Slashdot Mirror
Stallman And Bero Interviewed
Juraj Bednar writes: "I have done two interviews: one with Bero from RedHat and one with Richard
Stallman, the GNU and FSF founder. I usually write in my native language, but since these interviews were done in English, I asked myself why not to share them" Readers may want to also visit Bero's shared-source.com, and bookmark it as a FUD antidote.
Unfortunately (the brutal truth).. the people who are business minded are FEEDING on people like us.
You say this like it's a bad thing. Dung beetles feed on what I produce, too (well, not literally, but they could), but you don't hear too many people complaining.
OSS only works for commodity software. Kernels. Web servers. Mail servers. Toolkits. Stuff that people use to get other forms of business done. The software you're writing is not a commodity, so you can sell it. But you rely on a certain level of infrastructure (Apache, say), so it's in your interests to fix Apache if it's causing you a problem. You could fork Apache, and start bundling Pengo-httpd with your product, but who would want that?
Yes, the nick is flamebait
Hey, unlike many, I like what Stallman says, and frequently how he says it. But it looks like Stallman just copied and pasted some boilerplate. Heck, I bet Jim Allchin could have written those responses to the question on behalf of Stallman:)
But seriously, I think the interviewer wanted a solid answer in the first question: How does your view help me? We got the standard "someone can make a change". Maybe a better question is: how will this help my grandmother?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The splash screens that come with Ximian Gnome are always stunning, but they're not a major component of the GUI so they don't count for that much. The icons that come with Gnome need to be improved but they are still fairly good.
I can't say anything for KDE since I haven't used it in a while, but I remember it looking pretty good when I did.
I don't really see how one can say that Gnome and KDE are uglier than Windows and MacOS X when you can get themes that make the widgets look identical to those in Windows and MacOS X (although its a bit harder to find the MacOS X themes).
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
I'm sorry but I don't believe that Bero is being completely accurate when he claims that the "GPL makes no claims to data generated, processed, or stored by something covered by it." According to the text of the GPL "The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does." IANAL, but in my opinion, for a company to be completely safe about using the output of GPLed software, they must examine every line of the source code. The reason is that it is possible that the program will inject portions of itself into the output. An example is Bison whose license was modified. To quote documentation from an older version of Bison 1.20 "Bison grammars can be used only in programs that are free software. This is in contrast to what happens with the GNU C compiler and the other GNU programming tools. The reason Bison is special is that the output of the Bison utility--the Bison parser file--contains a verbatim copy of a sizable piece of Bison, which is the code for the yyparse function. As a result, the Bison parser file is covered by the same copying conditions that cover Bison itself and the rest of the GNU system: any program containing it has to be distributed under the standard GNU copying conditions." The license was later changed in version 1.24 and beyond: "As of Bison version 1.24, we have changed the distribution terms for yyparse to permit using Bison's output in non-free programs. Formerly, Bison parsers could be used only in programs that were free software."
I'm glad we finally get an interview with bero, one of the most underrated hackers out there imo, i've always been fascinated with the Bero Linux distribution from a while back and everything he's done with RH so far. I would have asked some other questions, so since we all know he reads slashdot I have a few questions:
... they rock.
1) You apparantly host dot.kde.org and post regulary, though RH 'sponsors' GNOME. Anyone at redhat have any comments towards you? Hate mail? Unexpected nerf ambushes? Do they sign you up for GNOME mailing lists? Do they make fun of the 'KDE guy in the corner'? (BTW, this is what makes open source so cool, the freedom to choose what you want).
2) Any of the ideas from bero linux make their way into the main RH distro? I know Mandrake did, but since RH is mostly conservative, I'd like to hear your opinion.
3) Does it piss you off that every complaint about the gcc in RH is answered on your website and you have to post the URL for the last 2 red hat releases including the betas? (that must suck).
4) You get paid to work on Linux, that rocks! What do you think needs the most attention?
5) Any chance that prelinking stuff will make KDE2.2? How about any of the other RH packages?
Thanks, and thanks for the kde daily builds
You have made the classic mistake (and it's an honest and reasonable one given the dual meaning of free) of software that is available at no charge with software that's free of restrictions. Mr. Stallman has never suggested that it's wrong to charge money for software (to the contrary, in fact), only that it should not have obnoxious restrictions placed on it. RedHat, Mandrake, et. al (even non-proft Debian) charge money for Free Software and it doesn't make it non-free.
And, of course, there are ways of funding free software other than trying to sell it. Linus is being paid partly to hack Linux because his employers think that it will help sell their products (microprocessors). Larry Wall is being paid to hack Perl because his employer thinks that it will help them sell their product (reference books). And now a number of big companies like IBM and Sun are paying developers to write Free Software at least in part because they think that it will help them sell their products (mostly expensive hardware).
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
What gives you the notion that writing software must be constrained to programmers?
At http://www.airwindows.com/dithering/index.html you will find an elaborate program for high-end digital audio mastering from >16bit word lengths. It includes a number of very killer vertical-market type features like multiband sidechain compression. It does NOT have remotely professional file-reading and writing, because those are more 'real programmer' things, and I'm not a 'real programmer'. However, no 'real programmer' has shown any interest in writing such an app, and the market is so tiny that the few people building stuff for it tend to charge in the kilobucks- and the app I did is GPLed and just to have it costs nothing.
So it is not a question of 'so if you wanted said mastering software, how would get it if nobody will write it without money?'. Surprise! Nobody wrote it anyway. The 'market' did not lead to any such software existing, even though I needed it desperately.
And it is not a question of 'yeah, right, like a programmer is going to do hard work like that for free': clue jet coming in on runway six, a programmer didn't do that. I did. It's not done in the way you'd want to sell as shrinkwrapped greedware, but then the market's too small anyhow. The point is, this program _exists_ and grows and evolves based on just one person's ability to mostly sort of program. It's GPLed making it that much easier for the _next_ person who has a personal task to accomplish, to get a head start. And that's how it goes...
I really have little patience for programmers. Programmers are like the people who put the spyware boobytrap 'dial up and invalidate the registration number if the person's reinstalled the program too many times' code into an mp3 player app that I _bought_ and ended up demanding my money back on. There's a lot that you don't really need a programmer for- you need one for good games, for serious server apps, for the _computery_ stuff, but there's a million other things that can be done more crudely by just regular people with a bit of determination.
(I'm not _really_ against programmers- not like that- but I grow very sick and tired of the 'software can't be free, how will you survive without paying US?!?' refrain. Maybe you're not as indispensable as you think.)