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Here's a sympathetic perspective on some of these issues (note: I've known and worked with RMS since the late 1970s, e.g before he grew his hair long and decided to start the FSF). From the article: > ...crucial mistake: confounding individual virtue and purity with wider social liberation. > ...the familiar liberal ideological mistake of lifestylism: the belief that changes in one's own personal preferences are the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't really see why it needs to be called out as such. It's pretty explicitly radical leftist. Is Hacker News exclusively capitalist now? TBF I tend to avoid this site, so maybe it is. If you think materialist analysis isn't useful, well, maybe it's not useful to you . But geez, the author didn't even get into, e.g., Marxist analysis or anything so controversial :P
Actually IMO majority of hacker news commenters are left leaning, and I try avoiding political news here because their rethoric is tiring (to me).
I notice that the comments usually the fit the article. For example, this has tons of comments sympathetic to Stallman (he's generally pro-socialist). While some other pro-libertarian article would have mostly comments sympathetic to capitalism, libertarian, etc. This occurs on Reddit too.
So libertarian/pro-capitalist people see HN as left-leaning, while left-leaning people see HN as pro-capitalist.
(Here I'm focusing on part 2 and the conclusion of the article, not part 1.) This article suggests that RMS ought to make his own leftist beliefs an explicit part of the free software movement. As the author is aware, RMS has generally tried not to do this, recognizing that free software advocates can have a wide range of beliefs about other issues, even if a plurality of people in the movement are hold leftist views…
Meanwhile I often joke that the highly permissive BSD/MIT/etc. licenses are for commies.
(Here I'm focusing on part 2 and the conclusion of the article, not part 1.) This article suggests that RMS ought to make his own leftist beliefs an explicit part of the free software movement. As the author is aware, RMS has generally tried not to do this, recognizing that free software advocates can have a wide range of beliefs about other issues, even if a plurality of people in the movement are hold leftist views…
Indeed, as an independent consultant I'm far more inclined to use LGPL/AGPL/GPL licences for work that I think I could sell commercially precisely because I see those licenses and private property/capitalism as very compatible. Quite simply, I'm happy if you either pay me money or code for the right to use my code; the users who contribute neither are more often than not still benefiting me via a wider userbase - aka…
> Stallman's rhetoric is filled with this problematic logic on all layers: from trying to correct other people's terminology Yes, this is my main obstacle accepting RMS. In my opinion, he took the word "free", made a term "free software", and described it in accordance with his agenda, while what he advocated only partially conforms to the meaning of the word "free" or "freedom". There are certainly licenses offering…
> There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3. More freedom to who? Users, distributors, maintainers, vendors, service providers? You can't guarantee complete freedom to each of them simultaneously. For example, allowing distributors to do everything they want (e.g not providing source code) will prevent users to do everything they want (e.g modifying the program). So it makes no sense to talk abou…
When a project includes code from another project (be it GPL or MIT), it is creating a new work under copyright. What GPL does is hold the developer ransom with a lighter over the GPL code, in order to guarantee the new work is distributed to other people with the same restrictive license. It just means that code under GPL is orders of magnitude less valuable to the world than code under less restrictive licenses.
It's not just about proprietary software that can't put GPL code into their software, but software that's released under less restrictive licenses as well. If code is GPL, I just stay away.
IMHO, Stallman made two mistakes: 1. He moved into politics (which is in my HO, one of the failure points of a lot of tech people. Everyone has a right to an opinion, but certain people have more talent at politics than others, and certain people have more talents at code than others). He's a great programmer, and could have pushed the FSF community directly by committing and improving code. And even if he can't code…
Who's their 2nd in command?
Who'll take over after he passes on?
What will the FSF look like in 30 years? """
I don't actually know who the second-in-command (if there is such a position, the FSF seems very flat) is. But the first-in-command is John Sullivan and has been for like, ten years? A long time at least.
I don't think anyone will ever replace rms. You can't necessarily teach vision like he has. Honestly, maybe nobody will replace rms because free software will be illegal in the surveillance dystopia of the future. Everything else in The Right to Read has born out. But, the management of the FSF has been out of his hands for a long time. He's just the theorist; a role that's utterly critical, but not business-critical. When rms dies, it'll be like Marx dying.
I have no idea what computing will look like in 30 years but I think the fundamental premise of the FSF is that software is an extension of thought, so the sanctity of your software is the sanctity of your mind and should be regarded as such. That is an easy thing to continue on.
> Stallman's rhetoric is filled with this problematic logic on all layers: from trying to correct other people's terminology Yes, this is my main obstacle accepting RMS. In my opinion, he took the word "free", made a term "free software", and described it in accordance with his agenda, while what he advocated only partially conforms to the meaning of the word "free" or "freedom". There are certainly licenses offering…
What is it that you want to do that the GPL will not allow you? How is the GPL taking your freedom or society's freedom away?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3. More freedom to who? Users, distributors, maintainers, vendors, service providers? You can't guarantee complete freedom to each of them simultaneously. For example, allowing distributors to do everything they want (e.g not providing source code) will prevent users to do everything they want (e.g modifying the program). So it makes no sense to talk abou…
There is absolutely no possible way that you can defend GPL as being more free than licenses like BSD/MIT. Copyright is about being able to copy the software. GPL places restrictions on who is able to copy your software. BSD/MIT place less restrictions. It's black and white; there is no argument. When a project includes code from another project (be it GPL or MIT), it is creating a new work under copyright. What GPL…
While we're voting with our feet, I don't contribute to BSD projects unless I'm paid to, because it's mostly feeding parasites.
That said, I think this essay paints an overly narrow view of Stallmanism. Stallman would much prefer systematic change, even though he is a self-identifying liberal; you see this less in the blessed FSF essays and more on stallman.org and similar because he doesn't get so speculative to talk about policy in most of the exhaustively-edited technical specifications on the finer points of software freedom theory.
Stallman is I think overly pragmatic. He lives in a society where individualist liberal political action, voting with one's dollar, etc., is the only acceptable method of political change, so he only ever expresses change in these terms. This makes for a weak praxis, because liberalism always makes for a weak praxis. But this isn't Stallmanism; it's just the overpragmatism of rms. Marx thought that electoralism was a good idea, for example, but that doesn't mean communism is inherently electoralist.
I think the best thing to do is to explicitly approach software freedom from a collective liberation stance and be ready and willing to point out the contradictions between the totality and the underlying ideological motivations of software freedom. Stallman doesn't need to do this; I think he's contributed quite enough honestly, and that if you want a better praxis, you should provide it yourself, because it isn't hard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is it that you want to do that the GPL will not allow you? How is the GPL taking your freedom or society's freedom away?
Personally, I find people complaining about the GPL's lack of freedom a bit hypocritical. What does the GPL prevent you from doing? As a user, nothing. As far as I (a user) is concerned, Mozilla's MPL/GPL, bash's GPL3 and VSCode MIT licenses are all equally free (I can use them and distribute them). So what problem do programmers have with GPL? You can't make a derivative closed source work. So you want to make a non…
That's not it. Your license has to be GPL in order to use any GPL code. I try to make the stuff I do on my personal time under the MIT license, which means I can't use GPL code, but GPL code can incorporate my code. Tell me which license is more free now.
Also, it completely disregards the scope of things. If I incorporate a GPL library into my software for say JSON parsing, then it means my entire program must be GPL. Thankfully most libraries aren't GPL but LGPL.
The other thing is that you can't use proprietary libraries in your own code that has been infected with GPL. If you want to develop your own software that incorporates GPL code and even release it to your users, it's impossible to link against proprietary libraries.