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Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

zdnet.com

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Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#81

Post by badsectoracula »

Beltiras wrote: post #38
mikekchar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure exactly what he meant by software license hygiene, but if it's what I imagine, it's a significant problem. Often people don't quite understand the licenses they choose and they get into trouble as a result. For example, there is a free software game that I follow which is licensed under the GPL. The author made a passing statement that the game is under the GPL, but none of text of the game is (it's an R…

Story sounds like data to me. Data should not be in the repo, just the means to fetch it.

Data definitely belong in the repository, not only because you want to version your assets too, but also because chances are your code at time T is also meant to work with your data at the same time T - so you don't even attempt to do stuff like trying to figure out when some bug was introduced with current data (that could cause or hide the bug or your older code not even working with the current data).

You could try to put your data in some other repository, but since you are versioning that data anyway, that introduces additional pointless complexity and besides the code is useless without the data to work with - so just stick them together and be done with it. If your VCS cannot handle that, instead of having it dictate your workflow towards an inferior solution, change your VCS.

At least as far as games are concerned, data and code are interwoven and any other approach is guaranteed to either fail or produce unnecessary and easily avoidable complications.

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#82

Post by Lammy »

farisjarrah wrote: post #80
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #33

Without sounding too sacrilegious, Dr. Stallman is the Free Software Jesus--he preaches the gospel of Free Software to the whole world and associates with "sinners" calling them to repentance. If he can bring "the truth" of Free Software to Microsoft employees and help them "see the light", why wouldn't he? He certainly looks the part of Free Software prophet when dressed as Saint Ignuicius: https://stallman.org/sain…

> Sainthood in the Church of Emacs requires living a life of purity—but in the Church of Emacs, this does not require celibacy (a sigh of relief is heard). Now there's a quote that didn't age well... That whole page is just... strange...

I miss levity in computing. That page is a nice throwback.

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#83

Post by farisjarrah »

kokwak wrote: post #79

copy paste from RMS: open source != free software, and GitHub has already done enough damage to encourage developers to ignore the existence of software lincences

If you make a public repo, Github literally shows you a little chart that shows you how "Complete" your repo is. And if you don't have a License, Contributing, and Readme files, then that chart never shows as completed. What about that is Github encouraging developers to ignore software licenses?

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#84

Post by grzm »

nailer wrote: post #28
ChrisSD wrote: post #7

An English language article: https://www.zdnet.com/article/free-software-advocate-richard... Also Pedro Paulo explained what the content of the talk was: > Mostly standard talk. Importance of free software, GPL v3, GNU vs Linux. However, he had a list of "small requests": make Github push users to better software license hygiene, make hardware manufacturers to publish their hardware specs, make it easier to workaroun…

dang / sctb could you please change the link to the English one? Thanks.

The mods don't see every comment. The fastest way to get their attention is to email them using the contact link in the footer.

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#85

Post by DSMan195276 »

km3k wrote: post #34
mikekchar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure exactly what he meant by software license hygiene, but if it's what I imagine, it's a significant problem. Often people don't quite understand the licenses they choose and they get into trouble as a result. For example, there is a free software game that I follow which is licensed under the GPL. The author made a passing statement that the game is under the GPL, but none of text of the game is (it's an R…

Yes that is a common problem. I could see GitHub creating tools to help you select a license and inform you how to use it properly, as well as having systems that show you how the license affects your project.

They actually already did this years ago, it's here: https://choosealicense.com/

It's not under the github.com domain, but they did create it. IIRC they link to it somewhere when you go to create a new repo, along with a drop down to select what license you want (Assuming you're not just pushing an already created repo).

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#88

Post by teh_klev »

bubble_talk wrote: post #66

If Microsoft hadn't embraced open source around the time Satya Nadella took over, by now they would have probably imploded and become irrelevant (I mean in the sense of how Bing is more or less irrelevant to most website owners even though it apparently makes a lot of money). Its not as if they decided to open source Windows XP.

> If Microsoft hadn't embraced open source around the time Satya Nadella took over

Microsoft were already well down the road to "embracing" open source before Nadella took over as CEO. The movement inside the company began around 2006 with folks like Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, Rob Conery and others pushing for more openness. Two open source licenses were created by Microsoft to accommodate such works (MS-PL and MS-RL[0]). When ASP.NET MVC was released in 2009 it was open-sourced and shipped with the MS-PL license.

As with any large organisation it takes some time to build up the momentum to change their behaviour and strategy.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative#Micro...

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#89

Post by Beltiras »

badsectoracula wrote: post #81
Beltiras wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Story sounds like data to me. Data should not be in the repo, just the means to fetch it.

Data definitely belong in the repository, not only because you want to version your assets too, but also because chances are your code at time T is also meant to work with your data at the same time T - so you don't even attempt to do stuff like trying to figure out when some bug was introduced with current data (that could cause or hide the bug or your older code not even working with the current data). You could tr…

Here is a very nice video on this very thing delivered at last Blizzcon about the restoration of WoW Classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhKkP8LryYM

Re: Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week

#90

Post by tannhaeuser »

thekyle wrote: post #67
tannhaeuser wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has a point. Why would he want his "performance" to be featured on proprietary video formats or platforms? Even ignoring the proprietary part, he'd basically provide exclusive content to yt without compensation. Speaking of which, maybe he could address Github blocking indie search crawlers.

> Why would he want his "performance" to be featured on proprietary video formats or platforms? Maybe so that he could reach a larger audience.

His reach is large enough at this point I guess. Maybe he also makes a living from giving talks, which he'd undermine by being on yt.
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