Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is the other goalpost? Are they equally necessary?
The SCO guy, forget his name, that equates open source with communism.
Bill Gates also called open source developers communists.
Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
151–160 of 263 posts
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#152I have to admit I've always considered RMS somewhat of a freak (but one who has done some amount of good in this world).
However, I have now lost all respect for him for making non-free software a human rights violation.
EDIT: Grammar
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#153Earlier 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…
I'm surprised at how high your comment is rated.
Bill Gates didn't become rich because Microsoft managed to work itself into a monopoly position with dirty tactics. The whole problem people have with Microsoft is that they abused their monopoly in one area to gain a foothold in another! They already had a virtual monopoly on desktop computers. How did they get there? By having smart people and making really good software that more or less worked everywhere.
When Microsoft started becoming evil they were already fully entrenched in the market.
How many millions of US$ would those people have donated to charity if their budgets hadn't been constrained by purchasing Microsoft software? Some of them were probably African countries that could have used that money to buy vaccines 10 years ago.
Yes, I'm sure that any money left over from a large corporation's IT budget would have gone straight into the donation budget.
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#154"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…
I think that Gate's work of software and philanthropy has been both beneficial and detrimental. Call me a sick kid, but I would deeply question some of the so-called "philanthropy" of the Gates Foundation. http://www.lavidalocavore.org/diary/3059/gates-foundation-mo... Stallman has given us GCC which is free in the many senses of the word free. The Microsoft C compiler has been good too, but it comes with strings att…
The Microsoft C compiler has been good too, but it comes with strings attached, just like vaccinations and bio-tech.
What are these strings?
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Free software have nothing to do much with capitalism. Stallman probably agree with the idea of competition improving life. What he disagree with is what he called combat .(Or what I least remember from reading one of his essay) Rather th…
"Free software have nothing to do much with capitalism." So why does the GPL make it so difficult to make any kind of money. Many of the supporters are also against any and all forms of commercial software. "What he disagree with is what he called combat.(Or what I least remember from reading one of his essay) Rather than improve over your competitors and sell great stuff to customers, you seek to annihilate your com…
So why does the GPL make it so difficult to make any kind of money. Many of the supporters are also against any and all forms of commercial software.
How many Free software supporters did you count said they're explicitly against profiting from software?
Beside, if GPL make it difficult to earn money, than it's a pure side effect.
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well, in that case, you're stubbornly wrong about things.
The US was and is far more liberal than most countries, and prosperity has followed liberalism (not democrat/republican liberalism, dictator/freedom liberalism) in every case where freedom has been allowed to prosper.
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#157Ah RMS, same fundamentalist as always! One thing I would suggest, for those not familiar with RMS's history, is to take a moment to read the Wikipedia page on Lisp Machines. Specifically, this passage: Symbolics still had the major advantage that while 3 or 4 of the AI Lab hackers had gone to work for Greenblatt, a solid 14 other hackers had signed onto Symbolics. There were two AI Lab people who did not get hired by…
The counterpoint: http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about...
And some counter-counterpoint:
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there aren't any manufacturing costs WTF are you talking about? Are you saying that all these nights I'm not sleeping, working 14 hours per day, not spending time with my family ... don't have a cost? Is this not manufacturing? > under a free software model you'd have to make money by continuing to make improved versions under contract, or offering support, hosting or other things like that Yeah, that's called cons…
> Is this not manufacturing? No. Note that this whole conversation started with a car analogy, under that analogy writing software would be designing a car, not manufacturing it. In software manufacturing is distribution, which carries virtually no cost. Of course making software would still have a cost. > I prefer to exercise my freedoms [...] to sell my work. More power to you then. Note that I never said that I ag…
Isn't "architecting"/planning a software project the design phase, and the actual coding/implementation the manufacture (manufacture means "to make")?
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Almost every freedom you enjoy came as an economic incentive first. bad_user, I'm sorry, I am not quite understanding your definition of 'almost every freedom'. There are plenty of freedoms that I enjoy which are not economically driven. Freedom of religion, freedom to assemble, right to bear arms, freedom of the press, etc, etc. I mean, are we talking fundamental freedoms? RMS sees the ability to hack your own sys…
"RMS sees the ability to hack your own system as a fundamental freedom. Computer as an extension of your mind/person. It would be like me telling you that you are not allowed think certain thoughts." Under these rules, I should be able to include GPL source in a proprietary application and not have to release the code. It's my fundamental freedom to do as I wish with open source code. Yet, it doesn't work this way. P…
Well, as long as you don't release the application, you are certainly allowed to do that under the GPL. No one will sue you (furthermore how would they know?).
I like the mind analogy, it is sufficiently weird.
Lets say my friend Phil and his pet Demon have the technology to implant a calculus subroutine in your brain.
It is a little buggy, but overall it works pretty well, sometimes it will get the wrong answers, but it is about 80% there (the marketing brochure, however makes it sound like it is 100% accurate).
It is perfectly (and easily) within their ability to give me the ability to introspect the subroutine so that I can safely fix any bugs that I find.
But they do not, because then I would know how it works! I could potentially duplicate it elsewhere.
They in fact go to disproportionate lengths to make sure that the particular subroutine is a complete black box. They encrypt it and use a Vulcan mind-meld to wall it off from me.
For a while they push updates, to that corner of my mind, but eventually they go on to greener pastures (they get jobs as consultants or win big in the VC lottery), and I am left with a buggy, 85% understanding of calculus.
If we take the idea that the computer is an extension of the mind seriously, any sort of proprietary software is extremely anti-social behavior. If I create proprietary software and allow people to install it, I am cutting them off from little pieces of understanding and knowledge that they could otherwise have.
It is even worse if it doesn't work properly and I 'hang them out to dry' once they depend on it (i.e. stop fixing bugs).
I didn't come in here to argue that RMS is right, but there does seem to be some sort of moral or ethical issue behind this that is far beyond RMS getting upset that someone else is able to make money with his code. I suspect that he could make quite a bit of money not being the 'free software' guy, if it were mere jealousy.
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#160Earlier 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…
>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.
Surely you're joking? Outlook is a crappy email client. Mutt which is older than I am, handles mail better than Outlook does, I hate using Outlook. It means archiving my mail every month (several accounts over several PST files over an a very high mail volume). Ever since it's beginning outlook was the crappiest mail software. You can't figure out what the hell it's doing and it crashes all the damn time without error or with generic/cryptic ones. The only way to fix it is to wipe your settings from the hard drive, and reset registry keys to defaults. And if that doesn't work reinstall office.
Not to mention compiz/beryl had desktop effects before any other operating system. Linux in the kernel level has removed the need for file polling, replacing it with iwatch. Linux has on demand file system and virtual file system mounting. There are hardly any drivers for file systems or virtual file systems on Windows. Dokan is the only place where you can get FUSE or SSH and the software is crappy.
MS to this day hasn't standardized it's own security structure (EX: runas.exe in XP will have the processes pass on administrator rights to all child processes 7 doesn't neither does Vista). And lets face it on the top of it's game Windows default security could have been over-riden by pressing cancel on the logon screen. On anything but a fickle consumer and ease level Windows and to some extent OSX (although the use of a BSD kernel and the growth of MacPorts mitigates this a bit) don't hold a candle to the features found in Linux.
You seem to equate success and innovation with sales and press releases. In this case you probably think that MS is doing something revolutionary by letting Xboxes read usb drives.