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Eric Raymond: Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters

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Re: Eric Raymond: Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters

#91

Post by pjscott »

arthi wrote: post #49
cstross wrote: post #38

We need people like RMS. He marks one side of the Overton Window framing the debate on freedom and software. (Overton window: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window ) This doesn't mean he's right but what he does is necessary . If he didn't exist we'd need to invent him (or someone like him). (Oh, and he is indeed a fanatic, but of the pacifist variety -- not the kind who's interested in killing people to enforc…

No doubt you feel the same way about Rick Santorum.

I would feel that way about Rick Santorum if (and only if) I wanted people's views to move closer to his. This is not a statement about his opinions, but about how his opinions influence the public discourse. Likewise for RMS.

Re: Eric Raymond: Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters

#92

Post by adavies42 »

papsosouid wrote: post #56
brlewis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ESR did not bring us emacs or gcc, but he has made some contributions: http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html I'm most grateful for vc-mode in emacs. (I'm merely addressing a factual point and in no way excusing the way ESR treats RMS in writing.)

Certainly "never produced any code" was hyperbole, but "contributions" is being pretty generous. Hobbling together some random scripts nobody has ever used isn't really contributing. Most of what he has tried to contribute has been rejected.

giflib is probably his most important project in terms of how many people use it

gpsd is probably the project he's working on right now with the most potential for widespread use and importance

forgeplucker http://home.gna.org/forgeplucker/ (oddly not linked at http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html) is probably the project he's working on right now that's the most interesting (and ironically something i expect RMS would be a huge fan of)

Re: Eric Raymond: Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters

#93

Post by btilly »

hollerith wrote: post #82
btilly wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. A number of years ago a friend of mine took the largest 10 software companies by revenue, and broke out their software revenue according to whether it was from sales of software, or from consulting. Microsoft was the only one who made more from sales than consulting. Every other one made more from consulting. Generally at least an order of magnitude more. I am sure that a similar exercise today would produc…

I question whether revenue is the right metric given that Microsoft's profit from software sales over the last 20 years probably exceeds the profits from consulting of the other 9 companies. Also, I question whether the 10 largest companies are representative of the industry as a whole.

If you go to the bottom end, I suspect that there are a lot more 1 man consulting shops than 1 man software development shops. Yes, there are a lot of app developers out tere (a new phenomena that you didn't see much of 10 years ago), but there are a ton of people who do contract work for companies with one-off needs. Software that typically never is seen outside of the organization that asked for it.

As for the top end, Microsoft is a monster. But their model has not proven replicable by anyone else.

The ascendancy of consulting over software sales is also rooted in history. The first pure software company was the Computer Usage Company, in 1955. They were a consultancy. So was every other software company that followed for a decade. It was not until 1965 that Applied Data Research offered AUTOFLOW for sale. (The company was predominantly a consultancy.) And it was not until they filed a lawsuit that forced IBM to unbundle software from hardware that the industry as a whole accepted that software was something that could be sold. (Previously you bought hardware and software came with it.)

Re: Eric Raymond: Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters

#94

Post by pjscott »

kamaal wrote: post #20

RMS is what he is because, what he is. You can't change such people, you won't be able to. And they won't change, And they must not change. If people like him, don't live like he does- Its impossible to take on entities like Microsoft and Apple single handedly. Although you can argue that ideas from Free software were there ahead and during RMS's times. You can never debate that he gave it a sense of cause, activism…

> People like ESR generally don't get taken seriously.

You realize that this is practically a textbook example of an ad hominem fallacy, right?

Re: Eric Raymond: Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters

#95

Post by rbanffy »

cube13 wrote: post #69
rbanffy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's intended to be used with a specific hardware configuration It's that way because the Boeing CST has its own software, as does the Lockheed's Orion and the Soyuz and every unmanned spacecraft ever developed. Development costs and quality could be greatly improved if all of them shared a single codebase. If more designs shared the codebase, it would end more modular, more maintainable and better tested.

>It's that way because the Boeing CST has its own software, as does the Lockheed's Orion and the Soyuz and every unmanned spacecraft ever developed. Development costs and quality could be greatly improved if all of them shared a single codebase. No, it's that way because nobody else in the world is using the specific hardware that they're using in the exact same configuration. Nobody is using the same input sensors.…

I agree with you - the hardware and its configuration is very different between all of them. Yet, the basics are the same and a lot of code could be shared between the different spacecraft if they builders agreed on a certain level of commonality (and it doesn't even need to be a high one).

And yes - a common OS for spacecraft would be a giant leap forward, abstracting the differences in hardware and providing a unified interface for everyone using them.

The strongest barrier against sharing development is the security concerns. Nobody wants people to build missiles with that.

http://www.openpilot.org/ has, so far, avoided these problems.

Re: Eric Raymond: Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters

#97

Post by pjscott »

jgon wrote: post #81
jiggy2011 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, how does ESR make a living? He seems to spend a lot of time running his personal site (which carries no charges or ads) and has written a bunch of Open Source software. I don't see him doing anything that would put money into his bank account, or is he being sponsored by some company? If so who?

I am going to simply go by what ESR himself says, which is that his wife is a lawyer and so she goes and works every day which funds his ability to stay at home and write blog posts about the intellectual inferiority of black people and how the poor deserve no government help. No I am not making this up.

You might as well be making up the part about black people. I checked, and ESR's actual argument is that black people have a lower average IQ than caucasians even after adjusting for things like socioeconomic status and childhood nutrition, that this IQ difference has significant effects on the observed distributions of things like income and crime, and that these same statistics prove that racial discrimination against individual people is idiotic, since the relatively weak Bayesian evidence from someone's race is greatly outweighed by, say, actually talking to that person for half a minute. (He makes exactly the same claim about caucasians having a lower average IQ than Ashkenazi Jews, BTW.) In addition to these claims about fact, he also makes the normative claim that racism is immoral.

I know that doesn't make quite as snazzy a sound-bite as "the intellectual inferiority of black people".

Re: Eric Raymond: Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters

#98

Post by icebraining »

cabalamat wrote: post #65

> There are some advantages to this strategy. It taps into old, powerful emotional responses in human beings – the same responses that give messianic religions their power. As a way of recruiting a small hard core of dedicated followers it’s tough to beat, and sometimes – if you’re, say, the Gautama Buddha or Jesus or Mahavira – you can make it scale up. But I described it as a trap for a reason – most such attempts…

You shouldn't mix up RMS with the Pirates. While there are obvious similitudes (particularly in terms of privacy, DRM, etc), RMS was initially opposed to their platform of reducing or killing copyright, since that would limit the effectiveness of the GPL without really fixing what he fights against - after all, lack of copyright doesn't mean you'll have access to the source, which is a precondition of freedoms 1 and 3 [1].

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Re: Eric Raymond: Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters

#99

Post by icebraining »

cwp wrote: post #89
raganwald wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between RMS and ESR is one of kind, not one of degree Yes. RMS is concerned with morality, ESR with practicality. Also yes, for some definition of “practicality.” The open source movement is just as ardent, just as committed and just as "extreme" as the free software movement, but more successful. I don’t know how to measure commitment, but I agree that the open source movement is more successful in th…

I think that’s a fine statement to make if you qualify who “we” are. If you mean people concerned with practical objectives, you may be right. I caution against rhetoric that might be mistaken for suggesting that your point of view encompasses everyone reading your arguments. Fair point. That line was actually meant as a direct response to cstross's "We need people like RMS," but I botched the parallel construction.…

What I dislike about the RMS position is that it seems to consider tinkering, and perhaps geek culture in general, as inherently good and goals in their own right. I take a more utilitarian view: tinkering is good insofar we benefit from the results.

I disagree; his position, as I perceive it, is that having the right to tinker is inherently good, not so much tinkering itself. Much like many of us consider Free Speech to be inherently good, even if we find some speech abominable.

And the advantages of Free Software aren't limited to tinkering, of course.

Re: Eric Raymond: Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters

#100

Post by cwp »

icebraining wrote: post #99
cwp wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s a fine statement to make if you qualify who “we” are. If you mean people concerned with practical objectives, you may be right. I caution against rhetoric that might be mistaken for suggesting that your point of view encompasses everyone reading your arguments. Fair point. That line was actually meant as a direct response to cstross's "We need people like RMS," but I botched the parallel construction.…

What I dislike about the RMS position is that it seems to consider tinkering, and perhaps geek culture in general, as inherently good and goals in their own right. I take a more utilitarian view: tinkering is good insofar we benefit from the results. I disagree; his position, as I perceive it, is that having the right to tinker is inherently good, not so much tinkering itself. Much like many of us consider Free Speec…

Sure. The right to tinker is required for actual tinkering, and a right that's never exercised is pointless. Regardless, I don't consider the right to tinker an end in its self. The pleasure of tinkering is utterly unimportant compared with the good that a tinkerers work can bring into the world.

As for freedom of speech, I think the analogy is flawed. The technology equivalent of speech is invention, and the freedom to invent doesn't require anything like the GPL. The freedom to tinker is more like the freedom to copyedit somebody else's work. And hey, I'm for it! Remix culture is great stuff. But it's not in the same league as freedom of speech.

When it comes right down to it, though, I don't consider freedom of speech an end in its self either. The value of free speech is the sort of society it produces, not the speech its self. I favour limits to speech when the effect of that speech is not a net good to society. Now, those situations are few and far between, but they do exist. Yelling "fire" and all that; our legal system has a long and nuanced tradition of weighing the issue in various situations.

The point is that dogma and fanaticism are counterproductive, whatever your goals are. The FSF is certainly not alone in this.

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