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Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

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Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#141

Post by rick888 »

kiba wrote: post #69
Aaronontheweb wrote: post #60

"I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people." Thank God Stallman helped all of those sick kids with Malaria in Africa with by giving them GIMP and GCC. Way better than the billions of dollars and thousands of vaccinations Bill and Melinda Gates gave to them. In all seriousness, if we're going…

When I compare the more calculus of capitalism and propreitary software against Stallman's dogmatism, it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good. Free software have nothing to do much with capitalism. Stallman probably agree with the idea of competition improving life. What he disagree with is what he called combat .(Or what I least remember from reading one of his essay) Rather th…

"Free software have nothing to do much with capitalism."

So why does the GPL make it so difficult to make any kind of money. Many of the supporters are also against any and all forms of commercial software.

"What he disagree with is what he called combat.(Or what I least remember from reading one of his essay) Rather than improve over your competitors and sell great stuff to customers, you seek to annihilate your competitors by unethical means and gain control over your customers."

His answer to this is to force everybody to the same level (IE: as soon as a company improves their software, all competitors should get those improvements).

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#142

Post by jodrellblank »

ynniv wrote: post #86
Aaronontheweb wrote: post #60

"I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people." Thank God Stallman helped all of those sick kids with Malaria in Africa with by giving them GIMP and GCC. Way better than the billions of dollars and thousands of vaccinations Bill and Melinda Gates gave to them. In all seriousness, if we're going…

it's obvious to me that capitalism is utlimately more moral and does more good. That is a heavy statement, and highly contextual. I expect it to be popular in this forum where people view technology as a way to make life better, but keep in mind that strong control over technology can do amazing evil more easily than it can meager good. Gates' philanthropy may appeal to you, but only because as individuals we cannot…

Fundamental attribution error - rebooting in the middle of a presentation is not an inherent property in Windows. You could have configured Windows Update to not do that. (I'm guessing it was "do it x minutes after bootup", or similar).

Especially in a discussion mentioning Linux, configuring a piece of software to behave how you want should be a basic sort of thing to do.

The efficiency gains are enormous

It was so much more efficient the other day when I had to cobble together a bash script to poll MySQL to show running queries, then realise it wasn't running fast enough, switch on query logging, find a reference telling me SIGHUP doesn't cause MySQL to reload config files, restart the database, run some tests, disable the logging, restar the database again. I was so pleased I couldn't just open SQL Server Profiler/Tracer and see live database activity in a couple of mouse clicks and no restarts.

The efficiency gains are arguable and situation (and person) dependent.

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#144

Post by 10ren »

About the lisp in unix question (#3): ocaml has struck me as lisp +c, because it's functional + mind-blowing performance. I'm not experienced in ocaml, it's just that when I tried it, it was that fast. I don't know if it has the homoiconism of lisp. It is statically typed, which is a pain (the type inference requires methods like "print_string" - perhaps these are rare if you code in ocaml idioms).

I'm very glad to see him looking happy.

Love his geek answer to "what's your favourite movie?". Why don't normal people react better to answers like that?

Perhaps the love for him is because, for anyone who is even the least little bit weird perhaps in secret, Stallman is a shining beacon of weirdness. More power to him!

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#145

Post by jodrellblank »

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #60

"I faced the same question at the beginning of the GNU Project. I decided that I would rather do something good with no monetary reward than profit by mistreating people." Thank God Stallman helped all of those sick kids with Malaria in Africa with by giving them GIMP and GCC. Way better than the billions of dollars and thousands of vaccinations Bill and Melinda Gates gave to them. In all seriousness, if we're going…

In all seriousness, if we're going to argue the ethics of charging for software

Which RMS isn't, he's arguing the ethics of restricting freedom. Which means he'd probably disagree with your claim "[Microsoft] created products that made the lives of millions of other people easier" and frame it as a negative not a positive.

Bill Gates made his money restricting the freedom of hundreds of millions of people, from which he bought a huge house and then gave some of the remainder back to the world.

Freedom is nothing without survival, but stealing freedom from some to buy survival for others, at a personal profit, is not clear cut moral or good.

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#146

Post by rick888 »

avar wrote: post #16
benofsky wrote: post #5

In response to software which requires a lot of development time to create, specifically tax software or games, RMS says: > The reason I don't use nonfree software is that it would take away my freedom. I don't want to let that happen. So I don't consider installing nonfree program, even as an possible option. I treat them as poison. I hope that you will too. This man lives in an imaginary world where no one has to m…

That's completely wrong. You're fundamentally misunderstanding what the free software movement is about. Ultimately it's a sort of grassroots consumer protection movement, not a bunch of hippies trying to abolish money. Stallman believes that you should vote with your feet and avoid using non-free software, and that if we all did this for everything there would be no space for non-free software in the market. That do…

"That's completely wrong. You're fundamentally misunderstanding what the free software movement is about. Ultimately it's a sort of grassroots consumer protection movement, not a bunch of hippies trying to abolish money."

They aren't trying to abolish money. However, they are trying to abolish the idea of making money selling software.

"Stallman believes that you should vote with your feet and avoid using non-free software, and that if we all did this for everything there would be no space for non-free software in the market."

Stallman wants all copyright abolished, which would abolish commercial software. Stallman doesn't want freedom, he wants everyone to follow his rules. True freedom means we have a market of free and non-free software.

"That doesn't mean that you can't sell software. The FSF has always sold copies of their software (I know because I've bought some). All of their licenses allow you to sell software, they consider any license that doesn't allow this to be non-free."

Which also allows the user to re-distribute the software for free. If companies did this, many wouldn't have a business any longer because anybody could legally get it for free.

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#147

Post by jodrellblank »

rick888 wrote: post #139
patrickaljord wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thank God Stallman helped all of those sick kids with Malaria in Africa with by giving them GIMP and GCC. >Way better than the billions of dollars and thousands of vaccinations Bill and Melinda Gates gave to them. RMS and the free and open source community have given way more billions of dollars and jobs that Gates ever has. Let me explain. Many governments have switched to Gnu/Linux and are saving billions of doll…

"Many governments have switched to Gnu/Linux and are saving billions of dollars each year for the last ten years such as Brazil" It's funny how you can make the argument about money that "would have been spent". Many open source zealots (and Stallman himself) talk about how the software industry can't equate piracy to dollars people would have spent. Why should this be any different? Software licenses are also a very…

Stallman has possibilities and no direct proof of anything.

Stallman is the guy who pushed the asteroid and watched it sail harmlessly past. In alternate reality, Gates is the guy on the ground helping the survivors clean up after the asteroid hit.

Metaphorically, of course. Stallman's good is causing unknown amounts of freedom restriction and consequent problems to not ever have happened - which isn't really tangible.

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#148

Post by rick888 »

ohyes wrote: post #83
bad_user wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If everyone adopted the free software maxim of not using proprietary software, it would be inevitable that society would become extremely computer literate, and/or we would develop a way of compensating people for working on free software projects. Almost every freedom you enjoy came as an economic incentive first. This is also an oversimplification, but implementing shit without understanding the impact on society…

> Almost every freedom you enjoy came as an economic incentive first. bad_user, I'm sorry, I am not quite understanding your definition of 'almost every freedom'. There are plenty of freedoms that I enjoy which are not economically driven. Freedom of religion, freedom to assemble, right to bear arms, freedom of the press, etc, etc. I mean, are we talking fundamental freedoms? RMS sees the ability to hack your own sys…

"RMS sees the ability to hack your own system as a fundamental freedom. Computer as an extension of your mind/person. It would be like me telling you that you are not allowed think certain thoughts."

Under these rules, I should be able to include GPL source in a proprietary application and not have to release the code. It's my fundamental freedom to do as I wish with open source code. Yet, it doesn't work this way. People that do this get sued.

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#149

Post by alnayyir »

patrickaljord wrote: post #135
alnayyir wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is why RMS himself said he uses Google. Where exactly did he say this? He's opposed cloud services from the beginning and designed GPLv3 to attack web apps. Last I checked, the man scarcely browsed the web.

RMS opposes software as a service, Google Search is no such thing http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...

The only mentions of Google concern Google Docs being SAAS and thus being unacceptable.

Hence, he was still lying about Stallman "using Google search".

My cry of shenanigans stands.

Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.

#150

Post by rick888 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #147
rick888 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Many governments have switched to Gnu/Linux and are saving billions of dollars each year for the last ten years such as Brazil" It's funny how you can make the argument about money that "would have been spent". Many open source zealots (and Stallman himself) talk about how the software industry can't equate piracy to dollars people would have spent. Why should this be any different? Software licenses are also a very…

Stallman has possibilities and no direct proof of anything. Stallman is the guy who pushed the asteroid and watched it sail harmlessly past. In alternate reality, Gates is the guy on the ground helping the survivors clean up after the asteroid hit. Metaphorically, of course. Stallman's good is causing unknown amounts of freedom restriction and consequent problems to not ever have happened - which isn't really tangibl…

"Metaphorically, of course. Stallman's good is causing unknown amounts of freedom restriction and consequent problems to not ever have happened - which isn't really tangible."

Without Stallman and the GNU, we would still have just as much software on the market. Many of the people and companies would have most likely released it under the BSD license (or public domain).

..and like I said. I still don't buy it. Piracy causes unknown amounts of damage to commercial software companies. If the community comes to terms with this, I might be more apt to come to terms with the amount of unknown "good" Stallman has done.

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