31–40 of 253 posts
How about just ask the guy directly? What are his current views?
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Part of the issue here is that rms has published his current views to great length. The issue at hand is over interpretation, which rms has the consistency to not bother rewording things for your benefit if asked to clarify
This is a weirdly hostile way to phrase it.
> Despite the name, Ethical Source licenses are in fact non-free because they put restrictions on usage of the software; if the author of such software disagrees with your political views, they can ban you from using the software. That strikes me as a weird distinction for somebody who supports copyleft to make. Is the difference that the political view that copyleft licenses support is limited to the issue of redist…
No, it's because it puts restrictions on use. Open source does not.
And those constraints are for political reasons. The Four Freedoms are a political ideology about how software, developers, and users should morally interact, and the GPL exists as a legal tool to support this political ideology.
Edit: clarification - by "use" here, I'm including "bundle it into a black box of hardware and sell that hardware."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup! You cannot have the FSF without free speech. Creating petitions to excommunicate RMS & other supporters just does not jive with the organisation's founding principles. I'm not going to defend Stallman's comments - they are extremely dubious at best - but I do not agree with trying to bully him out of the movement he helped build. If he really is problematic, you can just 'fork' off and create your own FSF equiva…
Free speech never implied freedom from consequences though - this isn't the government suppressing RMS, it's people reacting to his free speech and deciding that they don't like it. That's how it works.
Good point - looking at the petitions, it's become obvious that the people deciding they don't like RMS's speeach are in the minority.
Is it worth firing an entire board because a minority feels insecure?
On your mind, is tyranny by the minority better than tyranny by the majority?
From the linked article: > Our opponents wish to destroy Free Software > Our opponent’s true target is not Richard Stallman; their real aim is to destroy the FSF by thoroughly infiltrating it (like they already have with organisations like the OSI and Linux Foundation). These people even started an online petition calling for RMS’s forceful removal and for the entire board of directors at the FSF to resign from their…
Firstly Free software != open source, so you probably meant free software in your original quote.
Secondly, while there may be people who have legitimate concerns about RMS, the authors of the open letter have chosen not to highlight these claims but rather to rely on mischaracterisations and easily debunked lies. By supporting the open letter you are supporting these lies and thereby supporting an attack on free software.
Maybe this is not the most productive characterisation of the situation, but the creators of the open letter were the ones that chose this framing by choosing to propagate such falsehoods. We must stand up against such disingenuous actions, and can view them as none other than some kind of motivated attack on Free software.
Complete hogwash, but whatever. Stallman defenders would do well to not overstate his and the FSF's present (not historical) importance to the software community in addition to understating his views and the things he did.
But his contributions to the software community, even if not directly through software commits, but through advocacy and ensuring the fundamental freedoms are preserved, are still being reaped to this day.
The same thing goes for the FSF, which, having been founded by him, has a similar worldview. It may not be pragmatic towards startups that want to profit from artificial digital scarcity, but those same startups and other businesses have profited immeasurable through FSF's defense of software freedoms.
Would the world really be better off if the Microsofts, Oracles, and others of their ilk still had the same grasp on the user experience of software? Neither Android, AWS, nor countless other staples of billions of peoples' lives and livelihoods would be a thing if not for the early and ongoing defense of software freedom that the FSF has provided.
From the linked article: > Our opponents wish to destroy Free Software > Our opponent’s true target is not Richard Stallman; their real aim is to destroy the FSF by thoroughly infiltrating it (like they already have with organisations like the OSI and Linux Foundation). These people even started an online petition calling for RMS’s forceful removal and for the entire board of directors at the FSF to resign from their…
> So, you're either forced to defend Richard Stallman and accept what's going on over there, or __YOU ARE THE ENEMY OF ALL OPEN SOURCE__. Where did they say that, or anything that implies that?
Surely if you're OK with that, that heavily implies you are an enemy of open source? I think it's quite a reasonable rephrasing.
> The list that attacks Richard has Microsoft, Google, OSI, Linux Foundation, Gnome Foundation and Ethical Source people on it! These people oppose Free Software ideologically What ? The Linux Foundation ? It opposes Free Software ? Did I misunderstand this sentence ?
Don't forget Red Hat, a company that makes it living from FOSS, apparently now also hates FOSS...
I don’t think it’s binary in that RedHat is owned by a company that has other motivations than when RedHat was independent.