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Time to fork the FSF

larrythefreesoftwareguy.wordpress.com

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Re: Time to fork the FSF

#91

Post by praptak »

forensic wrote: post #83
jpadvo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not at all with his opinion. It is that he expressed it in a horrendously, gratuitously crass and offensive way. Here is a transliteration into humane language of what he said: "My heart goes out to Steve Jobs' family in their time of grief. And my heart also goes to the millions of people who looked up to him as an icon and inspiration. But we need to not get so carried away honoring the dead that we fo…

>horrendously, gratuitously crass and offensive way. And? It's rms. He's the biggest nerd in the world. Nerds are expected to be horrendously, gratuitously crass, offensive and insensitive of people's emotions. This is like being mad that the sky is blue. Pointless outrage.

The point of the linked article, as I understood it, was that "it's just Stallman being Stallman" should no longer be an excuse for tolerating this behaviour. It casts bad light on the free software community as a whole.

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#92

Post by aaronmorey »

sliverstorm wrote: post #74
jpadvo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not at all with his opinion. It is that he expressed it in a horrendously, gratuitously crass and offensive way. Here is a transliteration into humane language of what he said: "My heart goes out to Steve Jobs' family in their time of grief. And my heart also goes to the millions of people who looked up to him as an icon and inspiration. But we need to not get so carried away honoring the dead that we fo…

It's ironic- it would seem to be RMS who is getting carried away. A great man has died, and all RMS can think about is what this means for the Free Software movement? To me, this discredits him more than anything I have ever heard him say. Software is not more important than life. Disclaimer: Actively avoids Apple products

I think this is a microcosm of a problem I've seen in the open source area in general... a preference for code over people.

Open source software won't take over by being 1.86x faster and using a totally sweet heap sort algorithm. I'm a geek and I find that kind of thing interesting at an intellectual level, but it doesn't make me want to spend an entire Saturday trying to get Linux to recognize my sound card. "Normal" people absolutely don't care and won't put up with the hassle.

With Steve gone, there's a taste-shaped hole in the entire technology world that I can't see anyone stepping in and taking over. Until the open source world gets its own Steve Jobs -- someone out there who starts focusing relentlessly on the users (how to make software "just work" and look/feel great at the same time), it's never going to unseat the dominant players (as much as I might want it to).

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#93

Post by kragen »

josephg wrote: post #6

I'm aware of Stallman's advocacy on free software issues, but (completely honest question), what else does the Free Software Foundation do ? Software is at a point where its basically impossible to make anything useful without opensource software. Proprietary code is a minority in my stack both as a developer and as a user. Proprietary software is often good before opensource software is good, but consistently openso…

> I feel like the opensource movement has already won.

We have a really long way to go, still.

The most popular computer platforms in the world are iOS and Android, and their users don't have the practical ability or, in some countries, the legal right to modify the software on them.

Many people communicate with their friends and colleagues through Facebook and Gmail — proprietary software applications that send copies of their most private data to advertising-funded companies in foreign countries. (Unless they live in the US.) Their right to continue communicating with their friends through these media is subject to arbitrary revocation at any moment.

Every day, I run into web sites that don't work unless I install Flash.

And my friend David tells me his startup has just received a patent lawsuit from Lodsys.

I understand that you're happy with this situation (except the patent part), but I'm not.

I want to live in a world where people's communication with their friends, family, and colleagues, and the public, is subject to approval from nobody except the communicating parties.

I want to live in a world where Apple can't surreptitiously log everywhere I go on my own phone, and where I'm not committing a crime if I reprogram the phone to stop anyone who is.

I want to live in a world where I can buy any random piece of hardware at the computer store and plug it in with happy anticipation that it will work with Linux, not dread that I'll have to search all over the web for half-assed reverse-engineered drivers.

I want to never read another fucking EULA, and to never again have to click through without reading it and wonder what rights I've just signed away.

We've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#95

Post by daedhel »

cookiecaper wrote: post #51

OS X would not be possible without RMS. You have to remember that Stallman was around before Jobs' day -- he was performing real work at MIT when Apple was initially conceptualized. Stallman therefore is apparently less vulnerable to the reality distortion field and does not unduly offer oblations to a guy who was obsessed with shininess at the expense of hacker culture. Jobs went to lengths on many products to preve…

I should not say this as it brings nothing to the conversation, but thank you.

This hypocrite Job Mania is making me sick and your opinions expresses pretty well parts of my resentment..

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#96

Post by mrb »

sgentle wrote: post #21

I don't get it, personally. Yes, Stallman's a loon - although as an aside I think that every good movement needs its loons. Who's going to say "you know what? I believe in Free Software so much that I will use nothing else, and publicly and harshly declare that anyone doing otherwise is a moron and a traitor to the future of humanity"? Anyone who is willing to sacrifice the usefulness of the last 30 years of propriet…

Loon is NOT an adjective that you can apply to Stallman.

  loon
      n 1: a worthless lazy fellow
He is certainly not that. He founded the GNU project. Authored the GPL. Wrote dozens of open source applications. And overall contributed a lot to free software. Choose your words carefully!

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#97

Post by kragen »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #31
tlrobinson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've won that battle, but not the war. Servers, databases, frameworks, languages, etc are often open source, but the majority of applications are not.

That's the problem, you're the problem if you refuse to accept that the best solution is going to be the freedom for people to sell commercial closed software as well as use open software. The idea that this is a war is exactly why RMS is wrong. The idea that we must win it and we must make everyone use the new hot open license is wrong. The idea should be to encourage people to use open licenses, and to promote the…

> the best solution is going to be the freedom for people to sell commercial closed software as well as use open software.

The "freedom" you're describing involves government-granted monopolies enforced by pervasive surveillance, unannounced office raids to audit licenses, serial numbers to ensure trackability of all CD-R media, and prosecution of people for disabling malicious software running on their own computers. Certainly it's a kind of freedom; but can't we do better?

Stallman had a slightly different viewpoint about that "freedom":

The "freedom to choose a license" which denies others essential freedoms is not really a freedom. It is a form of power, of domination over others. Your description makes it sound like a matter of individual freedom by obscuring the presence of the others in the situation.

The GPL is designed to protect the essential freedoms for everyone, by denying anyone the power to take them away.

(He wrote that in 1999, but I imagine he still feels the same way.)

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#99

Post by tzury »

I fully understand this Larry, and think FSF would have been doing much better if there was someone else at its cockpit.

RMS is a fanatic about free software, like ultra religious people are to their religion.

For instance, for me, being free, means, at first and above all, being free to choose. Being able to install proprietary nVidia driver which does not crash my linux box every half a day, and have this driver built and available for me in my linux distro repository.

Years ago, RMS was a guest of honor in IBM Tel Aviv. These were the days, Linux was something left-field, obscure, that no one wanted to know or hear about it. There were hundreds of developers in the hall who came to hear about the "Gnu/Linux thing" from the Freedom Guru.

All of a sudden, in the middle of his lecture, out of any imaginable context, RMS took of his left shoe, and then the sack, and start rubbing his toes with his fingers while preaching about free software.

Yes, imagine that, a man is playing with his barefoot on a stage, would you remember anything he said? Would you listen to anything he has to say? Or would your brain being busy understanding and categorizing the extraordinary show you are in?

(Those were not the days of youtube and smartphone, I bet if that would have been happening these days, this was the most viewed video on youtube amongst hackers.)

It is sad, but successful open source project does not seemed to get along with RMS at all, see Ubuntu/Canonical as a good example.

Re: Time to fork the FSF

#100

Post by mrb »

I think RMS's statement is completely misinterpreted. Don't forget the first part of the sentence: "I'm not glad he's dead", which literally means RMS is not glad that Jobs died!

"I'm glad he's gone" is only a complaint towards Jobs' influence on personal computing. You may disagree with RMS (I certainly do), and it is certainly an inappropriate comment to make at this time, but this is nothing to make a drama of RMS' comment... Geez people!

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