Interview With Richard Stallman

An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has a fascinating and lengthy interview with Richard Stallman who founded the GNU Project in 1984, and the Free Software Foundation in 1985. He also originally authored a number of well known and highly used development tools, including the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the GNU symbolic debugger (GDB) and GNU Emacs. The interview covers a wide range of topics, from rms's early years, to his current role in the Free Software Foundation. He discusses the current state of GNU/Hurd, the problems with non-free software, and much more."

Comments

Other points

[UnknowingFool]

I'm not particular knowledgeable about RMS' views nor do I support them. I just hope he still doesn't look like that picture. The crazed psycho killer look is so dated.

Re:GNU/Linux? No.

[IgnoramusMaximus]

We are all using egcs, it replaced the original gcc years ago.

No, we are all using gcc which at one time had a fork called egcs which was later adopted as the main branch. If what the poster I replied to was saying was correct, the egcs fork along with its name and phillosophy would be described as such explicitely in daily use. Instead what happened is a natural consequence of a fact that egcs was but a small ripple in a surface of a vastly more comprehensive system called gcc under the umbrella of even more wide reaching project called GNU.

Re:Cue the assinine comments...

[oliverthered]

Your confusing people I'd like to have round my house with visionaries.

The Hitler legecy.
Brain sergury, Rockets, the Boy Scouts and about a million other things that you can't see because 'He's a great Asshole!'

Bush.
King of the Christian Democrats, he's a visionary because he has a goal that he want's to achieve and he won't let anyone get in his way It may not be your goal (or mine)

Come on, you can do better.

And if you think Ghandi was great think of salt well how just much salt do they put in things now, enough to kill us. Thanks Ghandi for helping to make millions of people ill.

Out of interest what's your AQ?

This site explains your shortsightedness much better that I can.

"
Villains and Kooks

There are many people wose ideas about the future are reasonable or respected but who are misguided about the subjects of methods of their visions.
Even though they may not lead to constructive results, erroneous visions deserve a special study.
Here is a modest initial selection:
Karl Marx - his main mistakes, in my opinion, were the seductively misleading idea that complex social processes may be explained and governed by a simple set of rules, similarly to those suggested by Newton for mechanical systems, and undue extrapolation of social trends of his time. Something we could learn from now...
Adolf Hitler One of the most successful proponents of nationalism in history, Hitler gave us some very good lessons. We paid too much for these lessons not to learn from them.
Vladimir Lenin did the same thing for communist ideas.
Nostradamus - an author of a set of vast, vague, and unsubstantiated claims about the future, which were less unexcusable in his time than in ours.
Jeremy Rifkin. - In the words of Charles Platt, "I believe Rifkin is the commentator who poses the greatest threat to attempts to transcend limitations of the human condition." Godling's Glossary defines Rifkin's kind of theories as Disasturbation
All religious thinkers that ever lived, for mistaking emotionally charged metaphors for the objective reality?"

Let go of my non-free software

[roman_mir]

Richard Stallman: Any development of non-free software is harmful and unfortunate - that's the most ridiculous statement out of the entire interview. I so don't care if an application that came with my web-camera is free or not, it's not even funny. I don't care about the source to that app and I don't care about my ability to change it and redistribute it, in fact I don't want to do any of those things. Leave my non-free software alone it's not going to go away anyway.

Richard Stallman: It is better to develop no software than to develop non-free software. - a load of BS. Who in hell would have created computers in the first place, if it wasn't for IBM and their non-free software and non-free computers used for war? It's better to develop something than to develop nothing. The users themselves are not interested in development, they are interested in the results of their use of the applications. I am so not interested in developing most of the software I use, but this software does serve its purpose and I am glad I can buy it. If I had to wait for everything to be free, I would have been dead before seeing most free software equivalents of the apps that I use daily.

So if you find yourself in that situation, please don't follow that path. Please don't write the non-free program--please do something else instead. We can wait till someone else has the chance to develop a free program to do the same job. - Maybe RMS can wait for whatever free software, I can't. Sure, if it exists now, that's great, but it's not the case. Why shouldn't I use nonfree tax-return software? I will use it and recommend it too.

- I have two words for RMS in this case: Fuck You, RMS. I will write all the non-free software I wish and no-one is going to stop me. I also wrote my first software on paper because I did not have a computer, you are not the only one. You are not to dictate what kind of software I will develop. Why the hell is it about software anyway? How many non-free (sort of like closed source, electronics for example) things you buy, what should everyone stop working on proprietary systems and all of a sudden release everything for 'Free'? Not while I am around that won't happen. But I am antisocial like that.

Richard Stallman: ...You know, it's no coincidence that we're having all this outsourcing. That was carefully planned. International treaties were designed to make this happen so that people's wages would be reduced. - That's also quite questionable. I don't think the corporations do anything just to annoy their employees, but they do follow a simple pattern of trying to minimize the cost.

Richard Stallman: FTAA. The World Trade Organization. NAFTA. These treaties are designed to reduce wages by making it easy for a company to say to various countries, "which of you will let us pay people the least? That's were we're headed." And if any country starts having a somewhat increased standard of living, companies say "oh, this is a bad labor climate here. You're not making a good climate for business. All the business is going to go away. You better make sure that people get paid less. You're following a foolish policy arranging for workers of your country to be paid more. You've got to make sure that your workers are the lowest paid anywhere in the world, then we'll come back. Otherwise we're all going to run away and punish you." - This is just paranoia, the guy truly believes in the 'evil intent' of corporations and individuals. That is not impossible of course (with me in charge, for example, everything is always an evil intent,) but I don't believe all companies care enough about such a long term prospect as inflated wages in their specific country. RMS always looks too far into the future and he believes others do too, but people are mostly not philosophers, they are just realists.

Businesses very often do it, they move operations out of a country to punish that country. And I've recently come

Re:"I have no control..."

[LordHunter317]

But that's the point.
No, it isn't.

The BSD license is making that decision for me.
No, you made that decision when you chose to license your code under the BSD license. Scapegoating an inanimate document is childish.
BTW, if you can't comprehend the full ramifications of a specific license, then don't use it.

If you want to contribute to a project licensed under me, then you MUST contribute your code to proprietary software vendors that want to use it
Incorrect. The BSD license does not forbid someone distributing BSD-licensed code from limiting distribution. It doesn't mandate it either. It also doesn't forbid you from charging whatever you want for distribution as well.
IOW, there's nothing illegal about licensing your code under a BSD license and then only giving it to certain people. However, you can't force them to do the same. BTW, the GPL is exactly the same way; neither license makes any statement about who can/cannot be distributed to. The GPL does differ in that you cannot charge for source distribution. The expectation is that you give it to everyone freely, but that's not the legal requirement.

The GPL gives me freedom to decide how the code will be used in proprietary software.
Actually, it doesn't give you the choice, it mandates it for you. The GPL requires open-sourcing of any changes made, this kills any proprietary software. The BSD does not. Like it or not, logically, this means the BSD license is more free than the GPL in this regard, because more choices are available. This isn't something that can be argued either.

The BSD license may force a situation (if you're required to license under the BSD license, which, without forking, you generally are for BSD projects), but the GPL merely has the absense of that force.
This is backwards.

Generally it's a strange definition of freedom that denies it to contributors.
It's also a strange one that denies it to it's users.

Re:Refuting RMS?

[Cally]

Before I answer your question, let me offer you a question: every second, several children dies from starvation. You're now reading Slashdot. Why aren't you out donating money to the Red Cross instead?

You don't have to answer that for me, because I know the answer. You simply don't care enough. Evolution hasn't equipped you with the ability to care for people you can't see or hear, but that are only numbers in a newspaper, if even that. So you don't care.

I was going to jump in after the first paragraph, but then I thought I'd quote your insults in full. You, who know nothing of me but what I said in my comment, not only claim to know that I'm not 'out donating to the Red Cross', but adduce this to a genetic predisposition towards not caring. I wonder whether you have a genetic predisposition towards being an arsehole? My guess is that it has more to do with your development environment, but anyway...

You've raised a real question in amongst the abuse though, which is: how does one decide whether the moral logic of Free software compells me to use it in preference to non-Free software, when there are many thousands of people suffering far worse things than lack of Free software? A: It's a false dichotomy. I do, as a matter of fact, contribute in various ways to various charitable orgs that have nothing to do with computers per se. But I am not a doctor, or a development worker,.. I am a computer-person for want of a better term. I try my best not to do things that appear to harm others, that's all. No doubt there is more I could do for others, but I don't see use of FreeSW as either inconsistent with doing anything else to help others, or as any kind of personal sacrifice. All I've done is to gradually move away from helping a system that harms me (as a user) and others (encouraging non-Free SW companies by giving them money or supporting / developing with their SW.)

As for the moral question, should we work on FSW, the answer is probably "no" for most people as well. The reason being that while a world wholly deprived of proprietary SW might be a better one than the one we currently live in (though I and many others doubt that. It's possible, but difficult to estimate), there are so many much, much more worthy causes to fight for before it comes to that, eliminating world poverty being one.

Again, it's not one-or-the-other; and anyway, FSW has the happy side-effect of being more utility to the world's poor.

Go outside every once in a while, will you? If you think the existence of NF SW is the worst evil in the world today, you're in for bit of a surprise. Then you'll be the one with trouble sleeping.

Of course NFSW isn't the worst evil in the world today. Do you think humanity as a species should make a collective list of Evil Stuff to elliminate, and then work down it one item at a time? 'Right, that's world poverty elliminated! Now to tackle the brutal trench warfare that's swept the planet!" If I see a big beetle on the footpath, I avoid stamping on it and instead will generally pick it up or prod it off into the undergrowth. How can I live with myself, not stamping on beetles, when there are children starving in the third world?!