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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.

#171

Post by jacquesm »

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…

I respectfully very much disagree with your assessment.

The only reason you can write that is because there is a dollar value attached to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, which in turn allows you to measure how much money is being pumped in to those projects.

But the effects of open source on the way the third world is operating are much harder to quantify, it could very well outweigh the effects of the money that goes in to helping those sick kids with Malaria, by enabling a solution to the problems around them rather than just curing a disease they've got.

Both are good, both have a place in this world, don't take the easy way out and use the money as the yardstick, and no, capitalism is not more or less moral than open source and does not do more good, after all for every Bill Gates there are lots of Larry Ellissons.

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

#173

Post by jacquesm »

culled wrote: post #100
smallblacksun wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who gets to decide if there is "no reasonable need"? Apple clearly believes (just like the microwave manufacturer) that there is "no reasonable need" to extend the iphones software.

Clearly the success of the app store shows that there's a desire to extend the functionality of the phone. Apple just doesn't believe that there's a reasonable need to do it beyond a certain point or to do it without their permission. However, no one is clamoring to write apps for a microwave. A microwave really just has one function and as long as it does that one thing then it doesn't really matter how the software…

> A microwave really just has one function and as long as it does that one thing then it doesn't really matter how the software works.

To a hardware hacker that would be a false statement.

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

#174

Post by loewenskind »

vorador wrote: post #168
tvon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is pretty active in OSS for someone you'd call the polar opposite of RMS.

Oh, yes, they're active, but only in their interest. You won't see apple freeing the source of cocoa...

But they're active right? Who's interests should they be active in? I bet their shareholders are so mad that they didn't follow Sun's lead....

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

#175

Post by rbanffy »

rimantas wrote: post #92
wtallis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the one who downvoted you, but I do think that casual users aren't quite the opposing goal post to RMS. They are greedy, but more than that, they are short-term thinkers. They can't (even collectively) cause quite as much harm as the guys like Jobs, Gates, Ballmer, and Ellison can when they manipulate the market. Big corporations led by big egos have the power to kill products and permanently remove innovatio…

Big corporations led by big egos have the power to kill products and permanently remove innovations from the market They also have money to sponsor development: Sun (R.I.P.) and JRuby, Apple and LLVM/Webkit/CUPS, Google and Android, and many more.

And that's why the GPL (and its derivatives/workalikes) is important - because it prevents any company or individual from taking away the freedoms of the users downstream.

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

#176

Post by rbanffy »

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.

The only freedom you give up by using the GPL is the freedom to take away the freedoms of your downstream users.

Once GPL'ed, any derivative must also preserve the freedoms of its users. This doesn't happen with MIT/BSD and that's one of the reasons there is a vibrant ecosystem around the Linux kernel and the GNU userland and nothing comparable around *BSDs.

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

#177

Post by dasil003 »

chanakya wrote: post #163
jseliger wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saul Alinsky wrote a number of books about community organizing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals , including Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals. Community organizing is about bringing people in communities together and helping them achieve some kind of goal; in the case of Alinsky, he was envisioning physical communities that needed things like coops, particular kinds of government services,…

RMS is advocating that using free software is in people's interest. As he says in the answer to one of the questions, he rates freedom as the most important self-interest.

Right, but so is any community change "for the better". The job is to convince people it's in their self-interest.

Meanwhile, only the tiny population of people who are programmers really even have a basic understanding of what Stallman's freedom is all about, and even they do not value it very high.

On a micro level I don't care about software freedom that much, because mostly I just want to get something done, and if 0.5% of my yearly income is going to commercial software that I find useful and have no desire to modify, then the freedom issues just don't even enter my conscience.

However on a macro level Stallman's slippery slope argument is correct. If the balance of software shifts to proprietary, then I feel the goodness of software in general is greatly reduced. If GNU/Linux didn't exist for instance, the technological landscape would be a shadow of what it is today.

But I digress... for free software to ever gain any mindshare in the non-developer community would require a stroke of marketing genius the likes of which I've never seen. It's just not reasonable to rank freedom with such a high priority for the average person who has no ability or desire to modify any software. There might be a redistribution angle, but again, it would have to be sheer marketing brilliance to convince anyone of that.

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

#178

Post by loewenskind »

>but I am sure that if you try, you can stretch your taste for games so that you will enjoy the free games that we have developed.

This is a terrible way to sell. You're going to have a hard time convincing people that the only way to be "morally acceptable" (in the eyes of someone they don't even know, no less) is to take a step back in most of your computing experience. He would have had an easier time getting fat kids to eat their spinach.

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

#179

Post by sambe »

smallblacksun wrote: post #93
sprout wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comparison of the microwave to the iPhone is just false. The point is that if the software is simple enough that it's pretty obviously bug-free, and you have no reasonable need to tinker with it, there's no reason you should need the source for the microcontroller. If the controller isn't working, the source is probably not going to help you. You just need a new microcontroller. On the flip side, there's no reas…

Who gets to decide if there is "no reasonable need"? Apple clearly believes (just like the microwave manufacturer) that there is "no reasonable need" to extend the iphones software.

The iPhone is pretty much marketed and sold as a multi-purpose computing device. There is a huge market for installing software on it, there is a development environment etc. People know this when they buy it. It is very obviously a computer-phone.

When you buy a microwave, you are buying it to heat food. You are not expecting to be able to browse the web on it or play games. If you are, then you need your head examined or to invent this new product (if you are right that it's a reasonable/desirable expectation, there should be a market for it). I think the distinction is actually very very clear, continuum or not.

Once the microwave starts allowing for remote control and twittering its status, the line does become more blurred ;)

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

#180

Post by rimantas »

rbanffy wrote: post #175
rimantas wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big corporations led by big egos have the power to kill products and permanently remove innovations from the market They also have money to sponsor development: Sun (R.I.P.) and JRuby, Apple and LLVM/Webkit/CUPS, Google and Android, and many more.

And that's why the GPL (and its derivatives/workalikes) is important - because it prevents any company or individual from taking away the freedoms of the users downstream.

Not all projects I mentioned are under GPL and some chose non-GPL license specifically to give more freedom than GPL and likes allow.
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