Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

zdnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 170 posts

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#131

Post by Beltiras »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #127
Beltiras wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell are the downvotes for? Seriously?

From [the guidelines]( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ): > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

I get that this comment is downvoted. I honestly didn't understand the other one. I don't care about the points. I don't even know how they are used except for killing comments. I've also read discussions on voting on the site that I adhere to. If I downvote, I also leave a reason why in an answer to give the poster context (except if it's an obvious troll which I hardly think I qualify for).

Someone posted what they think is a reasonable answer to what I proposed and I didn't agree. I could expand on the discussion and haven't changed my mind. I thought we all came here to do that.

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#132

Post by sitkack »

mdturnerphys wrote: post #110

I attended this. Here are a few notes: * This was organized like any other guest talk held at Microsoft Research, of which there are ~5/week, mostly by academic guests. * His host was Microsoft's Chief Economist, Michael Schwarz. Michael did his PhD work on free software and got to know Stallman then. * After hooking his computer up to the projector 10-15 minutes before the talk began he displayed a quite provocative…

I attended a talk given by ESR in the 90s at Microsoft. It was entirely reasonable on all accounts for all parties (except for a single audience member who nearly got boo'd). Even then, the mood was one of conciliatory agreement, like easy to get day passes to cross the Berlin Wall.

I continue to be utterly amazed at the OSS transformation that Microsoft has pulled off.

RMS's dedication to human expression via computers has given us all such wonderful things.

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#133

Post by 0-_-0 »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #127
Beltiras wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell are the downvotes for? Seriously?

From [the guidelines]( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ): > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

He didn't comment on it, he asked a question, to which he received an interesting and constructive answer. Your comment on the other hand didn't do any good, and it made boring reading.

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#134

Post by belltaco »

dcolkitt wrote: post #77
toyg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NT is not a bad OS, it makes some different tradeoffs than traditional POSIX systems and in some cases it’s objectively superior. It’s just the ecosystem on top that is a pile of flaming trash.

> it makes some different tradeoffs than traditional POSIX systems and in some cases it’s objectively superior. I'm curious if you (or anyone else) have examples here. I haven't touched a Windows system in nearly 20 years, so I'm genuinely curious.

Desktop features and performance have (understandably) being sidelined and ignored over the years, with everything tuned to servers. Almost everyone paid to work in Linux including Linus are funded by Linux server companies.

Example of someone quitting over his desktop performance patches being repeatedly ignored:

http://blog.falconindy.com/articles/con-kolivas-is-a-mad-man...

>In a 2007 interview, he notes that he initially got into kernel hacking as a hobby. Starting in 2003, he wrote some low impact code, learned from it, and then dug deeper into scheduling and desktop response. Eventually, major developers (Linus included) got wind of his work and asked him to clean it up for mainline submission. He proceeded to churn out some other projects in the realm of desktop performance: the Staircase Scheduler, Plugsched (a hotplug CPU scheduler to integrate the Staircase Scheduler), and the Staircase Deadline Scheduler . Fast forward, and Con is starting to feel like constant requests for bug fixes and resolution for corner cases is more of a job and less of an intellectual hobby. Throw in some more corner cases, a few extremely vocal users, and a medical condition (related to programming) that landed Con immobile for 6 weeks, and he decides to throw in the towel. In addition to the frustration, he also felt that mainline developers weren’t concerned enough with desktop interactivity.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2007/07/con-k...

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#135

Post by mdturnerphys »

pedrocx486 wrote: post #129
mdturnerphys wrote: post #110

I attended this. Here are a few notes: * This was organized like any other guest talk held at Microsoft Research, of which there are ~5/week, mostly by academic guests. * His host was Microsoft's Chief Economist, Michael Schwarz. Michael did his PhD work on free software and got to know Stallman then. * After hooking his computer up to the projector 10-15 minutes before the talk began he displayed a quite provocative…

>* At one point he did state "Sometimes there is a use for windows." Did hell just freeze over?

Read the next bullet :)

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#136

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

pedrocx486 wrote: post #129
mdturnerphys wrote: post #110

I attended this. Here are a few notes: * This was organized like any other guest talk held at Microsoft Research, of which there are ~5/week, mostly by academic guests. * His host was Microsoft's Chief Economist, Michael Schwarz. Michael did his PhD work on free software and got to know Stallman then. * After hooking his computer up to the projector 10-15 minutes before the talk began he displayed a quite provocative…

>* At one point he did state "Sometimes there is a use for windows." Did hell just freeze over?

He might have been stuck in a Caldera.

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#137

Post by fetbaffe »

aargh_aargh wrote: post #13
martin_a wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this reference, can someone explain it to me? (The Javascript part)

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html

Just love Stallmans criteria for nontrivial JavaScript programs, basically every JavaScript program is nontrivial.

And it is okay to enable JavaScript temporarily so you can send a complaint to the website operators that they should remove JavaScript.

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#138

Post by PeterisP »

belorn wrote: post #100
ChrisSD wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean you can very easily add MIT code in a GPL licensed project because MIT is more permissive. However adding GPL code to an MIT licensed project means you now have to comply with GPL's more restrictive "list of permissions" when you weren't before.

If we imagine a project with only MIT code that want to add GPL licensed code, the only significant additional legal action needed to be compatible is that you now need to give a patent grant that covers the combined work, and in the case of GPLv3 not distribute the combined work in hardware devices that use access control to prevent the installation of modified versions by the owner. If neither aspects is an issue t…

If a project with only MIT code adds GPL licensed code, then they can't distribute the "merged" new set of code under the MIT license.

Previously, someone could use your MIT code in a closed source product and distribute the resulting executables to their customers without including the source. In the future, that someone would have to start following the GPL rules or stop using your not-MIT-anymore project.

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#139

Post by tw04 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #101
amenod wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am bit more cynical about this. Google and others have simply shown Microsoft how to make loads of money by opensourcing the project, while still keeping the upper hand on it. How to "opensource-but-not-quite-opensource" (Chrome/Chromium, Android/AOSP,...) the projects. Even Amazon didn't succeed in prying away Android from Google (Fire). So in my mind it's actually surprising that it took them so long to join the…

> Even Amazon didn't succeed in prying away Android from Google (Fire). They didn't? Amazon's phone failed because it had no reason to exist—it was a new product in a crowded market and offered nothing unique. Nothing to do with Google or Android. Amazon's tablet line still uses their Android fork, and seems to be doing fine.

As do many of their echo devices, fireTV devices, etc. They absolutely "pried it away" if you can call it that? Obviously nobody can force Google to stop using Android themselves, but given the success of Amazon's many devices I'd say they accomplished exactly what they set out to accomplish.

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#140

Post by jadbox »

toyg wrote: post #55
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #33

Without sounding too sacrilegious, Dr. Stallman is the Free Software Jesus--he preaches the gospel of Free Software to the whole world and associates with "sinners" calling them to repentance. If he can bring "the truth" of Free Software to Microsoft employees and help them "see the light", why wouldn't he? He certainly looks the part of Free Software prophet when dressed as Saint Ignuicius: https://stallman.org/sain…

Stallman is very much like the saints of old: striving at all times to be coherent with his beliefs, walking the walk, preaching - and getting publicly celebrated and then mostly ignored or selectively quoted by “followers”. Like with saints, we often need extremists like him to keep the Overton pushed wide towards the needs of humanity at large, as opposed to private profit. We can’t all wear sackcloth and give our…

Many of the early philosophers operated in this way. They followed new ideas/paradigms to an impossible extreme, but it's under the name of progress. How does one get to understand the true limits of an idea if no one tries pushing it to the absolute max logical conclusion? How do you ensure that the new idea stays in culture if you do not actively promote it? We all take open-source for granted today, but it was the early pioneers that made a lot of noise and ruckus that got the movement slowing going on its way.
Post reply on HN