What I fundamentally dislike about RMS' philosophy and the licenses its inspired, is that it values a developers time as nothing. As if the world has some fundamental right to everything that rolls out of my head.
How does it value that time as nothing?
Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
261–270 of 426 posts
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
But consider the possibility that this might be perfectly rational behaviour for people who care about some side of the cause (even if it comes at the expense of HN as a forum): the victory condition for any belief is to be so universally accepted that its negation can not be expressed in polite company. If you come into a HN thread believing X and then see that every post stating X got downvoted into oblivion, maybe…
> this might be perfectly rational behaviour for people who care about some side of the cause I dispute this is rational. Creating echo chambers polarises and intensifies opposing viewpoints. The rational thing to do would be to engage in polite and meaningful discussion with people with whom you disagree. This would diffuse extreme opinions and allow people time to consider whether or not their position is justified…
This reminds me of The Racist Tree: https://lardcave.net/text/the_racist_tree.html
> By Alexander Blechman
> Once upon a time, there was a racist tree. Seriously, you are going to hate this tree. High on a hill overlooking the town, the racist tree grew where the grass was half clover. Children would visit during the sunlit hours and ask for apples, and the racist tree would shake its branches and drop the delicious red fruit that gleamed without being polished. The children ate many of the racist tree's apples and played games beneath the shade of its racist branches. One day the children brought Sam, a boy who had just moved to town, to play around the racist tree.
> "Let Sam have an apple," asked a little girl.
> "I don't think so. He's black," said the tree. This shocked the children and they spoke to the tree angrily, but it would not shake its branches to give Sam an apple, and it called him a n-[censored].
> "I can't believe the racist tree is such a racist," said one child. The children momentarily reflected that perhaps this kind of behavior was how the racist tree got its name.
> It was decided that if the tree was going to deny apples to Sam then nobody would take its apples. The children stopped visiting the racist tree.
> The racist tree grew quite lonely. After many solitary weeks it saw a child flying a kite across the clover field.
> "Can I offer you some apples?" asked the tree eagerly.
> "Fuck off, you goddamn Nazi," said the child.
> The racist tree was upset, because while it was very racist, it did not personally subscribe to Hitler's fascist ideology. The racist tree decided that it would have to give apples to black children, not because it was tolerant, but because otherwise it would face ostracism from white children.
> And so, social progress was made.
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazing how whenever someone does something controversial and gets forced out soon afterwards, it's never the thing they said, but "consistent creepy and inappropriate behavior" based on 10 year old anecdotes that suddenly appear out of nowhere... I'd think that if someone was "consistently" creepy and inappropriate, there would be a pretty good public record for that, but what do I know? EDIT: Let me give a bit more…
Would there? A friend of a friend hit on my under age sister at a party at my house. He later hit on my girlfriend in front of me in Spanish because he didn’t know I understood. There were witnesses to both events. I’ve gotten a couple complaints from other women attending my parties as well. And he’s always had a “creep” vibe and being generally inappropriate but my friends think of him as “harmless”. I had to tell…
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does it value that time as nothing?
If you invent a great piece of software, you need to be paid for the time you put into making it. If your only play is a license deal or such, open source will kill your business. Or turn it into something that RMS agrees with. But it wont be "your" business.
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
He wasn't blacklisted for committing thought crime. The dumb Epstein email triggered a reevaluation of his consistent creepy and inappropriate behavior against current community standards, which resulted in a large part of the community deciding they didn't want anything to do with him anymore. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from social consequences.
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Salem G. made a mistake in desiring to address a problem that is worth discussing, but did so with a hasty ill-conceived reaction constructed through gossip and hearsay. It shouldn't happen, but it does.
The various publications should have checked their facts and performed due diligence, but something, anything MIT related is money in the bank right now. They sold out.
Breaking down Salem for her mistake isn't going to help Free Software, rms, or the FSF, but reason and facts, and holding the publications accountable for their disinformation by correcting it, will.
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So the only difference is in distribution rights? So his sentence is misleading regarding the extent of the differences? Yes, it's misleading. There's no practical difference between the two in terms of licensing. What this boils down to is that not all open source developers subscribe to the free software philosophy (e.g. believe that proprietary software is evil). Therefore, rms doesn't like the term.
> There's no practical difference between the two in terms of licensing. Isn't it the case that (a) there could be / are open source projects with extremely restrictive licensing which totally prevents all distribution. I.e. a "copyright": you can still read and run the software and modify it for yourself, as long as you don't distribute it, and (b) such a project could never be "free" sensu Stallman?
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general, yes. Murder is a very peculiar case that is hardly suitable to be the benchmark for building our intuitions about trading off harm in general: human lives are not fungible, murder is not reversible, the victims do not generally get a meaningful way of influencing how the murder impacts them etc., all properties that do not apply in the case of being put off a pursuit like FOSS. (Even then, we're sometimes…
Also notice how it is almost always okay for "women" to be discouraged and counted as collateral damage. The fact that you do that tells me a lot.
Quote one person in this thread who said that it wouldn't be ok if it affected men instead. Or just one person implying that.
You're assuming a lot here. If anything, I think it's likely less people would care if a bunch of men were alienated, since there's already so many of them in the field in the first palce.
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Please don't. Salem G. made a mistake in desiring to address a problem that is worth discussing, but did so with a hasty ill-conceived reaction constructed through gossip and hearsay. It shouldn't happen, but it does. The various publications should have checked their facts and performed due diligence, but something, anything MIT related is money in the bank right now. They sold out. Breaking down Salem for her mista…
She's really building weapons for the US department of defense.
I'm not doing anything, just doubting of her qualities as a spoke person of a movement that targeted RMS for no reason other than ignorance (taking for granted that there isn't anything else behind it)
If we can doubt Stallman as a leader, we can as well doubt Selam G.
And I'm saying it because she put herself there, nobody pressed her to write a hit piece titled "Remove Stallman and every other toxic person", she spoke as a movement leader, a toxic one if you ask me.
Remove is not a word I would ever use in regard to other people.
> The various publications should have checked their facts
That's why I think that she chose Vice for a reason, and not by coincidence.
I guess, but I can't prove it, that she was sure they would have listened and published the whole thing without checking, and even if they did, they would have published it anyway as it is.
It's too juicy.
I'm not trying to break her down, just exposing facts.
It is what it is, I haven't invented anything here.
People need to have all the informations available to make their own opinions.
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think my leap from murder to war was greater than your leap from some gauche remarks during a talk in the '90s and a handful of emails lawyering about word choice that might have put some people off working in the speaker's discipline to murder. Other than that, what exactly is your point? At no point did I imply that rms's life history should be compared to the Allied intervention in Europe; I merely brought…
If any other person did this, especially someone from FAANG etc. you'll be out with your pitchforks. The double standard is so real.
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a user who is not a software developer, what is the practical difference between GPL and MIT? Is there one?
> For a user who is not a software developer, For a reader who is not a journalist, what is the value of free speech? Is there one?