Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions. • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by tmsh » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:11 AM UTC

all this time i never understood what FSF was about really.

in some ways, the guy is right. annoyingly, stubbornly, horribly-marketedly right.

to get people to really understand how freedom to modify software is important the way freedom of speech is important (i.e., it just saves time for everyone in the long run. take the gates-has-done-more-good-for-kids-in-africa argument. the counter argument is that those kids wouldn't have malaria if something more akin to the freedom to modify software were believed by more people. i.e., we did not excuse exploitation and we safeguarded against it heavily. against de beers. against remnants of colonial governments. against rebel armies. against anyone who takes advantage of other people.) -- anyway, to get people to see why it's important (and it took me -- what -- two decades of interaction with software as a user and now a developer?) -- this may sound lame, but i think there is a great character out there that could be part of some novel or screenplay.

it would be like sue sylvester as a team leader / tech lead. this incredibly uncompromising hardass who for some reason insists on free software. total jerk to new hires. rejects code left and right, almost arbitrarily (i'm reminded of the whole xemacs situation, but i suppose that's different.)

but then one day you'd have the sue sylvester's sister episode or whatever. maybe some unexpected vulnerable conversation with our once brow-beaten, junior-developer protagonist. and the glorious recognition scene would hit you and you'd realize -- f-, in some ways that dude is right.

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

#122

Post by quadhome » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:11 AM UTC

benofsky wrote: post #46

mquander wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait a second. Why do you think the world is better, having Google, than it would be if "google-search" was on Github and hosted by a bunch of people? That sounds worse to me. I assume you think that the existence of Google has led to other good things, but I don't see any reason to believe that the people at Google are doing better or more valuable work there than they would be if Google didn't exist.

I am not stating my point clearly, sorry. My point is no business could be built around search if all the implementation was "free" (in the FSF sense) because how would any business have an edge which allowed them to be competitive. Perhaps I'm being naive but this is just the way I see it.

I don't think the software is Google's sole advantage.

The best people, an already massive and growing infrastructure, and a proven-successful platform are all things that can't be readily duplicated.

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

#123

Post by mattmanser » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:12 AM UTC

dman wrote: post #116

mattmanser wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 for…

“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime".

Perhaps if we'd have taught Africa how to make IE6 they'd not need our our code today. Ah, what a missed opportunity Bill Gates had to solve poverty.

Or your point is totally fucking retarded. One or the other...

I really can't make the distinction.

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

#124

Post by quadhome » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:14 AM UTC

chc wrote: post #27

avar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the market changed overnight so that nobody wanted to buy non-free cars, which for the sake of argument we'll define here as cars where the full schematics are under a free license like the GPL. Nothing would really change. The main effort of making a car is still making the car . Just because you can download recipes or a CAD drawing of a car chefs or car makers aren't going to go out of business. They provide a…

Source code is not equivalent to a schematic. Source code is equivalent to schematics, raw materials, free labor and the key to a factory. All you need to do is run it through a compiler and you've got an operational program.

I thought the equivalent to the raw materials, factory, etc. was the computer.

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

#125

Post by delackner » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:46 AM UTC

rimantas wrote: post #94

rbanffy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Casual users. There are lots of market forces pulling towards proprietary. Most people don't care about software freedom - they want shiny toys right now. Jobs, Gates, Ballmer and Ellison cater to them. They build and sell tools to help you lock yourself to their software. And they even use free software for that. edit: dear downmodder: try harder. I am sure you can articulate a useful argument instead of just downvo…

I downmoded you. Mainly because I see no freedom in Stallman's vision and phrases like "shiny toys" and "lock yourself" rub me the wrong way. I want my freedom to use whatever I choose: open source, proprietary, free, paid, whatever, without some RMS telling me what to do. And I see more freedom in MIT/BSD than in GPL.

Since he argued coherently, honestly, and with good manners, just find someone else to up-mod instead please.

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

#126

Post by DaniFong » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 1:52 AM UTC

Most of life consists in trading one kind of freedom for another. What is striking about RMS is that in his defense of software freedom he sacrifices other freedoms of life that you and I enjoy.

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

#127

Post by isamuel » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 2:00 AM UTC

poet wrote: post #101

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…

I don't know, but it seems more likely to me that the causal relationship runs in the other direction: a society is likely to become more free as the median resident becomes more prosperous.

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

#128

Post by patrickaljord » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 2:01 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

RMS and the free and open source community have given way more billions of dollars and jobs that Gates ever has. Let me explain. Many governments have switched to Gnu/Linux and are saving billions of dollars each year for the last ten years such as Brazil ($1 billion per year http://www.brazzil.com/2004/html/articles/mar04/p107mar04.ht...). Given that many governments have switched to gnu/linux and free and open software, that's billions of dollar saved each year for the last 5 to ten years. Those are billions that can be spent on health, education, employment and more, it's an invaluable gift to humanity. I know Bill Gates fortune doesn't exceed $50 billions so I'll let you do the math. RMS and the free software world have given way more to the world than Bill Gates ever will. And Free Software will continue to give while Bill's fortunes will soon be over.

> In all seriousness, if we're going to argue the ethics of charging for software,at the end of the day who has done more good?

See above.

> Bill Gates who made himself rich, gave thousands of people jobs, created products that made the lives of millions of other people easier

Free and Open Source software give millions of jobs too. I'd say even more especially with the internet. Do you think Google could have been done without Gnu/Linux when they needed to install thousands of servers and didn't have yet the money to pay licenses? How about the internet? It's all free/open source software, a way bigger revolution than the PC which was a boring work machine before for most people.

> When I compare the more calculus of capitalism and propreitary software against Stallman's dogmatism, it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good

Well, think and try to calculate again. Gates' done way less.

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

#129

Post by cheald » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 2:10 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #2

"iGroan"? "iBad"?

Yup. That was the point that I shrugged and closed the article. The guy has done an awful lot for OSS as we know it, but it's really difficult to take him seriously when he talks like a 14 year-old. Why not just throw in a Micro$oft and Crapple in there while we're at it?

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

#130

Post by patrickaljord » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 2:18 AM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #109

avar wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 for…

> Google is winning now, with its even more extremely closed source software known as google search

Google search is not closed source as it is a hosted service. It would be if it was redistributed under closed source license. This is why RMS himself said he uses Google.

> It's just pretending to support OSS. Without actually giving away the crown jewels.

It has not given sources, but Google gave many papers about the technics they use such as map/reduce and compression which enable projects such hadoop, yahoo search and even Bing.