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Slashback: Stallman, Again, Wanderungen
Which way to America, please? After word of Microsoft Honcho Jim Allchin's (somewhat bizarre) words on Free software (later "clarified" by MS), we linked to a (preliminary) response to Allchin from RMS. Now RMS has himself issued a final version of his statement, here for your edification, passed on by Dan Gillmore, technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News.
Very eloquent.Thanks, Dan.
And if you're not yet out of sparklers, pie, bunting or RAM, matthew writes: "Bradley M. Kuhn, the new Vice President of the Free Software Foundation, has an essay published here. It's a more personal answer to Microsoft's attack against the GPL."
Start flossing that stein and pressing those Lederhosen! Jetzt! Alex writes: "I'm proud to announce that we finally got it managed. The date is fixed. The Linuxbierwanderung 2001 (1) will take place from 25th of August to the 1st of September in Bouillon (2), Belgium. As the hall we get the upper floor of the Archeoscope (3), a museum direct in town. It's warm, dry, nice, with enough electricity and has up to some 20 ISDN-lines. To get things easier for you we added a lot of phonenumbers and addresses of camping sites and hotels on the webpage. See (4) to look for your favorite place. So, now it's time to register ! To register yourself, your family, your pets, your computers and your lectures see (5). Thank you for your attention, Cheers, Alex.
(1) The Linuxbierwanderung 2001
(2) Bouillon on the Net
(3) The Archeoscope
(4) Hotel Overview
(5) Join the Linuxbierwanderung and register !"
I wish this didn't sound suspiciously close to LinuxWorld (San Francisco) 2001, because a lot of people would probably like to go to both. Lucky Europeans;) How about one of these in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee? I'll bring the fireworks, you bring the moonshine ...
I would have stopped at Pizza-Nizza afterward ... Google bought Deja. RallyDriver sends a report from the coolest six-letter city on I-35 between Dallas and San Antonio (gulp -- covered my bases?).
"On Thursday at the Omni hotel here in Austin [?] , we had the now familiar wake: the auction. While the public was overbidding on everything from furniture to laptops, dual P3 VA FullOn servers were going for as low as $275 a piece.
The show, however, goes on. Rumors of unemployment levels in Austin are greatly exaggerated, and it seems like most of the Deja people are already moving on to new opportunities. If you work in high tech, Austin is a small town of 1 million people.
Most of the server equipment (they still had the previous generation of equipment and the one before that) was picked up by junk dealers and resellers according to its vintage, but ironically a number of the rackmount boxes will be going right back where they came from -- Exodus Austin, where Deja was hosting, is also our co-lo provider."
Well put. For example, he is very strongly pro-copyright- the GPL falls completely if there is no copyright. In fact, if I had to make a blanket statement about RMS on IP, I'd say that e isn't anti-IP- he's against the trend where IP is used by large corporations to control our computing lives, and in favor of individuals chosing to share their IP. He certainly can't be against IP in all it's forms- if that is the case, we live in a BSD-licensed* world, and $LARGE_CORPORATION could exploit RMS's code without giving two bits back to RMS and his community. And I think we can all agree on what he'd think about that.
~luge
*Note: this isn't to knock BSD folks. If you want to allow others to use your code without encumbrance, that's your bag- you have that choice. In an IP free world, there would be no choice- everything would be BSD-style, whether the coder liked it or not.
IAAL,BIANLY
Of course, the reason you should personally be concerned about "hate crimes" is that you're open to becoming a completely arbitrary victim.
And am I less so, because of hate crime laws?
Read what I wrote again; I'm not saying hate crimes don't exist, I'm saying hate crime LAWS accomplish nothing other than dividing us further.
Nowhere have I said that hate crimes should not be punished. Quite the opposite; simply that the punishment for ANY violent crime should be very severe, and extremely violent crime (murder, attempted murder, assault with intent to kill) should be punished permanently.
Of course, being straight, white, middle-upper class protestant males, we really don't need to worry about that kind of thing, so it doesn't matter, right?
I am far more likely to be killed for my wallet or automobile than for the amount of melanin in my epidermis, and this would be true even if I were a black female living in Austin.
The fact that I am a straight white male (lower-upper class, atheist, but you were close enough) doesn't make it any less tragic if I'm killed. My wife and child wouldn't love me any more if I were a minority.
Hell, the fact that I'm not called a minority is further proof of the arbitrary and illogical nature of these divisions. I'm Irish, my "people" are still being oppressed.
Except that that's bullshit; I'm an American, and so is the American who was born in India in the next cubicle, and the American born in China in the one after him, and the American of African descent walking by, and the American of Greek descent in the next room who happens to be gay.
It's just as wrong to kill one of us as the next one, for any premeditated reason.
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And we're not just talking about ordinary crime. We're talking about hate crimes.
I fail to see how you're any more dead if the man who kills you hates all people of your skin tone, not just you.
I further fail to see why such crimes should have greater penalties than "ordinary" crimes. If murder demands a certain penalty, it should demand that penalty regardless of the race, color, creed, or religion of either victim or assailant.
Hate crime laws merely divide us further, by perpetuating the wrong-headed notion that there is a non-trivial difference between us that is based on our non-immediate ancestry.
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I have no opinion on "intellectual property rights," because the term is too broad to have a sensible opinion about. It is a catch-all, covering copyrights, patents, trademarks, and other disparate areas of law; areas so different, in the laws and in their effects, that any statement about all of them at once is surely simplistic. To think intelligently about copyrights, patents or trademarks, you must think about them separately. The first step is declining to lump them together as "intellectual property".
I'm not sure if I understand why one would choose to misrepresent RMS so badly. In any case this particular passage seems quite clear and I see no evidence of his "speaking with a forked tongue". Perhaps RMS doesn't speak well for all of us, but we should at least give him the respect of quoting him accurately and then discussing the pros and cons of his views.
Yeah, although ZDNet is now claiming the copyright. Go get 'em, Stallman!
Look, I may not agree with everything Stallman says, but I never have a problem understanding what he says.
Here, it's pretty clear that he doesn't want to make the article too long, so he discusses only copyright. That's the form of IP that the GPL most clearly attacks.
The sentence you quoted is part of his explanation of why he isn't discussing the other forms of IP in that article.
Doesn't sound much like a troll to me.
RMS's comments also made zdnet today (in the Commentary section). Picture and all :-/ .
He does not hate corporations.
He does not want to steal your property.
It infuriates me when people lash out against Stallman because they think he goes too far or they think he misrepresents them.
If you think he is too stubbornly stuck on Freedom then you're entitled to your opinion but it is stupid to attack him for his opinion. He has made a great contribution to our society. What good comes of attempting to discredit him and his work? To do so reveals your own malignance. I challenge you to go make your own contribution.
If you think Stallman misrepresents you then don't attack him. Instead, make your own opinion heard. He is defending his code and his rights. He is defending the rights of all of us who believe in the freedom of speech. He is defending all those who subscribe to the philosophy of the GPL. If you don't like Free Software then go promote your own Open Source software or your proprietary software. Don't stoop to Ad Hominem arguements to promote your ideas. Again, it only exposes your own lack of character.
"...when people have to tell you you're being oppressed, something is most definitely amiss. "
Maybe you don't feel oppressed using proprietary software. I think most people who don't write code don't feel too opressed. But most people also intuitively know they should be able to copy and distribute software freely. That's why most people will make an "illegal" copy of MS Word or Windows for their friends. They don't have to hate Microsoft, but they know that a proprietary software copyright holder should not have the right to tell you what you can (and can't) do with your copy.
Stallman is a generous, honest and brilliant man. Instead of attacking him, I challenge you to emuate him.
-R
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Tired of ICANN despotism?
Go OpenNIC!
No, RMS isn't at all pro-copyright.
The GPL uses the force of copyright simply to counteract (in his view) the evils of copyright. He'd be far happier if there simply was none.
He isn't against all IP, thought. He's got no objection to IP (indeed, copyright) on 'artistic works'. It's the unusual status of software as a tool which can be copied at near-zero cost, and modified and enhanced so easily which makes it possible and very powerful to share, benefitting everyone.
Jules
-- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a perl script.
Hate crimes are often recorded in greater proportion to population in areas where the police are more attuned to them. I would expect police in Austin, a state capitol and a liberal college town rolled into one, to be more on the lookout for hate crimes than Dallas or Fort Worth. The stat reveals as much about the measurer as the measured.