RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”
1–10 of 101 posts
Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”
#2Which organizations is he talking about?
Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”
#3Which organizations is he talking about?
My first guess was RedHat. From skimming through https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/all-courses-exam..., it seems all of the courses use open source software, that might not be libre. For example I'm guessing some of Puppet's software are not libre.
Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”
#4Metacomment: a few years ago anything by RMS would have been jumped on within minutes of posting with lots of comments against him and his principles. Is he now being looked at in a different light by the wider software development community?
Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”
#5Metacomment: a few years ago anything by RMS would have been jumped on within minutes of posting with lots of comments against him and his principles. Is he now being looked at in a different light by the wider software development community?
Not sure what timezone you're in but it's about 4AM US Eastern time.
Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”
#6Metacomment: a few years ago anything by RMS would have been jumped on within minutes of posting with lots of comments against him and his principles. Is he now being looked at in a different light by the wider software development community?
Not sure what timezone you're in but it's about 4AM US Eastern time.
Hmm, I asked since my mental model of the 'programming community' that I osmosify by reading comments on these kind of websites detects a slight shift on the RMS popularity front over the last year or so. I feel he's coming in from the cold a bit.
I am mostly browsing HN during my european daytime. Lots of people seem to comment on stories during my daytime. Do you mean his detractors are predominantly American? Do you think they have a particular political allegiance too?
Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure what timezone you're in but it's about 4AM US Eastern time.
Hmm, I asked since my mental model of the 'programming community' that I osmosify by reading comments on these kind of websites detects a slight shift on the RMS popularity front over the last year or so. I feel he's coming in from the cold a bit. I am mostly browsing HN during my european daytime. Lots of people seem to comment on stories during my daytime. Do you mean his detractors are predominantly American? Do y…
I think people are just tired of criticising him. I personally am against him, but it bores me to discuss the same stuff all over again, especially when it's "meta" as you say and can be deemed off topic.
(Not from the US)
Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”
#8Metacomment: a few years ago anything by RMS would have been jumped on within minutes of posting with lots of comments against him and his principles. Is he now being looked at in a different light by the wider software development community?
I don’t have any stats to back this up, but my impression is that most software developers doesn’t care that much about the FSF and RMS. Lots of people use free/libre software, of course. It’s kinda hard to avoid these days :)
Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”
#9I really appreciate what RMS has done as far as start a movement that I think has contributed greatly to the human existence but when he says things like "The basic point of the free software movement is that nonfree software is unjust and should not exist." I can't but seriously question his judgment. It's one thing to personally want to use free software, it's another to claim that nonfree software "should not exist". If one person writes nonfree software and another person voluntarily uses it, I don't think anything "wrong" has transpired. People should be free to offer software under whatever terms they desire likewise people should be able to consume software under whatever terms they are willing to agree to.
Re: RMS: Beware of Contradictory “Support”
#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 is our mission to correct.
Just to throw out an extreme example for discussion: the Mozilla Foundation would seem to be one of the free-software organizations that RMS critiques.
One initiative they've supported is Software Carpentry: http://software-carpentry.org/scf/partners/
One of Software Carpentry's packaged lessons is for MATLAB: http://software-carpentry.org/lessons/
To be fair, the current MATLAB lesson plan includes asides for how GNU Octave can be used...but the fact that the curriculum is titled "Programming with MATLAB" certainly counts as promotion of non-free software.
Edit: by "extreme", I mean that Mozilla is in most people's minds a passionate advocate for free software, and the number of their affiliations with proprietary software lessons is extremely small as far as I can tell.
Edit 2: FWIW, RMS's definition of non-free software may be much more expansive than most people's:
https://stallman.org/airbnb.html
> Airbnb requires you to run nonfree software (an app, or Javascript). It puts you in a data base easily available to Big Brother (just like a hotel).
JavaScript is many things, but nonfree isn't one of them.