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It's worth pointing out that GCC has been under GPLv3 since version 4.2.2 back in 2007. If it's a problem for anyone then it has been a problem for over five years now.

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-announce/2007/msg00004.html

Interestingly, the exception only is valid if you use GCC or another GPL licensed compiler to link it, to prevent the runtime being shanghaied in its GPL compliant entirety by another compiler.

Finally, you cannot accidentally license your software under the GPL through linking. Only the copyright holder may assign a license and copyright comes through authorship. If you link your software with GPL software but do not license your software under compatible terms you merely violate the GPL and are liable for whatever penalties come from distributing unlicensed software. This probably will be relatively low if it is accidental and one agrees to remove it, since actual damages are most likely to be zero, only statutory damages and punitive damages (impossible if not deliberate) apply.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF

The license makes it perfectly clear that you can use the latest GCC on proprietary code. Specifically:

The purpose of this Exception is to allow compilation of non-GPL (including proprietary) programs to use, in this way, the header files and runtime libraries covered by this Exception.

The GNU compile farm provides free build machines for a lot of open source projects. They might be interested.

http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/CompileFarm

Seriously guys, don't rely on third parties. If something is important to you, make it yourself!

I thought all serious slashdotters used GNUS for RSS feeds. Works great and you can customize it.

Apps need a standard user interface way to exit. Really.

Home button. Or are you referring to applications that hold services open?

Locking the Nexus homescreen to portrait is idiotic. Really.

Android 4.2 fixed that on my Nexus 7 tablet.

MTP looks great on paper, in practice it is dog slow and buggy. Back to the drawing board please.

True, I had trouble copying files between my Nexus 7 tablet and my Xubuntu laptop. But other than MTP, what royalty-free protocol for transferring files is compatible with a Windows host without having to download drivers, become an administrator, and install them? FAT over MSC, the solution used in Android 2.x, was found not to be royalty-free; Microsoft has been winning lawsuits with its FAT patents.

Pretending that Android is not Linux is intellectually dishonest.

AOSP is a Linux distribution, but it is not GNU/Linux. If GNU/Linux had been marketed as RMS had suggested, there would have been no dishonesty.

Support for unlocking and root access is still half hearted.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? All popular Android devices, except for early AT&T devices (many of which have since been updated) and certain Nook products, have the "Unknown sources" switch, and Nexus devices can be reformatted to rootable using commands like fastboot oem unlock.

Android is not a community project.

In what way?

If you're interested in health and software, you're interested in http://health.gnu.org/main-features.html

Because you can save lifes with software!

Which is of course a lie. Just because I have GPL software on my Windows machine, does not mean I have to make any software I write open source.

I don't even have to make it so if I compile a C program with the gcc - a GPL compiler. It explicitly says this in the license.

The same applies to any GPL program - using it does not make the works you create with it GPL as well.

Just a massive bit of FUD. Ballmer should be thankful that there have been open-source developers writing programs that work on Windows, increasing the value of his platform at no cost to his corporation.

I must admit I recently started looking a lot into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment . I was super happy with Gnome 2, my productivity was never higher! Then, *bam* Gnome 3 up my throat, I actually tried to use it for a month but it was too painful - it was slow as hell, crashing all the time. Now I'm with KDE 4, it is not as fast as Gnome 2 but, feature-wise it is in a entirely different league. Still, I feel I don't use most of its features..

The other day I needed a fancy way to visualize data in a gdb session - that's when I found ddd. The Data Display Debugger http://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/ is written in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(widget_toolkit) . I was amazed how responsive and fast the GUI was. I found the GUI very well organized and not confusing at all to use. So I wonder, why are we really moving away from this? Why is everything turning into eye candy bloatware?

Just in case you're not a troll, just really misinformed and confused: almost every point you make is either an argument against a straw man, makes no sense or is simply based on false assumptions. I'll just pick a few examples:

The moral handicap is that it uses copyright, backed by government force.

And then you go off to say that that's worse than making income (what exactly any of this has to do with income is anyone's guess) through legitimate contracts. Which are enforced by government force. Can you see how that argument makes no sense whatsoever?

A "legitimate contract" involves a pre-existing agreement, and government (or other arbitrating entity) force is only employed after one party violates the agreement. In GP's view, GPL is not a "legitimate contract" because the user may not have really agreed to it, thus suffering the use of force without agreeing. Note that his perspective only makes sense if you disregard copyright law (due to its assumed injustice) -- else GPL leaves infringers the option of (agreeing to the license, then violating that license) or (copying without agreeing to the license, therefore copyright violation).

By equating copying with theft, you're no better than the RIAA!

You seem to think that the GPL equates copying with theft. Where did you get this idea?

Good ghod, numbnuts, did you read the post he replied to? Here, let me help...

2. Microsoft and Apple can't steal parts of the code and use it in their OSes legally.

He doesn't think GPL equates copying with theft, he knows the fucktard he replied to equates copying with theft.

copyleft is an economically-retarded ideological movement that has hijacked [free software], and has done a great deal of harm - limiting how the software can be used, and thereby discouraging its use

That would be a great argument against using the GPL. That is, if the GPL indeed had something to say about how software can and can't be used. Which it doesn't.

Actually, with GPLv3, it arguably does, for some (not all) reasonable definitions of "use". For it to apply w/r/t GPLv2, I think "use" is the wrong term.

Stallman's wet dream is to [...] have [the] government come in to fund and regulate the development of all software.

And how exactly do you know that? Can you point to something he wrote or said that would support that?

Seriously? This is 2013, he's been preaching this shit for a quarter century. See for example The GNU Manifesto, scroll down to "Programmers need to make a living somehow." GP is being a bit hyperbolic, but he definitely supports something much like that (note that in the Manifesto, a software tax is promoted merely as one of several alternatives -- in other writings, which I can't be arsed to track down and cite, he's been more specific and preferred some arrangement wherein government has universal regulatory role and a widespread, but not universal, funding role).

For GPL, if you distribute the product (the binary executable) to the public, then you have to release the source code. You don't have to also sell it. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifiedJustBinary

HTML, entirely on one webpage is available for every GNU project I have ever seen.

What I find interesting about this Perl rewrite is that Guile, ostensibly the official scripting language of GNU, has had excellent structured texinfo support for years now. It uses stexi which has the same structure as sxml, so you gain access to all of the really great Scheme XML processing tools, including SXSLT which is basically ideal for spitting out arbitrary formats.

Texinfo is is a decent format for writing documentation in - nicer and less verbose than HTML or DocBook. You can generate either HTML or DocBook or XML from Texinfo, and then do a bunch of processing on it. For example the documentation for Kawa is written in texinfo, then makeinfo converts it to docbook, which is then converted to html. The result isn't splashy but (if I say so myself) fairly nice.

What you describe you can do in Emacs with AUCTeX. I believe JEdit has something similar.

I know that everyone's hatred of Flash often gets in the way of facts and reality, but everything regarding Flash -- the SWF format, the AVM2 bytecode, the communication protocols -- has been open-sourced except for Adobe's Flash IDE.

Why, then, hasn't there been a strong open-source alternative to Adobe's Flash Player? I know that there is a GNU project already out there to run Flash, but by most accounts it sucks in terms of compatibility and performance. Is there some "secret sauce" that Adobe is holding back from the published documents? (I suspect any of Flash's DRM features must be undocumented, since the lack of public documentation is practically the definition of DRM.) Or are they of OOXML-style complexity so that it's virtually impossible for anyone without the resources of a major multinational corporation to implement? Or is it just laziness?

That. You've certainly heard of open-source. Software wants to be free. This means that programmer salaries want to be $0.

Nice strawman. Even idealist RMS says you should be able to charge money for free software.

http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd-and-linux.html

But there is a difference, Linux is GPL v2 and Hurd is GPL. This distinction might get even more important as new versions of the license are released.

RMS coded GCC by himself - it was only later others got on board:

GCC history

And. of course, if it wasn't for RMS and GCC. Linus would not have been able to get a 'free' compiler for his project.

RMS is the seed of all of this. Don't knock him or his values. It is why we have a great 'free' OS (in all it's varieties) today.

Great, if you use a Libre version of GNU/Linux, such as Trisquel, Blag, Ututo, or Dragora, you don't get flash support anyway (unless you use Gnash http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ ). Your 'net experience becomes more focussed. It is not a good idea to give any one company like Adobe and those who use its products so much power over your 'net experience. Go Libre. www.gnu.org/doc/fsfs-ii-2.pdf

Actually RMS has said that development of the Hurd stalled largely because of the introduction of Linux, but that there was enough work already put in to it that that they didn't want to cancel it altogether.
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd-and-linux.html

In this case, you use something like "Found %d matching words in %s" and separate plural forms (such as in GNU gettext).

Yes, but as you can see from the example, even that pattern isn't enough since "in" is a grammatical ending in Finnish that also affects the stem of the word unpredictably. Note also that in Finnish and many other languages, adjectives have plural forms that must be used next to plural nouns. Moreover, Finnish doesn't use the plural after a numeral but the partitive case of the singular. And so on and so on.

You can manage it all with gettext, but the process is not straightforward and the degrees of freedom in the original gettext pattern are often not sufficient for every target language.

In this case, you use something like "Found %d matching words in %s" and separate plural forms (such as in GNU gettext).

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

No sir; you take back that pun right now, mister! [1]

Uhm yes, the license text itself? Just diff COPYING in the kernel tree with the one available at gnu.org. Honestly, it's not that difficult.

Anyway, since you were to lazy to do it, the difference is this added preamble (sans some layout changes):

NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work". Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.

Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.

Linus Torvalds

We have selected the GPL because it encourages sharing by ensuring that any applications created with it are also open.

This isn't true for any current compiler available under GPL, why would it be true for thier compiler?

It *is* true for all current compilers in major use. If you look at your favourite compiler's license, you'll see an *explicit* exception that exempts compiled programs from being covered by the compiler's copyright claims. The Microsoft compilers do it, even GCC does it.

Am I missing something? From the article via Twitter:

younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. fuck the license and governance, just commit to github. - James Governor (@monkchips) September 17, 2012

Ah, yes, eloquently stated. And, you know, it's totally okay to do that but let's assume that you've "fucked" the license and governance and your code is great and popular. Now, what stops a company from taking your code and making massive changes to it and shipping that code for mad moneys? What forces them to give back their changes that might make that code better? What did you and the community gain by contributing to that company's revenue? What if I just took your code and put it on a CD and started selling it with no credit to you and no link or reference to the source code? Wouldn't that rub you the wrong way? Just a little? Well, what if that company then claimed that your code was an unlicensed version of their code and moved to have it remove?

And that's why we have open source licenses. So those are out there and if you're lazy or whatever you can just download this file (or the corresponding OSS license you like) and put it in the root directory of your source tree. Are you really too lazy to include a simple txt file in your source tree? At the possible expense of your $MOST_HATED_COMPANY turning the screws on you?

This article seems to focus on just the "hey browski, I heard you liked code, here's my code" hippy hacker mentality and grievously ignores the "did Facebook just use an altered version of my library to track its mobile users?" possibilities.

To follow the analogy started by the twitter post: OSS licenses are like a condoms. Stop being lazy and just use one.

===
My view is that the license is a requirement in the USA, and serves to protect yourself from lawsuites. If you post something without a disclaimer, you may be liable for consequential damages. If it is use at your own risk, and you sign the license which details that statement, you have a bit of protection.

The USA has the most lawyers per capita than any other country in the world.

The redesigned bootloader has already been submitted to Microsoft for singing and once the signed version is received, The Linux Foundation is planning to provide it for free.

Why in hell did the world give Microsoft control over computer bootup hardware?

That's just insane.

The idea was suggested 16 years ago, you have Stallman to blame.

Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.

I don't feel it is trustworthy to leave a VM running all the time

It's really not a general-purpose VM like Linux, Windows, or $YOUR_OS_HERE on VMware, VirtualBox, Xen, or $YOUR_HYPERVISOR_HERE. It doesn't run an OS, just the one Java program it's given. One JVM instance only runs one program. Hell, the JVM works without any sort of kernel-level support, whereas everything moderately efficient requires kernel-level drivers to work properly. (Vanilla QEMU has no kernel-level drivers, but was so slow that KQEMU was developed, and QEMU was later tied with KVM to make it more efficient.)

Of course, that's not even getting into the fact that it's a very common practice to leave VMs running all the time, especially in datacenters. Many people leave Amazon EC2 instances running, I'd imagine almost everyone with a VPS keeps it running constantly, etc. This still has nothing to do with the JVM, because they are completely different concepts, though.

Also, would you be okay with running Java programs compiled to native code with something like GCJ? It doesn't use the satanic JVM, but that won't really change too much (except possibly give you better performance, depends on how well GCJ optimizes and how well HotSpot optimizes).

I have actually seen java applications access areas they aren't supposed to have access to.

As measured by? Hell, define "area." Are you talking across the network, or locally? If you're across the network, how do you know it was Java and not something else on that box? In either case, how do you know it wasn't malware that slipped in somewhere? This sounds like unsubstantiated paranoia.

That the VM doesn't provide me with good tools to see what really is running inside it...

VisualVM.

...and kill naghty processes

Again, I'm pretty sure you're confused about how the JVM works. Each Java program running has a separate instance of the JVM (java or java.exe). If you can't find and kill the process that's out of control, you are doing something horribly, horribly wrong. To summarize, if you don't like Java, fine. (I know I'm not a huge fan of Java on the desktop, and certainly not in browsers...) But you seem to have deeply flawed views on how everything works.

Am I missing something? From the article via Twitter:

younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. fuck the license and governance, just commit to github. - James Governor (@monkchips) September 17, 2012

Ah, yes, eloquently stated. And, you know, it's totally okay to do that but let's assume that you've "fucked" the license and governance and your code is great and popular. Now, what stops a company from taking your code and making massive changes to it and shipping that code for mad moneys? What forces them to give back their changes that might make that code better? What did you and the community gain by contributing to that company's revenue? What if I just took your code and put it on a CD and started selling it with no credit to you and no link or reference to the source code? Wouldn't that rub you the wrong way? Just a little? Well, what if that company then claimed that your code was an unlicensed version of their code and moved to have it remove?

And that's why we have open source licenses. So those are out there and if you're lazy or whatever you can just download this file (or the corresponding OSS license you like) and put it in the root directory of your source tree. Are you really too lazy to include a simple txt file in your source tree? At the possible expense of your $MOST_HATED_COMPANY turning the screws on you?

This article seems to focus on just the "hey browski, I heard you liked code, here's my code" hippy hacker mentality and grievously ignores the "did Facebook just use an altered version of my library to track its mobile users?" possibilities.

To follow the analogy started by the twitter post: OSS licenses are like a condoms. Stop being lazy and just use one.

We seriously don't give a fuck about the licenses, or the company making money off of them. Keep up.

Does emacs have a built in web browser?

You mean w3? (Although it's probably fair to say that it's somewhat limited when compared with the likes fo Chrome/Firefox/etc)

Have an RSS reader as well

Yep, Gnus RSS handles this.

Once all this is there, one can browse /. from a good ole vt100 terminal

In a pinch, you can curl http://slashdot.org/ | less. I assume this is how Vim users do it ;-)

And that's why we have open source licenses. So those are out there and if you're lazy or whatever you can just download this file (or the corresponding OSS license you like) and put it in the root directory of your source tree. Are you really too lazy to include a simple txt file in your source tree? At the possible expense of your $MOST_HATED_COMPANY turning the screws on you?

"simple text file" my ass. That file is hundreds of lines long and full of legalese. How do I know what all the text means and what is the ramifications of including that "simple text file" in my code?

Who wrote that file anyways? Isn't my government supposed to regulate this stuff?

Yes we need to work with our governments to create proper laws and stick to those, not rely on some unknown lawyers to create 200 different versions of some bull shit TOS.

Screw you and your "simple text file" I publish my code under government-defined laws and that's good enough for me.

As for your question about giving proper credit, what am I, 13? I know I wrote the code, and for any legal reasons that's been documented through the submission mechanism, and that's all I need. And if the code that I write helps others create something useful, or helps them make some money, Good For Them!

Am I missing something? From the article via Twitter:

younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. fuck the license and governance, just commit to github. - James Governor (@monkchips) September 17, 2012

Ah, yes, eloquently stated. And, you know, it's totally okay to do that but let's assume that you've "fucked" the license and governance and your code is great and popular. Now, what stops a company from taking your code

Copyright law.

And that's why we have open source licenses. So those are out there and if you're lazy or whatever you can just download this file (or the corresponding OSS license you like) and put it in the root directory of your source tree. Are you really too lazy to include a simple txt file in your source tree?

Yes some people are too lazy for that. And that's because more people are writing software and putting it up for other people to look at. Which is great!

You are free to copy that software down for your own use if someone uploaded it to github. The only problem you have is redistribution. Just ask the author if he or she would be happy with you re-using the code under a BSD/GPL license. Usually if they don't care about uploading a LICENSE file, they are happy with anyone using it. With their agreement, fork it on github and put a LICENSE file next to it, perhaps with a annotation in the README that the original author gave permission. That is not revocable and you are save now.

If the author says no to all licenses you proposed, you still haven't lost anything. Be happy you can look at someone elses solution. The problem does not come from people not upping their license, it comes from people copy-pasting code from third-parties without worrying whether licenses are compatible or the code you make can ever be shipped. If you are only making software for your own use, that's a non-issue.

younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. fuck the license and governance, just commit to github. - James Governor (@monkchips) September 17, 2012

Ah, yes, eloquently stated. And, you know, it's totally okay to do that but let's assume that you've "fucked" the license and governance and your code is great and popular. Now, what stops a company from taking your code and making massive changes to it and shipping that code for mad moneys? What forces them to give back their changes that might make that code better? What did you and the community gain by contributing to that company's revenue? What if I just took your code and put it on a CD and started selling it with no credit to you and no link or reference to the source code? Wouldn't that rub you the wrong way? Just a little? Well, what if that company then claimed that your code was an unlicensed version of their code and moved to have it remove?

And that's why we have open source licenses. So those are out there and if you're lazy or whatever you can just download this file (or the corresponding OSS license you like) and put it in the root directory of your source tree. Are you really too lazy to include a simple txt file in your source tree? At the possible expense of your $MOST_HATED_COMPANY turning the screws on you?

This article seems to focus on just the "hey browski, I heard you liked code, here's my code" hippy hacker mentality and grievously ignores the "did Facebook just use an altered version of my library to track its mobile users?" possibilities.

To follow the analogy started by the twitter post: OSS licenses are like a condoms. Stop being lazy and just use one.

I love it. You have a strap line about science by Feynman, yet you clearly don't fit to the ideals he would identify with. You make an unsubstantiated assertion, refuse to back it up when challenged and then run away when asked to provide evidence. In other words, completely antithetical to anything Feynman would stand for.

Right, here are the FACTS:

• The word "binary" and "binaries" appear precisely 0 times in the license text. "Object code" appears 21 times.
• It defines "Program" as "...any copyrightable work licensed under this License"
• Binaries cannot be copyrighted, code can.
• It defines "Corresponding Source" as not needing to "...include anything that users can regenerate automatically from other parts of the Corresponding Source..." In other words, since object code can be generated from the source, it does not form part of the Corresponding Source.
• So, if you're distributing "object code", you must also distribute the "Corresponding Source", but if you're distributing source code, then "The Corresponding Source for a work in source code form is that same work"
• Section 6 covers distributing object code, and the rules for including source with it.
• There is NOTHING, NOTHING about having to distributed "object code" with source code.

The license I looked at is here.

In other words, you're wrong. You've been wrong from the beginning, but have flailed around like an idiot trying to avoid the difficulty of reading the license itself. I've read it several times before, along with the BSD, MIT, earlier GPLs and the MS licenses, and Creative Commons licenses. I am often asked to advise on software licensing issues for my main client, a stock exchange, as well as having drafted licenses for my company's software products.

However, even I was not so arrogant as to assume I was right, and I went and reviewed the license terms after your first (rude) reply to me.

Argument from authority is a logical fallacy, which is why I provide evidence to back up my assertion that your initial, and still unsubstantiated, assertion is wrong. This should not be necessary, since it is usually the person making the assertion who is required to provide the evidence to back their statements up. Of course, you refused to do this, petulantly claiming I had been rude, when in fact the rudeness came from you in your very first reply to me.

Either grow up, or shut up. Provide evidence to back up your assertion or go away.

"Dumb, but clever"; what a stupid comment

Oh, and change your signature, someone as intellectually bankrupt as you should not be associated with Feynman. Anyway, it's not even a Feynman quote, the real one goes "The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth”."

Now, for the last time, go away. Go play with your friends.

Calling viewing works created by others "consumption" makes me think of tuberculosis. Anyway:

Consider three kinds of users: people who only view works, hobbyists who create works, and professionals who create works for a living. A dichotomy between devices for viewing works created by others and devices for creating works makes it harder for people to start creating for at least three reasons:

Each of these three hurdles deters people from creating as a hobby in the first place, which tends to turn people into "sheep that passively graze on what others make available to them," as free software advocate Richard Stallman put it when he decried the word "consumer".

[Devices for creating works] usually need a full complement of input devices, a full keyboard, a good mouse, larger the screen it is better. But [viewing them] does not need all these user input devices. Oftentimes, a tap, a touch, a click is all that is required to passively consume content. Ch+ , Ch-, Vol+ and Vol- buttons cover 99% of the usage in a TV remote!

If a viewer device isn't artificially restricted, it's a doddle to upgrade the latter into the former by buying a $15 keyboard and a $15 mouse. But if market-segmenting cryptography is in play, people who want to step up from viewing to creating might not be able to afford dropping $700 on a Mac.

Microsoft first missed the boat in creating a simpler device for [viewing].

Then what's the Xbox 360 console? In countries where the law allows, Microsoft even established a public "Indie Games" route to market using the XNA framework so that anyone with a $300 PC can create games for the platform.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party

Wouldn't it be nice if someone wrote a browser plugin to whitelist only trusted free software scripts ?

With RMS as an unlikely guardian angel, Kim DC could use existing crypto libraries at least ensure the integrity of client-end encryption. If "They" were to try and inject covert monitoring code into the process, tampered scripts would refuse to run...

K&R is perhaps the single ugliest coding style I have ever seen or used.

Let me introduce you to the GNU coding standards. Please pay particular attention to the crazy way they indent the braces in the function body.

If everybody had a gun, this would not be a problem. ;)

If everyone had a gnu, this would not be a problem.

GNU Chess played at it's highest level on a 2.4ghz P4 seems to play somewhere around a 2200 rating.

If you are beating highest-level GNU Chess on a decent CPU with any regularity then yes, you are certainly a "good player". Even if you beat it rarely, you're still probably a "good player".

I can't find any data on Battle Chess but IIRC it wasn't that strong.

Read and learn:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

The term “intellectual property” is at best a catch-all to lump together disparate laws. Nonlawyers who hear one term applied to these various laws tend to assume they are based on a common principle and function similarly.

Nothing could be further from the case. These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues.

So no, patent and copyright laws do not "overlap". (As for your first sentence, I'm not even sure what it means; "The need"? Right now I need a coffee, but that is certainly not based on any patent...)

Please don't imply that you do not make money with free software. Free software does not mean zero-payment software. Free software is software that respects the users' freedom - it is freedom-respecting software (free software).

It doesn't have to, it is GPLv3, not v2. Unless they modified it. see here if you don't believe me

RMS defines user freedom as the values of self control and the value of sharing with your community. Proprietary software forbids users to do this. When users accept proprietary software, users are forbidden to control the software and users are forbidden to share software. To choose proprietary software means choosing a life that is controlled by other people and division from your community.

Once again, people fail to comprehend what exactly he's saying for decades. Nothing he said here is news.

“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. With these freedoms, the users (both individually and collectively) control the program and what it does for them.

When users don't control the program, the program controls the users. The developer controls the program, and through it controls the users. This nonfree or “proprietary” program is therefore an instrument of unjust power.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

The evil here is the fact that companies are wielding an unjust power over their users.

Sounds like emacs' spook will be getting an update with more keywords and phrases!

You're mixing two topics that aren't related to each other.

Has Stallman ever said, "A unified design is bad"? Has he ever said that elegant user interfaces are undesirable? Has he ever lead a protest against beautiful hardware? Has he ever even claimed to be an expert on user interface design?

The elegant design and easy user interface is incredibly handy, and valuable. The jail is the part that does not need to come along with it, and is immoral and hurts consumers and competition. Stallman and the Free Software Foundation are focused on the latter, not the former.

I'm an FSF member, and I'm not hoping to see a command shell open at all times on all consumer electronic devices, or pushing for Emacs keystrokes as the primary way of interacting with your smart phone. I would love to see a build of Android, or Firefox OS that beats Apple for simplicity and ease-of-use, on a hardware device that beats the iPhone for elegant design, but that runs software with an FSF-approved licenses ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html ) from boot loader to UI. Nothing that the FSF advocates goes against that. Once a customer bought the device, he would have all the tools he wanted to modify or replace the running software with something bloated, slow, and needlessly complicated. But that's a freedom he deserves to have, and someone like your mother with the same device would run it as-is and never even notice that it had free software.