-billionaire camp usually only exist in countries with basic rights that roughly approximate those in the civil liberty camp. Consider the wealthiest charitable foundations [1]. The only outlier is a foundation from the UAE (whose endowment is a relatively small percentage of the sum). This is only a basic analysis, but I hope you get the gist of my argument: you can't naively separate the contributions of businessmen and civil rights activists; it is a mutualistic relationship.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_charitable_f...

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#102

Post by blhack »

hugh3 wrote: post #22
milesf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stallman is like a goalpost. He's as far over to one side as you can be. We need people like him since we all tend to measure our views and beliefs in reference to others. I just wouldn't want to hang out with the guy. I say "Linux" and buy proprietary software. I'm sure he wouldn't want to hang with me either, but I do respect him.

Who is the other goalpost? Are they equally necessary?

Steve Jobs

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#104

Post by dasil003 »

Hats off to Richard Stallman.

Whatever your views on software—and by default most people will disagree with him on many points—his contributions to the software world are undeniable. There are a lot of fundamentalists out there, and 99% of the time they scare the shit out of me because of what their unchecked advocacy could ultimately lead to. Stallman's fundamentalism on the other hand, does not seem likely to ever lead to any detrimental effect on society.

In other words, it's not just about respecting Stallman's conviction, but also acknowledging that his convictions are well-placed, even though my lifestyle would never allow me to share his position per se.

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#105

Post by jonah »

avar wrote: post #89
koeselitz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing apples and oranges, I think. Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or uninformed; but what does that have to do with software? Or freedom? Their being tremendous philanthropists has little to nothing to do with whether or not the way they earned their money is ethical -- and I hope that, in this day and age, it's clear that it's…

> Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or uninformed. Their foundation has done a lot of good, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Why does it have all that money in the first place? Well, mostly because Microsoft managed to work itself into a monopoly position with dirty tactics, and the proliferation of their own proprietary file formats. This…

The foundation itself isn't completely blameless. They have some of their n billions invested* in the very companies who's environmental and social policies are are causing harm to people they are trying to help with their clinics, etc.

*I heard about this several years ago so would be happy to be told they've changed this. Their response was that the fund management and philanthropic arms of the foundation were firewalled and the former's directive was to simply maximize growth. I find this unfortunate at best.

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#106

Post by tomjen3 »

akkartik wrote: post #41

His opinions that were new to me: "I value freedom more than technical progress." "We need to make it so hard to move production from one country to another that each company will be stuck in one country, so that country will be able to regulate it.

Thats interesting. As far as I recall (and I used to read his website everyday, before PG slapped me with his "how to create wealth" essay and showed me how wrong that world-view was) Stallman has always been a leftist, never liked corporations, and always been interested in human rights. He may have refined his position over the years, but it hasn't changed much.

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#107

Post by dman »

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #60

"I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people." Thank God Stallman helped all of those sick kids with Malaria in Africa with by giving them GIMP and GCC. Way better than the billions of dollars and thousands of vaccinations Bill and Melinda Gates gave to them. In all seriousness, if we're going…

While I might not agree with Stallman on a lot of things he is my hero for championing the cause of a computer where you can understand things on most layers of the stack. Comprehensibility of the underlying system is an important side effect of Free as in freedom.

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#108

Post by SkyMarshal »

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #60

"I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people." Thank God Stallman helped all of those sick kids with Malaria in Africa with by giving them GIMP and GCC. Way better than the billions of dollars and thousands of vaccinations Bill and Melinda Gates gave to them. In all seriousness, if we're going…

When RMS made his decision, BG was just another robber baron. Nobody knew what BG would do with his money back then. It's only in hindsight that we know he became a great philanthropist.

EG, we can't judge RMS's decision then based on what BG later became.

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#109

Post by mattmanser »

avar wrote: post #89
koeselitz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing apples and oranges, I think. Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or uninformed; but what does that have to do with software? Or freedom? Their being tremendous philanthropists has little to nothing to do with whether or not the way they earned their money is ethical -- and I hope that, in this day and age, it's clear that it's…

> Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or uninformed. Their foundation has done a lot of good, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Why does it have all that money in the first place? Well, mostly because Microsoft managed to work itself into a monopoly position with dirty tactics, and the proliferation of their own proprietary file formats. This…

This is an extremely naive diatribe.

There are few OSS projects that have done anything more than steal ideas from commercial software in terms of innovation. Programming languages are the only place I can think of that OSS is cutting edge.

MS pushed the boundaries of software to the extreme. Go look at any of their competitors at the age of their dominance. Man, look at Netscape navigator in its bloated unusable form when IE6 came out. Compare Excel to Lotus 123. Or Outlook to Lotus Notes.

MS didn't win because it was evil. It won because it was very, very, very, very, very good.

Google is winning now, with its even more extremely closed source software known as google search, because it is very, very, very good. It's just pretending to support OSS. Without actually giving away the crown jewels.

And MS still is very good in a lot of fields, OSes being the primary one. Only Apple is a close competitor and it's a lot more expensive.

So get off your soapbox and smell reality. The overall benefit MS software has donated to the world is worth many more trillions of dollars than the licenses cost.

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#110

Post by SkyMarshal »

dman wrote: post #107
Aaronontheweb wrote: post #60

"I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people." Thank God Stallman helped all of those sick kids with Malaria in Africa with by giving them GIMP and GCC. Way better than the billions of dollars and thousands of vaccinations Bill and Melinda Gates gave to them. In all seriousness, if we're going…

While I might not agree with Stallman on a lot of things he is my hero for championing the cause of a computer where you can understand things on most layers of the stack. Comprehensibility of the underlying system is an important side effect of Free as in freedom.

Agreed. I've learned much more about computers and computing using Linux for a relatively short time than from years of Windows. Such a gift.
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