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BBC interview with RMS
An anonymous reader submitted an interview with RMS running over at the BBC. Doesn't really say much of anything
that you haven't heard before but it's a nice little interview, and its
not like much else is happening today :)
Stallman interview
By uptight British network
Meant to excite me?
Isn't he RIGHT?
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
It's a lot less complicated than worrying about proprietary licenses - and if you think license conditions are easy to follow in MS licenses, read this:
We sat down and tried to figure this out step by step by step by step. We actually looked up the license agreements to ensure compliance. We think we have a handle on this.
Here's the scenario.
I'm at my local municipal library, and I want to check my Groupwise address book for a name. So I quick connect to my Citrix server from the library Windows95 machine. Here is the thought process that every user must use to make this legal, and prevent MS from labeling you a software pirate.
Hmmmm. This machine is a Win95 machine, and the office Terminal server is a Winnt 2000 Advance Server, so because the remote OS level is less than the Terminal Server, I'm going to need to allocate one of my NT server CALs and a Terminal Server CAL (TCAL) to this library machine. I'll have to call the IS guy to make sure the licensing hofix has been applied to the server, just in case it isn't and the license allocation is permanent and unreclaimable. If I already have a TCAL assigned to my primary computer at the office, I can purchase a Terminal Server Work at Home license instead to save some cash. If I've never connected to the Terminal Server from my desk at the Office, then I'll need to allocate a full TCAL for this library machine. Hmmm... maybe I should check with Joe, because I know he connected from here a few months ago, and it's possible that the Work At Home TCAL, and the Office licensing we purchased for this library machine is still valid.
Because the Terminal Server has Office installed, even though I don't want to run the blasted Office software, I'll also need to verify whether Office is installed locally here at the library. If it is, I can get away with purchasing a Work At Home Office license. Wait. Better check first with the IT guys again to verify that we have not upgraded our Select 3 license agreement which implied home use licenses. I should probably also verify whether the Work At Home license applies if I'm not at home. If we have a Select 4, or 5, or Enterprise 4, or 5, agreement at the Office, then we can purchase and apply a Work At Home license to the connection. In any case, the IT guys should know whether they have more WorkAt Home licenses purchased than they own in full Office licensing, because Microsoft only allows one Work At Home license per full license. If they tell me that we only have an Open license agreement at the Office, Work At Home licenses do not apply and in this case I would need to purchase an entire Office Suite for the library computer so I can find the address in my GroupWise Address book. This is because it happens that the Terminal server has Office installed on it, and every device that connects to the server will also require an equal Office license.
In short, you wanted to see an interview of ESR, not RMS.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
That's the exact impression I get from RMS, though. He's an idealist who is, as he said, only interested in protecting freedoms. ESR, with the Cathedral and the Bazaar, tried to temper that with a more practical appeal, with marginal success. Ironically ESR gets the most press for being kind of "out there," while RMS is (perhaps rightly so) paraded as the hero of open source.
And that's where most of our arguments lie: ideaology. If not for our core philosophical beliefs, a lot of us would simply throw our lot in with proprietary software vendors and try to make a buck like everyone else. Sure open source (sorry, Free) software has a lot of benefits to businesses and home users, but those are really afterthoughts.
RMS on availability of source code:
It means that you can see what the program does. So if you are concerned it might have a back door, you can check what it really does. And you can study it to learn how you do those jobs. You can study it to see precisely what it does.
Yes, it might be free to have, but no one at my job knows Linux or anything else about free software, therefore we'd have to hire a consultant at perhaps $80.00 an hour to analyze the code and solve the problem.
This is major $ compared to the price of licenses. Sometimes the "free software" argument is grasping at straws, since there is cost to maintaing software, no matter whose software it is.
If I weren't nailed to the penis, I'd be pushing up the daisies!
Uh, I count 31 instances of "free" or "freedom" in that interview. Is anyone else getting a strange blind spot in their brain when they hear or read those words? The word means so many things to so many people that we're in serious danger of it losing all meaning, and simply becoming a synonym for "good", which is pretty much the way politicians and industry use it already.
Perhaps the FSF could consider coming up with a new angle. I mean, I'm marching firmly behind the Freedom Flag, but it seems like we're slipping into a weird Braveheart parallel universe when two sides rush headlong into battle, both screaming "Freeeeeedom!" at the top of their lungs.
There are other words, and other concepts that represent the FSF's ideals. Open. Shared. Community. Perhaps we could embroider some of those words onto our flag for a while, just until the Freedom Fad blows over.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Hmmmm, commerce through ignorance? That must be Rad Hat's plan. Sell shiny boxes for $70, don't let on that you can get it for free if you ask. (The gurus know anyway).
Two words:
"Bottled Water".
'nuff said.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Except that in addition to selling it, you have to offer it for free, too. this simply isn't true. whenever you distribute GPL'ed software, you must offer the source code as well. you can charge whatever you want for the software, but either way, it must include the possibility of getting the source. you are not giving the source away for free, you are giving the source code along with the executable, and you are free to charge for that if you want to. the only difficulty arises because anyone you sell to can undercut your own price, creating a natural price point of zero, unless you believe in the natural good of humanity.
You only have to make the source available to people you distribute the binaries to. So if you sell source & binaries in the same box for $70, there is no need for you to provide either for free. Of course, you can't prevent your customers from giving it away for free, but that's a separate problem.
--
E_NOSIG
This story is hilarious... I half expected to see it posted so we could get in our usual Microsoft bashing in for the day...
As I write this, they still don't have that wehavethewayout.com web site working yet.
Also, be sure to check out wehavethewayin.com site....
I don't know. I'd call Linux and Apache pretty powerful. Emacs is certainly a powerful editor, wouldn't you say? PERL is a pretty powerful language too.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Does anyone have the sneaking suspicion that Richard Stallman is Karl Marx reincarnated? I think Marx would have had the same views about free software that Richard Stallman does. And did you see the picture? Give him a few years and some gray hair and he'll be a dead ringer for Marx. I mean, has anyone ever seen them together? Eerie.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
there is one catch.
yes, you can sell the software, yes you do not have to give it away at the same time, and yes others can resell copies, but brand names can not be redistributed. if I was to buy a copy of redhat, and then repackage a bunch of copies and sold it as redhat, I would be liable for tradmark infringment. and if I made up a new name, people would not notice me as I do not have brand recognition, value added (as people would say "why not just go with RH since it is the same thing") and services.
so realy, people are drawn in to distrobutions becasue of brand recognition mostly. with tradmark and services that RH offers, it will be hard to get into the market.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
RMS and others have not yet brought up the underlying reason that Open Source is so important in the OS and in common large "container" type applications.
:)
If you view a computers running environment as a software universe, with rules which govern its operation just like the laws of physics govern our physical universe, then it becomes a lot more obvious why closed source is really, really bad.
Unlike the physical universe, the rules in a computer environment can change. If you can't trust the person who is controlling the properties of the universe (the OS provider), and you can't change the environment yourself, then you are at the mercy of that person, group, or company. Imagine if there were no God, and Bill was controlling the universe. He could and would simply make everyone who didn't agree with him have to breath water instead of air and we would all quickly asphyxiate. The same thing is true of the OS. It is simply too much power to place in the hands of any one company, person, or organization. Thus the solution is to have it be completely open with everyone working together to ensure that no one person abuses the rest of us.
This philosophy should be extended to all container-model software applications. Apache is better than IIS because it is a container for web services (SOAP, CGI, mod_*, HTTP, etc...) and those services are not directly provided by the container. Just like in the case of IIS, any product that becomes popular is quickly either purchased and absorbed (often by less-than-honest means) by the owner of the container, or choked off and killed because it is a threat.
This is my problem with Weblogic, IIS, Microsoft's OS and any other system where I am writing code dependant on someone else's proprietary idea of how I should get things done. I simply don't trust anyone unless they trust me first.
This philosophy can even be extended to entertainment with very little modification. Our real problem with the RIAA and MPAA is that we can't trust anyone with the power to dictate what we are allowed to see and hear because they abuse it. They abused it when they started brainwashing us to listen to their idea of what was good music and by restricting and controlling the artists that produced that music. They are like the OS of the music industry.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Any container model is absolute power over the contained objects. OS, J2EE, Web Services, Entertainment, News and the list goes on.
Free the source in all cases, not just the OS.
Of course, when you start applying this to government you get the whole Democratic system and we all know how terrible that turned out...
Imagine if anyone who wanted to could just plug into the kernel CVS tree and change the current distribution source to fit their proprietary purposes. That's why there is a governing body of people with the ability to decide what does and does not belong in the kernel. Thus: a republic.
So we have come full circle peeps: Let's create a on-line open-source republic with independent governing bodies for every single container system out there, from open source to government.
Hell, I just solved the worlds problems... time for a coffee break.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
There's nothing else happening?
I do not know about India, but in Maghreb
(I think Algeria and especially Libya
which is more or less out of the world trade
system anyway) people couldn't care less about
pirating software. I think there is not even
a representative of Microsoft in some of those
countries ! so they end up working with age old
versions of pirated stuff. That's why indeed
they should switch to free software, to have something younger than six or seven years and
which actually works !
On the opposite, in 1st world countries, the
price of 1 licence of XP/Office Pro/whatever
represents maybe 4 hours of pay of an averaged
qualified worker, including overhead...
think installation and configuration
time for some free stuff !
Some businesses shell out 100K/year on some software to spare one or two workers, so free
software has really to be competitive in
performance and stability to convince some
management to switch.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Fantasy belief number one: People would love using command-line, UNIX-like environments if they didn't constantly have Microsoft shoving GUIs down their throat.
/. - you and i have - but imagine how clear the idea of Free Software would be after reading this interview. It is not a simple concept, nor is it common, it is necessary for RMS to not confuse the subject but instead deliver the relevant 'jist' of Free Software as quickly and clearly as possible.
What are you talking about? What does GUI vs CLI have to do with this?
Fantasy belief number two: Users prefer technical superiority over usability.
And Children prefer candy over green-beans. Do you let your children sit down to a meal of cake and suger-candy? (Soccer Mom Whimper: "Wont someone please think of the children!")
Fantasy belief number three: Slap a buggy, bloated GUI desktop on top of UNIX, and end users will flock to it in droves.
MacOSX - KDE && Gnome.
Fantasy belief number four: users will struggle through hours upon hours of painful software configuration in order to thwart the Evil Software Empire.
Who is struggling? GNU/Linux gets "easier" by the day, its not "MS Easy" vs "GNU/Linux Hard" its "Familiar" vs "unFamiliar".
Fantasy belief number five: Developers will give away their time and expertise to develop free software, solely to Make The World A Better Place.
When your employer sells a license - do you get a royalty? You are paid for the time you write code -- as am I -- why do you expect to be paid again, and again, and again - see the plumber point again please. Further, think about "Intellectual Property" (which is borne by a moment and act (like anything else)) vs "Property".
Fantasy belief number six: Ug. Me Stallman. Proprietary Bad. Ug. Open Good!
RMS gives lucid and appropriate-to-the-audience commentary. He "sticks" to the point because there are still many who havnt heard. He is a terrific communicator with an excellent understanding of language and its use as a tool. Not everyone in the world has read hundreds of RMS interviews from the front-page of
I love to read RMS interviews like this - it means thousands of ignorant people will just have received the meaning of Free Software.
And finally, to some people like myself, a person is a product of his relationships to his friends, family and his community. When you look at yourself, you are only a demonstration of your morals. If you cannot live a principled life - one guided by an imperative to do 'good'*, then you are failing as a person. I have been given an opportunity to "Make The World A Better Place" -- by my basic existence, as have you -- and it is my sole goal in life, and many others.**
*Of your choosing, this is true Freedom and Liberty.
**If not, we would all be sitting in mud huts masturbating and getting drunk all day.
I have to shake my head at this kind of reasoning. It's something like this: We have to revile RMS at every possible opportunity, or else he will instantly force us all to live in some hippy commune. Boo, RMS!
I don't have a problem with RMS living his life the way he wants to live it. I have a big problem with his shoving his version of "freedom" down my throat.
The chance of this ever happening is miniscule compared to, say, Elvis taking over your brain by shooting zoobie rays from the flying saucer he got from the elves. Come on! It isn't going to happen.
If I want to use closed source, proprietary software, then dammit RMS stay the hell out of my machine.
What, did he come to your house, break down the door, and force you at gunpoint to erase all your proprietary sofware licenses? Or are you being just a teensy bit paranoid?
The best we can hope for is a world in which some free software continues to exist and is not made totally illegal under pressure by the MPAA, RIAA, international media companies, etc. It's like a tug-of-war, and if you're outnumbered, you have to pull the rope really hard. I'm not like RMS, but I'm very glad he's out there and getting interviewed.
It is good that RMS exists, and it is also good that he has extreme opinions, because they define the arena within which consensus is built. He'll never get his way, but because of him and others, the mega-corporations may not get their way, which would be no freedom for anybody, ever, under any circumstances.
That's the choice here. It isn't RMS's vision versus a more moderate one. Closed source, proprietary software isn't going away. Ever.
It has long been said that nobody would have listened to Martin Luther King if the Black Panthers hadn't been there as an alternative. I think this is accurate. Nobody would listen to Linus or ESR if RMS weren't there, either. Consensus-building just doesn't work that way.