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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."
Funny you should mention that. I'm relatively new to /. and thus frequently feel like I must be completely missing something when I see the huge /. devotion to the open source world. But, here I am a bright, worldly, technocentric, system-building, wired guy... and I've just simply not heard good enough sermons to convert. I'm intrigued, periodically very impressed with so much of the work, but at some gut level I'm just not sensing the long-term head of steam and ecomonic viability of the approach (or is it lifestyle?).
Most interviews like this seem to take as irreducible truths that people like me are dumb as rocks... but not a single IT customer of mine (ranging from non-profits, to retailers, to municipalities, and so on) as developed the sense that they're on the wrong track, let alone done anything to go this route.
OK, do your worst (or, save me from myself, if you can!).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
...here is a Gloklaw story about a patent (U.S. Patent number 6,836,883, titled "Method and system for compiling multiple languages", described as a method or "process involving the parsing and analyzing of more than one source language to produce a common language file that may then be read by the same or another front end system.") that was awarded to Microsoft. Says PJ, "The patent cites the Free Software Foundation's GCC in the prior art section." Microsoft's motivation for applying for this patent is: "The protection and licensing of intellectual property allows companies and individuals to obtain a return on investment, sustaining business and encouraging future rounds of research and investment in the IT industry."
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I mean I love most of the gnu software I have running on my system and god bless any contributor to that effort but - woh! - he says some of the funniest things like:
The Workplace:
JA: What if your job requires you to use non-free software?
Richard Stallman: I would quit that job. Would you participate in something anti-social just because somebody pays you to?
I mean come on. Both free and non-free software has its place in the modern world and I need to take technology to a religious level like I need a hole in my head.
He is sooo wacky.
ACK
If they were able to capture enough of the value of what they write to pay for the legal defense of their rights they'd probably write a lot less free software.
This gets to a fundamental problem with the incentives created by taxing things other than asset value:
Possession is rewarded over creation.
Think about it: Once you possess something, you basically have no tax burden. You enjoy the benefits of young men dutifully going out to die in wars, the entire legal edifice describing and protecting your rights and without you having to pay a cent. You can just soak the public for these benefits.
Taxing everything but possession (income, capital gains, sales, value added, etc) is just a way to tax the creative process.
Naturally, creators who are trying to get a leg up on the situation end up selling their creations cheap to those whose possession is subsidized by the tax payments of the creators.
Well, there is one exception to this rule of no taxation of possession -- and that is the patent maintanence fee. Patents are the only assets that the government taxes. This is an incredibly regressive tax hitting hardest those who are earliest to support the realization of a new technology's value -- forcing them to sell their rights ("assign") cheap to someone who has been sitting around enjying the government's protection.
It all adds up to a very nasty way of sucking capital out of the hands of creators and giving over to the hands of possessors.
So the creators, unable to change the tax laws to tax assets rather than creative processes (becuse they can't buy the Ways and Means Committee) become socialists.
This is directly related to the issue of outsourcing since if programmers who had created the value of the information industry had been allowed to retain the value they created, they wouldn't need jobs. The corporations would be paying them royalties or be paying companies owned by the programmers for the rights to their software instead of just throwing creators out on the street after extracting their youth and creativity.
A system that would work would elimnate all existing taxes (although not necessarily tariffs) and just tax net assets at a rate equal to the interest rate on the national debt -- exempting from taxation the same assets that are exempted by personal bankruptcy protection: home and tools of the trade.
Seastead this.
Amongst the flames & trolls there were some detailed & reasonably thoughtful responses (including from someone who's got as 'Foe' - hi spectecjr:) - & the only argument I heard that stood up as not obvious Straw men, irrelevant, or based on a misunderstanding, was that some developers do not consider the four freedoms described by the GNU philosophy page to be fundamental freedoms.
The best counter-argument to that that I can think of is that it is only a matter of degree; the freedom to study, redistribute (etc) software is less important than the freedom not to be beaten to death by government clowns, say, but that does not mean that the software freedoms are not, in themselves, important.
I have a bad feeling I'm getting into areas dealt with my philosophy-101; can anyone else (a) advance sensible reasons why intelligent, informed people might produce non-Free s/w, and (b) refutations of those reasons.
Please, no confusion with 'Open source' development advantages or disadvantages - I'm specifically interested in the purely MORAL arguments made by RMS.
Arguments such as 'my family has to eat', 'how would programs like Photoshop be developed if it was Free?', "I am free to distribute software I write under any license I like", etc etc, are missing the point. I'd hate to find myself deciding that the reason is that proprietary developers consciously dismiss the moral / ethical issues as uninteresting or irrelevant. I know there are a lot of people here working on proprietary as well as Free s/w and you can't all be trolls :)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe