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RMS lifestyle

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Re: RMS lifestyle

#211

Post by snogglethorpe »

hga wrote: post #163
foobarbazqux wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copy pasta much? > But here on Hacker News (of all places), let's instead criticize his personal preferences on fucking ties. So someone writes about their personal life, and then people discuss it. What the heck does a whole bunch of honorary doctorates from Latin America have to do with this? Obviously the people in Latin America like him. As far as I'm concerned, a single actual doctorate is worth more than all of…

Perhaps a nit, but he didn't "write" any version of EMACS to my knowledge, just improved existing versions of them, in the two cases I'm most familiar with, making a significant qualitative difference. Guy Steele provided the start of the first (in that there were 3 or so visual TECO systems, each with its own key bindings etc., and he got enough people to agree on one), and RMS took off with it and made it into much…

> The current EMACS we use was written by an obscure guy at CMI who included a bytecode compiler in it, you might have heard of him, James Gosling ^_^.

This doesn't seems like a fair characterization of what happened. GNU Emacs was never something one could consider "written by Gosling."

GNU Emacs did start out with bits of Gosling Emacs in it, in particular the redisplay and buffer-management code (which were tricky to get right), but Gosling Emacs and GNU Emacs were always very different programs, internally as well as in their UI. In particular, of course, GNU Emacs had a real full-fat lisp interpreter whereas Gosling Emacs used a rather weird language with a vaguely lisp-like syntax called Mocklisp. GNU Emacs was influenced a lot by Gosling Emacs in other ways, of course, e.g. the use of real buffers to display completions instead of an ephemeral completion display like the original EMACS.

Up until that time, Gosling Emacs had been widely used and freely shared at CMU (where Gosling was a grad student), and RMS thought he had a verbal agreement with Gosling to use those parts he did. However Gosling then sold it to Unipress, and Unipress didn't agree... It's not clear exactly what Gosling really said to RMS, but my interpretation is that he didn't care so much about such issues and probably just said "yeah, yeah, sure" when RMS asked—after all, everybody else was using Gosmacs in source form—but of course a commercial company did care about such issues, and took a much more hardline stance.

So, RMS had to rewrite the parts he got from Gosling Emacs.

I suspect the end effect of all this could be described as positive though, because it made very clear the importance of paying attention to the legal details as well as the technical ones.

Re: RMS lifestyle

#212

Post by hga »

snogglethorpe wrote: post #211
hga wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a nit, but he didn't "write" any version of EMACS to my knowledge, just improved existing versions of them, in the two cases I'm most familiar with, making a significant qualitative difference. Guy Steele provided the start of the first (in that there were 3 or so visual TECO systems, each with its own key bindings etc., and he got enough people to agree on one), and RMS took off with it and made it into much…

> The current EMACS we use was written by an obscure guy at CMI who included a bytecode compiler in it, you might have heard of him, James Gosling ^_^. This doesn't seems like a fair characterization of what happened. GNU Emacs was never something one could consider "written by Gosling." GNU Emacs did start out with bits of Gosling Emacs in it, in particular the redisplay and buffer-management code (which were tricky…

Ummm, no. I was a front line witness to all this, after all (at one point I realized I could be a witness if this had gone to court).

By the time this was playing out, I was intimately familiar with the C base of (UniPress) Gosling EMACS, from having finished a MS-DOS port and was working on an Amiga port. So it was no trouble to look at GNU EMACS to determine it was, in the the legal, copyright sense, a derivative work, not something that was influenced by it, which is not something that RMS/GNU were even claiming at the time.

They said, based on an email they claimed to have received (that as I recall they never produced, but as you note all this hardly matters), that they were authorized to start with an old version of Gosling EMACS, and they claimed they fixed this legally by rewriting every part of it they got from Gosling EMACS ... which doesn't cut it, legally. If UniPress had been run by junkyard dogs they could have done an USL v. BSDi and put the GNU under a legal cloud, except they probably would have won. It was an unconscionable risk for RMS to take.

Fortunately, all they did was verbally disagree, they thought GNU EMACS would create a bigger market for Gosling EMACS, which I'm sure was true for a while (the version GNU started with was ancient and missing a lot of polish), and that no one would win if they took it to the courts. It probably helped that they'd previously worked at Plauger's Whitesmiths and the separation was as ugly as you can imagine, although the legal drama was cut short when the other side's lawyer was caught burglarizing their office, which doesn't tend to impress judges....

Note the other comments in this discussion about how RMS isn't a good steward of many of the efforts under his control, and I'd add specifically "look at how GCC died and was replaced by a community version", the Lucid Emacs/XEmacs mess (in the link that points out RMS can't sing), and Hurd's beyond Duke Nukem Forever path.

Re: RMS lifestyle

#213

Post by soult »

claudius wrote: post #148
pmarin wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyway, one can buy a throwaway cell phone in cash you can not do it in many countries like Spain where you have to provide your ID (because of terrorism).

Hm, curious. In Germany (and Austria, wherefrom I got my N9), it is perfectly fine to buy a phone . What you cannot do (legally) is buy a SIM card without ID – however, most shops just require you to fill in some form and don’t bother checking any form of ID.

In Germany there is a "swapping" service[1] for SIM cards where you can send your prepaid SIM and will get a random SIM that another person sent in. And in Austria you can purchase both phones and (prepaid) SIMs without any ID or form to fill out.

1: http://www.daten-speicherung.de/index.php/kartentausch/

Re: RMS lifestyle

#214

Post by snogglethorpe »

hga wrote: post #212
snogglethorpe wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current EMACS we use was written by an obscure guy at CMI who included a bytecode compiler in it, you might have heard of him, James Gosling ^_^. This doesn't seems like a fair characterization of what happened. GNU Emacs was never something one could consider "written by Gosling." GNU Emacs did start out with bits of Gosling Emacs in it, in particular the redisplay and buffer-management code (which were tricky…

Ummm, no. I was a front line witness to all this, after all (at one point I realized I could be a witness if this had gone to court). By the time this was playing out, I was intimately familiar with the C base of (UniPress) Gosling EMACS, from having finished a MS-DOS port and was working on an Amiga port. So it was no trouble to look at GNU EMACS to determine it was, in the the legal, copyright sense, a derivative w…

As I said, parts of it were copied, but many parts of it were not. You cannot say in any reasonable sense that Gosling "Wrote GNU emacs" (but of course that is not necessary to win a copyright challenge; part is enough).

[I also spent tons of time looking at the source code for both versions at the time, and both the similarities and differences were pretty clear.]

Re: RMS lifestyle

#215

Post by hga »

snogglethorpe wrote: post #214
hga wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm, no. I was a front line witness to all this, after all (at one point I realized I could be a witness if this had gone to court). By the time this was playing out, I was intimately familiar with the C base of (UniPress) Gosling EMACS, from having finished a MS-DOS port and was working on an Amiga port. So it was no trouble to look at GNU EMACS to determine it was, in the the legal, copyright sense, a derivative w…

As I said, parts of it were copied, but many parts of it were not. You cannot say in any reasonable sense that Gosling "Wrote GNU emacs" (but of course that is not necessary to win a copyright challenge; part is enough). [I also spent tons of time looking at the source code for both versions at the time, and both the similarities and differences were pretty clear.]

Obviously I disagree (although I don't think our disagreement is very large), I would say the truly essential parts were written by Gosling, and that RMS and company's biggest value adds were on top. Hmmm, I suppose that it might be a bit like "GNU/Linux", except the gcc etc. tool chain makes the argument for the latter stronger.

Without reviewing my Finseth, what is there besides buffer management and its linked redisplay, built in commands (a lot of which were copied, like my favorite marker of backup-by-copying-while-linked, which in the '80s was to my fairly extensive knowledge unique to Gosling EMACS), keymappings and the extension language? (Half my professional work in the '80s was on many different versions of EMACS, and I believe I worked on every significant UNIX one, although only Steve Zimmerman's CCA Emacs was a real competitor to Gosling/GNU EMACS as machines got enough memory. Note when I say "worked on" I might mean nothing more than porting; today's young whippersnappers are spoiled by the Linux mono-culture and/or modern package systems :-)

You say the first two "were tricky to get right" ... you've got that right, back in those days when resources were dear and performance was critical (Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping :-), they were in my opinion the hardest parts, especially since the superiority of the buffer gap vs. linked lines wasn't necessarily intuitive, and didn't the main file of the Gosling redisplay code have a skull and crossbones at the top? Although I'll admit to some bias since buffer management on the PDP-11 and non-VM PCs and 68000 workstations was problematic, in this case especially for a code base that started on a paging super-minicomputer (the VAX). Once you had those, building on top of them is fairly obvious, and a if not the largest part of the quality was a matter of taste, where RMS was vastly superior to Gosling, from using "standard" keymappings to a real LISP.

Re: RMS lifestyle

#216

Post by laureny »

leephillips wrote: post #208
laureny wrote: post #85

Stallman on Harry Potter: > I don't say you shouldn't read these books. That I leave to the author. I only urge you not to pay for them. Quite the upstanding citizen. His justification for this is even more bizarre, he accuses JK Rowling of something hypothetical: > Suppose that the mistakenly sold Harry Potter books had been ebooks: then instead of ordering her fans not to read her books, Rowling could have ordered…

"Quite the upstanding citizen." In the very next sentence, Stallman suggests that you borrow one from someone, and in the sentence after that that you use a public library. I think your out-of-context quote is a dishonest attempt to portray Stallman as suggesting something he did not. Dishonest, childish, and thoroughly contemptible. I'm not a Stallman fan by any means [0], but I doubt he would stoop to this level of…

Fair enough, but I still find the philosophy behind it repulsive. "Don't pay for it, just use the one that somebody else paid for". He follows the same idea with cell phones, and with food (I've also interacted with him at bars after conferences and he hardly pays for his drinks either).

If a friend of yours starts showing such behavior, you will quickly cut them off and think they are jerks. And rightfully so.

Re: RMS lifestyle

#217

Post by Jach »

hkolek wrote: post #138
Jach wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it would be that difficult to do without the user noticing. Even taking a photo or video wouldn't be noticed by a lot of people... I'm reminded of http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/rat-breeders-meet... The question is can they do it to everyone frequently, including the handful of super-nerds out there who love tracing every operation their devices do and can be certain they don't have some sor…

> I'd need some sort of evidence showing their existence to change my mind. Here you go, seems pretty well sourced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_listening_device#Remotel... Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Thanks for those, updated. It's also nice to see that it works as I would expect: the software isn't there by default but if the government wants you in particular, they can legally coerce the phone companies to install the software without you knowing and use that evidence in a trial.

Re: RMS lifestyle

#218

Post by tutufan »

mwfunk wrote: post #68

I see a lot of shock at the negative comments about RMS here. Those who are appalled at the lack of respect here need to understand that there are a lot of people within the tech world that have developed very complicated feelings about RMS over the course of the past 20-30 years. I mean, sure, a lot of people who don't know a whole lot about him or haven't had to deal with him over the course of decades might have s…

Wasted potential?? Compared to who? Gosling, Jobs, Gates all pretty much look like posers by comparison. Everyone's entitled to their opinions and objections, and no individual can withstand comparison to some theoretical saint, but RMS has certainly earned his spot. I'd be thrilled to accomplish one percent as much good before I go.

Re: RMS lifestyle

#219

Post by __--__ »

comex wrote: post #53
logjam wrote: post #38

Stallman's honors and awards for just some of the great work he's done (like launching the GNU Project, founding the Free Software Foundation, developing the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs): 1986: Honorary lifetime membership of the Chalmers University of Technology Computer Society 1990: Exceptional merit award MacArthur Fellowship ("genius grant") 1990: The Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray…

I think HN is excessively critical of Stallman, but to be fair, this is a thread about his personal preferences.

Criticizing people for their personal preferences is about as useful as criticizing a cat for licking itself. You look like an idiot and the cat ignores you.

Re: RMS lifestyle

#220

Post by keithpeter »

dllthomas wrote: post #195
keithpeter wrote: post #168

"...I do use airline frequent flier numbers because the airlines demand to know my identity anyway." "...However, I absolutely refuse to take Amtrak trains because they check passengers ID (sometimes, not all the time)." Are these two statements contradictory, or is there something special about what Amtrak do that threatens privacy more than the disclosure of identity to an airline? This is a genuine question, I hav…

It's hard to get overseas by train.

True, although we did manage it in the UK. Hard to see how that casts any light on the (apparent) contradiction.
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