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RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”

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Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”

#81

Post by paulryanrogers »

Sylos wrote: post #23
Rexxar wrote: post #16

In the RMS world you are not good if you support some free software. You have to support them exclusively From the link: The basic point of the free software movement is that nonfree software is unjust and should not exist. Personally, I completely disagree with this.

That's not true. He for example thinks it's a good thing that Steam is available on Linux, as it makes it viable for people to come into the Linux world and from there, they usually end up using more free software. Of course, he doesn't like Steam either, and would like to get rid of it eventually, but it's the lesser of two evils for the time being.

Isn't that why he also supported Gnash to replace Flash: as a form of bridge?

Aside: Interesting that Apple's insistence on not supporting Flash became a bigger influence. Albeit motivated more by battery drain than ideology.

Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”

#82

Post by paulryanrogers »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #72
cageface wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more time goes by the less crazy he seems. His goals may not be realistic but his predictions about the dangers of dependence on commercial software have been vindicated in many instances. And things might get much worse still if the trend towards authoritarian leadership in Western countries continues.

A bit nit-picky, but RMS is perfectly fine with commercial software (software that is sold for money), he objects to proprietary software (software that you cannot read and modify the source code of). Freeware is not commercial, but proprietary. When you buy a Linux distro CD, that's commercial, but might be non-proprietary (depending on the distro).

Yet selling software--not services--seems incompatible with RMS's insistence on the freedom of end users to distribute without cost.

Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”

#83

Post by lokedhs »

danso wrote: post #10

> There are organizations that proclaim support for free software or the GNU Project, and teach classes in use of nonfree software. It's possible that they do some other things that really support free software, but those classes certainly don't. On the contrary, they work directly against the free software movement by promoting the use of the nonfree software. That increases the magnitude of the practical problem it…

RMS isn't talking about how easy it is to access the source and modify it. What he's saying that even though the source is there, it's covered by copyright and using that source code for any purpose other than running it unchanged in your browser is a violation of that copyright. Whether or not you choose to obey that rule is besides the point.

I certainly don't agree with RMS on many points, but the fact that most Javascript code on websites are "non-free" according to FSF's definition is pretty clear.

Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”

#84

Post by jordigh »

deepnet wrote: post #75
emp_zealoth wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried to use Octave, I really did. Passed few classes with projects made in Octave. Then I nearly failed some classes because of simple, reproductible bugs no one gave a flying fuck about. None of PCs I've installed the thing on could produce a fully working figure with subplots. For example in 5 subplots number 3 would not render at all. Or the plot would not export to png if you had too many data points. Octav…

When Prof Andrew Ng first ran his Machine Learning MOOC, very many of us relied on Octave. An Octave dev showed up to help students and a fundraiser was organised in return. In the cases you mention, surely it would be trivial to prove if the problem was Ghostscript or not by demonstrating graph 3 or the missing data points were output or not by Octave before Ghostscripts png conversion. Surely modularity makes it ea…

> An Octave dev showed up to help students and a fundraiser was organised in return.

Hi, that was me.

There wasn't a fundraiser, just a thank-you card for jwe, Octave lead dev. We get some money from FSF donations but not enough to support a single dev. We mostly use the donation money to pay for travel expenses for the yearly Octconf.

I used to have an Octave job, but my current job is unrelated to Octave. I've been trying to court Enthought and Continuum Analytics to try to hire me or any other Octave dev to work on Octave again. My pitch is that while moving people off Matlab is a laudable goal, there's a lot of Matlab code out there that could be used as-is while they write new code in Python or Julia or whatever. With stuff like Pytave that glues Octave and Python, Octave could help their customers transition off Matlab.

Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”

#85

Post by jordigh »

emp_zealoth wrote: post #38
danso wrote: post #10

> There are organizations that proclaim support for free software or the GNU Project, and teach classes in use of nonfree software. It's possible that they do some other things that really support free software, but those classes certainly don't. On the contrary, they work directly against the free software movement by promoting the use of the nonfree software. That increases the magnitude of the practical problem it…

I've tried to use Octave, I really did. Passed few classes with projects made in Octave. Then I nearly failed some classes because of simple, reproductible bugs no one gave a flying fuck about. None of PCs I've installed the thing on could produce a fully working figure with subplots. For example in 5 subplots number 3 would not render at all. Or the plot would not export to png if you had too many data points. Octav…

> I've tried to use Octave, I really did.

I understand your frustration, but Octave's problems are not because we're incompetent developers or because we have a broken shit cult of free software. We're doing the best we can, but it's hard when the talent we attract is mathematical, not language devs.

Maybe our real problem is that we don't know how to turn Octave into a business while keeping it free. It is disheartening when everyone tells us we should just kill Octave and make everything Python.

Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”

#86

Post by Sylos »

letitleak wrote: post #63
joelthelion wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why people are still advocating Octave as a Matlab alternative. The real alternative is Python + Scipy. It's A LOT better than Matlab. Depending on your application domain, you might also want to look at R or Julia.

> I don't get why people are still advocating Octave as a Matlab alternative. Because it is the closest thing to a drop in replacement, which is what you need when taking a class or following a tutorial based on MATLAB. Trying to use a different language and follow along is a much more advanced challenge and can be borderline impossible for a MOOC with an autograder or a class with a dusty professor. I wasn't very ha…

I did take a class which worked with MATLAB and was using Octave to develop for it.

Well, and I guess it already says enough that I actually had MATLAB installed, but still preferred using Octave.

Just the minor annoyances in MATLAB like it taking probably a minute to start up, being in general really sluggish and having an annoying (read: not particularly bash-like) command-line were already enough to make up for the just as minor compatibility-problems I occasionally had to correct before handing in.

So, at least up until the stuff that you can get to in one semester, the compatibility was pretty good and I only really once had a problem which couldn't be fixed by a simple find+replace.

And in that case, it was actually something where I didn't understand why it didn't work in MATLAB (if I remember correctly, you for some reason couldn't use `hold on/off` with multiple `ezplot`-instructions in it).

So, yeah, I don't think at all that it was Octave-specific bugs bugging you, especially also because the MATLAB-syntax is actually even more annoying than Octave's.

Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”

#87

Post by emp_zealoth »

Sylos wrote: post #86
letitleak wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't get why people are still advocating Octave as a Matlab alternative. Because it is the closest thing to a drop in replacement, which is what you need when taking a class or following a tutorial based on MATLAB. Trying to use a different language and follow along is a much more advanced challenge and can be borderline impossible for a MOOC with an autograder or a class with a dusty professor. I wasn't very ha…

I did take a class which worked with MATLAB and was using Octave to develop for it. Well, and I guess it already says enough that I actually had MATLAB installed, but still preferred using Octave. Just the minor annoyances in MATLAB like it taking probably a minute to start up, being in general really sluggish and having an annoying (read: not particularly bash-like) command-line were already enough to make up for th…

>I did take a class which worked with MATLAB and was using Octave to develop for it.

Well, and I guess it already says enough that I actually had MATLAB installed, but still preferred using Octave.

That is exactly what happened with me. And then we started doing more advanced stuff next semester and Octave fell flat on it's face.

Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”

#88

Post by mmierz »

danso wrote: post #64
joelthelion wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why people are still advocating Octave as a Matlab alternative. The real alternative is Python + Scipy. It's A LOT better than Matlab. Depending on your application domain, you might also want to look at R or Julia.

It's been a long time since I've used Matlab (it was for a diff eq class), but isn't R, with vectors as its primary datatype, much more similar to Matlab than Scipy? Not that Scipy or Pandas is bad, but they have to work quite hard around the fundamentals of Python's syntax to emulate the same behavior of R/MATLAB.

I don't think this is the case. Most of numpy, which powers the vectorized operations that the rest of the scientific stack uses, is written in C anyway. The python part is simple, just python bindings to the C functions.

The matlab-like syntax for getting slices of arrays is the only really non-pythonic thing I can think of.

Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”

#89

Post by emp_zealoth »

deepnet wrote: post #75
emp_zealoth wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried to use Octave, I really did. Passed few classes with projects made in Octave. Then I nearly failed some classes because of simple, reproductible bugs no one gave a flying fuck about. None of PCs I've installed the thing on could produce a fully working figure with subplots. For example in 5 subplots number 3 would not render at all. Or the plot would not export to png if you had too many data points. Octav…

When Prof Andrew Ng first ran his Machine Learning MOOC, very many of us relied on Octave. An Octave dev showed up to help students and a fundraiser was organised in return. In the cases you mention, surely it would be trivial to prove if the problem was Ghostscript or not by demonstrating graph 3 or the missing data points were output or not by Octave before Ghostscripts png conversion. Surely modularity makes it ea…

http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?44050 I could easily reproduce the issue on a few different machines. I'm pretty sure it is ghostscript issue because it also hangs similarily when converting some images to pdfs. I can't remember if I even bothered to report the issue on GhostScript tracker - there are exactly the same issues being reported as early as 2008 all the way to today.

Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”

#90

Post by dandelion_lover »

legulere wrote: post #77
belorn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide a single political movement that is fully optional in their goal. Would a vegetarian say that if a person voluntarily buy animal factory meat, then there is nothing wrong with it. Would a environmentalist say that if a person voluntarily buy a polluting car, then there is nothing wrong with the manufacturer selling it. Would a anti-war activist say that if a person voluntarily join the military, then…

Do all vegetarians try to "replace and eliminate" meat-consumption for the whole population? How do you view those that do? > if a person voluntarily buy a polluting car, Everyone is affected by the pollution, so a bad comparison. > person voluntarily join the military, Again people are involuntarily affected by war. > I am looking at a list of political movements, and I can't see a single one which would say that th…

>Do all vegetarians try to "replace and eliminate" meat-consumption for the whole population? How do you view those that do?

Everyone is affected, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...

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