61–70 of 262 posts
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He isn't a developer, he is a front man for a decades old movement.
How do you define "developer"? The man has certainly written his share of code, and has contributed it to the community. I don't know how he has made his living, over the years, but I bet he's been paid to develop at some point.
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Google and Facebook would never exist the way they do today without the free software movement. Both of them rely on a huge stack of open-source technology. Stallman's ideas are what makes it possible for a college kid to run a web startup today essentially for free.
As the FSF would point out, the free software movement is different from open source. If there was no free software movement, or a prohibition on GPL'ed software, then Google could have used other open source tools (eg, *BSD) instead. One serious concern in the FSF seems to be that a large, programmer-centric company like Google could rewrite most free software, should the license not be compatible with the business…
They point this out and it's philosophically true, but are there actually any licenses that meet the definition of "open source" but not the definition of "free software" (or vise versa)?
All of the ones that people actually use (GPL, LGPL, BSD, MIT, ISC, and Apache, I think that basically covers it) appear to pass both DFSG and OSI definitions.
The saddest part of all this is that kids will read it and think "this is what 'sticking to my principles' is going to get me, so fuck it." RMS used up his "I was there when" cred a long time ago. He's now the demented grandparent no one has the heart to tell to STFU when he yells at the TV. And yet simultaneously, one of the greats.
When this link appears on HN I make a quick diff on two things and none of them change: what Stallman uses and what the comments are (I can make a bet I'll see comments about his mail forwarded web pages). And there are also comments about how GPL is restrictive and BSD is not... But hey - this guy has principles and sticks to his guns. I respect him for that and I don't give a dime if he uses a one inch display on a…
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Read the linked HN discussion (and also the original FreeBSD.org article). As an example, You can't (technically) use GPL'd code inside your iOS application. GPL is not the greatest license, that's why they created LGPL (to remove some of its stupid restrictions) and even that wasn't enough...
> You can't (technically) use GPL'd code inside your iOS application. Web startups don't generally build iOS apps, they build web apps. > GPL is not the greatest license, that's why they created LGPL (to remove some of its stupid restrictions) and even that wasn't enough... Enough for whom? Microsoft? I know it's hard to believe, but some people do not have "allow companies to benefit from my work without giving back…
> Enough for whom? Microsoft?
> ...some people do not have "allow companies
to benefit from my work without giving back
anything in return" as their top priority.
It's like giving others a choice to be a bad guy or a good guy. In many cases, given the choice, people would contribute back to the community.
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Don't take this the wrong way but I personally feel that the GPL is not a free software license, I feel it's a community software license. BSD is a free software license, BSD code is truly yours, you want to create a proprietary fork you can do it, you want to create a GPLed fork you can do it, you want to expand the BSD code base you can do it. One thing I really love about BSD licensed code is that I feel like I ow…
>you want to create a proprietary fork you can do it Why should you be allowed to take away the Freedoms of others? The one thing the GPL restricts is your Freedom to restrict the Freedom of others. That's the foundation of copyleft: your rights stop where mine begin, and that includes being granted the four Freedoms of software as defined by the FSF. In an ideal world, we would not need the GPL. Everyone would have…
The disagreement is not about how to best make sure the four Freedoms are respected, it's not about implementation. It's about whether the Freedoms are Freedoms at all. That tends to get lost when all everyone always talks about is licenses (i.e. implementation details).
You have to give the guy some credit; Stallman believes in the free software movement, fights for it, and refuses to compromise his rights or values.
Richard Stallman is to software what Jean-Paul Sartres was to philosophy during his time and still now. JPS like RMS was living through his convictions and ideas to the point of refusing the Nobel prize because it would have tinted his motivations. RMS would do the same without any questions. Don't get them wrong: these people are not fanatic, they are just living and breathing a cause they started for a good reason.…
AKA Fanaticism. He's become an inflexible, computerized hermit. His dogmatic adherence to a demonstrably untenable principal of "freedom" has relegated him a permanent state of pre-1995 digital stasis.
He's not principled, he's dogmatic. At best, he's a cautionary tale demonstrating the state of the world if he had his way.
You have to give the guy some credit; Stallman believes in the free software movement, fights for it, and refuses to compromise his rights or values.
Richard Stallman is to software what Jean-Paul Sartres was to philosophy during his time and still now. JPS like RMS was living through his convictions and ideas to the point of refusing the Nobel prize because it would have tinted his motivations. RMS would do the same without any questions. Don't get them wrong: these people are not fanatic, they are just living and breathing a cause they started for a good reason.…
Linux siguran 3.1.0-1-loongson-2f #1 Tue Jan 10 15:20:55 UTC 2012 mips64 GNU/Linux
It's fun for a hobby because it feels like the old days of Linux when you had to patch and compile a lot to get things running.
Of course my other computers are macs, this is just for the commute to work on some hobby stuff.
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> You can't (technically) use GPL'd code inside your iOS application. Web startups don't generally build iOS apps, they build web apps. > GPL is not the greatest license, that's why they created LGPL (to remove some of its stupid restrictions) and even that wasn't enough... Enough for whom? Microsoft? I know it's hard to believe, but some people do not have "allow companies to benefit from my work without giving back…
The iOS example was just to name one of many limitations of using GPL code. > Enough for whom? Microsoft? No, for developers themselves. Dynamic vs. static linking mess etc. > ...some people do not have "allow companies to benefit from my work without giving back anything in return" as their top priority. But in reality, that doesn't happen a lot - to name a few on top of my head: Webkit, PostgreSQL, Minix, LaTeX, Mo…