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And remember... Lensmen eat Jedi for breakfast.

And remember... Lensmen eat Jedi for breakfast.

Apparently, PHP-GTK gets by with linking to version 4 because GTK is released under the LGPL.

I'm surprised Richard Stallman hasn't released a blistering condemnation of the project yet.

Then, the lawyers and other rent-seeking non-productive leeches upon the economy would have to pay a royalty. The more they profit from pain and misery, the more they have to pay. (Before you mod me down for trolling, please go to you library and try to find Black Hole Tariffs and Endogenous Policy Theory)

But to whom? A collective of their victims? To fund community media outlets like Public Access Television or Pacifica Radio? RMS?

On top of that there are idealists galore that, while living under the umbrella of educational welfare (i.e. career students and professors) or enjoying the benefits of a capitalist society while superimposing their socialist idelologies, like to wax poetically about how everything should be free as in beer, or water, or whatever the silly saying is.

Now, I don't know RMS's opinion on micropayments, but I doubt that he's against worthy content providers being reimbursed for their expenses. I don't know of a single instance where he has claimed that anything should be free as in beer, period. Free as in freedom, yes.

Obviously, someone has made some fairly rash generalizations about these ideologists.

I think the preferred term is "Saint iGNUcious"...

http://www.stallman.org/saint.html

Now maybe I am wrong, but it looks like these guys might be trying to troll us. Or worse yet, trick us into breaking the GPL.

Don't be fooled. Your ass could be on the line if this goes to litigation.

More information about the GPL can be found HERE

God Damnit why can't I be an advocate for Free Software without having to kiss Stallman's unholy butt!

Especially after reading this in which Richard Stallman explains how a law put itself above the individual rights in Britain.
So, how can we ask a state to protect its citizens' privacy if it doesn't recognize it as a right?
--

I didn't really know how to program, I knew a little FORTRAN, C and Basic from doing data analysis during summer jobs, and I didn't really like it all that much. I used to really have to struggle to spend several weeks writing a 500 line program, and I'm sure I'd be embarrassed if I had to look at the source code to those programs today.

I figured I'd program for a while because it paid the rent (I was making $20k a year doing Sun administration and writing image processing software), but when I figured out what I really wanted to do for a living I'd quit programming and get a real job.

That was in 1988. Then some consultant visited and installed GNU Emacs on our machines (two Sun 3/160's, one diskless, both with terminals and no workstation monitor, but with frame grabber cards and NTSC color monitors). He explained about the GNU manifesto.

I thought it was pretty cool but didn't see it affecting me personally in a big way. I was mostly annoyed that I had to wait up while the consultant installed the software on what was supposed to be my day off while a ladyfriend was visiting from away.

Then my friend Jeff Keller, who went to MIT for a while and vaguely knew Richard Stallman, spent an evening with me singing the praises of Emacs. What I really wanted was VI with macros you could program to include conditional branches, and he said it had all though and much much more.

So I learned to actually use Emacs, and soon learned that it was quite extensible, but it wasn't made too clear how to extend it. The online manual was useful mainly to people who already knew what they were doing.

So I read the source code. One thing I was interested in doing was writing C functions that were callable from Emacs lisp as lisp functions. There are many such functions built into Emacs (usually for performance) and you can add your own. There's this big DEFUN macro that even makes the C API look like Lisp.

I learned that and a lot more. I learned what an eloquent statement of software architecture Emacs is.

I learned that there really was something worth my while doing in the way of software.

I wanted to write a program like that someday. Not another big editor, but a program that would someday strike other young programmers the way Emacs struck me.

During the course of reading the source code, one day I stayed at my terminal 24 hours straight, arising only to get coffee and use the restroom, not even eating. I only realized how much time had passed when I started to fall asleep.

That was when I started to take programming seriously. I began to put serious effort into studying programming, and studying it deeply.

For example I would read Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming on the bus on the way to work and I would stay up all night after work learning to program better on my Macintosh at home.

For many years I selected all of my jobs based mainly on what I could learn from them.

I've become a very skilled programmer. You can see this from my consulting business website, my resume (on my resume the place where I first encountered Emacs is the Programmer job at Verde Technologies) and my programming tips pages.

So in a very direct and profound way I owe it all to Richard Stallman and Emacs.

I still haven't written my great program yet. I don't even know what it will be. One project I've worked on peripherally is the ZooLib cross-platform application framework and a project I've just started up but not gotten too far with yet is the Linux Quality Database.

I did finally get my B.A. in Physics, from UC Santa Cruz, but only after being out of school working at a programmer for a number of years.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

"There is absolutely nobody high up in this new administration who is familiar with the Net, and when they do hear about it, it's all hackers and perverts."

Sounds like a pretty good assessment to me.

Steven

Ok, well the fact that people are keeping an online fucking tally suggests to me there are a lot of people out there not gettin' any...

My comments were mostly aimed at the FSF community however

In the discussion "Every vote counts" vs. "My vote doesn't matter anyway", did you think of those people Florida, people with 'supervotes' : those who might have to revote in Palm Beach, with each of the 3000 people having to make the definitive choice for 100,000,000 people (only counting those who voted)! That's more than 333,000 people represented by a 'single vote' in some way ! ------------------------- Hope It won't be Bush : USA is a modern country, and should not be an illustration of the most disgusting part of the bible.

An ode to Freeness from the sultan of source!

--

In this article (part of a Wired debate on technology policy between Nader and Gore advisor Reed Hundt, former chairman of the FCC during the Clinton/Gore administration), Nader speaks up about the CDA, DMCA, silly patents, and other dangers of continuing to elect corporate stooges like Gore and Bush.

Here's a great (although long) quote:

In looking at the Internet, one might also ask what has the administration done to support the open-source movement, either through procurement policies (very little), funding for open-source software (not something the administration talks about) or protecting free software developers from software patents and anticompetitive practices targeted at the free-software movement?

In the area of corporate welfare, tax breaks and subsidies for big corporations, there is no end to what this administration will do for the e-commerce industry.

But when it comes to supporting an astonishing citizen movement that is protecting the Internet from Microsoft and other would-be monopolies and providing huge benefits to the economy, the administration is completely inarticulate.

JMC

Shuffle blindly towards kitchen.

See this.

No thanks!

(well, at least it's not goatse.cx!)

Sean

I think there already is one, isn't there? The Church of EMACS Or is that open source as a religion?

--
Jon
(actually a Christian, but at least no longer using vi)

Well I have serious doubts about the authenticity of the rms-account as well, but Stallman does have rms@stallman.org as an email account too. For example check out the bottom of the www.stallman.org (www.stallman.org is The Real Thing, as it is referenced from www.gnu.org). But it's probable that both accounts are fakes :)

Look at this photo and judge for yourself.

>Come on! WHO ARE YOU? GOD?

Saint IGNUcius.

-K
---

Richard Stallman, president of the FSF and founder of the GNU project, who wrote GNU Emacs, Gdb and is the principal gcc author. You'll find his homepage at http://www.stallman.org.
Savant

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

I am in the UK where we are under threat of the RIP (Regulation of Investigatory Powers) bill - suitably named in a Reverse-Polish stylee, which has terrifying consequences!

ideally, if a program doesn't work properly, you change it so it does work. That's the point of free software

What does society need? It needs information that is truly available to its citizens---for example, programs that people can read, free, adapt, and improve, not just operate. But what software owners typically deliver is a black box that we can't study or change.

Society also needs freedom. When a program has an owner, the users lose freedom to control part of their own lives.

This is what RMS and other Free Software advocates mean when they say that the GPL actually frees software for others, rather than restricting it. The Linux kernel, GNOME, and other Free projects will never have this problem.