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Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

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Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#161

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

malvosenior wrote: post #50
zaphirplane wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are wording the sentences to create a vague wrong impression Of what transpired Be specific about what he said that you find abhorrent This topic is uncomfortable and a lot of people stay out of it or strongly self censor. he didn’t.

> This topic is uncomfortable and a lot of people stay out of it or strongly self censor. he didn’t. This is my point. As the president of an organization it’s not your job to make people uncomfortable about things that have nothing to do with that organization’s goals. Debating what is and is not statutory rape is not a discussion that should take place in any professional or technical environment. This instance is…

> As the president of an organization it’s not your job to make people uncomfortable about things that have nothing to do with that organization’s goals.

Did anyone claim it was his job?

> Debating what is and is not statutory rape is not a discussion that should take place in any professional or technical environment.

Why?

> This instance is actually even worse than just debating something in the inappropriate context. Epstein is a huge scandal. He raped dozens if not hundreds of girls. He loaned them out to other powerful people. It is within this context that RMS’ statements are most damning.

Why is that? Does the fact that someone commits a crime make it inappropriate to defend people associated with them against incorrect accusations? How do you square that with the rule of law?

> He’s wading in some very murky ethical waters and it should be no surprise he caught a backlash.

He also should not be surprised that he gets a lot of opposition for promoting free software ... so, supposedly, he should not promote free software either?

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#162

Post by Smithalicious »

marijn wrote: post #157
sn41 wrote: post #7

In the years to come, I believe free software will be recognised as one of the paradigmatic changes in how science itself is done. Now chemists and biologists have started talking about making data openly available and so forth. It's a shame that RMS has to spout forth on every issue, and in the current climate of outrage, science may have lost an important transformational voice. I think as a society, we need to cal…

He wasn't blacklisted for committing thought crime. The dumb Epstein email triggered a reevaluation of his consistent creepy and inappropriate behavior against current community standards, which resulted in a large part of the community deciding they didn't want anything to do with him anymore. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from social consequences.

Amazing how whenever someone does something controversial and gets forced out soon afterwards, it's never the thing they said, but "consistent creepy and inappropriate behavior" based on 10 year old anecdotes that suddenly appear out of nowhere... I'd think that if someone was "consistently" creepy and inappropriate, there would be a pretty good public record for that, but what do I know?

EDIT: Let me give a bit more of a nuanced position, because reading my post back, it looks like I'm saying that Stallman never did anything inappropriate before this.

Of course, I recognize that Stallman is fucking weird. I'm not saying that parrot-fucking, foot-fungus-eating St. IGNUcius never did anything inappropriate before; we'd be here for a long time if we were to make a list of all the times Stallman failed to read the mood.

However, I strongly believe that Stallman is not a creep. He holds some odd views and is pretty autistic, and so he occasionally makes inappropriate advances. Add to that that Stallman has been a very prolific person for decades and you won't relaly have trouble coming up with a list of anecdotes that, when framed a certain way, make him look bad.

I've read quite a few of these anecdotes by now. Some of them look fairly innocent to me. Some of them are clear social blunders. None of them look seriously harmful or in bad faith to me. Even taking all of them together, believing that all of them are remembered 100% correctly and played out as portrayed without any additional context, I don't think the appropirate reaction is to remove Stallman from his position(s).

What ticks me off so much about all this is the way the media deals with it. Stallman is portrayed as some kind of sexist, some kind of patriarch keeping women out of tech. It's ridiculous; Stallman is quite possibly the most inclusionary person I can think of. Stallman has had an immense, direct contribution to making tech more open for everyone.

I can understand the criticism of Stallman. I don't even think he necessarily makes for a good figurehead for Free Software; he has poor social skills, unhelpfully rigid and strong positions, and I feel like he often conflates free software issues with other social issues he cares about. He makes for a better philosopher than a political leader.

In this case, he's being thrown under the bus to score social points. People in tech are very itchy to do whatever they can to seem more inclusive, and condemning Epstein and his ilk is a noble goal (that also makes you look good). Stallman's statements that sparked this controversy were naive and he failed to read the mood, but they were not unacceptable things to believe or say. He did not deserve to have his words twisted, get kicked out of his own organisation based on the strawman, and then have people say that he was always bad, anyways.

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#163

Post by cbanek »

sn41 wrote: post #7

In the years to come, I believe free software will be recognised as one of the paradigmatic changes in how science itself is done. Now chemists and biologists have started talking about making data openly available and so forth. It's a shame that RMS has to spout forth on every issue, and in the current climate of outrage, science may have lost an important transformational voice. I think as a society, we need to cal…

> I believe free software will be recognised as one of the paradigmatic changes in how science itself is done.

I think we're already there. I'm an astronomer, and we (and many others) are already building platforms with software like Jupyter, dask, holoviews, etc.

While RMS may have started with a great idea, I'm not sure he's super influential in actually making progress and writing software. If anything, the idea that companies will sponsor open source software has (and I'm not sure many saw that one coming). For example, nVidia supporting dask, or Bloomberg supporting Jupyter.

It's the idea that was important, and less so the person IMHO. RMS had a lot of ideas, some good, and some bad. But like evolution, people take the good and run with them, and leave the bad. And we rarely remember who started the whole thing, since having the idea is generally such a small part of actually making it a reality.

"We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world."

- V for Vendetta

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#164

Post by eesmith »

redis_mlc wrote: post #123
eesmith wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Allowed to" is not the same as "required to." Open science people generally want people who publish papers to be required to publish the data. This might be in a public repository, or with the journal, and if there is a fee, that fee should effectively only cover cost. Stallman's conception of free software says that you should be able to charge as much as you want. Hence, these are different concepts. What I mean i…

> Stallman's conception of free software says that you should be able to charge as much as you want. Yes, he was referring to the service of duplicating and mailing tapes pre-Internet. You seem to have mistaken that for a key philosophical issue of some kind, when it's secondary. > reacting to the hyperbole I worked for national labs back in the day. Every dept. wrote their own terminal applications, plotting program…

Really? Because I think it is part of the key philosophy of free software.

Consider #1: I think of an improvement to gcc. I get a copy of the gcc source, modify it, and prove to my satisfaction that it works.

I stop at that point, intellectually satiated, tell a few friends, and don't release any software (source or binary).

The principles of free software say that I am not forced to release any changes. I am not even obligated to send improvements upstream.

Am I wrong about this?

Consider #2: The same as above, but I know that Yoyodyne could save $1 million per year with my improvements. I don't tell them. The free software principles say that I have no obligation to tell them.

Am I wrong about this?

Consider #3: The same as above, but I go to Yoyodyne and say that I'll sell my gcc modification to them - under the GPL - for $250,000. They of course can then redistribute those changes, including back to mainline.

Is that contrary to any free software principle? I don't think so, according to my years of reading the history of the FSF and the free software movement.

But, suppose you are correct, and Stallman's essay only applies to "the service of duplicating and mailing tapes pre-Internet". If so, there's a simple workaround:

Consider #4: I have the idea, implement it, and distribute it to a single organization - a tape duplicating service - and it's that organization which sells the software to Yoyodyne, for $300,000, of which $250,000 comes back to me. (My brother just happens to run the tape service.)

Is that against the principles of free software, and if so, how?

I don't think Stallman's "selling free software" essay was meant to be so easy to work around.

Just because free software is generally distributed at no price or "reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source" (quoting GPLv3), doesn't make it the same as saying that there's an free software principle which obligates that.

While the open data movement in science does have the principle that the data should be free, or should only cover the "reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of" data.

How am I off base?

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#165

Post by concordDance »

ariabuckles wrote: post #82
norcalli wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be horrifying to have meticulously documented notes on every thing you ever said that may or may not be true, and may or may not have been a joke. If his career had been a comedian and not a FOSS advocate, then would he still be crucified for saying the same things or would he simply be an awful comedian? I would be dollars to doughnuts that the author of that site and the editors of that "wiki" have made or…

Honestly, I think we let a lot of mean-spiritedness pass as "comedy", and I think sexist comedy causes a lot of real-world problems. > I would be dollars to doughnuts that the author of that site and the editors of that "wiki" have made or thought worse things at some point, but because they have not reached a certain level of celebrity, there's no dossier on them. It's truly ridiculous to me the amount of effort spe…

> his misogynistic ideas.

I can find nothing that meets this criteria in the above links. Do you have an unusual definition of "misogynistic", were you being rhetorical or do you have another source?

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#166

Post by jokoon »

I would really be interested in an explanation of why driver issues persist on linux, or at least why there were so many issues.

Do vendors have financial preference to work with microsoft to write and maintain those drivers? I'm talking about things like touchpads, wifi... I can understand that if there's no demand, it makes no point for them, but even after all this time?

Not to mention nvidia. What makes nvidia be so complacent towards linux? It has been almost 15 years now. Are there agreements between microsoft and nvidia?

The arguments of Stallman make sense, but to me they don't explain the state of linux drivers, which made the linux desktop so difficult.

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#167

Post by atoav »

grawprog wrote: post #19
sn41 wrote: post #7

In the years to come, I believe free software will be recognised as one of the paradigmatic changes in how science itself is done. Now chemists and biologists have started talking about making data openly available and so forth. It's a shame that RMS has to spout forth on every issue, and in the current climate of outrage, science may have lost an important transformational voice. I think as a society, we need to cal…

One of the things that really soured me to working as a biologist was being told the data we collected would not be allowed to be made freely available, as we originally proposed and was accepted in our grant proposal. Instead it would be locked away in a government database, available for a fee despite the data being collected using tax dollars, after we'd been working for over a year and a half on the project and h…

To me open data feels a lot like global warming: individual action is great and needed, but what we really need is to enshrine it in law and make it the default. Make public data usable, while protecting private data or like they say in Germany: Öffentliche Daten nützen, private Daten schützen.

Same should be true for publicly funded code: should be open source and accessible by default and anything else should require special reasoning.

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#168

Post by concordDance »

hinkley wrote: post #71
cat_plus_plus wrote: post #3

That's what makes me so furious at the morons who deplatformed RMS over some silly devil's advocate defense of Minsky on an internal mailing list. The guy has an important idea that he put most of his life into developing. In the process, he made programming much more inclusive than anyone could dream about in the days of proprietary operating system with compilers that sold for thousands of dollars. So even if havin…

Until the latest stink I wasn't even aware that RMS still had a platform. I haven't heard from him in probably 15 years. That may be a good thing. FSF isn't about Richard Stallman. And some of the "kids" that ran him out of town know to keep plants at their desks because it turns out he's kind of a creep around young women, and also afraid of plants. None of that information has anything to do with mailing lists. The…

> There is always some reason that gets people to deal with a problem and that reason is often objectively kinda shitty

The problem is that that reason is the one people think is the reason the problem got dealt with.

It has a nasty chilling effect.

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#169

Post by doesnt_know »

eesmith wrote: post #138
kqr wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, when you purchase GPL licensed software, the author is required to supply you also with the source code, and you must be allowed to redistribute this (under terms and conditions.) Sure, there are distinctive features for each domain, but in broad strokes, I don't see the above description as very different from the one following: When you purchase access to an open-data paper, the author is required to supply y…

"when you purchase GPL" .. sure. But there's nothing to force me to provide you with the software until you've given me money. Even if I used someone else's GPL'ed software in my software, I can simply not distribute it until someone gives me $100,000. "When you purchase access to an open-data paper" Some provisos first. Some papers are gratis, and don't require being purchased. (Eg, author-pays papers.) Also, I thin…

> I can simply not distribute it

Of course, you haven't infringed on anyone's freedom yet, there are no users. I guess the thing is if you massively overcharge without providing any corresponding service of value the first person that purchases it has the option to throw the source code up on the internet and it can be forked.

I guess you also have to find a buyer that is willing to pay you the large sum while also knowing they can't charge others for it without also handing over the source code, so it's doubtful anyone would do so.

There are other options though, if a single person or entity owns the copyright for the entire code base, with no outside contributors, they can dual license it. GPL for the public and then commercial proprietary license for businesses. That way the business can build on it if they wish without redistributing the source.

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#170

Post by arnoooooo »

jimmaswell wrote: post #131

Free software misses the point of open source. Open source wants to make the world a better place without strings attached, while free software just wants to push some bizzare ideology.

Except nothing is "without strings attached" in life. To me "making the world a better place" is precisely about recognizing that everything is interdependent and setting up the right "strings", not about pretending we can live without them.
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