Earlier quoted context omitted.
BS. Free software existed well before Stallman.
Do you have any examples please?
The first BSD work predated GNU by a good seven years.
Richard Stallman’s rider
261–270 of 292 posts
Re: Richard Stallman’s rider
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stallman has an uncanny ability to predict the future in regards to our industry. Everything he predicted has happened already or it will. Trusted computing? It is here, it is popular and because of Apple it is also considered cool. It doesn't matter that the device you paid for is not your property anymore, people love shiny. Also, trusted computing got rejected by the market when Microsoft tried it, but now Microso…
> Basically OS X destroyed Linux's chances on dominating the future desktop. Yeah, because the constant feuds within the Linux community, the failure to settle on a common desktop platform, the crowd of "I-want-to-write-yet-another-irc-client" devs, and the utter lack of appreciation for end-user needs all have nothing to do with it. What Stallman in particular and the Linux community in general fails to understand i…
> community development simply doesn't scale.
Maybe it doesn't need too. See http://vpri.org/ Their attempt at making a 20Kloc OS is quite good.
Re: Richard Stallman’s rider
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
"community development simply doesn't scale" I think that depends on what you apply it to. Community development seems to work well enough for individual projects, but not in-between projects (see amount of duplication caused by LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org).
> Community development seems to work well enough for individual projects, but not in-between projects that's pretty close to saying that community development doesn't scale, isn't it ? :-)
Well, it scales within projects (see Linux kernel for a good example of a distributed project run by a mixture of volunteers and people paid to work on it), it doesn't seem to scale as well to projects working together.
Re: Richard Stallman’s rider
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's only fair for a software author to demand whatever the fuck he wants from the software he wrote Like, a fee of $50, for example? I would say that your position is diammetrically opposed to Stallman's stated goal. But it's not your fault, the GPL is also in opposition to Stallman's stated goals. He went from having the high ideal that software should always be open, to trying to force other people to thin…
> the GPL is also in opposition to Stallman's stated goals. I suppose you say so because it doesn't give the user total freedom over his copy of the software? It's not that simple: if the user had total freedom, he would also have the freedom to actively restrict the freedom of users who get the software from him. One's freedom is supposed to stop at other's, so this is not right. Therefore, you need to take away the…
The problem is that your reasoning only works for those capable of producing their own software. If I'm a normal user, my "freedom" is strongly limited by the fact that I will only ever have access to functionality provided by programmers - I can't produce it myself. And if you remove one of the big motivations for programmers to produce software, you have effectively reduced the freedom of end users - they will be able to do less with their devices, not more.
I have seen projects canned because we needed to use GPLed software to do an implementation in a reasonable timeframe, and management didn't want to give a leg up to our competitors by publishing the code. If the code in question had have been under a BSD license, the project would have gone ahead.
Re: Richard Stallman’s rider
#265I particularly enjoyed this part of the rider:
" Bus and train tickets:
If you buy bus or train tickets for me, do not give my name! Big Brother has no right to know where I travel, or where you travel, or where anyone travels. If they arbitrarily demand a name, give a name that does not belong to any person you know of. If they will check my ID before I board the bus or train, then let's look for another way for me to travel. (In the US I never use long-distance trains because of their ID policy.)
Don't give them your name either: please pay for the ticket in cash. "
It's fascinating to see how far into the experience he lays out his expectations and concerns. The "no Coke" mentioned elsewhere here is also an interesting requirement.
Re: Richard Stallman’s rider
#266I, too, was disappointed by Richard Stallman' talk. We were a bunch of students in a conference in general software engineering. And he was invited to give a talk about copyright and freedom.. cool, right? Not exactly. He came in and started acting like he really didn't wanted to be there and didn't care at all about us, the place and the organizers. I'm usually not the kind to judge someone else dressing but Stallma…
I feel for you. Stallman seems to think we all live in some free love hippie commune where we can all just give source code away. The world doesn't work like that and his fundamentalist attitude doesn't take people's need to eat lunch into account. You can't deny his skill and the great work he's done. Free software has its place in this world but so does proprietary code too. This rider while not being supremely hig…
You say: "The world doesn't work like that..."
People who have FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGED THE WORLD are in a position to critique the ways that the world works. A few decades ago, everyone agreed that "Open Source" (giving away code) just wasn't how the world worked. And RMS changed that. (Not alone, but he was a vital seed for that change.) So he's got every right to speak up on the subject.
Re: Richard Stallman’s rider
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would it really be Stallman without long moral justifications of every clause?
The problem with unerring dedication to a moral cause is that life always manages to present the most absurd edge cases. You start with someone casually asking 'Coke or Pepsi?' and your knee-jerk response is something about murdered workers in a South American jungle. There's nothing wrong with moralizing in every context, but it's the opposite of fun/pleasant to be around. Everything in life is a tradeoff. Myself, I…
But adding that extra information made at least me remember.
Besides, I like the idea of buying/not buying a company's products based on whether you support them or not.
Re: Richard Stallman’s rider
#268This is charming; gives a sense of the guy; seems like it would be useful information. Who thinks to say "do not buy me a parrot"?
"do not buy me a parrot" must be his "no brown M&M's". If he shows up to a gig and finds a parrot there, he knows that not everything is in order.
He would have to have ordered an aviary for that comparison to have worked (people don't give parrots by default).
Re: Richard Stallman’s rider
#269""" Food: I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about what I will do breakfast. Please just do not bring it up. """ Love it. Anyone know why?
I actually had breakfast with him at a conference in Havana in 2007, so I was a little surprised to see this in his rider. Another reader posted that it's new since 2008, so maybe he had some sort of breakfast-related disaster at some point in '07-'08... or maybe having to spend an entire breakfast lecturing me about why Linux should always be called GNU/Linux put him off the meal for good.
Re: Richard Stallman’s rider
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the GPL is also in opposition to Stallman's stated goals. I suppose you say so because it doesn't give the user total freedom over his copy of the software? It's not that simple: if the user had total freedom, he would also have the freedom to actively restrict the freedom of users who get the software from him. One's freedom is supposed to stop at other's, so this is not right. Therefore, you need to take away the…
The problem is that your reasoning only works for those capable of producing their own software. If I'm a normal user, my "freedom" is strongly limited by the fact that I will only ever have access to functionality provided by programmers - I can't produce it myself. And if you remove one of the big motivations for programmers to produce software, you have effectively reduced the freedom of end users - they will be a…
The problem is that your reasoning only works for those capable of producing their own software.
That is entirely the point. One of the stated aims of the GPL is to ensure that everyone is capable of producing software. The GPL attempts to ensure that your software won't ever be redistributed in a form that takes away the user's capability to build on your code.