Vyatta's Dave Roberts went to Hawaii and all Richard Stallman got was this undressing ... which, depending on your view of Stallman, either reeks of unfairness or fits the man to a T (my vote).
Roberts, vice president of strategy for Vyatta, an open-source router startup, begins his account of meeting Stallman at the Pacific Free and Open Source Software Convention by calling the founder of the Free Software Foundation "a shabby guy."
Then it gets personal. From the post:
The summary is that after meeting Stallman, I wasn't very impressed. I have been reading his writings, such as the GNU Manifesto, since the mid-1980s. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I didn't get it.
Richard is not the best spokesman for the FSF. Sure, he founded the organization. And I wasn't expecting him to wear a shirt and tie. But to be honest, he's just a shabby guy. If you ever wonder why generally Free Software went nowhere inside corporate circles until Linux came along, this is one reason. Just at a personal level, Linus is a better spokes-model than Richard. He's just as geeky, without looking shabby.
Beauty is only skin deep, of course, whereas philosophical differences reach deep into the kernel. Roberts continues:
I react very negatively to Richard's use of "GNU/Linux" versus "Linux." Richard's contention is that all the userland for Linux came from GNU and thus Linux is really just the kernel while the whole OS should be called "GNU/Linux." Whether that is true or not, the fact is, Linus built his own operating system and he should have the right to name it. If Free Software is truly as Free as Richard wants to claim it is, naming should be one of the things where the Freedom shows.
Now that he's warming to the task, Roberts moves in for the moment of truth:
My other big takeaway from the conference is that I don't agree with Richard on the fundamental philosophy of free software. ... Sorry, while I like open source and believe there are certain advantages to it, I specifically reject Richard's moral basis for Free Software. Richard tries to portray access to source code and redistribution for no charge as abstract moral rights that every person should have, something akin to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Using proprietary software, Richard says, is to make an immoral choice. I don't buy it. ... In my opinion, this is why the FSF has been largely ineffectual in getting people to think about "Free Software" as opposed to "Open Source" (a term which Richard rejects as missing the point).
(Roberts isn't averse to invoking the word "freedom" himself, although the context is decidedly different.)
As someone who has never written a line of code but appreciates the instinct and need to protect intellectual property, I have always found the "moral" argument against proprietary software easily dismissible. Serious people simply don't take this kind of nonsense seriously, which is why Stallman's following will always remain scant (much like nudism, only without the gawkers).
What do I mean by nonsense? Take this example from an interview Stallman granted last year to Forbes:
Forbes: Would it be ethical to steal lines of unfree code from companies like Microsoft and Oracle and use them to create a "free" version of that program?
Stallman: It would not be unethical, but it would not really work, since if Oracle ever found out, it would be able to suppress the use of that free software. The reason for my conclusion is that making a program proprietary is wrong. To liberate the code, if it is possible, would not be theft, any more than freeing a slave is theft (which is what the slave owner would surely call it).
What does one say to a man who would equate - even for the sake of an analogy - the "freeing" of software to freeing human beings from slavery?
Right, the correct answer is don't waste your breath.
Which isn't to say that the occasional undressing isn't an appropriate response.
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slavery and freeing software can be compared like this
The conceptual elements represented in software are things each and everyone one of us can give harbor to in our own minds. Unlike a statute which we cannot all own. The underlying knowledge of the concept can be represented as mathematics.
To imprison ideas within a concept created on the same footing as physical property ownership is the same as saying this person is my slave. A person in the physical can and were made property.
The equalising question to ask is "did you ever own the person" and "did you ever own the concepts embodied in the code".
I know this is a departure from the literal copyright side and more an attack on the likes of patents.
Mr. Roberts is certainly
Mr. Roberts is certainly entitled to his opinion. A hundred years from now, however, people will still remember that old hippie RMS and what he accomplished. Mr. Roberts? Opinions are cheap, sir. What have you accomplished?
What if...
a closed-source software project was set up with the specific intent of raising money for the FSF? Would this constitute an imoral action?
Doing a thing that's imoral according to the FSF to further the cause of FSF, thus working against the very thing one works for...
- it's an interesting categorial game, no?
it's an interesting categorial game, no?
No.
Sell a slave to fight slavery. Now there's some nonsense.
Roberts who?
I truly have no idea who Roberts is so his opinion is lost among all the static produced by the freedom of the net.
Imagine that,,....people not agreeing.
Unheard of.
Actually, what is unheard is a grown man talking like a 13 year old girl "Did you see what Tiffany was wearing? Like, its totally not hot!!"
Stallman looks exactly like the people who worked in his field in the 70s. Computer nerds and deadheads were pretty interchangeable.
Whether he has a beard and jeans is totally irrelevant. His job is not to kiss ass of some corporate board which is something that is easy enough to grasp for most people.
As for any questions of Stallman's abilites, I saw him in Montreal for a Copyleft seminar as well as in Spain for a FSF thing and once you get past the weird voice thing, it is very compelling stuff.
I also interviewed him for a local radio station in french (hearing an american speak one or two foreign languages is very surprising) and found him to be interesting and very outgoing.
As much as I respect Linus, I have never been awake long enough to hear him finish an interview. He might be a lot of great things; vocal he is not.
Do I agree with RHS on everything?
Of course not.
But I dont know of any person in my life with whom i agree on 100% of the time. Not my wife, not my family.
He tends to get a litte too philosophical on some points and the whole Gnu thing is annoying but harmless (I agree in principle that it should be GNU/Linux but for practically sakes I go with the shorter version).
Harping on these things while overlooking others is understandable: Maybe its because we live in a soundbyte world, were we know only one reality (an american following CNN, ABC, gets a very limited view on events than an italian, german or frenchman does) and are not confronted intellectualy (we know best so thats the way it is) but people who force others to think are evidently dangerous to some people's self worth.
If I wanted to hear the whiny bitching of a teenage girl, I'd call my 7 nieces.
If I want a mature discussion, Ill know where not to go.
Right
You are right. People dismiss RMS by the way he looks or talk, certainly in 100 years from now people will remember him by his ideas and achievements and not this "funny" guy with a product that sucks. Hopefully this guy has the balls and intelligence to fix XORP (which I don't think so). Maybe the problem is that Vyatta (XORP) product is BSD licensed and RMS likes the GPL so is a matter of BSD attacking again GPL ppl.
Well, this is not certain.
Well, this is not certain. What might be said is that a hundred years from now, people will still remember Richard Stallman and what he has done.
However, many people still remember the recent dictators and rules of the world and what pain and suffering they caused. What does it mean that we can still remember Nero burning Rome? Does it mean Nero "accomplished" something?
Well, it depends on what you mean by "accomplish" but you should be careful about using the word this way. Sometimes, it's better when the world would have had no reason to rememeber certain people.
But I'm sure, the dictators and rules of the world agree with you: People who exchange opinions in a rational discussion are usually just a hinderance for the people who try to accomplish something. They should not argue -- they should better obey, follow orders, bow to irrational visionary ideas, and never ask questions, right?
Expressing opinions
You evidently believe that I am "entitled to [my] opinion" but you suggest that I should not express it unless I have accomplished something. Can you explain that? Exactly how accomplished do people have to become before they can say "I don't agree with you" to someone else?
You are probably right that in 100 years RMS will still be more famous than I. Of course, I never claimed that I would be, and being more famous than RMS in 100 years also isn't my life goal, so I don't see how that has much bearing on anything. Had I been seeking fame, I certainly wouldn't have posted my opinions in an obscure Lisp blog in a backwater corner of the Internet.
Yes, you would have gone to
Yes, you would have gone to Hawaii to shoot your mouth off instead, and your words would have promptly vanished back into the entropy from which they came.
You don't get famous by trying to be famous, so you can't make it a life goal. Sure, you can achieve some notoriety in your own time, but Britney Hilton and Paris Spears won't be remembered twenty years from now, much less a century hence. You get remembered for having accomplished something great, not for being an accomplished party guest.
You can say, "I'm not respected in my field because I don't seek to be," but it carries no more weight than saying, "When I step off this building, I'm going to go down because I'm not seeking to go up."
Wow, Nighthawk. You are a
Wow, Nighthawk. You are a hypocrite, that much is clear.