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Time to fork the FSF

larrythefreesoftwareguy.wordpress.com

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Re: Time to fork the FSF

#161

Post by forcefsck »

pushingbits wrote: post #153
cookiecaper wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe RMS sees a subtle distinction between death and gone-ness in his head. But I promise you that people in grief see absolutely no distinction between the death and the loss of the person they mourn. It is not legitimate for the mass of HN to be "in grief" because of Steve Jobs's death. You may be sad, but certainly no grieving period should be necessary for strangers. Stallman was not overtly disrespectful imo,…

>It is not legitimate for the mass of HN to be "in grief" because of Steve Jobs's death. You may be sad, but certainly no grieving period should be necessary for strangers. When was this decided? And by who? Did I miss a memo? I've never owned an Apple product in my life, but the computers I have used, the smartphone I own, the tablet I will eventually get, the world I will live in 20 years from now, probably would n…

> but the computers I have used, the smartphone I own, the tablet I will eventually get, the world I will live in 20 years from now, probably would not exist if it wasn't for Steve Jobs.

This is such an overstatement. What makes you so sure that Jobs had a positive influence on the world? You can't tell if in his absence something better would evolve. Not all his ideas were originall nor all the inventions were his own. And more importantly, neither was a better world his goal.

I see him more as a vanity figure and his contribution way overestimated. Sorry, if you had an image o Jobs running in a green forest along side with unicorns and rainbows, my opinion differs.

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#162

Post by thu »

Stallman didn't say he's glad Steve Jobs died. I understand he's glad that Steve's influence on computing stop, as that influence is driving computing in a closed ecosystem.

You can take it in a non-emotional way. A is, in your opinion, a bad thing. If A stops, you're glad. If A stops because of a sad B event, you can be both glad for A to end, and sad for B to occur.

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#163

Post by DanBC »

josephg wrote: post #6

I'm aware of Stallman's advocacy on free software issues, but (completely honest question), what else does the Free Software Foundation do ? Software is at a point where its basically impossible to make anything useful without opensource software. Proprietary code is a minority in my stack both as a developer and as a user. Proprietary software is often good before opensource software is good, but consistently openso…

I think you're under-estimating RMS's extremism about 'freeness'.

RMS would say that you booted your machine with an evil closed EFI / BIOS; that there's a bunch of evil non-free drivers; that there's a bunch of evil non-free gui stuff, etc etc.

Chrome was not, to RMS, a valid solution. Note his approach to "browsing the www" - (http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/)

>To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me.

RMS would say that there is still plenty of work to do to work toward 'free' software. (Mobile phones is something he's keen to open up.)

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#164

Post by angus77 »

0x12 wrote: post #149
cookiecaper wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe RMS sees a subtle distinction between death and gone-ness in his head. But I promise you that people in grief see absolutely no distinction between the death and the loss of the person they mourn. It is not legitimate for the mass of HN to be "in grief" because of Steve Jobs's death. You may be sad, but certainly no grieving period should be necessary for strangers. Stallman was not overtly disrespectful imo,…

He could have made that statement when Jobs stepped down but chose to do it after he died, so I'm assuming that he made no such distinction. That said, I do agree that walled gardens are bad but there are more effective ways of delivering that message, to use someones death and name recognition to further your agenda is not in good taste.

When Jobs "stepped down", he remained on the board of directors. He became remarkably less active, but certainly wasn't presented as being "gone".

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#165

Post by Fice »

As I said already, today's hacker culture is crippled. So called "hackers" here have lost their principles, forgotten the value of freedom, worship the wrong idols. How come an entrepreneur be a hero much more important than any of the researchers who pioneered the modern computer technology? How can the man who worked against the values and principles of the hacker ethic be an idol for so many hackers? There is no real hacker community here on HN, only a flock of spineless ship.

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#166

Post by Joeboy »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #9
zalew wrote: post #2

so... it's perfectly ok to publish tons of linkbaits about 'how steve jobs changed my life' even if they are vague and repetitive boring opinions, but nobody can state his negative views on this occasion. gimme a break. death is sad, but it's good that there are people who had decided to stay out of this bubble.

Here, I'll let someone with much more eloquence than me explain to you why Stallman's diatribe is poorly wrought. If Stallman had to make a statement emphasizing his dislike of Jobs' influence, he could still have done so respectfully. Consider this; "I didn't share Steve Jobs' vision of computing, and I wish he'd chosen to embrace free software. I'm very sorry that he's gone and we've lost the opportunity to have th…

Given the hordes of people who seem keen to use Stallman's words against him I think he should perhaps have put a bit more thought into them, but I'm extremely glad he didn't make the kind of bland, wishy washy PR statement you suggest.

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#167

Post by pushingbits »

forcefsck wrote: post #161
pushingbits wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is not legitimate for the mass of HN to be "in grief" because of Steve Jobs's death. You may be sad, but certainly no grieving period should be necessary for strangers. When was this decided? And by who? Did I miss a memo? I've never owned an Apple product in my life, but the computers I have used, the smartphone I own, the tablet I will eventually get, the world I will live in 20 years from now, probably would n…

> but the computers I have used, the smartphone I own, the tablet I will eventually get, the world I will live in 20 years from now, probably would not exist if it wasn't for Steve Jobs. This is such an overstatement. What makes you so sure that Jobs had a positive influence on the world? You can't tell if in his absence something better would evolve. Not all his ideas were originall nor all the inventions were his o…

Oh, I am sure we would have gone similar places without him... eventually. A windowing graphical user interface is objectively easier to use for most people than alternatives at the time, for example. But he saw it at Xerox, recognized it for what it was, refined it until it was sharp and crisp, and made such an impression that everyone followed suit. How long would it have taken otherwise? How many failed attempts and how many iterations? How many more failed tablets and how many more incremental improvements on feature phones? It's not like it only happened once.

Anyway, you may very well disagree. I was just trying to explain why some people who think differently might be more than a little sad about it. And that just because he was a stranger doesn't limit the amount of sadness people may legitimately feel.

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#168

Post by __david__ »

cookiecaper wrote: post #159
microtonal wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs also brought DRM-free internet music stores to the masses.

Please dude. iTunes was very late to the game. eMusic? Most early music stores had no DRM. Jobs leveraged the popularity of the iPod with iTunes (which, by the way, is not allowed to talk to any other program under normal circumstances) to make Apple a ton of money. As was the case with iPhone, Apple was big enough to force the hand of the industry-controlling posse into accepting things on its own terms. While they…

> Most early music stores had no DRM.

Yeah, but they also had no music. Apple used their near monopoly of online music to force the majors into selling DRM free music online. That deserves praise.

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#169

Post by burgerbrain »

__david__ wrote: post #168
cookiecaper wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please dude. iTunes was very late to the game. eMusic? Most early music stores had no DRM. Jobs leveraged the popularity of the iPod with iTunes (which, by the way, is not allowed to talk to any other program under normal circumstances) to make Apple a ton of money. As was the case with iPhone, Apple was big enough to force the hand of the industry-controlling posse into accepting things on its own terms. While they…

> Most early music stores had no DRM. Yeah, but they also had no music. Apple used their near monopoly of online music to force the majors into selling DRM free music online. That deserves praise.

Amazon MP3 beat them to that.

"Launched in public beta on September 25, 2007,[1] in January 2008 it became the first music store to sell music without digital rights management (DRM) from the four major music labels (EMI, Universal, Warner Music, and Sony BMG), as well as many independents.[1][2][3][4]"

"On January 6, 2009, Apple announced that DRM had been removed from 80% of the entire music catalog in the U.S."

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