The comments in the blog talk about arrogance and how someone else would have done what RMS did if he didn't exist. They also complain that him being a "nutjob" has actually done harm to freedom. This line of thinking is dead wrong. It takes someone precisely like RMS to stand for his ideal and dedicate his life to what he believes. I, personally, feel a great debt to the man.
It's "funny" that people see his statement, that perhaps it's better he didn't die as an infant because he's done some good, as arrogant. He could be paraphrased as saying something like "I've experienced such misery that sometimes I wish I wasn't here at all but on the other hand I think I've done more good than harm for others and there is some comfort in that." How that's arrogant is beyond me. I can understand people having the opinion that, no, he's done more harm than good - but he's not arrogant for thinking otherwise.
Yeah, I'll have to agree with that sentiment, and hope that at least Stallman reads HN. I, for one, have been personally paid over multitudes of times due to free software, not just free to use, but also free to read and free to tinker. I'm better at what I do because of what he championed.
"I think I've done more good than harm" is vastly different than "in terms of the effect on the world, it's very good that I've lived", though. A little humility goes a long way.
The "someone else would have done it" seems particularly unlikely to me, at least at the time. If you were to list significant bodies of free software that were released between the FSF's founding in 1983 and the Linux kernel's release in 1991, they're almost all GNU projects. The one significant exception I can think of is the X consortium's decision in 1986 to freely license X. And the stuff that started to be released starting in the early-90s pretty much without exception built on GNU stuff (even all the free BSDs still grudgingly include GNU code, despite 10 years of actively reducing their reliance on it).
Free, Open Source software grew out of the polemic position it took.
BSD / MIT licenses might be "freer", in some sense, but almost all free projects are released because of the ideal of fighting propitiatory software.
I'm pretty sure that the GNU project was one of the main forces that inspired this culture.
The fight is still going on. Academia and business is still getting pushed to release code - think climate models and finance. If it weren't for RMS's work, would people really take such a hard line on propitiatory software? I doubt it.
BSD / MIT licenses might be "freer", in some sense, but almost all free projects are released because of the ideal of fighting propitiatory software.
This word, propitiatory .. I do not think it means what you think it means .. But even if it did mean what you thought it meant, I don't buy the argument. Lots of people don't release software for free because they're against proprietary software. Some release it for geek cred, or because they want somebody else to maintain it, or because it's not commercially viable as a product (which defines 99.99% of software that comes with a linux distribution .. I mean, do you really think you could get people to buy /bin/ls?)
The word you're looking for is "proprietary". And back in the day, people did (effectively) pay for /bin/ls. The difference between proprietary software and F/OSS isn't just price though, it's also the freedom of what you can do with it.
The old BSD wasn't freely licensed, though. Some versions included source code, but with no license permitting distribution of derived works.
The first even partial release of a free-software BSD was in 1989, when UC Berkeley first wrote the 4-clause BSD license (with the now-dropped "advertising clause"), and released a non-functioning OS core consisting of TCP/IP stack and libraries, called "Net/1", but couldn't release a functioning OS because they couldn't get permission to release the code that AT&T owned. They rewrote a bunch of the AT&T code as free software and released the first-ever free BSD, Net/2, in 1991, which then led to the 386BSD port, and thence to FreeBSD.
Prentice Hall owned the copyrights. Only after minix lost significant ground to linux was minix released under a different license.
I think that one was one of Tanenbaums great strategic mistakes. The world of software was definitely 'ready' to adopt minix instead of linux (micro kernel, big name behind it), but 'free' won out, and minix is a footnote whereas linux is the unix with the most distribution ever.
What do you think would happen to FreeBSD if GCC vanished tomorrow? Hint: It would probably suddenly finish incorporating some other, more freely licensed, compiler into its base system.
The question is not what would happen tomorrow...the question is what would have happened has RMS never existed. I think there's a pretty compelling case to be made that FreeBSD would have never happened; or at least, it would be a very different beastie.
I don't agree with RMS on all things, but he was absolutely instrumental in making our free software world what it is today, and just because you have differing beliefs about what a "free" license really is doesn't mean you should discount what he did for your favorite OS.
The question is not what would happen tomorrow...the question is what would have happened has RMS never existed.
My hope is that if RMS hadn't existed, somebody who wasn't a creepy, bearded hippy would have been the spokesperson for free software.. Hopefully somebody more balanced who didn't work himself into a tizzy over whether to call it "GNU/Linux or Linux" ..
The creepy, bearded, unbalanced hippy is what you see when you judge Stallman with a glance. His words, on the other hand, are unusually balanced and reasonable. In his essays and conferences, he wields them with extreme care, showing he fully understand their power.
Hence his insistence over GNU/Linux. It boils down to being aware of the origins of the system you are using: how it came into existence, and why. The answer, of course lies in the mouth of the original author. In the case of GNU/Linux, the name of the system directly influences which guru we are going to listen to (Linus or Richard). This is very important, because the two men have very different political opinions.
Plus, as far as I know, GNU is bigger than Linux, in probably everything. Especially at the beginning of Linux. So the legitimate name of the entire system may well be "GNU". Unfortunately, the GNU system became popular largely thanks to the Linux kernel, and people started to use the wrong name for the entire system. Really, "GNU/Linux" is a reasonable compromise.
One doesn't even have to agree to use the term "GNU/Linux", in order to have some respect for the man who made a huge impact on a community and culture we all benefit from. We owe him a great deal of respect. That doesn't mean we have to use the exact same language he uses. I don't call Linux "GNU/Linux", for example, but I would never hurl insults at the man who made so much of this possible. Humans have a strong sense of "other" and since RMS has decided to be so other-ly from mainstream society, he gets a lot of flack. That judging is a failing of the people doing the judging; weak egos attack others to try to make themselves feel better. RMS is following his beliefs, completely and without reservation, which is something few of us have the guts or gumption to do. I respect him for that, even while disagreeing with him on a few things (like the name GNU/Linux).
The counter argument to that is that nowadays on my desktop based on the Linux kernel I use a lot of software that are not GNU projects. Sure they may not be as fundemental as say the coreutils - but they are just as important to having a useable modern operating system.
And the last time I looked, it was more of "Clang not being complete" then anything else to hold up DragonFly BSD from compiling. Not sure about the state of OpenBSD or NetBSD with Clang, though.
On OpenBSD: there have been quite a few "Fix <simple bug>. Found by Clang static analyzer" commits. I believe that everything builds with Clang, but I'm not sure.
Quite true. A movement like the free software one needs people who are not willing to barter with their ideals. I for one do not agree with RMS on everything, and I do still use a few proprietary pieces of software, but I do appreciate the fact that RMS is who he is.
An appropriate quote from George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man."
I don't see Stallman's statement as to whether his birth had a good impact on the world or not as necessarily arrogant. Arguably, that's a question everybody needs to or ends up asking themselves: on balance, has my existence been a positive one?
While there might've been an open software advocate without Stallman, it can't be seriously said that the world would've been better off without Stallman's advocacy. And thus, on balance, the world's better off with Stallman than without.
He's about the worst PR possible for free software. I like his code & I mostly drink the kool aid, I do, but he really needs to let Eben Moglen do the talking..
He should definitely not have a kid. He seems of the opinion that life is painful, and he has wished he had never been born (well, he has wished he had "killed himself when [he] was born", but there's little difference).
To "have a kid" is to create another person who might well wish to never have been born, another person who will have to decide whether or not it is justified to bring kids into this painful world.
I am glad that RMS is so honest about it. Most people cover up their unhappiness.
A classic dilemma, but I suppose then nobody should have kids, by that logic. Or only stupid people should have kids, who are unable to see the dark sides of life.
Did RMS say that, or just that he himself had a miserable experience? My point is, if only people with thoroughly happy lives should have kids, then probably only stupid people would have kids.
No, RMS didn't say that, I did. I don't know how RMS feels about this; whether he doesn't want kids for the sake of the kids, or for the sake of those living now.
I myself am indeed of the opinion that no one should have kids. Life is a very mixed bag. Nonexistent people don't suffer the bad, and don't miss the good. Everybody wins! Or rather, nobody loses. :-)
He is on record as not wanting to have a kid because in his view the planet is over-populated. Also, I don't fully understand (due to lack of inquiry into it) his view of marriage but I'm fairly certain that "thinks it's too easy" is not accurate.
I'd think Stallman would have no problem finding an interested woman, provided he emphasized his fame rather than a self-described lack of "success".
All the people grabbing cheap cool points by dumping on the man are ultimately making it harder for him to get a date, and that's just needlessly cruel.
You think he's not finding a woman because he's not famous in a way that's attractive to women?
Hilarious.
How about this: he has a very arrogant personality, the ego the size of a blimp and it's just impossible to have a conversation with him unless you agree with every single word he says.
I don't think that at all. I was responding to a post that claimed RMS should use his fame to attract women. I doubt that will work for a number of obvious reasons.
This point of view is miserably broken. Yes, planet is overpopulated, in Asia & Africa. On the contrary, by having kids in a highly developed country and by giving them education one is doing a favor to this planet & its culture.
Seems to me that without the programmers who went the commercial route (Gates et al), computers wouldn't be as widely used and his impact wouldn't be as big. Or that someone else wouldn't have stepped up in his absence. And statements like those quoted in the article seem just a wee bit overdramatic.
Stallman is nothing if not dramatic;) I have trouble imagining that computers would not be as widely used today, not without corporate backing and innovation, but without the kinds of hijinks that have kept the Wintel near-monopoly in place for so long. It was a bunch of hackers, not suits, who started the personal computer revolution.
I'm not sure that's true, though it's a counterfactual so hard to prove either way. I think without Wintel, probably we would've had more competition and innovation in the area, and cheaper/faster machines. There was plenty of speeding up and broadening of home-computer access before Wintel came on the scene, with competition between Amiga, Atari, Apple, etc. And even in Wintel, innovation sped up noticeably once AMD managed to temporarily break Intel's stranglehold, and inject a bit of competition into the x86 market.
> I think without Wintel, probably we would've had more competition and innovation in the area, and cheaper/faster machines.
Maybe. Or maybe we'd just have locked on to CP/M-86 and Digital Research, which was just as tied to x86.
However, it's impossible to tell if someone like Gates would have risen to the top. Gary Kildall was not Bill Gates and, for that reason among others, Digital Research never became Microsoft. Corporate culture and philosophies matter.
Innovators - really any business providing a product or service that's of some value - deserve to get paid. Competitors, however, deserve to be treated fairly, which Intel and Microsoft both have a track record of not doing. They have both done a lot of incredible work over the years but IMO their reputation is tarnished, and people like RMS, while they may at times sound crazy, have done a lot of good for businesses and hobbyists alike.
In an alternate world where Windows wasn't dominate, we probably wouldn't have been locked into x86, and you are right, we wouldn't have 3000 MHz machines, but we probably would have BETTER machines since x86 sucks so hard.
Even if hardware performance didn't improve as much as it has (and that's a really big if), it would have improved.
Software might not have eaten up all the performance profits, either, though. Overall, we might have had more clock cycles free and gotten things done more quickly with whatever hardware we had.
> programmers who went the commercial route (Gates et al)
It's a false dichotomy. There is no need to imprison (as Stallman would say) the user and disrespect his rights (at least to use, understand, improve) in order to be commercial. What "Gates et al" have done is to bind their users through the software they use to manage their lives and jobs, ensuring long-term prosperity through technological dependency.
The folks at Red Hat, Canonical and MindTouch (just to name a few I have in my head right now) are every bit as serious as Microsoft when it comes to be commercial and to be paid for their work.
The main difference being they show much more consideration towards their users and customers.
Red Hat, Canonical and MindTouch combined have not had as much impact on computing as Apple or Microsoft alone. I was going to qualify that, but no, I think it's pretty unequivocal.
Also, your selection of companies seems a bit deceptive. These companies' profit strategies are very narrowly focused on the one market where it's possible to make money with free software — and even that isn't really making money from the software. You have to be in a market where people will pay through the nose for support contracts, because the software itself isn't making much money.
The one real exception I can think of is Mozilla, which makes decent money off of Firefox. Otherwise, unfortunately, it does generally seem to be necessary to bind the users enough to make them pay you for the software. (That's not a sarcastic "unfortunately" — I do think it would be great if I could reasonably sell free software as profitably as non-free software, but I don't see any evidence that it's feasible.)
> Red Hat, Canonical and MindTouch combined have not had as much impact on computing as Apple or Microsoft alone.
Wouldn't that be a question of time and business model? Apple is a hardware company and both were around when the PC (not the IBM one) was invented.
> isn't really making money from the software
It's very hard to directly make money from software sales if you grant your customers the right to share it. Software companies make money out of the scarcity of software ("You want Windows? Ask Microsoft"). Free software is naturally abundant. It's possible, but not easy, to make your users pay directly for it.
And Mozilla can't ask users to pay for it. Not only because it's infinitely abundant (anyone can give you one) but Microsoft's IE comes bundled in the OS most Firefox users run. Opera does that and look at their market share.
And that is why it is generally necessary to "imprison" (as Stallman would say) the user. Otherwise you're making a product that won't make money. There are a few markets where you might find a connected business to recoup the money you spent on software, but it's not a general business model for development.
That's what I was getting at: It's hard to be rewarded for free software, so there really is a dichotomy between free and commercial software. It's not just Jobs and friends being dicks and restricting customers.
No. You are only making software that doesn't usually get sold. Most of it isn't, but you can custom-develop - building upon piles of other free software - and then license it under a free license to your client who chooses whether to share it (always under a free license) or not. Free software can be sold. I know this because I did it a lot.
> It's hard to be rewarded for free software
OTOH, it's much cheaper and easier to develop it. With closed software, you have to invent your own wheels. With free and open-source software, you are free to use the ramjet engines other people have developed.
Again, you're outlining a highly specialized business plan for custom development — not a general principle for making money with FOSS. If I freely license my next game, I'll lose my shirt. If I create an awesome, game-changing productivity suite and GPL it, I'll lose my shirt. If I do anything outside of some very tiny niches, I'll lose my shirt.
There are a few small areas where FOSS is as commercially viable as anything else, and you'll notice those are also generally the areas where it seems to be most mature. You can't generalize those tiny areas and say that making open-source software in general is a reliable income source.
It's not possible to make a business out of selling goods that are infinitely abundant. Free software is one such thing.
Making open-source is not a direct income driver and, apart from very limited niches, will never be, but, nevertheless, it allows a business to have full control of its technology stack.
Company A builds a great game using a closed-source library built by company B and company C builds another great game using, say, an LGPL library. When the underlying platform changes, breaking both libraries, company C is not subject to whatever the strategy of company B is and, therefore, can be first to market with a new, compatible, version.
This is a hypothetical situation, of course, but illustrates one important thing about free software - most people don't really make it: they use it and, from time to time, and, if and when the need arises, add a little improvement here or a fix there. Its strength lies in the sheer number of people that give a little hand, scratching one another's itch.
>There are a few markets where you might find a connected business to recoup the money you spent on software, but it's not a general business model for development.
I also believe that the "Stallman or nothing" suggested by so many of his fans is a false dichotomy. You don't need to be rabidly communistic about software to oppose the "imprisoning" influence of corporate software vendors, after all.
No, you don't. And there are certainly some pressures not to do so, but, in the end, it's a rights issue - your right to control the tools that everyday grow more and more indispensable to participate in society and to protect your privacy.
But this attitude, of sacrificing "just a little" here and there for more convenience is not healthy either.
And then there is another false idea: Free Software is not about Communism. Communism is about the collective ownership of scarce resources. Free Software is the realization that software (as ideas and knowledge) are infinitely abundant.
The Stallman/FSF conception of "free software" is about communism, though. You don't need to give everything away for everything to be free. A copyfree license (BSD license, MIT/X11 license, OWL, et cetera) is just as much a "free software" license as a copyleft license, but doesn't make developers beholden to other developers and to the code itself. Rather, it makes the code beholden to developers and users, without making developers and users beholden to other developers and users.
The truth of the matter is that we're probably going to continue to see an increase in corporations using the GPL and (more to the point) other mutually incompatible copyleft licenses, because copyleft licenses can be extremely valuable for those who want to maintain control of the codebase while still getting the benefits of open source software, thus providing a way to sucker competitors into supporting your software "product" while still keeping an anticompetitive advantage by way of the MySQL AB business model and other ways to combine the GPL with proprietary licensing for market domination profit.
So, in summary . . . yes, it's true that "free software" in general isn't necessarily communistic or socialistic, but copyleft licensing in particular does bear a striking resemblance to various principles of communism and socialism. Just like communism and socialism, it also tends to get co-opted by market dominating monopolists and their ilk.
ispell-mode comes with emacs, but not with FireFox. Anyway, my browser is currently a little mis-configured so I can't actually see what I type as I type it. I need to fix it, but I haven't gotten around to it.
Either computers would be useless novelties or they would be mainstream and lose the hacker/counterculture status. Those are the only two options. There is no way that every person on earth was going to care about source code. Progress is still progress even if it's not what you want.
There is plenty of fun to be had still in technology, just don't get married to a philosophy. I learned that the hardway.
In the early days I ran a BBS. When the Internet became mainstream I remember thinking "how do I compete?" I redoubled my efforts: upgrading modems, adding drives/door games, increasing my software library, etc.... All the time thinking "where's the 'community feel' on the Inet?" By the late 90s I realized the problem was me and not the world.
Either computers would be useless novelties or they would be mainstream and lose the hacker/counterculture status. Those are the only two options.
Maybe you don't look at your cell phone or nintendoDS and think "hmm, there must be some way to run irc on this thing". Maybe you don't care anymore, but there are huge communities who do. Maybe the spirit of openness is fundamental to the tools themselves?
Sure, in his absence others may have stepped up to the job, but in this world, he did. We can sit and imagine all we want that with a different leader, FOSS would be better. But, that doesn't change the fact that we have him to thank for so very much.
I know very little about Stallman beyond his role in the GNU Project. What pain is he referring to that makes him wish that he had never been born? The loss of hacker culture?
I'm wondering too. He has a kind of "Woe is me" attitude, but all I know of him is that he eats his toe skin in front of his audience.
I also don't know if his existence has had a net positive effect. Free software he advocates is used to power robots, missiles, and other weapons that kill many people. It has also taken money from developers who write good software and shifted it to middlemen who sell services for free code, which limits the viability of writing code and the financial options for hackers to put a roof over their heads and food in their mouths.
If you really want to help hackers and keep the hacker culture alive, teach the world that software has value and is worth paying for.
Stallman's hubris is shocking -- and I'm not talking about his claim that the world is a better place for him having lived. I'm talking about this line of shit:
That quote makes a lot more sense when taken in context. It's from the 1983 epilogue to Hackers.
In 1983, there was no "free software" as we have today. No FSF, no EFF, no Creative Commons.
Additionally, Stallman's interview is at the end of a book about the guys who started "hacker culture". These guys did some amazing stuff: they physically modified one of their computers to add new machine instructions, wrote editors, compilers and games from scratch, etc, etc. Then they made their code available for free.
When I read that quote in the book, I interpreted it as Stallman expressing sadness over the loss of hacker culture.
I think that is what apotheon means! Hacker culture is far from dead; it is alive and well, just different.
It's just him being stuck in the "glorious past" (nothing really wrong with that) and assuming that hackers should be working with computers on that sort of level.
Things move on; if we still had to do all that computing wouldn't have moved on very fast :P
I heartily disagree that the culture is materially different - it's just spread out a bit more (instead of being on the university campus' etc.)
Hacker culture not only is alive and well -- it was alive and well through those years, too. It was just less visible, and since Stallman was moving through different circles, it wouldn't have felt as much to him like it was all clustered around his immediate vicinity.
It is to some extent in human nature to assume that what's happening around someone is what's happening everywhere -- but that's really no excuse for declaring himself the last of his breed as he did. In fact, I'd say that the rise of the cypherpunks was a stronger resurgence in the hacker culture tide than Stallman's generation, and actually far more committed to freedom in an essential sense.
The fact things change doesn't mean the good stuff has all died off. I think we're a lot better off for the modern state of hacker culture than if there was still the kind of hacker culture that existed Way Back When. Concepts of freedom, inquiry, and improvement that are central to a hacker culture have become more refined and encompassing than they were in those early days, which is pretty much what happens with everything that sees long-term success; it starts out less well-defined, and feeling more "special" because of its rarefied nature, then grows more widespread, better defined, and more generally applicable, thanks to the efforts of people who pick up where a previous generation left off to add their own efforts to the continuing evolution of the movement.
Far from being the last of his breed, he went from being an early visionary to a late relic, from what I can see. I might not have used such harsh terms for it, but his own statements about being the last of his kind pretty much completes the picture of Stallman as a dinosaur who has died and is too stubbornly attached to his own illusions to realize it.
Yeah, the culture isn't materially different. It has simply continued developing. If it had remained exactly the same as it was for Stallman's early peers, that wouldn't have been success. It would have been stagnation.
He should learn to take a cue from people like Ken Thompson, who has managed to remain relevant and continue to contribute fresh new ideas to the state of general purpose operating system design all these years. Yes, advocates for freedom in our software development model are of critical importance; I'm not arguing otherwise. I think, though, that Stallman's apparent idea that such advocacy should focus on trying to recapture a communal sharing model that worked for a very small number of people who mostly knew each other, at least peripherally, is naive at best. Furthermore, the way Thompson and his spiritual descendants lead by example does almost as much for effective advocacy as the actual advocates (e.g., Bruce Perens and Theo de Raadt, to name a couple out of many -- who are, unlike Stallman, well-known for being currently contributing developers as well as advocates, thus lending credence to their statements even when they're abrasive in the extreme as de Raadt can sometimes be).
Looking at things with a critical eye, Stallman is the only guy I can think of who is granted so much relevance as both a developer and an advocate for freedom in software use and development whose achievements are always described in the past tense.
"This "pain" that Stallman says he has endured makes his decision to champion tirelessly freedom and free software for all these decades all the more remarkable."
Alright, I realize this might be a bad statement to make on this subject... but seriously? He's a free software advocate. It's not like he's Ghandi going on a hunger strike or Martin Luther King Jr going to jail over his beliefs.
"I hesitate to exaggerate the importance of this little puddle of freedom," he says. "Because the more well known and conventional areas of working for freedom and a better society are tremendously important. I wouldn't say that free software is as important as they are. It's the responsibility I undertook, because it dropped in my lap and I saw a way I could do something about it. But, for example, to end police brutality, to end the war on drugs, to end the kinds of racism we still have, to help everyone have a comfortable life, to protect the rights of people who do abortions, to protect us from theocracy, these are tremendously important issues, far more important than what I do. I just wish I knew how to do something about them." - Free As In Freedom by Sam Williams (p66 or p73 depending on version).
I think the importance of freedom as it applies to software is often underrated. The idea of freedom in software use and development is really a near-perfect model in microcosm of intellectual freedom as a whole, and there's little that can compare with that for importance.
I also think the importance of Stallman as applied to freedom of use and development of software is often overstated, though.
After reading this I felt a deep sense of pity for RMS.
Even if he was only referring to his perceived lack of belonging, openly fantasizing about suicide is not the sign of someone in a healthy emotional state.
I hope very much that he has grown past this point his life.
It's a real shame that inventor of the time machine, Leo Schultz, travelled back in time from 2042 and killed himself as a child. We'll never have a time machine now :-(
