Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing

#1: it's too hard to say whether the free software movement would have evolved without RMS. We do know that Linux was able to bootstrap from GNU which was founded some 7 years earlier and without that, it probably wouldn't have taken off the way it did. By the time Linus came around, the only thing missing from GNU was its kernel. The Berkeley people got bogged down with the BSDi lawsuit, and you might ask yourself how that happened if their license was so freedom preserving. If it wasn't for that, I imagine that BSD would be in the place linux is now.

#2: People say it's divisive not to have one way of thinking about open source, but why this need to do it one way only? Surely there is a place for the GPL for some projects, and RMS isn't forcing anyone to GPL their software. The FSF counts lots of other licences as GNU-compatible.

RMS just wants people to understand that if they license their software restrictively they're not doing the hacker community any great service, even if they claim otherwise.

#3: "To rms, one ought to act ethically, and anyone who does not do so is essentially evil." That's not just RMS who thinks that. You're going to have a hard time justifying why unethical people who harm others are essentially good. You make it seem like it's radical to stand on the side of ethical behavior. Maybe it is.

Stallman rose to the occasion as the defender of the "old way". He did not "invent" free software, whatever that means. (He did invent the Copyleft license, but there are many other licenses of free software besides Copyleft.)

Hypothetical speculation of how history would have turned out if certain details were changed a little bit are hard to argue because they're hypothetical and thus a realm of opinion. There does not exist an actual alternate universe in which a given event never happened that we can just observe to see how things worked out differently.

I think that where we're heading in software is inevitable. Yes, RMS contributed to it early on and yes, things might have taken off more slowly without the FSF and GNU, but in 100 years, I think we'll have won no matter what. This is an opinion. There's no empirical way to evaluate it. I think the nature of easy copying via the Internet has created a sort of inevitable force, like gravity, and that fighting it is ultimately futile. Am I right? We'll see how things are in 2112.

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> Surely there is a place for the GPL for some projects, and RMS isn't forcing anyone to GPL their software.

If you think that proprietary software is evil instead of just bad, then yes, the GPL is good for some things because it is "freedom-preserving". I could easily imagine an alternate reality in which Mac OS X used a BSD-licensed Linux kernel.

It could also be argued, for the sake of argument, that the GPL is ultimately a bad thing. It requires copyleft, sharing with the same license, and about half of FOSS has been "infected".[1] Very few projects do the copyright assignment that the FSF does. If there is a currently unseen issue with the GPL, it would be very hard to get every single contributor who owns copyright to switch every major project from the GPL. If you say "GPL v2 or later" or "GPL v3 or later" in your software's license, you are dependent on one organization for your "upgrade path" of licenses. An advantage that the permissive licenses have is that there isn't one major permissive license: there are lots of them. It's a more diverse ecosystem, without one point of possible future failure and without any dependency on one organization.

> RMS just wants people to understand that if they license their software restrictively they're not doing the hacker community any great service, even if they claim otherwise.

Those companies are not doing themselves a great service, either. The big proprietary software companies will realize this eventually, or like the big media companies who are so resistant to change, they'll go out of business in the long run. Reinventing the wheel is expensive, time consuming, and there's no guarantee you'll get the best programmers on board. You'll also get stuck into other vendors' lock-ins unless you're a very big company like Microsoft, so you'll lose more than you'll gain by going with closed source, non-free software.

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> You make it seem like it's radical to stand on the side of ethical behavior. Maybe it is.

It's not radical to focus on doing ethical behavior (or maybe it is, but it's not the radical thing I'm talking about). I do admire him for his courageous ability to take an ethical stand against all odds. I just don't think it's the most productive way to achieve to his goals.

If you want all software to be free, then you need to convince companies making software to make it free. If you can't do that, then you need to make your own company and put those older companies out of business. There's only so many things that an organization or individual not making any money can do. In the world as it is, money matters. Maybe that's not how things should work, and maybe all software should be made by the FSF, but very radical structural changes are probably never going to happen.

People went with "open source" not because they hate freedom or rms, but because they needed to "sell" the concept to companies like IBM.

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[1] http://osrc.blackducksoftware.com/data/licenses/

It's a tricky question about personal ethics and judgement. Is it possible for someone to have personal ethics that don't implicitly include the concept that everyone should share them? I'm not sure.

Anyhow, yes I am referring to the RMS's judgmentalness in my (what I meant to be ironic) reference to "conformist."

My understanding of the meaning of "conformism" is that it refers to the use of emotional, social, and behavioral methods that a dominant group use to coerce others who think, act differently than they want them to. RMS's ideas of morality are very much addressed towards the behavior of others and how he thinks people "should" act. The irony is that if many people adopted the ethics of RMS, I am positing that this would create a very conformist society (at least in regards to the proper use of technology).

The MIT Labs story is illustrative. The other protagonists in the story did not act how Stallman wanted them to, and hurt him (and others too). If others act in ways that hurt you or others, I can see how you can choose to define their behavior unethical. But you could also say they just behaved in ways that you didn't like, and hurt you.

Everyone has their own idea of ethics, and where various lines are drawn about moral/amoral/immoral.

It's interesting to see the down votes I am getting. I was starting to feel upset, but I guess it's just part of the method of discussion here? A short of shorthand to disagree? It's true I am a newbie to the Hacker News site, so if I am out of bounds on the discussion I apologize.