Live data from Hacker News

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

gnu.org

221–230 of 426 posts

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

#221
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While RMS may have started with a great idea, I'm not sure he's super influential in actually making progress and writing software. I had to re-read this to be sure it's not sarcasm. RMS has some of the largest footprints in software among the living people. How can one hold an opinion about his contribution and not be aware of that?

Maybe its a sign of your greatness when people think your contribution to the world somehow arose spontaneously, like a hurricane.

That's not a sign of greatness, so much as a sign of a cult of personality.

If people believe that Free Software could never have existed without Richard Stallman, and cannot continue without him, that calls into question whether it has any lasting societal or cultural value of its own. Other software licensing paradigms don't have this problem, real or percieved. No one believes that open source will die if ESR gets hit by a bus, after all.

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

#222
post #163
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 t…

He wanted progress to happen in the field of freedom. Jupyter, dask, holoviews are free as in beer, and that's why there's little progress if not degradation in freedom.

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

#223

To start, let me say that I believe in Free ( libre ) Software, as it is defined by the Software Freedoms. People should have the right to run the software they have, as they themselves see fit. That said, there is a lot wrong with open source and free software right now. First, and I think foremost, is that we’ve done ourselves a huge disservice in training users into believing that software should be gratis . Throu…

This. The biggest contributors to open source, and the most popular open source project maintainers, are now the mega corporations, who’ve figured out how to weaponise it (either to commoditise other competing software/services, or as PR for hiring developers).

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 eve…

I don't think you are. Trade secrets aren't covered by GPL except in the case of v3 on software accessed through a terminal. Even in this essay, he makes clear than open patents aren't the same as Free Software.

That being said, the Free Software movement was obviosly seminal in all of the open data talk, and for that matter open patent talk; it's not the same thing, but a strong and heavily influential idea in one context inspires analogues in other contexts. I think your overall point is wrong, although I think your supporting point is completely correct.

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

#225
post #163
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 t…

> 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.

While true, there's a difference between forgetting a person, and making that person forgotten. The latter seem to be happening now.

> 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).

So a garden finally bloomed (though RMS would probably think some of these companies are weeds). It would however be unfair to say that the people that built and maintained this garden (which is an artificial hydroponic garden in the middle of a volcano) for decades weren't "influencial". The Free Software movement benefited from having someone with clear and unyielding vision. Actually, scratch that. The Free Software movement benefited from RMS the way you benefited from having a biological mother - it wouldn't be born otherwise.

That some companies will sponsor Open Source wasn't that unexpected. That some of the players that now do would (Microsoft?!), that was more surprising.

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

#226
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't just this incident. RMS alienated so many women from open source and free software over the last 30 years, and we've lost all of those potential contributions. He's been getting breaks for 30 years. That he has also done some very good things isn't a good argument for continuing to tolerate his harmful behaviour after he's been asked to fix it for literally decades, and hasn't.

Do you believe he has alienated more women from FOSS than he has inspired people to contribute to it? Considering the frankly extremely low percentage of female contributors, it seems that he would have had to personally (considering that all of the creepy behaviours listed seem to be limited to his meatspace circles) alienate multiple women for every one woman who did wind up working on in free software, which seems…

> Do you believe he has alienated more women from FOSS than he has inspired people to contribute to it?

Almost certainly not, but at this stage it is not unlikely that he'll put off more than he'll encourage going forward. So by the same "net effect" argument you make for accepting his behaviour up to a point in the recent past, he should go. Live by the sword, get asked to resign because of the sword.

> Considering the frankly extremely low percentage of female contributors

That low number of female contributors is at least in part due to the impression people have of working in these areas. Allowing him to continue to alienate people works against efforts to rectify that impression (and where it is true rather than just an impression, work to fix the behaviours that are causing the problem).

> all of the anecdotes of actual bad behaviour that seem to come up are from about two decades ago

Perhaps most, but not all. I've definitely seen some more recent claims, and they were mentioned before this particular episode. They weren't as egregious as the earlier behaviour so he was at least controlling/curbing/changing the creepy behaviour for which I suppose there should be some credit, and there is definitely some curious timing wrt MIT and the Epstein contributions so there is presumably a bit of "throw him under the bus as a distraction" going on, meaning this is a case with significant grey areas, but I think painting him as an entirely innocent victim is a step too far.

Let's be fair handed: if we wouldn't accept it from a politician or other celebrity, we shouldn't accept it from someone whose other ideas we agree with either.

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

#227
There a TL;DR; on the bottom.

I'm very sympathetic with people (over)reacting to what Stallman said and did.

I'm from a family where my parents and most of my uncles worked in healthcare.

Specifically my dad worked in oncology and my mom in infectiuos diseases.

I've seen patient's relatives panic because of some blood (after a very dangerous surgery) or complaining to the management because some other patient had sever pain and they could not stand them crying.

People are tribal, they usually act as a tribe, if not educated differently or introduced to things they do not know.

Of course I don't have to explain than when some of my friends needed to go to an hospital I was always regarded as the unemphatetic for saying things like "some blood is normal at this stage" or "the pain is gonna go away soon, don't worry" or "well, they amputated that man's leg, I bet I would be crying too. You can't complain about that" (this one really happened to me, when I had surgery to remove the saphenous vein, one of my parents friend came over to visit and asked me "why your parents keep you here with that man crying all the time?", I must specify that in Italy healthcare is mainly public, it was even more 25 years ago, you don't find the private hotel like rooms, and it worked much better than today, but that's another story).

SJWs are the same: they only think about their group, their needs, their right words, without stopping to think for a moment that Stallman started 40 years ago and that for 40 years he resisted, you don't just throw him under the bus because he said something you don't like because you were never exposed to that kind of thinking.

But Stallman would have defended their right to speak their minds if the role were reversed.

And that's why I'm sympathetic with them because they don't even understand the damage they made to themselves.

TL;DR;

We should work together engaging in what makes us similar more than what makes us different.

That's what Stallman did.

Exactly 80 years ago Sigmund Freud died.

> The narcissism of small differences (German: der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen) is the thesis that communities with adjoining territories and close relationships are especially likely to engage in feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to details of differentiation. The term was coined by Sigmund Freud in 1917, based on the earlier work of British anthropologist Ernest Crawley. In language differing only slightly from current psychoanalytic terminology, Crawley declared that each individual is separated from others by a taboo of personal isolation, a narcissism of minor differences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...

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

#228
post #112
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free software isn't about making data openly available. Stallman, at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html , argues that free software developers should "charge as much as they wish or can, ... if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money ." If you have useful data, the free software principles say that you might as well charge a lot of money…

If I'm understanding right, those journals still kept it copyrighted, without copy-left provisions. It's more like the notion of open source, where the source may be viewable but isn't necessarily available for redistribution. While Stallman says you can charge as much as you can, his terms say that once someone buys it they can immediately undercut you, and he admits that limits the amount you could charge sustainab…

> It's more like the notion of open source, where the source may be viewable but isn't necessarily available for redistribution.

That's incorrect: open source software is necessarily available for redistribution. What you are referring to (source viewable but not necessarily available for redistribution/modification) is commonly referred as "source available" software [0].

Now, the distinction between open source and free software is more a social/political one rather than a practical one. Free software encompasses an entire philosophy while open source is simply concerned with software licensing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

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

#229
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe its a sign of your greatness when people think your contribution to the world somehow arose spontaneously, like a hurricane.

That's not a sign of greatness, so much as a sign of a cult of personality. If people believe that Free Software could never have existed without Richard Stallman, and cannot continue without him, that calls into question whether it has any lasting societal or cultural value of its own. Other software licensing paradigms don't have this problem, real or percieved. No one believes that open source will die if ESR gets…

Free software might continue without Stallman, but it doesn't follow that it would have ever existed without him. Read his auto-biography, he lays out in very convincing terms just how bleak the world of software looked when he started the FSF.

You don't even have to jump back 30 years to see what that world looked like, it still exists today, inside every large corporation that hates free software, except when they can steal it and not give anything back. That nasty, back-stabbing world is what it all would have looked like without the constant efforts of the FSF to continue to advocate sharing and cooperation.

It might have come about anyway, but Stallman accelerated it by at minimum decades. It should also be noted that the timing of the FSF's and GNU's founding was important, if they had tried even five years later when all computers were ensconced behind protective legal walls, they might not have gotten anywhere at all with the effort.

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

#230

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…

It wasn't just this incident. RMS alienated so many women from open source and free software over the last 30 years, and we've lost all of those potential contributions. He's been getting breaks for 30 years. That he has also done some very good things isn't a good argument for continuing to tolerate his harmful behaviour after he's been asked to fix it for literally decades, and hasn't.

> RMS alienated so many women

[citation needed]

Post reply on HN