Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is the other goalpost? Are they equally necessary?
Steve Jobs?
Bill Gates?
Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
71–80 of 263 posts
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#72I wonder how many Hacker Newsers really remember what it was like back before the GPL and the FSF. The availability of a high-quality open source unix system is pretty much the defining quality of modern computing, and it took us out of the dark ages of a half dozen mutually incompatible proprietary OSs, compilers, and commandline utility packages (sometimes broken - with fixes impossible). Stallman's contribution is…
I wasn't really online _before_ GNU/FSF, but I was around early enough to remember ordering GCC on 9-track magtape from the FSF to help support them back in the day. I was also pulling down great kit from mit (like X), project athena (kerberos, etc), and free code and utilities from hackers around the world (many that were later "embraced and extended" by GNU/FSF.) Maybe working in a university computing center gave me a distorted view of the world at the time, but I am reasonably certain that we would have gotten along just fine without RMS. Some things might have taken longer to appear or converge on a standard, but other things might also have moved a lot faster if the BSD license was the dominant format within the open source movement.
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, there aren't any manufacturing costs. So under a free software model you'd have to make money by continuing to make improved versions under contract, or offering support, hosting or other things like that. A lot of people are doing this sort of thing already, so you can make a living off it.
Yes, there are lots of people who make money doing support or hosting. Those people would still exist in a world where writing software was unprofitable. There are also people who make money baking cakes and painting pictures of flower fields, and those people would also exist in a world where writing software was unprofitable. That still wouldn't make it worthwhile in general to write software except in-house for a…
I don't buy that. Almost all software is the equivalent of toilet paper, it's something auxiliary that should perform a service so that you can get on with your life.
Just because people demand a different color toilet paper (free software) the demand doesn't go away.
If everyone demanded that software be free we'd still have cellphones, search engines and games because people want that stuff, and they're going to pay for it one way or the other.
Of course business models would be different, but the end result probably wouldn't be. The main difference would be that there'd be more collaboration on shared problems (like game engines), instead of each proprietary software company coming up with their own solution.
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#74I lost patience with RMS years ago. The problem with Free Software is a marketing problem. If you have to keep explaining things over and over again, saying "Free as in Freedom", or trying to get GNU/Linux to take hold instead of just Linux, you're doing it wrong. Richard is a tremendous hacker, but he's a lousy salesman. I'm not a big fan of salespeople in general, but guys like DHH have proved that it's not enough…
GNU is such an ugly logo. A few years ago I asked Duane Bibby to do some artwork for The GNU C Reference Manual . I rather like his whimsical approach on the gnu... http://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/gnu-db-1.jpg
Whimsical line art of the ugly, hairy wildebeest. Dot dot dot.
If GNU wants to brand itself to anyone other than hardcore hackers, it’s probably going to need the kind of logo that hardcore hackers will complain is generic and corporate-looking. The 1975–era homebrew esthetic is exactly the kind of surface feature that people dismiss RMS for. (Not that he’d necessarily be super popular even if he were a charismatic Lawrence Lessig type, but it couldn’t hurt.)
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#75"iGroan"? "iBad"?
I think names like that (and Digital Restrictions Management and all the others) just undermine the seriousness of their position. They sound like the playground taunts of children.
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#76"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…
You're comparing apples and oranges, I think. Bill and Melinda Gates have done tremendous good in the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either crude or uninformed; but what does that have to do with software? Or freedom? Their being tremendous philanthropists has little to nothing to do with whether or not the way they earned their money is ethical -- and I hope that, in this day and age, it's clear that it's not only possible but easy to get money in a way that isn't ethical.
You can mock RMS's contributions all you want, but the fact is that he has done a good deal for the world. He created the basis and licensing for the operating system that's been on more devices than any other operating system that's ever existed, that's run on more processors than any other operating system that's ever existed. This thing he started is the basis for the bulk of the internet, for the architecture that runs web sites; people don't give it this credit often enough, but Gnu/Linux in many ways has made the modern technological world possible, and without things like GCC and the standard utilities, it would have died a sad death in 1991. Heck, just for his work on Gnu AWK alone, I think Richard Stallman deserves a few geek medals. And finally, his Gnu Public License and its derivatives (the Apache License et al) have been instrumental in filling the world with an open architecture that makes many of the amazing things we're able to do now possible.
It is possible to admire Bill Gates for his humanitarian work while believing that much of his Microsoft legacy has been bad for software and for freedom in general. I know Stallman can seem like a cranky old man, but he's more careful and thoughtful than you're giving him credit for. When people ask him whether Microsoft (or any company) is "evil," he usually says that you can't say that a whole company is evil, and you have to think about particular things they've done. I believe that his argument that some of Microsoft's business practices are unethical is sound; and while I think Bill and Melinda Gates are wonderful philanthropists, that doesn't mean that I have to think that they're great for software, too.
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, there aren't any manufacturing costs. So under a free software model you'd have to make money by continuing to make improved versions under contract, or offering support, hosting or other things like that. A lot of people are doing this sort of thing already, so you can make a living off it.
> there aren't any manufacturing costs WTF are you talking about? Are you saying that all these nights I'm not sleeping, working 14 hours per day, not spending time with my family ... don't have a cost? Is this not manufacturing? > under a free software model you'd have to make money by continuing to make improved versions under contract, or offering support, hosting or other things like that Yeah, that's called cons…
That's R&D. Manufacturing would be the production of discs or the cost of the pipes used to transfer it.
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, there aren't any manufacturing costs. So under a free software model you'd have to make money by continuing to make improved versions under contract, or offering support, hosting or other things like that. A lot of people are doing this sort of thing already, so you can make a living off it.
> there aren't any manufacturing costs WTF are you talking about? Are you saying that all these nights I'm not sleeping, working 14 hours per day, not spending time with my family ... don't have a cost? Is this not manufacturing? > under a free software model you'd have to make money by continuing to make improved versions under contract, or offering support, hosting or other things like that Yeah, that's called cons…
> Is this not manufacturing?
No. Note that this whole conversation started with a car analogy, under that analogy writing software would be designing a car, not manufacturing it. In software manufacturing is distribution, which carries virtually no cost.
Of course making software would still have a cost.
> I prefer to exercise my freedoms [...] to sell my work.
More power to you then. Note that I never said that I agreed with Stallman.
I've was just responding to the fallacy in chc's post where he claimed that just because consumer demand would shift towards free software, that the entire software industry would be destroyed. That's ridiculous.
Software would still be needed, and people would still need to be educated and compensated for writing and maintaining it. To assume that the market couldn't come up with a way to meet the demand and that the clock would be reset to 1920 is naïve.
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#79"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.
That's what I've always believed - if you want to do any sort of significant and impactful good in this world, you have to have capital. I can't help but give Gates the nod here when it comes to the greater good.
Re: Richard Stallman answers Reddit's top 25 questions.
#80"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.
It's a mighty big leap from the charity of Bill Gates to the essential moral quality of capitalism.