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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.
The FSF's views on selling software are childishly innocent and trusting of society. When redistribution is essentially unrestricted, you have an essentially infinite supply of the product. Infinite supply means that demand no longer affects the price...and the price drops to zero. We already see this with proprietary software...many people pirate Windows, Photoshop, whatever on a regular basis. The only time most people will bother to pay up is when threatened with legal action. If the license allows unrestricted redistribution, that club is not there. The only people who will pay for free software (meaning just the software, not any services/documentation/whatever) will be those who want to support the people/companies making it...and people with that mindset are pretty rare.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Thank you for a definition! Often when I discuss this, there is no agreed upon definition, and since I'm not an expert in socialism, I hesitate to provide my own.
That said: GNU does not anywhere propose a "system of social organization". Nor does it talk about collective ownership; indeed RMS emphasizes "Our emphasis is on freedom, decentralization, and voluntary cooperation" (from the interview). There may be similarities, but the core ideas of socialism are not in GNU, and vice versa.
On the other hand, consider all the flattering things RMS says about America and the american economic system: 'As in "free enterprise" and "free speech", the "free" in "free software" refers to freedom' (from The GNU GPL and the American Way.
It is plain to any person who actually reads RMS: GNU is not about communism or socialism! Neo-socialists: please do RMS the courtesy of not adopting him into your cause.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
When you say "derived in the GPL sense" you don't know what you're talking about. There is no "derived in the GPL sense". A "derived work" is a legal construct taken from ordinary copyright law. The GPL in no way introduces its own definition of "derived", nor does it modify the existing definition of "derived".
The owner of a copyrighted work has the sole right to prepare derived works based on the copyrighted work. The license does not need to state this. This right is given by ordinary copyright law, and remains in place unless the license specifically allows others to prepare derived works.
But Microsoft's code is under a redistributable licence, and the relationship between their code and your code is clearly spelled out in that licence.
I have the license right in front of me. It's a ghastly hornet's nest of legalese, and it does sort of suggest that you have the rights to your own code, but it says nothing specifically mentioning header files. (Compare to the LGPL, which specifically mentions that including header files from a LGPL'd library does not infect your code.)
Now am I suggesting that Microsoft has a secret plan to launch a massive lawsuit against all developers who have ever used Visual C++ to create a program that uses one or more header files, claiming ownership of their code, in an attempt to completely take over the world? Of course not. But, otherwise sane and rational people are willing to make the similar claims for Richard Stallman and the GNU project, even though their licenses are clearer and less ambiguous than Microsoft's. In fact, when the GNU project attempts to clarify and assert your rights by removing even the slightest ambiguity in one of their licenses (such as clarifying the role of header files in the LGPL, or making a special modification for the license of Bison), this is twisted, in the finest Orwellian fashion, into proof that Stallman must have been scheming to take over your code all along.
This describes what Microsoft USED to do.
It's what the initial announcement of "shared source" was like.
The WinCE license happens to be a bit different and more open - precisely because of this, I've added a comment about it on the top of the page, leaving the rest of it intact because I assume further "shared source" code will fall under the terms from the original announcement (this is actually explained on shared-source.com/wince.html).
WinCE is an end-of-lifed product, so it makes sense for them to release it under a slightly more sane license.
I'm quite sure that if their cashcows (Windows, Office) become "Shared Source" at all, they'll be released under the original terms, that's why I didn't change the comment on the original announcement.
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Bullshit alert!
First of all, they are not selling other people's work. They are charging a reasonable fee for the distribution of Free Software (not to mention that it takes considerable effort to build and compile the hundreds of different pieces of software on a Red Hat system and testing them to make sure they work). It's not like they're out there selling software they have no right to distribute. They are doing exactly as anyone who distributed his or her software under the GPL intended!
Second, Red Hat employs Free Software developers. One of them was even interviewed for this article. Were you paying any attention at all? Yes, Linus wrote the core of Linux, but over the years do you think the kernel would be where it is if not for people like Bero and some other developers employed by Red Hat? Along these lines, do you really think that RPM is such a minor feat? It is Free Software, no? While you may have enjoyed finding and downloading and compiling the source to every Free package you wanted to use, and building your Linux system from scratch, most of us are not so inclined.
Third, I don't know when the last time you actually read Red Hat's annual report was, but they don't seem to be raking it in, like some proprietary software houses we might name. In fact, they are struggling to break even and have done so because they have taken on a lot of work besides selling Linux distributions. Don't forget the enormous expense that goes into maintaining servers where anyone can download the entire Red Hat software for no charge (and they even conveniently provide images to burn CD-ROMs). I mean, have you priced the cost of hosting something like that lately? You have to sell a lot of boxed sets at $99 a pop to cover that expense-- and don't forget that most companies only need to buy one boxed set, which they can copy in-house easily, or simply install multiple systems from that single image.
So who the fuck are you anyway? Craig Mundie? Bill Gates? The only people who oppose what Red Hat is doing are either braindead zealots (you'll notice that even hardliners like RMS seem to be in favor of companies like Red Hat, so where these zealots are coming from is beyond me) or people who want to equate selling software they didn't write with piracy. And either of these is a distortion that is not healthy for Free Software.
If you really don't like what Red Hat is doing, then send your donations to the FSF and Debian. Don't download Linux from RH, use something else. But as long as they are playing by the rules of the GPL, leave them alone and stop trying to infer that they are acting unethically. Free Software is about user freedom, nothing else-- and Red Hat is doing a pretty decent job of making sure that users can get into the Free world.
I do not have a signature
It amazes me how eagerly people will believe that the kool-aid they are being fed doesn't contain poison. Why do you find my points to be so controversial that I need to back them up? Have you never bothered to think about these issues yourself?
Free as in Speech is clearly a misnomer, as Free Software has little if anything to do with Free Speech. It's a rather poor attempt to misdirect criticism by wrapping oneself in the flag.
As far as my last paragraph, maybe you need to go read the GNU Manifesto again:
"What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other than riches; but if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, they will come to expect and demand it. Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned. "
Are you familiar with the definition of the word banned?
Go read Levy on your own.
Using laws of scarcity to govern the infinite is foolish.
The problem is that ideas aren't infinite in the sense that you're using the term. You can't just reach in the air and pull out a good idea for containable nuclear fusion, for example.
The truly marvelous and useful ideas are normally the result of a tremendous amounts of hard work, brilliance, and/or extraordinary luck. They have a uniqueness that is quite analogous to the uniqueness of physical objects.
To disregard the value of that uniqueness is to disregard the work and brilliance of the mind that created it. Besides being a disservice to that mind, it's also a disservice to a society that seeks to cultivate such minds to create more and better ideas.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Interesting.
I have already responded to you in a different message providing you quotations from the GNU website backing up my opinion of them.
Yet you choose to respond to this other message with further requests for clarification.
Why exactly do you feel you have to rely on tactics of misdirection instead of countering the statements on their own merit?
It doesn't sound to me like you are a serious poster at all.
You are drawing the wrong conclusions from the history of the last 100 years.
What we have seen in the last couple of thousand years is a very interesting evolutionary landscape of economies. Over time, economies will tend to move toward an evolutionary stable model, and stay there until an external influence jolts the system enough to move into another state. Just because something is evolutionary stable, does not mean that it provides 'the best guarantee for across the board increase in standard of living': a ruling system is successful if it perpetuates itself.
One of the most successful models in human history has been the monarchy, which develops natually from dictatorship. Another is the managed market economy, which develops natually from an unfettered free market once people get tired of stepping over all the dead bodies in the streets.
'Communism' is an example of an evolutionary unstable model: even if reached (and none of the so-called 'communist' states of the 20th century were actually communist), it quickly regresses into despotism.
Eliding a little, consider a simple situation in game theory: the two prisoners. They are both kept seperate, and given a chance to confess to a crime. If neither confess, they get off. If one confesses, and the other doesn't, then the one confessing gets 10 years, and the one who doesn't is killed. If both confess, they both get life imprisonment. The best outcome for the both of them is for neither to confess, but this isn't what will happen: the expected outcome for a prisoner who confesses is much better than the expected outcome for a prisoner who doesn't confess.
The conclusion: don't assume that the solutions that are around today represent 'the best', they represent 'the least worst'.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
The very first paragraph of his page says that the Windows CE source code was released under a Shared Source license.
And points to a new page that deals with the specifics of the WinCE license, which happens to be somewhat different (and closer to acceptable) than their original "shared source" announcement.
The sentence you're referring to clearly states
The first "Shared Source" code, Windows CE, has been released, and the license is slightly different from what the initial announcement made it look like. You can find a more detailed comment on the Windows CE Source License here..
I've left the comments on the original announcement of "shared source" unchanged because I presume that any "shared source" code that does not belong to an End-of-lifed product like CE will be released under the original terms.
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Why do you insist that he "danced"? RMS has made clear for years that his movement has nothing to do with communism. Can you not take the man at his word?
Alot of what the FSF and stallman yell about is common to utopian communism.
In the same sense that the spirit of sharing and cooperation in general is common to utopian comumnism. Does it surprise you that many people consider sharing and cooperation wonderful, but loathe the lack of personal economic freedom and concentration of power implied by communism?
Please see my other message in this thread for more.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
I did end up reading it. ;)
/.! If you comply, I promise I won't try to get first post on that article!")
;)
maybe he should contact the Powers That Be (if they don't get to him first!) and set up an actual slashdot interview
I won't ("Hey! I haven't done anything in particular worthwhile, but I want to be l33t h4x0r of the day! So go ahead and interview me on
I don't really think many people would be interested in the "Ask someone you never heard about anything!" column.
Maybe I'm wrong (and if I am, I have no problems with answering); in any case, this is definitely not something I should be asking for.
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Do you know if RH will add support for LVM during setup? It's a real drag to have to install the system to a temp volume, make the LVM volume, move root over to the LVM volume, reboot, and convert the temp dir to a PG. I'd like to do that at install.
Maybe in 8.0?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Was that a sarcastic comment?
While you may not enjoy programming in your spare time, I do. For me, it's my way of recreation. So yes, I, and the many many others, will continue to "write that free software." We're not necessarily writing it for you in particular, but I hope you like it.
Q: For example when Borland introduced Kylix for GNU/Linux, we'll see a software, that is itself free, but can't be built with free tools. Do you consider this really a free software?
... useless in the Free World." (He then pats himself on the back for having written the GNU C compiler.)
A (Stallman): It is free software, but not usable in a free operating system, not available to people who want to keep their freedom
I can understand Stallman being annoyed that Kylix is a free-as-in-beer closed source compiler. Still, this is a tool for generating free-as-in-speech software (or non-free commercial software, developer's choice). Does Stallman not understand the difference between Delphi (for programs running under MS Windows) and Kylix (for programs running under GNU/Linux, as Mr. Bednar so tactfully called it during the Stallman interview)?
The previous question is a more general one about non-free compilers. Stallman described software compilable only with a non-free compiler as something that "can't run on a non-free platform
Stallman considers "GNU/Linux" to be a free operating system, right? Does he consider an installation non-free if every byte can't be generated from free source code?
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
I don't think the FSF is at all naive.
They give their view on selling software because they are trying to be deceptive. They know exactly what they are doing, but want to misdirect criticism.
It's kind of weird for me as I'm a dyed in the wool Liberal Democrat. But yet I can see in the tactics of the FSF the same things which the GOP has long accused liberals of doing.
What standard would you like to hold Microsoft to?
Yes, their header files are copyrighted, so is the compiler and the libraries, etc.
But which provision of the Visual C++ license do you find remotely similar to that from the bison example?
No. I wasn't around that early, and actually didn't make use of the TCP/IP stack when I started using Linux. Network connectivity around here was way to expensive back then (especially considering I was still in school)
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I own a small software company. I use free software to build my products (it's an web based ASP). But, I charge a HELL of a lot of money for products and services. And no, they don't get the source. I have sent diff patches in for software that I use and have found bugs in or fixed, but that's it.
Why don't I give my code and products away? Because I wouldn't have a business if I did. I sell goods to make money.. if it wasn't software it would be Beans or Cabbage. Whatever.
Monopolies will come and go, but as long as there is a need for premium or niche services (almost any business now days).. there will be commercial software and there will be people getting rich.
Unfortunately (the brutal truth).. the people who are business minded are FEEDING on people like us.
I don't think what he said was a mistake.
Free as in Speech(which is a misnomer of it's own) implies Free as in Beer. Read the GPL and see what it says on your rights for redistribution of the work.
Also Stallman has made it pretty clear that he doesn't feel programmers should be paid. He rails about it, calling it greedy, etc. This is certainly the case in the early versions of the GNU Manifesto, although he's recently revised it to be less harsh. At any rate, I think it's clear especially after reading Levy's book what motivates Stallman and it is a desire to prevent people from making money off software.
Unfortunately, as the value of that software is brought lower, those services will be needed more and more to deal with what will eventually be an acceptance of faulty software. Don't believe it it can happen? There's a whole majority of software users out there, one of which might be your grandmother or cousin, who believe that its OK for the program to crash if you can just restart it or reboot and carry on.
... uh, waitaminnit, what wuz you tryin' to say again?
Duh, yeah boss! So we gotta get 'em to stop using dat buggy open source source stuff like Windows and start usin'
-- Sigs are for losers
I just have to shake my head and chuckle whenever I read anything from Stallman. Does he always have to be so intense and extreme?
I mean, I like "Free" software, and I've devoted some of my time to its creation and improvement - but when I see Stallman throwing around the word "freedom" as though the only thing between utopia and the world are those evil non-free software writers, I'm just more than a bit turned off to the rest of his message.
Free software is great for hackers sharing some code and for people who just like doing things that way. But it's not always the answer. Who's going to write the crappy quilting software that my 60-year-old mom enjoys using so much? A bunch of Linux heads? Yeah, right. If someone wants to write a piece of quilting software and sell it to my mom without giving away the source, than more power to them.
I think the root of this problem is Stallman's propensity to use a concept that's best maintained in a relative sense in an absolute sense. If I have absolute freedom to do anything I want, I can bash your skull in with a shovel. Yeah, now that's real freedom, right? Oops?
As with many things in life, freedom is best when it's balanced properly. As computer people, we probably like the whole binary concept, and we think it'd be great to have something like "freedom" be an on or off thing. Real life is just a bit more complicated than that.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Analogies of physical goods to ideas are irrelevant.
An idea is like a fire that lights up the world. It cannot be taken- only given. It can only be created- and cannot be destroyed. An idea can be granted- but cannot be revoked. A thought is immortal.
Using laws of scarcity to govern the infinite is foolish.
The scary thought is, for most of the geeks out there, what do they consider their native language? How long before we get entire interviews in Perl?
Humourous example ommited because of lameness filter and general poor quality of my Perl.
Uhh... DUDE! Fire is a physical reality.
:)
Comparing a physical reality to an idea is irrelevant.
You said so yourself.
But the goal is not "more free software adoption" but "more free software". As such, telling people how to port their proprietary software to free systems in counter productive.
You know, I could personally think of many more questions that I'd like to ask Bero. Since he's a slashdot pseudo-regular and might just end up reading this, maybe he should contact the Powers That Be (if they don't get to him first!) and set up an actual slashdot interview where we get to ask him our ten most highly moderated questions.
Some of the most obvious questions are already answered on some of his websites (bero.org comes to mind), but I'm sure we could collectively come up with some that are interesting for both him and us!
It's only software!
The most obvious problem is that plenty of hard-working people don't make enough money to afford decent housing, food, and medical care. Meanwhile, some people who seem much lazier live in luxury.
$6/hour * 40 hours/week * 50 weeks/year = $12000/year. That's barely enough to live some places in the U.S. (here in Champaign-Urbana, IL, for example), but definitely not in major urban areas.
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
So, how is this division of land being decided, kind of a divide the area of the earth by the number of people on it and we each get a slice of that size?
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Also, it seems to me that development of apps that run on Open Source Operating SYstems (GNU/Linux) lead to adoptions of these operating systems. In fact, the lack of apps is the one major thing holding back Linux and with it, Open Source.
Michael
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
Let's face it, if you can't put a fence around it, or chain it, or lock it up in some manner, it does not belong to you. It does not matter if it's music, writings, software, ideas, inventions, drawings or what have you. Once you release it, it becomes like the air that we breathe: it belongs to nobody and to everybody.
Property and its offspring intellectual property are simply societal constructs. We live with them by convention, and I see no basis to just disregard intellectual property because you don't like it. We could just as easily say, "Let's face it, if you leave your car in a public parking lot, it belongs to nobody and to everybody." But would society benefit from such a rule?
Personally, I think that society is better off with property rights, including some measure of intellectual property rights. Human motivation is just way too bound up with obtaining things to do with out such basic tenets.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
You forget that quite likely, you own part of Nike. Have you checked the holdings of the funds in your retirement accounts lately? You are directly benefiting from their abuses. And the abuses are carried out in your name.
Fella, the reason you have a high standard of living is because, in the third world, people are working in factories or massive farms for 50 cents an hour and being beaten by security guards for complaining -- and the profits from the enterprise get sent to the USA.
Fair enough, but this has really only applied to the past fifty years- the post-colonial era. The USA emerged from WWII and the Depression as an economic superpower; it's a shame that so much of our continued development has been based on exploitation of the developing world- but much of this based on military expansion, not just global corporations. I think most of the type of abuses you're referring to are even more recent.
Most Americans don't see any of those profits; Nike may have their shoes made for $2 by impoverished Indonesian teenagers, but that doesn't make them cheaper for the consumer. It allows Nike to spend more money on endorsements from superstars [I refuse to buy Nike for this reason]. It sure as hell isn't helping my standard of living, though Michael Jordan and the Nike execs have done quite nicely from the deal.
Well, I was thinking more along the lines of people implying that if you use a GPLed editor to write your code, you have to place the code under the GPL. I've heard some people actually making that claim, so I thought it was important to mention that it's not the case.
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First of all, this is not some generic interview section - it's just a pointer to some questions about "shared source" I answered a while ago.
;)
But since I'm reading this, guess there's no reason not to reply.
1) Ever since the Qt license problems have been resolved, RH hasn't had problems with KDE. Actually, most people in this office use KDE.
There have been a couple of internal flamewars of course, but nobody really takes them seriously.
2) Sure - some of the most serious gripes I've had with Red Hat Linux when I started BeroLinux have been fixed for quite a while - for example, the lack of a possibility to add a non-root user during installation (added in 6.1), KDE integration (initially added in 6.0, updated to a sane version in 7.1), or wasting space by not compressing man/info pages (fixed in 6.1 or 6.2, don't remember), or the lack of optimizations (all 7.x releases are compiled with -march=i386 -mcpu=i686). There are still some things I'd do differently, but overall, I'm quite satisfied with the current version (the current beta in particular).
3) Yes, to an extent. It annoys me even more that RH never bothered to make an official statement regardning the compiler.
I think the whole thing wouldn't be the way it is if someone in power had taken the time to communicate it correctly, preferrably before the 7.0 release.
4) That strongly depends on what you want to do - I personally want to eliminate the need for non-free OSes, which means usability (and thereby KDE) needs the most attention at the moment. But then, things like scaling down to embedded devices and up to high-end servers are not exactly useless either... I think going ahead in all directions the way it's happening now is a good thing.
5) We have a more generic approach to prelinking (needs a patched ld.so and binutils though). This is part of the current beta of RHL.
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If software is to be free, then who can we expect to write it.
Someone who needs it - most free software projects have started out by someone deciding he needs something for himself and just coding it up.
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One could consider the GPL to be the authoritative power (if it actually has any power..its never been tested), but i guess its a matter of interpretation.
My point was that stallman didnt answer the question. Instead he pulled out the Soviet reference..while the soviets were 'communists', they were also almost dictatorial and not in the sense that marx was looking for. I dont think that the question was comparing the FSF to a dictatorial organization, nor should Stallman have answered it as such.
-
Richard Stallman: With free software, you are free to make a modified version and use it, and free to publish the modified version if you want to, but you are not required to publish it. That's you choice.
Freedom is the key. Intellectual property owners accuse those who copy the stuff they publish of stealing their property. They want to prosecute (persecute is a better term) those who do, fine them and/or put them in jail like common thieves.
My question is this, who's going to prosecute IP owners who steal my freedom?
Let's face it, if you can't put a fence around it, or chain it, or lock it up in some manner, it does not belong to you. It does not matter if it's music, writings, software, ideas, inventions, drawings or what have you. Once you release it, it becomes like the air that we breathe: it belongs to nobody and to everybody.
You say, "Well, I worked hard and I must get paid for my work." Right. Well there are a million things in society that you never paid a scent for and you enjoy them freely. Time for you give something back. "Well", you say "how am I gonna make a living?" Good question. It is one that you need to ask your governement.
They instituted the slavery system that you live and work in. Tell them it's no good. Tell them that everybody should be given a piece of the earth, an estate if you will, for you and your descendents. Ask them what they're going to do when AI and advanced technologies finally make human labor obsolete. How is the slave system going to work then? What will your worthless intellectual property going to support you then?
If you read the whole shared-source.com page there is a section on "if open source is so unsafe then hack this computer". It lists all of the software and version numbers the box is running.
It would be nice if a MS website where able to be that bold.
Ascii artist &
I'm serious about this - I'm not trying to be a troll.
If software is to be free, then who can we expect to write it. Obviously, I have a need for a paycheck. Since I have this need, I have an employer. In order for my employer to pay me, I have to contribute to their revenue.
Is it reasonable for companies to only make money from services, and to offer the software for free? Are there companies who are successfully doing this? (Yes I saw the RedHat Quarterly report, but that was a little number fudging - they still lost money). Do we just have to wait out a certain transition period before the idea of Free Software pervasively existing is realistic?
Right here.
This is why free/open sourcers are called communists; because they advocate a social model where no one is making money off of software. In their model, no software generates money because no one is going to be willing to pay for something that has been devalued as low as "free". The value of our hard work is brought down so low that we become the janitors of the network world rather than seen as highly skilled people.
Instead, money is generated by services. Unfortunately, as the value of that software is brought lower, those services will be needed more and more to deal with what will eventually be an acceptance of faulty software. Don't believe it it can happen? There's a whole majority of software users out there, one of which might be your grandmother or cousin, who believe that its OK for the program to crash if you can just restart it or reboot and carry on. Customer service is only glad to help at $100/hr when you call. Somehow I think this is really not what they intend, but there are roads leading off to all sorts of bad places paved with good intentions.
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
This describes what Microsoft USED to do. Microsoft no longer restricts it to their biggest companies (or universities, which for a long time have had access, which noone here seems to realize), but instead allows anyone to look at WinCE code. You can even mess around with it, modify, recompile, as long as it's not for commercial use. This is pretty cool. You can hack with it, play around with it, etc., as long as you don't try to steal Microsoft's code.
Granted, it's not open source by a long shot, but it is a way for Microsoft code to become friendlier.
Oh, and if you check it out, they even allow you to use code in your own. So it's NOT the "Oh-my-god-if-your-seventeenth-cousand-thrice-remo ved-looks-at-this-you-can't-make-anything-more-tha n-shell-scripts-or-Linux-will-be-fucked." Indeed, they're willing to give you ideas.
Shared source isn't what we're into, granted, but it is a lot nicer than we give it credit for. If we're going to be opinionated, let's at least be right.
RMS listed several companies that sell commercial free software. From what I understand, his idea is that software should be free as in speech but need not be free as in beer. As far as I have seen, the main ways to accomplish this and make money at free software are
- The source is free as in speech, but companies can sell compiled binary versions so the users don't have to go to the trouble of compiling their own.
- Some companies also charge for support, documentation and services, while the software itself is free as in speech.
What I am trying to understand is how well this will play to general, non-technical users, the real market that needs to be conquered in order to compete with Microsoft et. al. and get a foothold in the industry.I think that in order for the free software/open source movements to succeed, they need to appeal to everyday users. I think that there also need to be mainstream companies that make money with free software so that the programmers creating the free software can do it as their day job. So please help me understand, in all sincerity, how we will accomplish this?
I have a GUI installed on faux-wife's computer.
It is running KDE 2.0 and I think its a very nice GUI. Better infact than windows even if it is a little less "entuative", entuative is like the word reality -- it always belongs in quotes.
But I alwasy feel limited by the GUI. I can not >, |, x(){} or , a GUI app to get the level of power that I require/want. Command line apps are also easier to hack because you just add anoteher -x option instead of haveing to find room on an already clutterd API.
You can not cron a GUI app that does anything substantial.
My sig is not ment to spark a GUI vs Command Line argument. Its ment to appeal to those who thrive on the things that a command line can do that a GUI just is not capable of. By the same token there are those things a GUI can do that the command line can't. It is all a matter of preferance.
Drag and drop and WYSIWYG is not always the best way to go.
Ascii artist &
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."
There is a certain prevalent mentality that assumes the only significant motivation for doing anything is the desire to make money. There are a great many craftsmen (and women, I know) who would not say money is their prime reason to be doing what they are doing. Most of the best art falls in this category. The stuff made primarily for BIG SALES tends to suck. Britney Spears anybody?
Some people write this stuff because it is fun to run their own code. Others do it because the software in ancillary to their true goals. The Apache web server came about this way. Apache wasn't developed to make Webserver Inc a pile of money. Some webadmins needed a httpd daemon that was reliable and featureful. The original Linux kernel that Linus made available to his fellow hackers wasn't going to make anybody mounds of cash: it would barely boot a 386. The additions from volunteers was what made it valuable.
I'll agree that anybody who wants to make money trying to sell something that is free is on a fools errand. However there is nothing wrong in taking something free and using it as part of something larger that is sold. The school district that I work for uses a product called the Firebox. It is not marketed strictly as a Linux box. It is sold as an easily configured firewall and proxy server. The middle school tech guy loves that thing. Oh yeah, and they pay the guy who works on iptables. IBM and SUN are hardware companies and are all for anything that helps them sell hardware. Incidentally, the bulk of RedHat's profit doesn't come from selling the boxed distro. They also sell customization and consulting services.
Open source only fails to make sense to those who sell boxed software. It is a moneymaking or moneysaving opportunity for others with different models. Think about independent music for a monent. With the RIAA gone there wouldn't be many pop music multimillionaires. There would be and ARE a lot of people who earn honest livings writing and performing. The same is true of open source. No one will be a multibillionaire selling it but it will enable many others to earn decent livings.
Apparently these interviews are dynamically generated.
Got friends?
The very first paragraph of his page says that the Windows CE source code was released under a Shared Source license. A mere five sentences later (note that this is also five paragraphs later, since he's one of those idiots who uses a new paragraph for just about every single sentence he writes), he's telling us that Shared Source "gives only some selected (by Microsoft) large companies the permission to view parts of the source code [...]" This is also a point (entirely incorrect, by the way) that he continually harps upon. Is he senile or something, or did he forget what he wrote only 5 sentence earlier?
As if that weren't enough for one sentence, he continues by saying, "[...] under the provision that it is not modified, compiled (turned into an executable file the computer rather than the programmer understands), or redistributed, in modified or unmodified form." Please note that this is complete bullshit, and anyone reading the short and very easy-to-understand license will see this immediately.
Let me know if the rest of it has anything useful, but because he so bolloxed up the first page length of his article with lies, I'm not going to bother with the rest of it.
"The core of communism is who controls the means of production. Did the people in the Soviet Union control the means of production? No, they did not. Thus it was not communism. "
...
True, but simply because communism, as a completely utopian idea, cannot exist in reality.
Human nature alone is a reason enough that communism will never succeed.
There will always be a stronger individual, somebody with enough balls to hijack the entire enterprise and pretend that everything is done "in the name of the people."
It happened every time people tried to implement workable version of communism
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
If you owned billions of dollars worth of MSFT stock, you would dance like that too I'm afraid.
cpeterso
good interview with stallman except his dance around the communism question. Alot of what the FSF and stallman yell about is common to utopian communism. Instead he pulled out the Soviet reference without answering what was probably the true intention of the question.
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Bison is an interesting example, but as far as I know it is somewhat unique. And now that version is obsolete so the whole point is moot.
The spirit of the GPL and precedents are pretty clear that the GPL does not put restrictions on data generated but only on derived works.
Technically, of course, you are right there have been GPL programs where the output also had to be placed under the GPL. But I cant think of any GPL program included in a major distribution that has this problem now. Or perhaps I just havent looked far enough?
If you look in a Visual C++ header file, you will see something like this:
People love bringing up the Bison example to demonstrate that GPL code poses some sort of secret threat to take over everyone else's code. Yet people include header files in their C++ programs without worrying that their code will become a derived work of Microsoft's.Why is GNU held up to a higher standard than Microsoft?
I think that RMS probably knows that the Soviet system was not true Communism as defined by Marx; he's a pretty smart guy. But when somebody throws around accusations of Communism, they're generally doing so to paint the target of those accusations with being like the thing that was called Communism under the Soviet system. That means that disclaiming similarity to the Soviet approach is a reasonable response, since it's a response to the comparison intended.
The alternative of launching into a discussion of how the Soviet Union didn't represent true Communism, and you're happy to accept the mantle of being a Communist as described by Marx, etc. isn't the way to convince people that you're OK. Turning the issue around and painting yourself in Red, White, and Blue as the defenders of peoples' rights and your opponents as evil authoritarians out to deprive those rights makes a much better sound bite. And despite people's complaints about RMS, he's actually getting pretty good at coming up with clever sound bites and slogans. The comparison of software code with recipies is an apt way of making his point.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Almost all of Linux and BSD was written simply because there was a giagantic need to have a flexible OS freely available and no software around to fill the void. People got together and wrote it because who else but them was going to?
These days there is still that kind of modivation present(ie. someone releases new hardware someone has to write a driver for it or its just dead weight in the box). But also present is the tinkering and experimentation. Do you want to experiment with different scheduling methods in the kernel? Go for it! Did you hear about some wacky advanced method for heap walk allocation and want to implement it? Go for it! Where else are you going to try this on? Windows? Bwahahahah! ^_^
First off read the license. It never says that.
Second off, if you are just an end user you don't have to give the BSD or GPL a second thought.
Thirdly if you are going to to tinker with the code, you have all the freedom any man/woman/child/whatever can have with a piece of GPL code. But this extends to everyone. Everyone is equally equal on the usage of GPL stuff. How much more freedom does anyone want?
You can read the code. You can learn from it(very important). You can modify it. You can put it in a blender and make a nutrious shake to make you loose weight and feel great. What every you feel is good for you.
As for this myth that Stallman/FSF/anyone else is going to beat you with the GPL stick if you don't release code upon immediately changing is all BS.
Anyone can take any GPL stuff modify to suite their needs and never need to release their changes back to anyone. Its nice to return code back to the hardworking authors(like bug fixes) but other things are meanless(like idiosyncratic stuff). Why does anyone need to know how my Linux kernel has been modified with some beta driver?
The only time you are forced to release changes back for GPL stuff is one "publish" it again. For instance I can't tinker with a GPL "Beta Video Driver 0.1" and then turn around and publish it on the web page in binary form only as "My Video Driver 1.0". That is a giant no-no.
Why would you anyway...it serves no purpose and robs the authors who worked under the GPL agreement of their rights.
"This is why we have kde vs. gnome "
....
Both of which are trying to CATCH up with MS desktop which supposedly is so stagnated because of lack of competition
Dumbass.