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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."
This is a GNU/Interview. Get it right please!
Someone should teach the editors how to diagram a sentence.
I guess I better move IBM to the inconsequential list now :\
... and as usual the person who makes it his business to inform, impower, and proliferate benefitial technology will be ignored by the greedy, insane corporate monster and comments against him will be moded up by the PR sock-puppets who frequent Slashdot.
btw frell off sock-puppets. `(
Stallman will not change his beliefs because they aren't practical.
No sane person would sit down and write their own C compiler+debugger from scratch because he didn't like the licenses of the currently available compilers.
Stallman is gonzo batshit crazy, and that's why he was able to start a movement - normal people would have evaluated the difficulties and not even tried. If his movemement hadn't caught on, Stallman would still be labouring by himself, in obscurity, trying to make his vision a reality.
BTW, the market hasn't been slowly squeezing out Open Source, quite the contrary.
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.
> Maybe he's ahead of his time or something, but right now, his ideas just aren't
> viable
That's not his problem. Or at least, it's not just his problem. You can't blame someone for identifying problems and coming up with solutions just because most people don't understand their worth at the moment. Current womens/black/animal rights were won through slow, unpopular and sometimes illegal methods, and people criticized those at the time too. When people can't tape programmes off the tv or listen to music they've bought on CD (or wherever) in the car is when people will start to pay more attention to some of these issues.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
The death announcment of OS is a little premature. I work for a large biotech and we see OS as a valuable, litlle different, business model. Sure it will have a hard time with Joe Sixpack who just wants to surf pr0n, but there are already enough non-PHB bosses out there who see the benifit of OS. Just take the religion out of it and start realising that not all OSS is written by ideologic amateurs. The % of OS software written by people who get paid for it is on the rise!
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Desperately trying to find RMS' fault?
Why do slashdotters hate RMS so much? I hope you realise that slashdot (and all such sites) would not have been here if it wasn't for RMS' efforts.
...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.
Exactly. The best thing RMS has done [w.r.t. software] was get the ball rolling. I think he deserves all the credit in the world for that.
I don't think he deserves the credit for the current state of things. GCC is now the result of 1000s of contributors and several dozen active developers none of whom are RMS.
But does anyone know their [GCC developers] names? Hell, I couldn't even name one off the top of my head. [Mark Mitchell comes to mind but I don't think thats right]...
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Stallman may be fanatical but you must be blind. I see companies embracing open source and thriving. And you know what. Open source was here before their was a market for it, and it will be here after if it comes to that.
Sounds like "There is no God but Allah; Mohammed is His Prophet".
I care about the idealogical bents of Richard Stallman. I am a consumer and a producer. Please don't speak in my place, especially without my permission. I shall refrain from speaking in your place, albeit I had beans yesterday...
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
They should have asked him about his thoughts on the recent introduction of software patents in India.
Surely they mean SNOBOL.
The subtext of your argument is that (if I'm reading you correctly), because only a small minority see freedom in software as important, free software is not viable. That minority however is important: that minority is a huge proportion of those who make technology decisions for computer companies, which is why we're seeing a situation where most servers today seem to run free software. That minority is also intelligent and educated enough to be able to support free software, to provide the infrastructure that allows it to exist. And free software, to an extent, is self-sustaining as long as someone, somewhere, believes in it. If there's only one person in the world who believes in it, that person can modify and improve the software they have. The same argument cannot be made for proprietary software which requires a large enough market to become sustainable.
In other words, the marketshare of free software is not a serious issue and never has been. Those handing their private parts and a mallet to Apple have more to fear than those handing them to RMS and ESR.
RMS has already won the war, to a certain extent. Free software is no longer a lunatic idea. The second most popular operating system is free software and is just as viable as the first.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
blah blah blah bullshit.
Public domain software existed before RMS started his FSF and GCC/GDB projects.
No, you wouldn't have Mozilla to type your post in if it weren't for 100s of developers [none of whom are RMS] or a desktop mananger [gnome/kde.... again not RMS] or X [not RMS] or fuck, even a shell [not RMS] or a kernel to host it all [not RMS].
What's your point?
Even the current state of GCC/GDB has little to do with RMS's efforts.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
That's why I completely support the anti-piracy measures that companies like Microsoft favor. I just think the MS and company don't go far enough in enforcing the anti-piracy measures. I want every person in the United States to know that installing the same copy of a single user license of Windows on their PC and all their friends and families PCs is piracy. I want all of them to know that swapping music and movie files online is illegal and that there are no loopholes no matter how much they might wish there are. I want them to know that even sharing a VHS copy of a TV program broadcast for free over the air is considered to be an illegal action here in the U.S. And I want these things enforced. Once there are consequences behind these actions, I think people will realize how totally screwed they are. Then I can sit back and say, "I told you so"... :)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
You're right. We should wait until Netcraft confirms it.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
He doesn't get it? I think YOU don't get it. Why on earth would there else be such a massive amount of copying of copyright protected works? Because people don't want freedom? Because people are happy to pay inflated prices???? Please, please, explain that to me.
If you pull all the Linux based products off the market right now, I guarentee retailers would feel it. If you forced all IT companies into costly contracts for Windows, and therefore reduced the capabilities of their servers, I guarentee they would feel it.
If you don't care about your freedoms, then you're an idiot who doesn't deserve to have them. The beauty is that if you think I'm wrong, by inference you must take Stallman's side as truth.
You talk about RMS like he has "missed" something. Do you think a guy who has been fighting this hard since 1984 hasn't had time to contemplate his goal? I think perhaps it's you who has missed something.
And on a more personal note, you're a fucking retard.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
In no particular order:
- RMS was useful at one time but he should now leave serious persons do the real work.
- RMS is too extreme
- RMS is a crackpot
- RMS is a communist
- RMS is a dirty hippy that smells bad
- GNU/Linux is childish/idotic/ego-driven
- The GPL is not free/ viral etc...
I just wish for once all the idiots who will inevitably spout their mouth would just shut up.
Richard Stallman has consistently proved he was a true visionnary. He forsaw the problems with software and copyright law 20 years ago and devised an extremely clever answer : the GPL.
Not only that but he gave us great software to work with. Some he wrote himself (GCC, GDB, Emacs), some he inspired others to write.
He warned us many times when few would listen. About the importance of protecting freedom. About the importance of tracking copyright ownership. About software patents. About the right to read. Every time he's been criticized, ridiculed or dismissed as a lunatic and every time he was right.
It is time to recognize Richard Stallman's place in history as a great modern philosopher.
So I, for one, would like to thank deeply RMS for dedicating his life to our freedom. For standing tall when no one else would.
Live long, RMS, and never give up.
Where, in my post, did I say that its all because of RMS' code? Its because of his efforts. Get a dictionary and look up the word 'effort'.
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
Hmm, somebody is full of themselves.. but it doesn't seem to be RMS.
A bit of reading comprehension and critical analysis would go a long way, you know.
As is amply clear from the article, RMS doesn't see his major contribution to be code. He has coded, and he enjoys coding, but his cause is not to produce code - it is to spread the free software ideology. Now, you might agree with that ideology, or you might not, but to intentionally misread somebody's words in an attempt to characterize them as 'full of themselves' is arrogant, small-minded, and spiteful.
For what RMS considers important (the promotion of the Free Software ideology), he IS indispensable. There is no-one else that is as well-known, respected, and staunchly committed to the FS movement as Stallman is. And that's what he cares about, so he is correct when he calls himself 'indispensable'.
You might scoff at the 'respected' comment, but trust me when I say that there are a lot of people (including me), that are not in complete agreement with his philosophy, who still respect him - because he acts in good faith, has good intentions, and makes his intentions clear. RMS is the fucking ephitamy of a straight shooter. And that's a lot more than you can say about most people.
-Laxitive
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I can already see the way these posts are heading.
Talk about a bunch of ungrateful children...
He is now and has been consistent in his views. He hasn't changed his message. The fact that his message is still relevant after 20 years should say something.
Richard Stallman, over the past 20 years, has done more than most of you put together will do in your entire lifetime and all you can do is complain and make fun of him for it.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
Public domain software existed before RMS started his FSF and GCC/GDB projects.
But GCC is probably the biggest reason that free software runs on just about anything now. Before GCC became widespread, porting software used to be a major bitch. GCC changed that, mainly because it was one of the first ANSI C implementations that worked well.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
"Free Software" vs. "Open Source":
"...for our readers that may therefore be confused themselves, can you explain the differences, and why it is important to get it right?"
Richard Stallman: "...In the free software movement, our goal is to be free to share and cooperate. We say that non-free software is antisocial because it tramples the users' freedom, and we develop free software to escape from that..."
I found this to be the vaguest answer possible to the question. As someone who is not on the front lines of "Open Source vs Free Software", his response does nothing to clarify his position and only adds to the confusion for me. Are we talking licenses? How is non-free software anti-social? Does it not play well with others? Does it run with scissors? Sit in a dark room listening to emo music all day?
After reading the entire interview, I'm sort of sick of seeing him respond with the word "freedom" without really clarifying.
shame on us / for all we have done / and all we ever were / just zeroes and ones
I totally disagree, the mad poster. You say that people don't care about open source and the ideology behind it. Wrong. However, you are entitled to your own opionon. Just be careful when you decide to speak for "everybody" soley because "everybody" does not share you views on open source and if it's idea's are viable or not. For my self, I don't won't to be bonded by intellectual software. I want to be free. I want to use software and be productive without worrying about copyright laws and such. But for those who just don't care about that, I would understand how Stallman's movement may seem useless and "ahead of his time" as you put it.
And, he doesn't even understand himself. Here he is, trying to legislate what we call Linux ("That's GNU-slash-Linux"), as if he owned it. One of the things you have to give up, if you develop open-source (or free, or whatever) software, is the right to be credited as you'd wish. Someone may grab your code, rename & repackage it, strip many of your identifying marks from it, & sell it for a million dollars. That is precisely the freedom I thank Stallman for inspiring us to achieve, & it's exactly what Stallman, now that he's been eclipsed, wants to take away from us.
That said (or ranted), us Slashtrolls' reaction to this is too predictable. Why is the OSS community, on the whole, so antipathetic toward RMS? Is it because he's become such a dogmatic preacher? Is it that he's always been so, but now that we're nearly on top, we'd rather not be reminded of our moral obligations? Is it that we only respect the one with the latest Freshmeat entry?
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.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Cue the GNU/assinine comments...
In no GNU/particular order:
- GNU/RMS was useful at one time but he should now leave GNU/serious GNU/persons do the real GNU/work.
- GNU/RMS is too extreme
- GNU/RMS is a crackpot
- GNU/RMS is a GNU/communist
- GNU/RMS is a dirty hippy that smells bad
- GNU/GNU/Linux is childish/idotic/ego-driven
- The GNU/GPL is not GNU/free / GNU/viral etc...
That was always the biggest complaint I heard about RMS: his insistence that Linux be called GNU/Linux.
I think it depends on who you are and what you do with it. Personally, I don't care at all about the economic viability of Free/Open software since I'm not involved to make money. I was just having a conversation with a friend yesterday. I've had two revalations about myself lately. Although I am a "wired" guy, I'm not really a geek as I once thought I was, but really more an artist who uses computers. I just happen to be much more advanced in my use of computers than most others who are primarily artistically inclined. Music is my main focus and the computers help me get there easier. Combine that with Open/Free music software and it's a really great thing. :) Though many people who know me would probably think otherwise, I'm not really a "gadget guy" but more of a "device guy". I'm more likely to buy a set of electonic components to build something or a bunch of computer parts to build a dedicated system of some kind, than I am to want a prebuilt product.
Yes, I have a computer as part of my entertainment system and it's been years since I've used my CDs directly to listen to music. The same goes for video tape. But everything that I use for the computerized portion of my entertainment system (as well as my speakers and soon my amp) has been assembled by me for me. Just as I've always prefered to build my own speaker systems, wire my own house and build my own electronic circuits, I like to compile my own collections of software using raw materials (code). There is something so unsatisfying in going to Best Buy and buying a gadget. It's a combination of being let down and feeling ripped off at the same time. It's truly depressing. Of course, there are things I can't build (LCD monitors, digital cameras, etc...) but for those that I can build (Amplifiers,mixers, MIDI thru boxes, power supplies, speakers, video switches, etc...) I prefer to.
Some of us just like to build our own because we know it will work better than what we can buy. It might cost more, or it might be cheaper, but the cost is irrelevant compared to the satisfaction of having something that is custom made. If you apply that same ethic to software, you get Free/Open software. The only thing better than having something custom made is to know that you can share it with everyone else. I would love it if I could build a good pair of speakers or a nice amp and then easily duplicate them and give them to people for free. That would be the most phenominal feeling ever. But, sadly, it's not possible to do that at the moment. This is the desire that Free/Open software satisfies. Some of us aren't in this for the money, we're in it because we love to do it and we love to share. That doesn't mix very well with economics.
While there are people who support the Free/Open movement who can get quite zealous (I've been guilty of it at times) it doesn't mean we think that everyone else is stupid. It just becomes annoying to have to keep defending your own position when all you get back are childish arguments about why all of the things you do are wrong. The anti-Free/Open side is just as zealous about their support of making money over everything else. That's what most of us rail against.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
And my point was if you want to hero worship for why Linux/BSD is the way it is today... it's not RMS you should look at. This is 2005. The software you are currently using was not written by RMS. It was written by 1000s and 1000s of other people.
Why is he the figurehead for OSS anyways? Most kids who are writing/working on OSS today [I'm talking teenagers to young adults] were barely alive in 1984.
I can seriously say that I wasn't motivated in the slighest by RMS political views [or his FSF movement]. I write OSS because *I* want to share. I don't use the GPL because I don't want to unduly restrict.
RMS may have kicked OSS into gear in the 80s but it's been sustained through the 90s and so far this decade by so many other people that it's largely moot.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
What he failed to note, however, is that people don't care about doing what's right. The vast majority of the public doesn't even care about losing some freedom (such as the FCC broadcast flag issue he mentions). What the public cares about is discomfort.
As long as a loss of freedom, even a "big" freedom, does not manifest itself in the form of present discomfort, a person has no motivation to change. Folks like Stallman who feel a present discomfort due to future possibilities are a rare breed, and while there is a danger in worrying too much about possibilities there is value in thinking about the future.
However, since most people only care about the discomfort they feel "now", it will be hard to get political change. We will probably see some soon as there are a lot of people feeling "now" discomfort due to the international trade policies (you cannot blame capitalism for sending jobs to lower-cost providers, even if the companies that do it abuse the power, because that is what capitalism is designed to do. Capitalism is working just fine!).
I'm also not quite sure what Stallman thinks people will do for food if people quit their jobs over non-free software. And you have to ask the question, if people "donate" money to you for writing non-free software (i.e., they pay you for your services as a programmer rather than for the right to use and control the software), is it really non-free?
Anyway, those are just a few thoughts. In summary, I don't think any of Stallman's "solutions" are real solutions as they merely mitigate the symptoms; they don't eliminate the cause, which is basic human selfishness.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Because there are suckers out there who'll do the work for them at a fraction of the cost of hiring programmers.
"Information wants to be paid"
There is not taking away that GCC is a good tool. It is.
My point though is that GCC [as it is today, and by that I mean competent and competitive] has little if anything to do with RMS.
It's as if Linus gave up on the kernel in 1995. Would we still go "oh well if it weren't for Linus, who missed the 2.0, 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 releases we wouldn't have the kernel we have today?"
People also seem to misunderstand my anger a bit. I'm happy that RMS started the FSF movement and got OSS/FS rolling. I think what he did was important and sticking to an unpopular idea shows character.
I'm just trying to dispel this floating myth that all the tools we use today are because of RMS. They're not.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's nice to see that at least *someone* on slashdot is not an idiot.
You have a very simplistic way of viewing the world.
If a large corporation offers to move one of its factories to a country with a GDP less than that of, say, Nevada, in return for some tax breaks, do you think the government of that country will say no?
After a couple of years, if that corporation says that wages are climbing too quickly and it may have to leave if it isn't stopped, do you think the government will sit by and do nothing? Or do you think they might move ahead with measures to reduce further wage increases?
If you're saying that that's what the people in that country have to put up with in order to be given a better standard of living at some point in the future, that's bullshit. Corporations these days play countries off against each other to ensure that they get the best deal they can, and they ensure that this state of affairs won't change by locking in countries to free-trade agreements, which are enforced for them by larger, wealthier countries.
The world ain't black and white, and smartass soundbites like "protectionism only prolongs the poverty" don't help people living on an annual wage lower than your weekly junk-food budget.
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
You think of RMS as a hippie. One could disagree, about that, but one shouldn't forget hippies are people too. Friendly, freedom loving people with no intent to hurt anyone.
I really don't see any reason for you to spit dirt at RMS.
As I wrote in the comment to another KernelTrap story, using the term "GNU/Linux" (referring to the GCC and glibc essential role in the system) is totally misleading.
Both GCC and glibc are in the current state despite the RMS and FSF efforts. For GCC, remember the situation from the 2.8 times, when an independent team (egcs) had to fork GCC, because the FSF-managed development of GCC was dead. In the same way remember years of work that H.J.Lu invested in Linux libc, because GNU libc was unmaintained and unusable. And of course the work of Ulrich Drepper, who took GNU libc2 and developed it into a form usable in Linux-based system. Ulrich considers none of his work on glibc to be a part of a GNU project (details here, see the bottom part of the text). And it looks like even the present situation in the GCC development is the same (anonymous comment at KernelTrap).
So I can say run GCC/glibc/perl/X.org/TeX/etc/Linux system, but it has nothing special to do with GNU and FSF, and I just prefer the short name "Linux" (named after a single biggest, always-running, and essential component of the system).
-Yenya
--
While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it has to be. --Linus
Well, a previous Slashdot article linked to this:
_ lifecycle.htm
http://www.moonviewscientific.com/essays/software
It's pretty good, and it explains why OSS outcompetes and outperforms commercial software in the long run. Proprietary, commercial, software will always be around for niche markets or emerging market though.
The OSS development model works because instead of tapping the finite resources of individual companies, it taps the nearly infinite resources of human creativity through the internet. The only thing that could suck the steam out of the OSS movement is if the internet broke down (unlikely) or if humans stopped being creative (haha).
As for economic viability, I know this sounds crazy, but a lot of people do things just for fun, for recognition, for pride, for the love of their work or simply just because the problem was there. Money isn't the only thing that can make people produce excellent software.
He really comes across as duplicitous when he says over and over how he is "fighting for freedom" and then says the following:
... I do not think it means what you think it means.
JA: What about the programmers...
Richard Stallman: What about them? The programmers writing non-free software? They are doing something antisocial. They should get some other job.
JA: Such as?
Richard Stallman: There are thousands of different jobs people can have in society without developing non-free software. You can even be a programmer. Most paid programmers are developing custom software--only a small fraction are developing non-free software. The small fraction of proprietary software jobs are not hard to avoid.
So if one freely decides to write a program and not divulge the code, then that person is antisocial? Hey - I don't accuse Colonel Sanders of being antisocial just because he keeps his 11 secret herbs and spices a "secret". And I don't accuse Bill Gates of being antisocial because he refuses to divulge the code to Microsoft Bob. He may be a numbnut, but whom am I to accuse someone of being "antisocial".
This word "freedom"
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
Amen, that's exactly what I was trying to say.
Is of course the GNU/Darwin. Somehow it is what GNU always wanted to have - a GNU running on a microkernel (at least sort of). (I admit, I don't know what licence applies to Darwin).
You can defy gravity... for a short time
In nomine Stallman, et Emacs, et FSF sancti. Amen.
If your interest is more on creative media and copyright then we hosted a talk with Richard Stallman, the gist of which is here:m an0504.htm
http://www.plugincinema.com/plugin/articles/stall
My Personal Blog on Games and Technology and More
Mac OS X is the third most popular OS. GNU/Linux's marketshare has been higher than Apple's for a while (and all of Apple's marketshare tends to be bunched together anyway, a high proportion, possibly even a majority, of Apple users are using Mac OS 9 and earlier operating systems.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If RMS had not started GNU, GCC would not exist. Period. So I would say that GCC 'as it is today' has quite a bit to do with RMS.
There is trade and then there is trade. In one case you have a bunch of totally psychopatic and anti-social artificial personalities called corporations seeking to abuse differences in income between countries to make less then 1% if US population even richer and on the other hand you have attempts to control the flow of goods and services in order to ensure that the local populations' standard of living actually goes up as trade increases and the standard of living of the country to which the goods are exported does not decrease as a result.
Yes I do buy into the Naomi Klein "BS" as well as many other people who thought these sort of things do. It is the prophets of Ayn Randish unrestricted capitalism that is creating such economic wonderlands as Iraq who are in the wrong on this one.
It's more accurate to view RMS as asocial, rather than anti-social. Anti-social is more about breaking kneecaps and giving people bloody noses.
And what a kernel. Personally I doubt it boils down to monolithic vs micro kernels or other architecture decisions. I reckon simply that Linux was seen as a dynamic development process driven by practical requirements rather than politics. An example of this is Linus' decision to use non-GPL SCM tools for developing the kernel, simply because they were better than the free alternatives.
Frankly nothing about HURD supports any notion that Linux is ultimately doomed. It's a hobbiests OS that feels like Linux ten years ago but without any clear purpose. I can't see any possible benefit for using it, except for someone who wants to play with a GPL'd Mach kernel. All other cited reasons such as the supposed stability benefits have long since been disproven.
By that logic FSF has nothing todo with RMS but his mother and father. For that matter...
But to turn this around on you. If GCC today was the same quality as GCC was then no one would use it. Commercial entities would [and still do] use commercial compilers and hobbiest/students would use what they can find or pay 100$ for a watcom license.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I think Stallman is a bit eccentric about his ideas about freedom. I would venture to guess that he's wired a bit funny. His ideologies are are not practical nor are they rooted in reality. My freedom is not in jeopardy because I elected to use MacOS X on an Apple G5 (my wallet was but not not my freedom). Stallman presumes that his intelligence and knowledge give him the right to not respect the boundaries of others. When someone tells him that he can't have his way with their software (or if it isn't written by his own minions or philosophies), he cries foul and plays the freedom card. This isn't an ideology, this is arrogance and extreme anti-social behavior. This sort of behavior is very consistent with a high-functioning autism known as "Asperger's Syndrome."
Draw your own conclusions...
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Democracy is a great thing but it has tricked some folks into believing we're all equal instead of the need to strive for an egalitarian society. There are those who are more talented, intelligent, faster, than others. Those who get their acts together quicker benefit and those who don't suffer. When the people of Iraq want to stop acting like jackasses they too shall be able to build a great nation.
But not before then.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
PS - I don't think the BSDs are directly involved /w Tendra, are they?
Open-source code is protected just as strongly by copyright as closed-source code.
Interesting how one must choose to license their program under the GNU GPL and one must choose to distribute GPL-covered programs, yet "the GPL forces [RMS']" view of free software on others.
There's no force involved. If you don't like the GPL, don't choose to distribute programs licensed under it. There are entire free software operating systems written by people who are working hard to rewrite GPL-covered programs because they don't like the strong copyleft implemented in the GPL.
Quite to the contrary of what you're saying, the reason the BSD licenses qualify as free software licenses is because they grant the licensee the freedoms free software talks about.
Digital Citizen
fwiw, your 4 examples are really just 2 examples (IBM twice, and Sun twice).
In any case, do you really think that IBM and Sun care about Open Source? They only care insomuch as it's part of their strategey to deflate Microsoft and perhaps then be in a better position to compete with them in other markets.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Ditto.
b.g.
### 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?).
Free Software is not about economic viability, its not about making money or anything. Its about giving freedom to the user to share, modify and distribute software, it is NOT about the programmer who wrote it, that one is rather irrelevant in the view of the Free Software movement.
The Open Source movement on the other side now kind of reverses it and inserts tons of marketing speach to argue how Free Software can be cheaper to maintain, to produce, better and what not, at least half of it just marketing lies and such.
To make it short, when you want to make lots of money and buy yourself a Ferrari, don't try to acomplish that with writing Free Software, just won't work. If on the other side you want to make good software available to the community a Free Software license might help to ensure that your software stays protected while still giving your users all kind of freedoms.
Yet, strangely, he doesn't feel compelled to get political about everything and the kitchen sync, he doesn't drag the community in pointless debates, he doesn't alienate commercial partners, and he also doesn't imply he knows what's best for everybody.
Yes, I am very grateful for the software he wrote. Yes, what I've done so far in my life is like a firefly to the sun, compared to what he did. But that doesn't mean that I'm not entitled to a critical opinion, especially towards his "political" enterprises.
P.S. one should be careful about labeling someone "communist" - after all, communism killed an estimated number of 100 million people (more than fascism, albeit over a longer period of time)
The Raven
Freedom is the most important aspect of these projects. While good things should follow, having the freedom to fork, as GCC and glibc and others have done when the originators stagnated is what I would interpret as RMS/FSF's most important contribution.
If they recognize the changes as good and accept them back into their code base, that is their right, and that is how free software projects work.
Richard Stallman never said he personally wrote the code all by himself, any more than the creators of a Redhat, Mandrake, Debian distribution who slap their names on the collection do, even though the RMS/FSF contribution to the code and project that created them was in my view clearly superior to that of Redhat, for example, even if I think his personal judgement on EMacs UI and many other things does not produce a product I want to use. The key is I can fix it or choose to substitute something else.
His desire to attach the GNU name is, again, the desire to teach about the free software nature of some basic building blocks there, which he consideres the most significant aspect of the software. What other name would convey the spirit of freedom like GNU? Others contributions, while valuable, are technical except for their choice to follow the GNU lead and code under the banner and license of free software.
the dude could use a good dose of George Will.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but if you called it an onion you'd get cooks very confused.
I think RMS really missed the question here. In most cases it is not that you could quit one job and find another that allowed you to use Free Software. Entire fields of work cannot be completed without proprietary software. It's all fine that he can find himself another programming job that only involves Free Software, but most people have no desire to be programmers.
"Legislate" is the wrong term. It's best desribed as "asking." He's asking you to call it GNU/Linux. That's all. You don't have to do it, you don't have to listen. But he's asking you.
He doesn't want to take it away from you. He never says that, and he says quite the opposite.
From his site:
"Why not sue people who call the whole system "Linux"?
There are no legal grounds to sue them, but since we believe in freedom of speech, we wouldn't want to do that anyway. We ask people to call the system "GNU/Linux" because that is the right thing to do.
Shouldn't you put something in the GNU GPL to require people to call the system "GNU"?
The purpose of the GNU GPL is to protect the users' freedom from those who would make proprietary versions of free software. While it is true that those who call the system "Linux" often do things that limit the users' freedom, such as bundling non-free software with the GNU/Linux system or even developing non-free software for such use, the mere act of calling the system "Linux" does not, in itself, deny users their freedom. It seems improper to make the GPL restrict what name people can use for the system."
Could that be any clearer?
Well, this is linked to from the project front page, plus there's the MAINTAINERS file in the top of the source tree (although that lists the active maintainers and their responsibilities, not everybody-at-any-time-ever). Yah, Mark's one of them.
GCC isn't like the Linux kernel, where the development teams are formed around cults of personalities, and /.ers eagerly congregate to hear the heated flame wars between their favorites. :-) The GCC people are way milder, way less vitriolic, and as a result, don't make the tabloid news.
The inflammatory statements made on LKML concern stuff like DRM and proprietary drivers and things about which more Linux users actually care (or even understand). Inflammatory statements on the GCC list are of the kind which only arouse the ire of other compiler geeks. We can almost get into fistfights at the annual summit over whether a combined CSE and DCE pass should be done even when optimization is off ("the Laffer curve argues for-" "bah, users shouldn't notice!"), but nobody on /. will care. *grin*
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
How ironic that you celebrate the practical outcome of software freedom RMS started talking about and working for 20 years ago, yet you refuse to cite the name which is most associated with software freedom.
I remain unconvinced and I'll continue to choose to give GNU a share of the credit when I talk about the GNU OS and the Linux kernel.
Digital Citizen
Commercial software has been around for 40-50 years. OSS has been around for about half of that. I'd say there's a long enough history to extrapolate long-term trends, at least as much as there is for anything else in the software industry.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
Stallman constantly talks about the freedom of users. What about the freedom of programmers? By this I mean the freedom to decide whether to publish your source or not, to charge money for your work or not. That concept never enters his lexicon. Yes, he has made huge contributions to computing over the years. No, he is not always right.
Corporations these days play countries off against each other to ensure that they get the best deal they can...
Consumers these days play businesses off against each other to ensure that they get the best deal they can. The only difference is that the commodity in question is labor, instead of vegetables, cars, or whatever. What makes it virtuous to seek the best price on tomatoes, but evil to do so for labor?
And I suppose we all have Bill Gates to thank for making the PC a commodity, so you can afford to run your free software on it.
Same logic.
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Earlier revisions of the APSL were non-free, but Apple changed it to make version 2.0 of the APSL a free software license. The APSLv2.0 is now a GPL-incompatible free software license.
Digital Citizen
Open source is thriving in spite of Stallman, really. In fact, with the exception of the Linux kernel, most of the popular open source software is not GPL'd. Apache license, X license, BSD'd license...
Even the Linux kernel is a modified GPL, giving explicit permission to make derivitive works (ie linking to the API).
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
charging money for software to cover costs and run a business. Everyone is free to buy it or not. I worked for 12 years on a software package that assists and optimizes the manufacture of printed circuit boards. It has become very difficult to produce PCBs without this type of software. It would never have been developed as free software. Custom "one-off" solutions would force hardware manufacturers out of their expertise. Without charging for software I'm guessing there would be alot fewer choice we'd be able to make.
Like the current state of the U.S. being a free country has little to do with the founding fathers? Oh wait... ;)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Summary of this entire thread: The Richard Stallman "I Love Me" Thread.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
How the hell did this get modded up? No, you don't give up the right to be credited as you wish. You may put things in the open, but the GPL is meant to protect free software from actions EXACTLY like "[grabbing] your code, rename & repackage it, strip many of your identifying marks from it, & sell it for a million dollars".
I call it Linux because it's easier. GNU/Linux may be more correct since it includes the whole toolchain and such, but I know what went into the system. A whole different beast than using freely licensed code in a way it wasn't meant to be used. Get a clue.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Really? So you mean that those who are more talented and intelligent and faster are to be treated preferentially? If so in what ways? The only way the laws of society work is to define rights and responsibilites... So we are unequal when it comes to our rights? Some are destined to be masters and some property? No?
I have news for you dude. Each person's skill and aptitude play only a small part in their destiny. Your initial starting point in life, the confluences of geography and history are far more important. Or are you going to tell me that an Einstein level genius born in a tribe in the middle of jungle on some remote island is going to achieve the same financial status in the world as, say, Titney Spears?
When the people of Iraq want to stop acting like jackasses they too shall be able to build a great nation.
This might come as a great shock to you, but the definition of a "Great Nation" varies wildly from person to person. To a Muslim extremist, a "great nation" is a Caliphate. To a Socialist a "great nation" has a well constructed and efficient government run social support structure, to a Nazi a "great nation" is one run by a "great leader" of his superior race, to an Ayn Rand follower a "great nation" is one where everything is decided by dog-eats-dog capitalism which would surpass the darkest of the darkest moments of the 19th century industrial revolution, etc etc.
As you can see you just spouted a piece of useless propaganda sound bite which brought nothing to this discussion and only sought to obscure the unpleasant facts that the economic reforms introduced by Bremer are a total disaster, even in areas of Iraq that are not overrun by the guerillas.
I think what he means is that Open Source can't survive as a viable business model. Sure, open source will be around forever, so long as people maintain it. The question is, will we continue to see massive corporate sponsorship of it? I don't know the answer to that one, and I doubt you do either.
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Someone may grab your code, rename & repackage it, strip many of your identifying marks from it, & sell it for a million dollars.
Huh? Hmm, I was about to tell you that you're wrong - but of course, someone could fork gcc, rename it and sell it for a million dollars. But they could not lawfully prevent their (rather foolish) customer from having the source code and redistributing the program to whomever they like.
That's why the GPL is more free than, say, the BSD license. Your users can do what they wish with your program as long as they don't try to take anyone else's freedom.
(Stallman does come across as fairly mental, though - stating that programmers of non-free software are 'doing something antisocial' and that they should quit.)
#define struct union
Stallman considers himself indispensible; Linus makes jokes aout stepping in front of a bus.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
I was referring to the post-invasion attempts at "reconstruction", specifically to the Bremer rules which are basically a textbook adaptation of extreme market conditions as advocated by Rand. They had over a year to work now and even in the areas which are not affected by the fighting (the Shia south) are nothing but a total failure.
The problem is the American version of unrestricted capitalism, which is that politically connected American companies get to do whatever they want and have the US military back them up if they decide they want to pay less for oil or labor.
This is a problem with any form of unrestricted capitalism and the true evil of Ayn Rand theories. They are an excercise in one of the oldest pursuits in "phillosophy": an attempt justify naked agression and dominantion in some "moral" terms. It is an inevietable path for any unrestricted "capitalism" model to devolve into a feudal-like oligarchy of a tiny super-wealthy minority who would own and rule everything and everybody. People who see themselves poised to join that elite are those who promote such ideas most enthusiastically.
I do not deny big RMS and FSF contributions to GCC, glibc, and of course the GPL. Yes, they get (part of) the ball rolling. But this does not justify their requests to use the term "GNU/Linux". DEC's (and X Consortium) contribution was of the same magnitude, because without the good graphical interface Linux (and any of *BSDs) would be nowhere near the current state. Yet they do not demand the term "xc/Linux" should be used.
If they recognize the changes as good and accept them back into their code base, that is their right, and that is how free software projects work.
In fact this is precisely the way Open source projects work. I.e. judging the code by its quality instead of some "political" reasons.
Do not get me wrong - I consider freedoms I have from using (and writing) the GPL-licensed code to be very valuable. Let me repeat that: I agree that without RMS (and FSF) we would be nowhere near the current state. But this is about as true for RMS/FSF/GNU as is for Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox et al./Linux, Jim Gettys et al./DEC/X Consortium, */Apache project, and many others (Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie did not contribute much of the code for my system, but they created an excellent API and design; the same for Internet protocol authors, and so on). But nobody except RMS does request that I use the term their project name/Linux. And, unfortunately, the present FSF efforts with respect to GCC and glibc looks less than nice to me.
Currently I can switch the kernel I use for something else (*BSD, may be even HURD) the same way as I can switch my glibc (to dietlibc, for example), and GCC (to Intel CC or lcc). I use Linux, GCC, glibc, Perl, xorg/X11, etc., because they best fit my needs. GNU project is nothing special in this.
-Yenya
--
While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it has to be. --Linus
I suppose that part of my problem is that I work on projects where the most valuable thing brought to the table (expertise in some process or approach to performing some info-centric task or business/administration model) is expressed through both the consulting time AND the software that is developed/implemented to support the users. The software, in its form and function, is a critical part of the value. Knowing when and how to deliver it, and when and how to enhance it is how I put a (modest!) roof over my head and buy food. This isn't about buying a Ferrari - it's about helping end users to keep in mind that software and the systems that support it, are part and parcel of keeping useful professionals at hand and practicing the skills.
/. has of course commented on the perception that since (say, Linux) is "free" and certain apps are increasingly "free," that the value in knowing how to put together a technology solution is going to be eroded. Truly smart end users will see that's not true, and truly smart consultants can get at least some of the rest of them to understand it, but there's a large chunk of the IT-consuming world that is lowering its perception of technology value (and thus their perception of what I'm worth, all in the same bucket) because of the free-software buzz. It's incorrect, but it's still very corrosive.
Many another post on
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Yeah. That's the point of freedom. You don't get to make decisions for somebody else.
The world isn't black and white. The world is unfair. That's why everyone is a mixture of idealism and practicality.
Stallman seems to believe that Free Software is a moral issue. That is his choice.
But what really irks me is that he tries to impose his own set of values and beliefs upon other people.
He talks about "Open Source" having a different philosophy, about how "Open Source" focuses on the GPL and sharing of source code because of its tangible benefits. And how these are "narrowly practical values".
By his definition, that would mean my thoughts about getting a decent job are "narrowly practical values".
People use software for a purpose. People develop software for a purpose. For some it is a hobby. For some it is a way of putting food on the table.
Its just like people who believe that no country really needs a military, since no one fights wars anymore. Is that realistic? Is that practical?
I don't think Stallman even knows what practical means anymore. All he wants is credit, and his chance to shove his world view down other people's throats.
Last I checked, using a license didn't mean subscribing to another person's philosophy.
Another poster mentioned that Linux has come so far in 10 years compared to Hurd. This is because Linus is a practical person. Linux is a practical piece of software engineering. Hurd, is more like a academic research project mired in politics.
Sometimes, talk is cheap. Stallman has made great contributions yes, but that doesn't give him or anyone else the right to shove his views down my throat.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
I only can give my utmost respect to Richard Stallman. He is a true visionar and good person. We should all support him!
How on earth could a credible threat be made against a free software developer? Details, please. If he was receiving benefits or consideration from the FSF or the FSF was offering something, then it is appropriate that FSF has some say in what he does. Otherwise, as I told Darl McBride to his face, what part of the GPL don't you get? How does it make it possible to threaten someone and force them to work in a direction they do not believe to be of value?
Please do provide specific examples of where RMS is "trying to legislate" what some call "Linux", and be sure to point out how RMS is not merely requesting something which people are free to dismiss or reject.
That's not true. One does not need to give up getting credit for one's work when one writes or distributes free software. In fact, the most widely used free software license (the GNU GPL) requires all copies to carry an appropriate copyright notice.
I fail to see where RMS has "been eclipsed" because I don't see anyone involved with the open source movement championing software freedom squarely and without reservation. The people I see talking about software freedom in this way all come from the FSF--Eben Moglen and Brad Kuhn, to name a couple people I've heard speak on the subject recently.
Finally, you and the grandparent post got the name wrong--the name of the movement RMS started is not "open source". It's called the free software movement. It seems fair to call the movement by the name the founder of the movement gave it, no?
Digital Citizen
This thread won't be of much help to you because it chiefly concerns the free software movement, not the open source movement. There is a difference. If you're interested to learn more about the free software movement, you should consult the philosophy directory on gnu.org as the interview pointed to.
Digital Citizen
Technically games are also software, and require programmers to program them. By his philosophy, all games should be free? How will we get good games then, if we don't pay a whole bunch of people to make them? Surely people are not able to make Halo 2 in their spare time.
I don't hate RMS, but I dislike his "movement".
I dislike that he says I shouldn't have the freedom to decide what to do with my code.
I dislike that he says I shouldn't be able to profit off of software that I have writtern. (The custom programs/modifications argument doesn't apply to all software, so please don't pretend that it does.)
I dislike the fact that he throws around the word "freedom" cheaply, without defining what freedoms are actually violated by proprietary software.
I dislike the fact that he insults me because I do not share his views.
I dislike the fact that he is trying to trample on my freedoms in some narrow-sighted campaign.
Enforcement of high labor standards in rich countries is a good thing. It imposes higher costs on employers, prompting them to move jobs that become unsustainable under such a regime to more permissive regulatory environments. This increases the demand for labour in these economies and as a result decreases the substitutional value of labor standards in this new regulatory environment, prompting improved conditions of work.
The point being that when you say:
you are largely correct. But unrestricted trade and enforcement of labor standards are not mutually exclusive and the notion that they have to be is fallacy on the part of Ms Klein, a lot of corporations that threaten to outsource jobs if they are not given a free reign of labor standards, and in this case, you.
I think the problem is that RMS is of the opinion that anyone who isn't sitting on the farmost left tip of the line doesn't count and is morally repugnant. Most people even on slashdot will share a mix of some open source and some free software views, and I think that's important. You've got to be flexible and work with other people who may have different views in life. Personally I'm about 25% along from the left- I'm sad when a BSD-licensed program is taken, a little extra is added, and a proprietry software product produced (e.g. Posidon UML editor). On the other hand, I couldn't say hand-on-heart that I'd still be interested if my Linux computer didn't work very well.
If there's one thing I wish for RMS, it would be that he and his team finally wrap up and release the Hurd kernel. Maybe then he'll finally bugger off and leave Linux alone.
"You did WHAT to WHO for BEER MONEY?!? Jeez, man - you don't even like beer..."
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
(all from the FSF)
Possessions/assets are taxed, in various ways:
Most obviously, real estate tax is assessed on the value of the real estate. This is a direct tax on assets. Real estate makes up a very large proportion of the nation's net worth, so this is not an insignificant asset tax.
Less obviously, inflation provides a built-in tax on assets. In particular, if you earn, say, 4% in a bank account, the govt taxes you on that 4%, even tho inflation might be 3%. The tax on the 3% which is inflation is, in effect, an asset tax. If you keep your money under your matress, to avoid paying tax, then inflation itself eats your money away.
You did miss something. These arguments were huge during the mid 90's. At this point there are settled. Read /. from 8 years ago and you'll see people arguing.
1) The Linux has surpassed the NT kernel in just about aspect
2) Linux based servers outperform just about any other Unix server on the same hardware or on a cost basis
3) There are almost no innovations that are not part of the Linux kernel
Similarly for Apache. Similarly now for Mozilla. Things like Open Office still have a long way to go to catch up with Microsoft Office but the path of progress is well known, well understood and being implemented. You aren't hearing the debates because it is a settled issue. My guess if you went your whole life without every hearing the debates on the continuous theory of matter vs. the atomic theory.
Protectionism, as implemented by the United States over the last twenty years, apparently means, "You third world countries will open your markets, and your governments will cut back on taxes and social spending."
We demand that they open their financial markets, making it quick and easy for foreign investors to shovel money into a good economy (read: inflation) and then take it back out at the first sniff of trouble (read: bankruptcy).
We demand that their governments avoid deficit spending, making no distinction between money being spent on education and public infrastructure, or on facelifts for some dictator's harem. It's like John Maynard Keynes never existed.
We demand that they open up their markets. Now. There are no timetables for job retraining. There are no exemptions for classes of goods that, if left unprotected, would result in millions of people thrown immediately into poverty. There are no delays for giving local industries a chance to modernize and become competitive. They will "liberalize" their economies, and they will liberalize them now, or else we will have the IMF withhold loans and badmouth them to foreign investors.
Meanwhile, we protect and subsidize our agriculture, our steel and aluminum industries, and dozens of other industries. When Russia found that the one thing their economy could do really well was create aluminum, we responded by accusing them of "dumping," when in fact they simply had a competitive advantage because of their abundant cheap energy. Then when that failed, the Bush administration (those champions of the free market) latched onto the idea of creating a worldwide aluminum cartel. Hint: The entire point of a cartel is to keep the price of a given good higher than it would be if its sellers behaved competitively rather than cooperatively. They are also illegal as hell when done by anyone but the government.
The IMF has been pushing for decades for precisely these sorts of "reforms", though they haven't demonstrated any particular knack for improving economies or reducing poverty. But the policies are beloved by American banking institutions, as are the IMF "bailout" loans which are almost invariably targeted towards making sure that when a given economy collapses, foreign investors get their money back. So billionares can make bad investments and be protected from the risks of making those investments.
After the fall of communism, Russia's entire economy was ransacked. We encouraged its government to privatize in a Chinese fire drill* fashion, and threatened to withhold loans if there was any delay. Result? Many critical components of the Russian economy ended up in the hands of rich investors, usually friends of Yeltsin, who were more interested in stripping them of their assets for a quick buck than in taking the harder and riskier road of growing them into healthy and competitive companies.
Conclusion: simple-minded free trade policies, worshipped by so many on the right, hurt the poorest of the poor, while enriching a very few. Read more Stiglitz for a complete blow-by-blow of the incompetence and intellectual bankruptcy of the institutions we've charged with the task of reducing worldwide poverty.
* Besides being a bit racist, the phrase is a bit of a misnomer. China, which has basically told the IMF to go have relations with itself, seems to be doing quite well.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I have never met him personally, but I prefer to regard him as a person who has an extensive record of creating useful tools for the benefit of everybody in the community, and as such, someone who is perfectly entitled to suggest principles along which the software development community should run.
I find it somewhat tiring to read continual criticisms of his standpoint from those who have contributed nothing whatsoever.
When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. - Jonathan Swift
If you have the time of inclination, check out the novel Confederacy of Dunces.
Easy, there. Most working consultants voraciously consume information that they perceive to be meaningful to their paycheck. If you write proprietary software or build highly specialized systems for a living, you tend to have an allergy to any school of thought that suggests there is no rent-paying/food-earning value there. I'm not suggesting that the open source arena results in a demand for unpaid technology experts, only that it makes it much more difficult to make a living in that space. There are probably a LOT of very successful IT pros that leverage open source and free IT tools, and more power to them. In my arena, though, it's difficult at best.
BTW, if this was "settled" 10+ years ago, why is it not settled? I'm sure you know what I mean.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The "free" argument needs some clarification. I think it's too easy to read these sorts of interviews and come away thinking that "free" means:
1)Source Code
2)The right to do ANYTHING you want with said code
I get the feeling that it's more that the code should be provided, and you can do whatever you like with said code on your own machine, but the original author has the right to limit other rights like distribution or sale. I say this because it simply makes sense to me. To say that if you're going to write a program that is meant to be distributed, you should be required to provide all code and give up all rights of ownership over said code seems to discourage serious development of anything overly complex in anything close to a timely fashion.
Freedom is all well and good, but who would have preferred we never had proprietary software to begin with? How far behind current standards would we be if companies like Apple and Microsoft had not pushed the GUI as they did? Where would modern word processing be if it weren't for WordPerfect and Office? Most free software out there now is working to emulate non-free equivalents. Does the FS/OS community have the vision to pioneer technology instead of immitate?
It's too easy to say "Apple bad! Microsoft immoral! They no give code free!" Dislike the giants all you want, but they accomplished in a few years what has taken us geeks decades to do in our free communities.
There is a place for Free as well as Non-Free software. To say one is inherently superior to another is simply ridiculous. To say one is immoral by it's nature makes you sound like a self-important maniac.
How on earth is controlling the flow of goods and services supposed to make the local population's income go up? It's like screwing for virginity.
Recent economic studies have found that the benefits of increasing prosperity are not limited to the richest stratas of society. but instead tend to be wide spread. Indeed, they have found that lower-income people often benefit more than the rich from improved prosperity. Your claim that only the richest 1% benefit has no basis in fact.
There are few people that think Ayn Rand's philosophy, as a whole, is a workable, and I'm certainly not one. We should be using the results of modern economics, not philosphy, to be solving our problems. And economics say that free trade is an essential component of prosperity.
In truth, I am completely at a loss to understand how poverty can be eleviated without free trade. Do you think poor countries are capable of bootstrapping themselves into the 21st century by themselves? They need investment and open markets for their goods, not closed borders.
Since when should geniuses only work on that area in which they express their genius abilities? Also, RMS is upfront about what free software won't do. After explaining the way in which businesses turn the Phillipine 2-year exemption from labor into a perpetual exemption by closing up shop and establishing a new business every 2 years, RMS is asked: (emphasis mine)
It sounds to me like he realizes the limitations of free software and is quick to answer as such. If you listen to his speeches, you'll also hear him respond that if he knew a way to help get corporate money out of political campaigns, he would work on that and nothing would make him more proud. This too is not a problem free software can solve alone, perhaps playing a minor role in making such a thing happen, but it is critical that we work on this when we consider the amount of power that comes with campaign donations and how much more money multinational corporations have to put into campaigns than most ordinary people.
Digital Citizen
You asked why it wasn't being debated on /. I explained it was settled on /. years ago.
In terms of consulting most consultants (and most programmers for that matter) write custom code for specific clients. There isn't really a closed vs. open source issue here. Under either paradigm a company pays you to write code on essenttially a per hour basis.
As far as the general public open source hasn't quite gotten all the apps yet. The focus of the open source movement was: server applications and an operating system. Going after desktop business productivity apps is newer and things like the game market aren't being meaningfully tried at all. So things like Bind, and Sendmail are very mature. But right now Oracle sells a product which is vastly better than any open source product. Even still MySQL (which is worse than SQLServer, Oracle, DB2 on virtually every front) has eaten up a huge market share based primarily on cost. Similarly with Microsoft office.
The big issue for Microsoft OS is that it is the best platform (with the possible exception of OSX) for running Office.....
Time has zero worth to the validity of a belief.
A truth today, is usally true tomorrow.
It's not like Hitler didn't spend time reflecting upon his beliefs in the master race....
We know where that lead to.
And it is an analogy simply to point out a flaw in logic. Please do not post back in the....HOW CAN YOU COMPARE HIM TO HITLER vein, as it is misleading to the point
I do not deny big RMS and FSF contributions to GCC, glibc, and of course the GPL. Yes, they get (part of) the ball rolling. But this does not justify their requests to use the term "GNU/Linux". DEC's (and X Consortium) contribution was of the same magnitude, because without the good graphical interface Linux (and any of *BSDs) would be nowhere near the current state. Yet they do not demand the term "xc/Linux" should be used.
But I would still be happily using the free software I have, and who knows what technical advancements would have replaced them. I used and valued DEC software long before there was a GUI, and the GUI isn't the indispensible piece for me that you seem to think it is, even assuming nothing else would have taken it's place. Believe me, DEC's GUIs were never worth writing home about. I do not run a GUI on my most important systems today, which is freedom that free software gives me with no contribution from DEC. DEC wrote all kinds of wonderful compilers as well as operating systems but were never philanthropic enough to allow me to use them freely. The UI was not much of an intentional contribution which you would understand if you ever licensed software from them, including their DEC adaptations of the UI.
DEC's contribution was at most a technical contribution to a narrow part of the system. I do not find this comparable to the FSF contribution.
Linus already gets all the credit, some of which he deserves for the kernel. Alan Cox contributes under his Linux kernel banner. Linus does not seem to value freedom and GPL (based upon past actions) to the extent it is merited. And what does the Apache Foundation have to do at all with Linux distributions or free software?
While the Linux kernel may be substitutable, I have never found the GPL, GNU utilities and other things as substitutable.
Linus seems to believe that the technology is more important than the freedom (as he has clearly expressed WRT bitkeeper and on many other occasions), which is part of why they tend to undervalue the GNU contribution. I suspect Linus is coming to value it a bit more with the SCO nonsense.
That is why I respect the idea that being forced to use non-free software where reasonable alternatives exist could easily be reason enough to change jobs.
...I'm almost with him until somewhere in the late middle of the interview he goes off into raving luniticism...
He has good ideas, but he fends them and speaks of them like a Muslim arguing with a Catholic about the nature of GOD.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Hmm... well, see the problem with Iraq was the 10 years of trade sanctions that prevented them from rebuilding their country and more importantly their military.
Yeah, Saddam rebuilding his military would have done *wonders* for Iraq. And *certainly* would have kept the *Eeeeeevil* George W. Bush from ever going to war with Iraq.
I *love* how it's the US's fault that people are destitute because the UN (not just the US) refuses to do business with their dictator government.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
and declare this discussion terminated. Read about Godwin's law here.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I suppose, then, that was has my hackles up a bit is the degree to which the longer-term free software celebrities are find themselves quoted in the types of news that CFO-types consume. The folks that are looking for highly proprietary solutions now pollute almost every one of those projects with a lengthy (thus costly) round of "first show me all of the free solutions that we might use" phase.
With these decision makers, it's not a discussion about which server or file system to use, or a debate about PHP vs ASP... it's an understandable (given what their college-age kids tell them) sense that, "Aren't we at the point now where some of this stuff doesn't cost anything?" It just muddies the waters to the point where they'll spend 20 hours (x $150+ an hour at local consulting rates, or $3000) to avoid spending that much on a commercial product, and then: still have to buy the commercial product!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I have no problem with the world according to Richard Stallman as long as compliance is voluntary. As a software creator I am free to choose to release the software for free and I am free to demand payment for my software. On the other side of the coin, consumers are free to accept my terms or not.
Oh wait, we already live in that world. So what is his beef with people making decisions for themselves?
Are you a complete idiot? Don't you see the amazing potential of HURD? Think about it. If you had a system where you could multiplex the whole system without root access, you would still have security problems, but those would be confined to that percentage of the system, and not affect other things. You could donate processors to the whole lan, or the whole internet. You machine is sitting idle? Someone else in your house or business could use those cycles or a defined percentage of them. I think Tunes will achieve this computing ubiquity before anything else You can see on their Wiki that the project is not dead.
Bypass Compulsory Web Registration -- http://bugmenot.com/
If you're writing GPLed software you are "working for Apple for free" too. Last time I checked Samba was GPLed, and so was GCC, and dozens of other programs included in OSX.
Let's be honest - no matter what the license - OSS is free slave labour for the corporations.
Interesting enough, every developed country used protectionism as a mean in its development. In fact, most critics of China's current monetary policy (ie fixing the price of its currency) blame it as a form of protectionism. And you can see China's growth.s /Chang1.h tm
http://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/text
http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/faculty/chang/
No, really ? Imagine that.
Stallmans ideal is to protect the right of everyone to review and improve software. The profitability of OSS comes from the right of everyone to review and improve software. But somehow the profitability of OSS does not come from Stallmans ideals, despite those ideals being the state of things where the profitability of OSS comes from.
Please explain ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It's a shame that Stallman seems to be mostly interested in bashing the Open Source movement.
1. Open Source is more like Microsoft than GNU:
"The open source movement promotes what they consider a technically superior development model that usually gives technically superior results. The values they cite are the same ones Microsoft appeals to: narrowly practical values."
2. Linus Torvalds is a corrupting influence:
"People know that Linus Torvalds wrote his program Linux to have fun. And people know that Linus Torvalds did not say that it's wrong to stop users for sharing and changing the software they use. If they think that our system was started by him and primarily owes existence to him, they will tend to follow his philosophy, and that weakens our community."
You might be interested in reading John Perkins' "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" in order to understand that investment in poor foreign countries is really more like extortion.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
If any factor (such as increased labor standards) causes the cost of doing business to go up, *whoosh* off the jobs go to somewhere even cheaper, driving wages back down again. If some factor improves conditions across the board (improvements in efficiency, etc.) the advantage to workers will eventually be nullified by the pursuit of ever-increasing growth rates.
Just look at the quality of goods. We've seen in several examples (agriculture, drugs, etc.) that the only realistic way to keep a floor on product quality, in a capitalist system, is through regulation. (I can see the business-apologist crowd now: "If you don't like maggots in your meat, just buy it somewhere else; you've asked for such low-quality meat by only being willing to pay $10/pound for it. Agribusiness is legally required to increase their shareholder value, so they have to make this kind of profit; they'd happily provide safer meat for $50/pound."). Never mind that most people can't afford to voluntarily pay extra for higher quality.
I'm not particular knowledgeable about RMS' views nor do I support them.
You should change your moniker to "UninformedContrarian."
The problem is that BusyBox is mostly GNU; if you don't believe me, download its source and check the copyrights; large parts of it are copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, because it was built from cut-down versions of GNU tools.
Sigh. Think for a bit before saying ludicrous things like that. Here are some examples: you penalize imports of finished goods while promoting exports of finished goods... or promote exports of processed foods while penalizing exports of raw produce...or promote exports of finished goods while penalizing exports of raw materials .. etc etc. In each of these cases a balancing act occures, where your trading partners and you have to arrive at an equillibrium. This not only enables control of relative motion of incomes for citizens, it also allows for nations to buy needed time to allow for slow process of social adjustements required to reduce impact of negative effects of trade. Unless of course you are an ideologue and believe that trade has only good effects? That rapid change in centuries-old social structures which displaces entire generations of people while destroying their age old communities is a good thing?
On the other hand, eliminating all trade barriers leads to a rapid movement of capital not followed by rapid movement of labour. An equalization occurs, but unfortunately since the amount of wealth is highly concentrated in wealthy countries and the populations of poor countries are vast the per-person increase in wealth in most countires is minimal and decrease of wealth of industrialized nations rapid and great. The only entities that benefit greatly are those which control the conduits through which the wealth flows during that process: the multinational corporations.
Recent economic studies have found that the benefits of increasing prosperity are not limited to the richest stratas of society. but instead tend to be wide spread. Indeed, they have found that lower-income people often benefit more than the rich from improved prosperity. Your claim that only the richest 1% benefit has no basis in fact.
Studies of what? Under what conditions? Where? Are you referring perheaps to that great and totally discredited system of "trickle-down" economics we are so familiar with?
And economics say that free trade is an essential component of prosperity.
Yes but it does not mean unrestricted trade under all conditions. An economic theory does not take into account history, culture and geography. It is merely concerned with flow of numbers from column A to column B. That is why common-sense adjustements have to be made to moderate the effects of the clash between an ideological, simplistic, theory and the vastly more complicated facts on the ground.
In truth, I am completely at a loss to understand how poverty can be eleviated without free trade. Do you think poor countries are capable of bootstrapping themselves into the 21st century by themselves? They need investment and open markets for their goods, not closed borders.
The truth is that they cannot get out of poverty without trade. Notice use of "trade" as opposed to "free trade". Trade is an ancient system of exchange of goods and services. Free trade is an ideology. While in an ideal world, where all countries are on equal footing and have appropriate social safety infrastructure, free trade would indeed be optimal, in the real world of today it is a recipe for pain, misery and growth of power of rich over poor. So in the real world, trade has to be controlled in such ways as to shape the economies of some countries in ways different to other countries. Investment can be promoted in certain areas, while penalized in others, borders opened to some goods while closed to others. As time goes on, and the differences between countries decrease, the rules can be relaxed until they are no longer needed. Only then "free trade" will be plausible.
I did not mean to suggest that business should be completely unimpeded by governments, if that's what you took it as. I have no objection to reasonable laws regarding such things. I meant that impediments to international trade should be removed.
This reminds me of the ending of the book "Prince of Lies": "The world was doomed but it kept going anyway."
And even the title of the book fits your post !-)
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
----- There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend; those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
What Mr. Shaw didn't mention is that there's a big difference between a unreasonable, intelligent man and an unreasonable idiot.
He is making valid points. Stop abusing your mod point.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
So if one freely decides to write a program and not divulge the code, then that person is antisocial? Hey - I don't accuse Colonel Sanders of being antisocial just because he keeps his 11 secret herbs and spices a "secret". And I don't accuse Bill Gates of being antisocial because he refuses to divulge the code to Microsoft Bob. He may be a numbnut, but whom am I to accuse someone of being "antisocial".
When Stallman says "social", he is going to the root of the term - talking about society.
How is it NOT harmful to society to have any one thing controlled by one person alone? How is it not harmful to have myriads of documents that are in a format no-one but Microsoft can REALLY read. How is it not harmful to have many video files that one company can control weither you see or not? How is it not harmful that you have an OS that millions of people use every day and yet are not able to modify in such a way that it is secure or built to thier satisfaction?
So anti-social, in terms of being bad for society - yes Bill Gates is Anti-Social. Just as are car companies that try to make sure you cannot repair or modify a car away from a dealer.
If you like, think of this in terms of dependancy. You are reliant on Microsoft for care and feeding of your OS, if Microsoft every went south or in a direction you did not like you are reliant on thier good graces to get a job done you could do before. But a healthier mode of existance is a compartmentalized one, an encapsulation if you will of the tools that you use that isolates your dependance from the tool makers. A socket wrench I bought 20 years ago still works to turn a bolt, but really no software I BOUGHT twenty years ago is still viable - the only software I used fifteen years ago or so that I still use today is Free Software. There is a message in that truth.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Many governments dislike free trade because it means they give up control. It makes it difficult to reward their cronies in industry who use protectionism as a way to line their pockets at the expense of society as a whole.
You surely jest. China considers economics to be a tool of warfare. The "liberalization" is only and exlusively benefiting China at the expense of all its trading partners since China still employs quite effectively its authocratic system in order to ensure cheapnes of its labour. The Huan is artifically pegged to the US dollar for example. This clever strategy allowed China to become largest US creditor. Power over other nations is the name of that game. I guarantee you this: as soon as China will no longer be able to play the western greed to its advantage, the "free trade" will end overnight, complete with nationalization of all those beatiful high-tech factories the West has so kindly built in there.
The rich get richer because they spend less than they earn. I am weathly (by my friends standards anyway), solely becuase I spend less than I make and invest the difference. They could also do this but would rather have a starbucks, new $35K SUV every year, plasma TV, etc. Better yet, I get wealthier every year without do anything except spending less than I earn. The problem is not capitalism, but an inequality of financial education and an unwillingness to sacrifice in the short term to come out ahead in the long term. Like studying in school rather than getting drunk three night a week, or choosing a degree based on the ability to earn a living rather than the ease of the coursework, or living in a $120K house rather than the $250K my peers live in.
BTW, I am signficantly wealthier than my parents, who were solidly working middle class. In turn, my parents are signficantly wealthier than thier parents, who were sharecroppers. So much for the poor getting poorer.
----- There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend; those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
Maybe he's not english speaking... if he is, then yes...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
First, there is the good old "free as in freedom (libre)" vs. "free as in beer". I think most slashdotters get that distinction.
Here's the thing, though. There can't be unlimited freedom (libre). If I were free to do anything I feel like, that impinges on your freedoms. My desired right to punch you in the face impinges on your right to personal security. These freedoms cannot coexist.
Upshot: which freedoms do you fight for, which do you value? Which has priority, which is right? Should people and/or corporations be free to earn an exclusive revenue stream from a creative or useful work that fits in the "IP" category? Or should there be, rather, unrestricted freedom to copy said works? Should a corporation/person be free to distribute a program as binary only, or must the public be free to view the source code?
I'm not trying to be redundant (as this may seem obvious to some), and I'm not trying to get everyone to repeat themselves in reply to my post. I'm just stating what I see to be an underlying theme in the discussion, which I think sometimes gets murky when people on multiple sides of the issue all argue for "freedom".
But China is not about to renationalize its economy, whether you guarantee it or not. They are enjoying too much the wealth, and yes power, that private enterprize brings.
was not even asked.
Richard, have you showered anytime in the past 20 years since you founded GNU?
bash: rtfm: command not found
but at some gut level I'm just not sensing the long-term head of steam and ecomonic viability of the approach
Not to convert you, but I'll say something about the long-term head of steam and economic viability of free software. Fist, how free software tend to be better than closed one: On free software, there are plenty of projects trying to do the same stuf. On closed software, this is very hard because no project can be forked, but on the free sofware word, a single project tends to be a colections of forks, each one slightly different, and a lot of users have their own fork, also different. This create a "feature testing space" much larger than closed source projects. Also, free software help putting all the features togheter, it's not as simple as cut-an-paste, but it's simpler than closed software.
Now the economic analisys: No population becames rich by doing superfulous work. On the case of sotware, replicanting it is wasting money (I'm not talking about replicating sotware with R&D objectives, that generate features). So, once everybody uses the same software, everybody gains reusing it.
Now, if you are talking about companies and money, they are not essencial elementes of capitalism. Even if the companies doesn't survive (very unlikely) free software, society will adapt.
Rethinking email
Not at all. I said that I don't hate RMS but I dislike what he is saying. I'm not saying that he shouldn't be saying what he is saying, but rather that I disagree with what he says and dislike it. That is, in no way, trying to control what he says or do. Neither is it criticizing him for saying what people should say and do.
I dislike the fact that you choose to flame me without understanding my arguments, and decide to put words in my mouth.
I just don't get why the only ethical way for me to sell or buy software is to accompany it with an unrestricted source code license. It's like saying that the only ethical way to sell milk is in 8-ounce glasses. Surely the details of the transaction should be left to the transacting parties.
Of course I'd RATHER have the source code, just like I'd RATHER have unlimited ocean cruises and Swedish masseuses.
The reason that capitalism favors the rich is because they own the capital, and it's easy to use capital to generate more wealth. Think about it - if you have money (capital) to buy a well and pump you can pump oil and get more money (more capital) much more rapidly than if you have to dig that well and pump it by hand. In fact - if you're poor and have to give up farming to dig that well, you get poorer while you're digging that well.
You are right in saying that financial education helps, and willingness to sacrifice in the short term helps, but if you are already not able to save more than you make (and you have no cushion) you cannot sacrifice without sacrificing your health. The only way to avoid having the poor get poorer in a capitalistic society is to create a flexible workforce that can adapt rapidly to changing market conditions. This is not something our current policies or sentiments allow (the stereotypes about "we don't want our jobs replaced by machines" were not for no reason - this was an unwillingness to adapt to market conditions. The problems in the steel industry and auto industry - in any industry - are all at root an unwillingness or incapactiy (due to managment or whatever) to adapt to the new global marketplace).
Of course, even in the US we don't have a true capitalistic economy, because we don't have truly free markets. The Wikipedia has a good article on capitalism and links to other economic systems.
But, I'm pleased to find that there are other sensible folks out there who spend less than they make!
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Any intentional invocation of Godwin's law is ineffectual!
Humorless sig goes here.
I think you are deeply mis-understanding the Chinese social system. The wealth and power are meaningless unless they can be wielded by the ruling class of that country, its on the surface "communist" government. As soon as that wealth is not theirs to control they will not hesitate in using brute force to end its reign. Also you missed the main point I was making that "free trade" in case of China is a one-sided game run under complete control of China and benefits only China. Should that cease to be the case, China will revert to import/export controls because unlike the West, their government has no attachment to the "free market" ideology and in fact quite the opposite, it is at least nominally "communist" (which is a great gig in itself, maintaining a slave labour force for the benefit of a few ex-patriots and multinationals, another great example of the conditions under which "free trade" really flourishes).
### Open source can't survive in this market because nobody of consequence really wants it to.
OpenSource itself can survive quite good even without any market at all. However you are right, OpenSource could have it a lot easier if it moved a little bit closer to the end user, currently there is still a whole lot of elitism or hostility around against the average user and a lot of projects simply don't care about the end user at all.
R. Stallman gets enough money and fame, alright. What about the thousands of the silent hard-working geeks toiling away for nothing? Toiling away for the "businessmen" network more easily, and "yuppies" make more money, and "party animals" to have a better sex life? The geeks gave it all away, and got nothing back. When I try to buy an apartment, nobody cares how much software I gave away. When I buy a car, nobody cares how much software I gave away. This "freedom" stuff has been going on for a while, and everyone benefitted, except for us. Take a look at The Rat and the Butterfly.
Yes, but OTOH, if Apple wants to improve that software, then they are working for me for free also. Just see what's happening with KHTML/Safari.
It's not slavery if you get to keep (and share) the fruits of your labor.
I believe that one of the reasons that Open Source is winning the terminology war with FSF is because it actually supports more freedom, while pointing out the real benefits of this model.
I do dispute that there is a sizable percentage of the world population that cannot save (without actually knowing what I am talking about because I have never lived in these areas). In any community, I have observed that there is always someone who makes less than you do. I am comfortable that this applies in most third world areas. By simply living as these poorer people do, you can save money. I believe that the reason these people cannot save capital and become rich(er) is the fact that the political systems in these areas are feudal, and you can only get right with the proper connections. Thus, I would argue that real capitalism would free these people.
The fact that you *can* spend less than you earn and stay healthy and content does not make you rich, it makes you psycologically healthy. Numerous studies have shown no link between wealth and happiness once basic essentials are provedd for, and you do not have to make $30,000/year US to provide for basic essential despite what the media tells you. There are plenty of happy tribes in the Amazon that have no income, and happy people in the third world making $500/year.
What leads to unhappiness is the belief that you need more than you currently have. I am not sure who all is to blame for this, but you can start with Madison Avenue and Hollywood.
BTW, do we have a point here? :-)
----- There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend; those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
I can't believe can programmer he doesn't get the fact that gnu linux spell like NEW Linux and every one I know who heard that has always answered : what ? there's a new linux ?,
He not pronounce the GNU "NU", it is be pronounced "GUH-NU". The G-letter be's not silent so. Feel bad, don't. Even the people speak the English got wrong this one often.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
The reasons for the exemption are manifold and really very obvious:
Do you get it?
Seastead this.
In this particular case US bears a dis-proportionate share of responsibility. The sanctions were instituted mainly as a result of US arm-twisting of the UN, a common practice employed so that any negative effects can be then blamed on the UN which is the scapegoat of choice for any self-respecting right-winger. The stated purpose of sanctions was restriction of military technology, but the unstated purpose was economic devastation in order to induce a revolt against Saddam. That is why importing of medicines for example was severely restricted. There are many people who take issue with that approach, myself included. Neo-con and Zionist influenced fixation on exaggerated hatred of Saddam by the US political elite was no excuse to cost over 500,000 lives. Was Saddam complicit? Of course. But how does that justify trying to out-murder the murderer in order to overthrow him?
Recall the asset tax exemption which has a very clear purpose and justification:
The vast majority of residential and small busienss real estate would become totally untaxed directly or indirectly. The middle class would be dramatically expanded by such a reformed tax system.The reasons for the exemption are manifold and really very obvious:
Do you get it?
Seastead this.
Recall the asset tax exemption which has a very clear purpose and justification:
The vast majority of residential and small business real estate would become totally untaxed directly or indirectly. The middle class would be dramatically expanded by such a reformed tax system. Such bankruptcy protection is routinely extended to retirement plans. The basic principle would probably be that a set dollar amount, say $100k, would be untaxed. If you wanted to live somewhere cheap and save up nearly $100k, you could do so without experiencing any taxes whatsoever. You'd never even have to file.The reasons for the exemption are manifold and really very obvious:
Do you get it?
Seastead this.
What you have described is accurate, except for one thing: this is not "free trade", nor is it capitalism. Unfortunately, such terms have been co-opted to mean things very different from their original definitions.
The "free trade" agreements we hear about today are really sets of regulations that countries agree to impose. But regulated trade is the opposite of free trade. This is our modern doublespeak.
To take your example: the corporation in question only succeeds in lowering wages through government. But if the economy was truly free, the government wouldn't be getting involved, and certainly wouldn't be dictating wages.
Capitalism = market economy, laissez faire
Fascism = government/business partnership
Now I ask: what part of our economy isn't up to its eyeballs in government involvement? So which system do we have? Apply the same reasoning to international affairs, and what we have is mercantilism, not free trade.
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
Dunno -- seems to me Stallman has had a much longer time to look for a "replacement", which would again be folk with the same je ne sais quois. Torvalds has, from the start, claimed he is not irreplaceable. So what's behind that? I think S sees himself as a spiritual leader. T sees himself as a good project manager.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
It is only a passing observation but it seems that the rhetoric (obsessive usage of the word "freedom") is strikingly like the current US white house. I am not trolling here, I am only observing how an effective speaker like Stallman has to adapt to the climate in order to "sell" his ideas.
Had Linus stuck with the "no commercial use" NCU licence v0.01-0.12, he would have scared off RedHat, IBM and before that programmers who could justify using/developing Linux for their employers projects. Had he adopted a BSD licence he would have little to distinguish Linux, and FreeBSD would have dominated (BSD had a _huge_ headstart_.
I believe that many kernel developers were attracted specifically by the GPL, knowing that their work wouldn't be swallowed up by Apple. They didn't want to be food, and the GPL gives that protection.
Prayer: "./make all - I hope this works"
Charity: Give back to open source as you see fit.
Hajj: Just where *should* I go, except Redmond?
Observing Ramadan: From looking at some developers, getting them to not eat from sunrise to sunset for a month could be problematic.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
"sorry but open source existed WAY before closed source"
What do you base that claim on? What is the earliest year you claim that open source was available?
Look up the phrase "sunk cost" and be enlightened. Regardless of the state of gcc before or after, Redhat was forced to commit the time to meet their own needs. That they chose to release those improvements to the world allowed other groups to avoid incurring the same cost. Ideally, if every group addressed the problem this way, the overall efficiency would increase and the aggregated sunk costs of all parties would be lowered.
-Hope
I don't think any of Stallman's "solutions" are real solutions as they merely mitigate the symptoms; they don't eliminate the cause, which is basic human selfishness. Selfishness is not inherently human. This is a common fallacy on which way too many people explain way too many things.
I think delivering source is only fair. They paid for it. It would only become unfree if the client couldn't make changes or redistribute it.
they don't insist that we say TEE SEE PEE SLASH EYE PEE
People on fixed incomes, e.g., pensioners, are especially affected. After they have retired into homes with increasing property values, what is to keep them from losing them?
It seems to me that an *all* free software world would kind of hinder progress or at least prevent competition based on software (maybe that's the whole idea!).
Let's say company A is using a "free" CAD program to design ultra light chairs (the only CAD available since, in a perfect free world, all non-free softwares have disappeared) and thinks of a new way to improve it to attain a production increase and gain an advantage over its competition, company B (Note that the modification could just be fixing a complex and obscure bug).
Imagine that company A doesn't have the expertise to implement the software modification so it pays a freelance developer to modify the software under GPL (*).
Now, what would prevent the developer from freely distributing the modification he was paid to make (since the original software was under GPL)... which would eventually end up in the hands of company B.
So the situation is that company B is getting the improvement for free but company A had to pay for it.
Company A would have been better off not modifying the software in the first place.
With this scenario there isn't much drive for investment in software improvement and creativity.
What's wrong with this scenario? I'm sure I must be missing something within GPL.
I also know RMS considers custom sofware as different from non-free software but I fail to see the difference. Aren't all the users of any software customers? If not, how do you make the difference - are users of an internet browser customers? Users of a spreadsheet program? Users of a mathematical suite? Wouldn't all free software eventually become custom software?
(*) I also assume most professional softwares can't be realistically created and delivered for free - development of product is long, difficult and never over (maintenance).
I was referring to the post-invasion attempts at "reconstruction", specifically to the Bremer rules which are basically a textbook adaptation of extreme market conditions as advocated by Rand.
If you really think a bunch of no-bid contracts to politically connected corporations constitutes a free market, you're confused. Furthermore, the whole shebang is being funded through coercive taxation. This is not capitalism, this is fascism. Here's a hint: if government is involved, it's probably not capitalism.
I have read that some Rand-ite knuckleheads are avid supporters of the war. But support for a tax-funded foreign adventure is ethically inconsistent for people who believe that taxation is slavery. And bombing other people's houses is inconsistent with property rights. So this loud minority is, quite obviously, wrong.
This is a problem with any form of unrestricted capitalism and the true evil of Ayn Rand theories. They are an excercise in one of the oldest pursuits in "phillosophy": an attempt justify naked agression and dominantion in some "moral" terms.
Now I wholeheartedly agree that the system we have today is wrong. But this system is not capitalism - despite the rhetoric claiming so. Capitalism is the system you get when the only rule is "don't hurt others or take their stuff". Capitalism is the system designed to minimize aggression, by making all economic relations voluntary.
If you can suggest a better system, I'd love to hear about it. Every alternative I know of requires massive government-sponsored violence against peaceful people.
Governments, as a rule, hate real capitalism because it leaves them with vastly less power than they have today. Government is the problem.
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
I agree that "selfishness" is a vague term. That does not mean, however, that the drive to do what is perceived most attractive for oneself is not a very dominant (if not the dominant) factor in determining what a person will do. This is not to say people cannot act in a way which is not selfish (such as a parent going hungry for a child to eat - but isn't this just ensuring that the parent's genes will have the best likelihood of lasting longest*? Ok, how about giving up food so someone not related to you can eat. That does happen, and that is not selfish.).
I would ask, though, how you would explain any of the "way too many things" to which you refer without selfishness. I would posit, though, that if nobody was selfish, we'd never have wars (there would still be violence, because things like weather can be violent; harvesting a plant for food is violent, wild animals attacking is violent).
* - I love the "Selfish Gene" theory, don't you?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
I don't see why this guy is such an icon for so many geeks. He seems unsympathetic and makes outrageous black & white statements. I think he gives Linux a bad name.
Yes, DEC's contribution is probably smaller. But: GNU project is far away from providing a complete system (no web browser, ssh server, init, windowing interface, RDBMS, desktop [yes, GNOME is far from a complete desktop]). So I do not buy an argument that GNU project provides complete system. This project provided a significant part of the system I use (and the licenses for even bigger part of my system), but I think it is still not enough to name the whole thing (including X11-licensed x.org, dual-licensed Perl, MPL-licensed Gecko, etc) GNU/Linux.
As for the second sentence I have quoted, I agree that GPL is very important contribution of FSF and is not substituable (except the dangerous "or (at your option) any later version" clause, which I deleted from GPL text for every software I wrote). However, I think all of the other GNU work is substituable - just look at *BSD - the only part of the GNU project they use is GCC compiler. And even that can be replaced (but GCC is still superior, which is the reason they use it, not because of its license). And as I said before, the credits for the current state of GCC does not go to FSF, but to the egcs team.
Back to the "GNU/Linux" debate: I used to live in a communist regime (which is hopefully gone forever now). Because of that I surely value every single freedom I have (including the freedom of using, modifying and distributing the GPL-licensed software). I just hope the freedom of naming the system I use as I want and the freedom of choosing the license of my code as I want are among those freedoms. I got very nervous when somebody tries to order me what names should I use or generally how should I speak/what should I think.
-Yenya
--
While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it has to be. --Linus
It's particularly interesting that he's radically libertarian about things like software, but disapproves of companies from different counties doing business unimpeded by governments.
Ha! He's not libertarian. Libertarianism is about freedom from government, not freedom from corporate rule.
The best thing developed countries can do for under-developed countries is trade with them. Protectionism only prolongs the poverty.
The best thing you can do for a starving person is give them food...
Rancid food? Frozen food? Food in tin cans and no can opener?
The blanket statement is WRONG. Same as with your statement on trade. Trade *CAN* be good, but it isn't always, and the way things tend to work these days, it's usually *BAD*.
Your other statement is also wrong, regarding protectionism. An economy is like any complex system. Sometimes you have to limit/regulate certain portions for optimal performance.
This has nothing to do with the contracts. Bremer instituted rules to be applied to all Iraqi businesses. The idea was to stimulate a free market orgy and expectation was of investors killing each other in a wild stampede to invest. The corrupt Halliburton/KBR/US Government dance is playing on a different stage altogether and it does have a lot to do with fascist tendencies, although you gotta be careful not to go overboard in tax-hatred since no taxes = no social services.
.Capitalism is the system you get when the only rule is "don't hurt others or take their stuff". Capitalism is the system designed to minimize aggression, by making all economic relations voluntary.
There is no such thing as "voluntary" unless you consider the instinct of self-preservation to be "voluntary". You gotta eat, therefore you will do things to get food. From there flows all the other stuff people do. So as soon as you have a system where one group controls food and resources for some other: goodbye "voluntary". So lets drop pretenses. As to aggression, once you have that sort of power (life and death) over others, aggression insues. Having someone deprived of livehood by your economic action is only different in method from using a rifle to shoot him/her in the head.
If you can suggest a better system, I'd love to hear about it. Every alternative I know of requires massive government-sponsored violence against peaceful people.
True. The "peaceful people" are usually defined as "those who would be doing the violence if they were in charge". The violence can be economic or physical. If a group of people wishes to have a system which makes even bigger group their slaves (they can call things by nice terms like "wage" slaves to soften the impact) they are not "peaceful" in my book.
In my opinion the system that produces the least violence and most social justice wins. I would argue that a strong representative democracy, with strongly independent and protected by law media with a strong social safety net (public medical care and education) and with market driven economic system structred so it effectively forbids formation of businesses beyond certain size complete with strong import/export controls would be optimal.
Governments, as a rule, hate real capitalism because it leaves them with vastly less power than they have today. Government is the problem.
Governments are both a problem and a solution. Without government, there is absolutely noone to enforce any rules. With no rules any man with a bigger gun wins. Without government, there is no social safety net and that means that poor will become poorer and rich richer much faster then they do now. Essentialy, if you remove government a void forms which will be quickly filled by would be feudal lords and/or paramilitary gangs. An example of government-less place where anything goes was Afghanistan. Under such conditions, a group of religious fanatics which had the most coherent organization and were willing to do what it takes, became the government.
Democracy is a great thing but it has tricked some folks into believing we're all equal
Examples please. I've never heard anyone say, "we're all equal in capability". Duh.
There are those who are more talented, intelligent, faster, than others. Those who get their acts together quicker benefit and those who don't suffer.
Wrong. Or are you saying every rich person is "talented, intelligent, faster", etc? And that every poor person is "untalented, dumb, slow", etc?
When the people of Iraq want to stop acting like jackasses they too shall be able to build a great nation.
Wrong again. It's hard to be productive when your nation is invaded, blown to pieces, occupied, and the vast majority (read: all) reconstruction work is being done by foreign corporations.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
This post is really a plea for people to be a bit nicer to and about RMS. Take my word for it, in time he will come to be considered as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Richard Stallman: I would quit that job.
Stallman seems to be in the class of individuals that are in a position to make statements such as this because they don't have to ever face the reality of actually *doing* what they are advocating. He's worked for years, is fairly well off, and doesn't *have* to work for a living. It's very easy to say cling to high flung idealogies when you don't have to balance them against reality.
Stallman doesn't *have* to work for a living. Saying "I would quit that job" is very easy when he won't ever have to back the statement up with action. Personally, I have very little respect for RMS. Ivory tower decrees don't mean a damn thing when you don't have to balance them against reality.
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
I'm reminded of a recent holiday commercial featuring philadelphia eagles wide receiver terrell owens...
---
"T'was the night before Christmas and all through the house
T.O. was the best receiver in the NFL
I know it don't rhyme, but y'all know it's true"
---
Does anyone (well, anyone who follows the NFL) doubt T.O.'s ability on the field? And certainly, it would seem that T.O. is aware of and not timid in aggrandizing his importance.
But is the fact that he's right NOT make him "full of himself?"
I'd say no. And I'd also say no about Stallman for the same reason.
Stallman IS indispensible to and for the hardcore Free Software enthusiasts... and he's also full of himself. The two notions are not mutually exclusive.
And since when have governments been able to optimize anything? Trade protectionism is mostly used to enrich the few at the expense of the many. For most governments this represents "optimal performance".
...which is why his emphasis on "GNU slash Linux" is a such loss of focus (IMHO). Far more valuable, I think, to insist on the name being GPL/Linux which is, after all, where the RMS contribution is so profound.
Give Linus some credit for picking that as the licence for the Linux kernel.
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
I totally agree with RMS about free software, but when it comes to the issue of economic freedom we split paths.
When I go into a store and buy something, noone takes a gun to my head and forces me to buy it, and noone takes a gun to theirs and forces them to sell it. We are engaging in a free activity.
Now maybe I can't get a better deal - that might be an argument for more economic freedoms that lead to more market activity, but that is not a reason to try and controll the prices people sell things at or where they get them from.
When I get a job, noone takes a gun to my employers head and forces him to hire me, and noone takes a gun to mine and forces me to work for them. It is a voluntary agreement, and an act of freedom.
Now maybe I can't do any better - that might be an argument for more freedoms and thus more opportunities, but not to make him hire people or coerce him to pay my salary even if it is deemed not be worth it for him any more.
The same is true when I hire someone from another country, or someone from another country hires me. Of if I buy and sell goods from another land.
RMS can clearly understand information freedoms, I wish he would understand economic freedoms too.
We began this interview via email, but later had to finish by telephone after Richard Stallman fell and broke his arm.
See - real programmers don't drink coffee. Real programmers drink beer! Lots of beer!
The UN is a US lapdog? Why didn't it support the US invasion of Iraq then?
You think the UN is a scapegoat? I think you have those letters confused. You yourself just blamed the US for a UN action.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
In most situations UN is bullied and browbeaten into things by the US. The US routinely and copiously vetoes the Security Council, particularly if it has anything to do with Israel. The lack of UN "support" for invasion of Iraq was an aberration, US simply went too far and some found themselves too threatened on domestic fronts to simply roll over as usual.
If you look back in recent history, in between all the important decisions in favour of US, the UN has been threatened with withdrawal of US funds on nearly a yearly basis, the Republicans in congress called for abolishment/reform/castration of UN everytime they figured a decision might not go their way in that institution etc etc. And it worked up to a point but an unprovoked, unjustified invasion of Iraq however clearly was too much (and even then some on the Security Council rolled over).
I suspect that as technology becomes more advanced, what with robotics, AI and nanotechnology, then there will have to be some major reassessments of how to have a fair and productive economy.
It's time for people to start questioning the 'free market' ideologues, and assess how much this ideology actually contributes to the well-being of society and how much is actually just clever propaganda for maintaining the status of the wealthy.
mhack
Building a better ribosome since 1997
And you posted claiming to be me.... why?
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Hey, I did Linux in the 90s too. My computer teacher saw that I wasn't like the other kids, so he let me play with old hardware instead of following the regular program. I installed Slackware on it and learned tons. I don't see how this has anything to do with your geek credentials, though.
I'm just saying RMS seems to be this very opinionated guy. He seems obsessed and overdramatisizes everything. I'm not the only one who thinks he's harming more than he's helping with his attitude.
Why does it have to be so that every time there is a disagreement, ever so civilized, on Slashdot, somebody has to shout "idiot"? Isn't it possible to be factual? This is the sort of thing that makes me read Slashdot comments more for the sake of contemptuous entertainment than true insight.
Bremer instituted rules to be applied to all Iraqi businesses. The idea was to stimulate a free market orgy and expectation was of investors killing each other in a wild stampede to invest.
Ok, thanks for clarifying. Nevertheless, it takes a big leap to claim that the failure of Iraqi reconstruction is an indictment of free markets. War causes poverty and suffering anywhere, no matter what the economic system - Iraq definitely still is at war. And the risks of war scare off investors. No surprise there.
You gotta eat, therefore you will do things to get food. From there flows all the other stuff people do. So as soon as you have a system where one group controls food and resources for some other: goodbye "voluntary".
I would agree with you that property is necessary for life. That is why the right to own property is inherent and inalienable. But I think your argument about what is "voluntary" and what constitutes "control" needs to be more closely examined.
Labor is certainly required to keep anyone alive, so in this sense, labor is never voluntary. It's simply the human condition. Somebody has to gather the nuts and berries. Thanks to the agricultural revolution and the development of specialization, we don't all need to literally grow food anymore. But the principal is still the same: we live by the fruits of our labor. There's no free lunch.
So buying food is not voluntary. But buying food from any specific producer is voluntary, in the sense that you can always go to another. And in a free market, there will always be such choices, because if the existing choices suck, it represents an opportunity for someone new to enter the market and do better, getting rich in the process.
True. The "peaceful people" are usually defined as "those who would be doing the violence if they were in charge".
So you're in favor of punishing people for the potential to commit crimes? What happened to innocent until proven guilty? Should we lock up all the young black males in the US simply because they're statistically more likely to commit crimes?
The violence can be economic or physical.
Your concept of economic violence is unclear to me. Now, I certainly agree that it is possible to do economic damage to another person or group. Like the prewar sanctions against Iraq, for example. Or you could steal someone's bike so he can't get to work. However, such things are only possible because they are backed up by physical violence/theft. I cannot think of an example of "economic violence" that isn't actually caused by the actual application of physical violence, or the threat thereof. Can you give me an example?
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
You're engaged in an activity which is governed by an enormous number of laws and regulations.
These say the shop can't refuse to serve you simply because you're better able to produce melanin than the next guy or wear a kippah, but it may be required to refuse service for some or all items if you've not yet been out of the womb for 570 megaseconds or have obviously already imbibed an elephant sufficiency of the product in question.
More laws say you're not allowed to sell "whipped cream" when it's really sweetened whipped raw pork fat plus additives, or include botulin with the burgers.
Laws that prevent the shop from opening on a Sunday or running continuous footage of cum-dripping anal assaults on twelve-year-olds through the waiting-room television in order to attract custom.
The stuff you buy was manufactured and/or imported, then transported and wholesaled under the aegis of another tonne of laws. It's not free, it's not anything like it. Ditto for the circumstances of employment you posit.
As it happens, I also disagree with much of RMS's economics as well as some of his personal philosophy (but do agree with a lot of what he says). OTOH, what you're spouting here is dangerous starry-eyed nonsense, and you don't appear to recognise it for the blind idealism that it is.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This has been said before, and not by me:
GPL gives freedom (to control the relicensing of his code) to the developer by placing limits (only to GPL projects) on the distribution of the code.
BSD gives freedom (of distribution) to the code, by placing limits (on control of relicensing) on the developer.
You could go even further in either direction of the spectrum.In the BSD direction you will hit the public domain licenses (complete freedom of code distribution, complete lack of developer relicensing control), and in the GPL direction you will hit proprietary licenses (complete lack of code distribution freedom, complete control by the developer).
So it depends on what "freedom" you're talking about - not "speech" vs "beer", but producer vs product. To have one neccesarily requires the sacrifice of the other, and there are many places on the spectrum to choose from. If your concern is with the freedom of your code to spread and be used anywhere, BSD is more free than GPL, and public domain is the most free. If your concern is with your freedom to control the use of your code, then GPL is more free than BSD, and proprietary licences afford you the most freedoms.
The choice is yours.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I AGREE WITH YOU, who is free using "FREE SOFTWARE", the copiers, because we have tho king of users: PROGRAMMERS(P) AND NON-PROGRAMMERS (NP), (P) users may love to have the sourcecode of a program because they can add it own ideas to it, or to correct its errors, but (NP) users aren't intersted on modify it, they only want a better product and a better support, and this could not be reached without following the economy rules: you need to pay to gain. The "FREESOFTWARE" fails here because you don't have a REAL tangible structure to demand or prize for the program quality. I think that "FREESOFTWARE" is aplicable only to: Goverment Sponsored Projects, Philanthropical projects, or communitary projects, "FREESOFTWARE" is not aplicable for commeccial projects, because it denies (in facts) the property of the work. As I see the sponsoring of the "FREESOFTWARE" comes from enterprises who needs and alternative OS to Windows and need to distribuite if for free, but self protecting from the laws who forbid this competition mechanism. Also the sponsoring comes from slpeeless communist (they who don't beleive that the URSS dissapeared), that try to mount a charade to ignore the copyrights, the patents and the intellectual property, because they think that the intellectual property is not tangible, because untagible goods are not real goods, but they intentionally forgive that every thing is tangible because the brains can recongite it (remember TURING), and that each man has natural right of property on what it is fruit of his work, being a this tangible or intangible good. And this right gives the faculty them to do what they want with his goods. -This is the REAL ESSCENSE OF THE FREEDOM-, but they (the communist) don't believe on this ESSENCE. The "FREESOFTWARE" is not legal because to use it in a work you can't separate the rights of your work and the work of the creators of the "FREESOFTWARE" and I think that somebody must demand it on a court, the "FREESOFTWARE" bypass your natural rights. I write REAL-FREE SOFTWARE, you are free to use it or not, you are free to buy it or to go with the competition, and if you need the code you are free to gather a very big ammount of money to purchase from me my rights on it. I'm not an anti-social, because my software gives money to many people who needs it to go to the market, anti-social are people who denies it, with a "Philosophy" based on LIES. COPY RIGHTS is a CAPITALISM as COPY LEFT is a COMMUNISM as LEFTIES are COMMUNIST as RIGHTIES are CAPITALIST as RIGHT is a FREEDOM as LEFT is a NO-FREEDOM SO CopyRights is a Freedoms and Capitalism as CopyLeft is a NO-FREEDOM and COMMUNISM.
Entire paragraph is missing, and it seems that one of my stronger-worded replies belongs to the previous paragraph.
JA: What about the programmers...
Richard Stallman: What about them? The programmers writing non-free software? They are doing something antisocial. They should get some other job. - 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.
You can't handle the truth.
Then, in the 80s, Stallman noticed that one company refused to release the source code for IIRC a printer driver. Stallman, visionary that he is, forsaw the consequences of this type of thinking and delveoped the GPL and the free software movement.
You'll remember that Gates' first public 'postings' was in a computer magazine, with an essay explaining why programmers should charge for their work. Back then, the mainstream idea was that software is free, and sharing it is not wrong. You paid for the hardware already, you should be entitled to copies of the software. Gates' radical argument was that people should pay for code alone.
So, you are in fact bass-ackwards. Commercial software came about the same time Stallman began work on the GPL. Both of these were a response to a technology world where sharing source code was not considered to be wrong or illegal in any way by the majority of computer users, but businesses were starting to limit the licensing of their software.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Did I claim that installing Slackware on derelict hardware makes for "geek cred"? Did I claim to be a "geek?" I am not a "geek." Following instructions like a good little trained ape and installing Slackware doesn't classify for any credentials. What did you do when /your/ kernel didn't recognise the hard-drive? I know what I did, I hacked it so it would.
Yes, Richard M. Stallman is a very opinionated guy. Thats just how visionaries are. As a visionary he is very good, unlike the dorques who keep proclaiming "200X will teh year of the Lo0nix." And unlike the soap-box material over at Wired, he made his mark on the world. He created the FSF, the GPL and a ton of software you likely use. Please tell me, ThJ, what contributions have you made so far that give you +v to claim Stallman as "obsessed" "overdramatic" and "harming more than helping?" Harming? Don't make me laugh. He created that which you claim he is harming. Of course you're not the only one who thinks that RMS doesn't belong. A thousand years ago you wouldn't be the only one thinking the world was flat too.
You're probably are aware of this, but for the benefit of the general readership... I once read an article that had the following quote from Bill Gates. I found it compelling enough to copy and paste to a quotes.txt file. It illustrates that there are some very good reasons why these things go under-inforced. It's very planned (Dons tinfoil hat):
"As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."-- Bill Gates on software piracy in Asia
If anyone out there can provide the link to the original article, I'd be very appreciative!
---
That would be a shame, but the overwhelming picture I got was of someone interested in promoting software freedom.
Your characterizations are a little over the top. Prominent members of the Open Source Movement would have no argument with RMS' statements, but would object to being called "like Microsoft" or "corrupting". Open Source does appeal to "practical" people who don't mind using non-free software when it gets a job done. That's something that RMS thinks is a mistake and that is a real difference of opinion that's worth pointing out. Linux Torvalds consistently describes himself as an "engineer" more concerned with getting things done than freedom. RMS is right to say he dissagrees with that and tell you why.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Well, I saw no other reason for mentioning it, so I wildly assumed creds were the reason. Fine. He created all that, and for that I am grateful. But I don't like the way he does PR. I'm embarassed on his behalf, because I just know that so many disagree with aspects of his arguments. If the public views him as some sort of representative for the Linux community... Well, I just don't like the thought of that, because people will often interpret opinionatedness as narrowmindedness and stupidity. He's hostile to the whole model of closed source programming and he doesn't care if a zillion programmers lose their jobs. I just dislike that strongly. Although I am a fan of open source and free software, I think they can coexist with closed proprietary software. I don't want to abolish it. He's just so extreme.
the inevitable result of capitalism is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Yes that's why everybody in the U.S. is so poor, and all those wealthy communist countries are laughing at them. I mean just look at all those countries that have succesfully implemented central planning on a large scale; they don't even have poor people!
The fact is that capitalism makes the poor richer, and the rich much richer. This is a net gain. In the end it doesn't matter if the rich in a country are a million times richer than the poor, instead of a thousand, if those poor now have more. More to feed themselves, clothe themselves, more opportunity.
I'm not sure where i'm going with this...
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares?
Again, it's all the US's fault.
I have to admit, I have a serious distrust of people who think everything is "somebody elses fault." Rarely is one side at fault completely.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Yoda, is that you?
I think we agree more than we disagree. Although one could argue egoism as a motivation for everythign we do, I was pointing out that people too often assume that material wealth is an unsatisfiable urge within human nature. This seems pretty rediculous to me, so I may just be talking to the wrong people...
I don't get the fight between Open Sourcers and Free Software advocates. Isn't it obvious, the software is better BECAUSE it's free?
There's a reason humans evolved the concept of freedom and justice: because it works better than the law of the jungle.
You'd thing the USA would have learned about blind hero worship after Lindbergh. RMS is a living person, and we do not have to accept every idea he has, only the good ones.
That's IMHO why RMS condemns publicly distributed non-free software, while custom software that is never distributed to outsiders is okay to him. In the latter case, it might be better in some cases for the user to share the code with the world, but then it is the user's choice not to share it, and he would have made that choice no matter what. In the former case the license basically forced people not to share, unless they are willing to break the law, so it changes people's behavior for the worse, since in some cases it is very beneficial to share, but general disrespect of the law is undesirable for the society.
I own a refrigerator. That one thing is controlled by one person alone. Me. I guess that makes me anti-social. I guess I'm harming society. Oh well.
That's odd, when I look at my fridge I find I can order parts myself, or hire any number of people to repair it.
If you have bought a fridge that only you can repair, then I guess you're just a blithering idiot since the rest of us manage just fine. But then I guess you proved that already by missing my point. Oh Well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'll have you know that with those long black hair, those soft dark eyes, that bushy moustache, and the gorgeous beard (no wonder he's a freedom fighter!), some of us are quite ready and willing, eager infact, to please :)
WOW!!! I for one am all hot and wet just thinking about getting fucked by him!
Bring on the RMS Porn I say!
Abuzar
Where would we be without the GPL?
Where would we be without the FSF?
Heck, where would we be without GCC?
The fact that FOSS even *exists* is because of RMS.
Not to troll although given the state of affairs these days, this probably sounds like one.
I respect RMS primarily for his sincere devotion to what he believes in. He's not "pragmatic" (ability to sell out when the monetary gains are high enough) and is the most dependable point in the whole Free Software community as far as I know.
However, his reasons seem to be things like "morals" and "ethics" rather than ideas which are fashionable in the US like "reason" and "maximum profit".
How "American" are these values? After opportunists like Eric Raymond capitalised on the whole idea of Free Software and produced a watered down "pragmatic" version called Open Source where companies can get work done without paying for it, the whole deal seems to have been a lot more accepted.
In any case, I don't think we're going to see anyone as devoted to a cause as RMS anytime soon and even though given the present state of affairs, some of his opinions sound "cranky" to some people. He's one of the few people who absolutely refuse to sell out or water down their ideals it's wonderful to have such people around.
The big difference I see is since I'm advocating fixing the tax rate to the interest rate on national debt, and Islam prohibits usury, fixing the rate would be somewhat problematic.
However I don't think Zakat Al Mal the primary source of revenue for Islamic states, is it?
Seastead this.
How on earth is controlling the flow of goods and services supposed to make the local population's income go up?
You improve the local populations income like this. Permits goods to flow out freely, but you do not allow any foreign ownership of local property, and you impose tarrifs on imports on any goods from countries whose legal codes offend your moral standards of industrial, environmental and human welfare ethics.
Recent economic studies have found that the benefits of increasing prosperity are not limited to the richest stratas of society. but instead tend to be wide spread.
Recent economic studies also have found that increasing prosperity is a MYTH. We are in a period of widespread decreasing prosperity, and increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a minority.
Any economic study which claims to "study the effect of increasing prosperity" is propaganda.
Indeed, they have found that lower-income people often benefit more than the rich from improved prosperity.
How often is "often"? The vast majority of cases? Do you mean, in about 1/2 of the cases? Or do you mean in thousands of cases, but overall in a tiny percentage of cases?
Because however much "often" is, as cited in these recent economic studies, even MORE OFTEN, the rich get richer and the poor get screwed.
In truth, I am completely at a loss to understand how poverty can be eleviated without free trade. Do you think poor countries are capable of bootstrapping themselves into the 21st century by themselves? They need investment and open markets for their goods, not closed borders.
Did you just claim that "poor" countries are fundamentally incapable of developing without being OWNED by rich foreign investors?
Perhaps before bootstrapping themselves into the 21st century we could permit these countries to bootstrap themselves into the 20th century without us going in there and overthrowing every single democratically elected government which tries to implement protectionist policies.
Allowing multinational corporations to have free trade with undeveloped nations is like allowing grade school teachers to sexually molest their students.
Worse... it is like knowingly hiring convicted sex offenders to be teachers AND THEN allowing them to sexually molest their students.
Just like children are not allowed to consent to sex with adults, governments of under developed nations ought not be permitted to consent to free trade with 1st world nations.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
I would not call it simplistic. The line of reasoning you suggest is often refered to as race to the bottom, with which you seem quite familiar, and which is essentially both coherent and analytically persuasive.
I think it is wrong, however, and heres two reasons why:
First: the number of competent people available from overseas to fill up positions, and the ease whith which employers can transfer production overseas is probably vastly exaggerated. Remember that it is in the interests of both employers, to use as levereage to resist regulation locally, and unions, to secure jobs which factor conditions no longer favor local production from overseas competition, to exaggerate this threat.
Secondly: only the companies whose business models depend on screwing the worker, or the environment for that matter, would find it profitable to move production overseas as a result of stricter regulation.
This will potentially free up labor and other resources for companies whose businessmodels do not depend on such practices, while increased competition for labor in developing nations eventually decreases the costs of labor standards there, which as I argue in my original post, is the way it is meant to work.
That is true, but in an unrestricted free market, a self-inducing and self-reinforcing condition occurs in the absence of external controls: a spontaneous formation of cartels and eventually a monopoly. The process is simple: under ideal market conditions, one company will be slightly better then others, it will allow it to obtain higher market share and if done right, that will give it more resources to become more efficient etc. In this process a critical element is called "barrier to entry". That is as companies become larger, the higher the initial capital required to start a brand new "competition" company capable of challenging the entrenched behemoths. In the final stage only a few mega companies remain, eventually merging into one. Once that occurs, the barriers to entry become insurmountable and once the suply chain is purchased by the company, there is not only economical but even physical possibility of competition, i.e. the fields on which the crops grow and the fertilizer and herbicide production as well as related transportation etc are all owned by the same company. Then the price of the product becomes irrelevant and the company can proceed to introduce monopolistic pricing.
In a simplier conceptual scenario, imagine the humanity as a tribe on an island: once one person owns all the fields and all the fruit trees, no "free choice" is any longer possible for his "customers".
Truly free market economy, like most 19th century social engineering ideas, has a built-in self-destruct mechanism. If allowed to function as intended, it will inevietably self-destruct at a great price to human societies.
Your concept of economic violence is unclear to me.
One only has to examine the conditions that existed during the industrial revolution to see what I meant. The process is simple: one creates an economic situation whereby the victim is unable to extract themselves from under your control due to his inability to earn enough even though he is in theory capable of making the "free market" choice. But by making the employee of your company so poor that he/she can only afford to obtain his/her food and shelter from you, cost of which is provided as a debt towards his/her future earnings makes the person get into more debt more she/he works for you. So her "free market" choice is to be your slave or die. This condition was wide-spread in the world, most companies providing their own stores, hospitals and housing all of which was credited against employee "debt" to the company. No savings were thus possible and whole generations of people had to work permanently as essentially indentured slave force. This and many other tricks of that sort is what lead to the Marxist revolts etc.
Note that in this scenario, if executed properly, the capitalist is the phisically "non-violent" one and the only option the worker has is to violently revolt, a trick that allows the one commiting economic aggression to later claim being a victim when eventual physical retaliation occurs.
So you're in favor of punishing people for the potential to commit crimes? What happened to innocent until proven guilty? Should we lock up all the young black males in the US simply because they're statistically more likely to commit crimes?
This is simply not an issue of guilt or innocence. The simple truth is that some people are hell-bent on dominating others. In any social system some of them end up winners and some other losers. I dont think it is possible to avoid this unless you come up with a method to make everyone a rational, cooperative person interested in welfare of society and his fellow human beings. One sociopath can ruin any utopia and that is why precisely no utopia can exist, be it "free market" or Communism one. Note that communists were destroyed by sociopaths taking over their "commune" and turning it into a feudal fiefdom, just as the "robber barrons" were proceeding to do it to the attempts at "free market" economy until they were slowed down and stymied by aggressive government intervention regulating the markets and labour.
No it is not. As I indicated, the US was clearly an instigator but the blame can be also put in a large proportion on the other members of the Security Council who proved spineless or proceeded to profit from their own conflicting interests while claiming to be on the side of the "Iraqi people". The US is indeed recently acting a big, belligerent, foaming at the mouth bully but the UN plays the part of a bunch of victorian school girls screeming in panic while jumping on the table: "Look he is looking at us again! Waaaaah!".
Ii doesn't matter if only 5% is crap, if that's the 5% I'm using.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No, thank you.
Sure, but AFAIK they aren't actively contributing to the project.
It's more "wouldn't it be nice if there was a BSD-licensed compiler that compiled more quickly than GCC".
spontaneous formation of cartels
Cartels are highly unstable, as long as you assume each member places their own interest above the group. By underselling their partners, they get a larger piece of the market, even though they depress prices and cause overall cartell profits to drop. The fact that this happens is well-documented. The only successful cartels are backed by governments who can punish individual producers who don't follow the cartel rules (OPEC, for example - and even OPEC is rife with cheating amonst the various countries).
under ideal market conditions, one company will be slightly better then others, it will allow it to obtain higher market share and if done right, that will give it more resources to become more efficient etc.
I agree. But this isn't a bad thing, because as you point out, efficiency is increasing. This business only increases its market share by offering a better product or a lower price. So the consumers are winning throughout this process.
Now, you're suggesting that once a single business has market dominance, they'll start jacking up prices. They can try, but as soon as they do their efficiency is out the window, and they're ripe for destruction by a new entry.
I admit that at present, we have an economy dominated by large corporations that are difficult to compete with. But this is not a free market. The costs of regulation are borne disproportionately by smaller businesses - and this does indeed create an artificial barrier to entry. The big players maintain their position through legal action and lobby influence, neither of which are free market mechanisms. Government spending is a large fraction of GDP, so if you don't have the connections to get government contracts, in many industries you're completely sunk.
Given a level legal playing field and a government that keeps their hands off, small businesses have the advantage of being able to innovate much faster than larger businesses. This has happened repeatedly in the past and it still happens somewhat today, despite the problems with the system. Startups can and do succeed. Big, old, slow businesses die.
In a simplier conceptual scenario, imagine the humanity as a tribe on an island: once one person owns all the fields and all the fruit trees, no "free choice" is any longer possible for his "customers".
How many industries can you name in which a single entity has cornered the entire world market? I can only think of DeBeers with their diamonds, which, by the way was the result of British imperial policy in S. Africa, not a free market. But even that didn't last - the price of diamonds got high enough to inspire the invention of synthetics that are now indistinguishable.
Surely no one has ever come close to cornering the world market on food or shelter. There are a vast number of possibilties for producing either. This is not surprising, because if the world wasn't full of ways to keep humans alive, we wouldn't have gotten this far in the first place.
One only has to examine the conditions that existed during the industrial revolution to see what I meant.
One only has to examine the large increase in living standard experienced by even the lowest classes during the transistion from pre-industrial to industrial society. You're forgetting that people chose to live in factory towns because they perceieved it as a better deal than what they could get back home on the farm, or elsewhere. Furthermore, I'd add that wildly differing historical interpretations of this time period exist, precisely because it is so closely related to the ideological differences we've been discussing. The mainstream tends to present a version of history like yours, but of course that doesn't make it valid.
In fact, the opinions you've been presenting help maintain the status quo. Government wants you to believe that "government is also the solution". It's something that all political partisan
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
My example is that there are folks who want to levy confiscatory taxes on the rich to bring them down to everyone else's financial levels.
No not every rich person or poor person is a certain way. But the majority of them are, and then they have associates (wives, family, friends) who may or may not be similar.
The Iraqis were assholes, BEFORE the invasion. They let Saddam stay in power for too long. Had they removed him themselves we would never have had a reason to invade.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Those who have greater abilities ARE treated preferentially, by life. They get and achieve more. And as far as rights go, those with money still have more.
And yes that tribal Einstein would achieve more than Britney, if there were any tribal Einsteins to begin with. The fact that it has not happened yet is proof that there are not.
A great nation accurately defined is one that does right by its own people. The former Iraqi government did not do that. And the citizens themselves are getting in the way of having a proper government installed for them. The longer they keep acting up, the longer they will suffer.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Stallman needs to update and refresh his soap box material. His arguments boil down into petty semantics, which make him look like a doofus.
There I was of course thinking of Gates - the reality of many larger companies is that the direction of a product is indeed at the whim of company leadership - technology companies are prone to this being one man (Ellison, Gates, Jobs, etc.)
Thus buying into products from these comapnies is indeed putting yourself at the mercy of the direction you choose to go. Buying Word is no different.
Even knowing this I choose to use Apple products for home computing, but in taht case I like the trend he has shown and wish to support it. At least there the tendancy is for open formats.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"The Workplace:
JA: What if your job requires you to use non-free software?
Richard Stallman: I would quit that job."
Then so shall I. I'll lose all my worldly posessions, not to mention my wife, but I'll be FREE!!
Hold on a second. My wife. Hey, I really will be free. This guy's on to something.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
My example is that there are folks who want to levy confiscatory taxes on the rich to bring them down to everyone else's financial levels.
No one wants to do that. Have you ever heard anyone say, "tax Bill Gates until his net worth is equal to everyone else's financial level"?
Your political philosophy does not match reality. You *do* identify potential problems, but you do not accurately assess them.
No not every rich person or poor person is a certain way. But the majority of them are
I did not say they weren't a "certain way", I said they were not all rich (or poor) based simply on their intelligence, speed, physical prowess, etc. The world is far, *far*, more complex than your simplistic view.
The Iraqis were assholes, BEFORE the invasion.
So? Is being an asshole reason for invasion? Even assuming they are assholes (which they are not, asshole), now they are unemployed, bombed, occupied assholes with little left to lose.
They let Saddam stay in power for too long.
They did not "let" Saddam stay in power.
Had they removed him themselves we would never have had a reason to invade.
We did not invade because "the people of Iraq did not depose Saddam", or some such nonsense.
Where did you get this idea that trade is mostly bad?
I did not get that idea. I said that trade with "underdeveloped" nations by superpowers (like the US) tends to be detrimental to the underdeveloped nation. I did not say it had to be this way, but that it's how it's working out currently, due to entities like the WTO.
That is the precise opposite of what economists say.
They say it's good for the economies of the nations, but it's absolutely retarded to not realize that economic welfare does not mean that it's good for the people.
The most prosperous nations today are the trading nations, and the correlation is no accident.
Of course not, and I never implied otherwise.
My theory is that subconsciously people feel uncomfortable around RMS because they recognize the debt they (we) owe to him.
Nice theory, but not the case.
I personally abhor people who go around saying that I'm antisocial, or evil, and who condemn me without knowing the first thing about me.
That's why I hate the guy - because he started it.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
good points all around. hope you didn't misinterpret my post - i can't stand TO and his egotistical baggage. however, his numbers are quite impressive. and right now, 2004/5 season, he IS by those numbers (and by what he did for philly's receiving corps) the best receiver in the NFL.
my point was simply that actually *being* important does not preclude you from being "full of yourself" if you take it upon yourself to extol your own virtues. and in that respect, TO is a case-in-point (as is Stallman, in my opinion, although to a lesser degree than TO).
And they are also very profitable and very common. If it were not for various governments trying (with questionable success) to break them, they would be even more profitable. Some recent examples: virtually all world's drug makers conspired to control prices of vitamins, doing it successfully for decades until caught; computer memory makers were caught doing so; the chemical companies were caught doing so to cerain compounds used in plastic; etc etc.
Are cartels unstable? That depends on a singular factor: if by breaking away from a cartel one can make more money then if staying within. If you break, you can make more in short term but then you actually have to do the efficient manufacturing. If you stay, you need to produce much less and still obtain similiar profit due to your margins being 10 or sometimes 100-fold more then otherwise. This of course assumes that we are discussing industries which are already consolidated and have exceedingly high barriers to entry, as the examples I mentioned indicate. Besides, as I mentioned, cartels are only one mechanism through which monopolies arise.
Startups can and do succeed. Big, old, slow businesses die.
It is only so because the governments impose rules preventing the "big old" companies from squashing the startups at their whim due to their vastly superior resources. It is the external conrtrols introduced by the governments that do slow down coerced "buyouts" and other abuse from totally preventing any sort of meaningful competition, althogh it is quite common, most visibly in large companies purchasing the miniscule startups in order to shut them down.
But this isn't a bad thing, because as you point out, efficiency is increasing. This business only increases its market share by offering a better product or a lower price. So the consumers are winning throughout this process.
Again this is a classic oversimplification based on uncritical acceptance of religious dogma of "free market" which claims that endless improvement in "efficiency" is a good thing. For one, as the company grows in size and is able to overtake more and more market share, it forces all related companies which exist in symbiotic ecosystem of products to adjust so that they are less and less capable of supporting other types of products. What results is a decrease in consumer choice combined with decrease of price of the remaining products. One just has to look in BestBuy or such and compare the amount of choices for stereo equipment and their features and contrast it with say a decade ago. The indvidual units are now much cheaper but they also have far less features and their differences are superficial. This sort of consolidation in the name of efficiency occured in many industries. Is the consumer the winner? Is a less choice at lower price better then more choice at higher price? This is not a clear cut advantage by any means.
Furthermore, on the idea of "efficiency" itself, which seems to be elevated to truly revered status amongst believers in "free market", if pursuit of efficiency is the ultimate goal of every corporation, then the ultimate, most successful market condition is that of a small number of fully automated production lines belonging to companies which own their entire supply chain all the way from mining of raw materials, each having exactly one employee: the CEO. Everyone else on the surface of Earth remaining unemployed. That would guarantee maximum "efficiency" as in operating cost equal to the CEO's salary, 0 employee and other operating costs and 100% profit on everything, if you can find anyone to "sell" your stuff to that is.
This is just one example of how the tennents of "free market" can be shown false by reducto ad absurdum.
They can try, but as soon as they do their efficiency is out the window, and they're ripe for destruction by a new entry.
As I explained, the monopo
Which is an aberration, luckily for us all existing only in trivial areas, unless you mean to tell me that Michael Jackson can go on a shooting spree in a mall every Tuesday, treating mall goers as ducks? Or perheaps play a little "doctor" game with some teenage boys? Surely such a rich man could do it with no fear of consequences, no?
And yes that tribal Einstein would achieve more than Britney, if there were any tribal Einsteins to begin with. The fact that it has not happened yet is proof that there are not.
This basically concludes any possiblity of sane discussion with you. Tribal "Einsteins" do exist and have existed for eons. What we are discussing here is a capacity for thought. In the absence of education, scientific institutions, generations of effort prior to the lucky birth of our genius, and him having access to all of that, his superior brainpower, even though outclassing all of his tribe mates, results in him becoming a really, really good shaman. Only sometimes we get to see a glimpse of what their talent could have achieved if only they were born elsewhere, when via lucky coincidence they get a chance to communicate with the world, such as for example Srinivasa Ramanujan did. It is the combination of potential with social conditions that resulted in "our" Einstein coming into being, for if he was indeed born in a tribe in Borneo, we would have someone named perheaps Ipkis to thank for coming up with General Relativity say in 1975 in Vancouver. Yet you seem to fail to grasp this rather simple and obvious logic.
A great nation accurately defined is one that does right by its own people. The former Iraqi government did not do that.
Neither does the US. Nor does China which appears to nearly own the USA these days. Your point?
And the citizens themselves are getting in the way of having a proper government installed for them. The longer they keep acting up, the longer they will suffer.
Did it ever cross your mind that the people of Iraq might value their own self-determination more then "proper government" (you get to decide what is "proper" no doubt) installed for them (talk about hubris!) by the likes of you?
He came up with a similar phrase to differentiate GNU/Linux when he was doing his Saint IGNUcius (a saint in the "Church of Emacs") skit. As it says on the site:
(Notably it's just a joke he does for a laugh, he's not *quite* that mad ;))
Ok, I can't resist one last post in this long, long thread. If you're interested in continuing the debate, email me. I'd be happy to.
Well, yes and no. Yes, each person owns his/her life and can do as he/she wishes.... as long as her/his actions do not cause misery and pain to others. And herein lies the rub. It is on that latter part of this "equation" (which was conspicuously missing in your version) that the pure "free market" ideology falls apart.
The latter part of the equation follows directly from the first. Self-ownership implies both rights and responsibilities (ie not violating other people's self-ownership). As for your formulation "not causing misery and pain", I'm not sure it's very useful as a standard - because just looking at your own examples so far, clearly there are times when you believe it is correct to cause someone pain. So other principles are required to sort things out. I would argue that those principles all comes down to 1) the legitimacy of self defense and 2) who owns what and why.
Regarding history: it is a truism that the victors write the history books. It is also obvious that every historian works through the distorting effects of his own ideology. If you learned history in school, any school, you have uncritically swallowed a large set of things that might not be true.
Compare the viewpoints for yourself. If you haven't compared the Keynesian, Chicago, and Austrian schools of economics, how do you really know which makes the most sense? (you have espoused a Keynesian view, by the way.) If you haven't read both Marx and Hayek, how do you decide if either or both are wrong? If you haven't spent any effort to learn the history of banking, how can you claim to understand the causes of the great depression? Did you know the US education system was consciouly modeled on Bismarck's Germany, a system explicitly designed to indoctrinate and pacify?
Before you accuse someone of religious devotion, inquire how they've come to believe what they believe. I once held opinions just like yours. I've done a lot of learning since then.
In fact, I could retort that we are all saturated from birth in a religion of state worship. Especially Democracy worship - have you ever bothered to read something critical of Democracy? Try Hans Herman-Hoppe.
Bottom line: all these arguments have been done before, in a depth that we cannot approach here. You accuse me of oversimplifying, but I'm quite sure that we are *both* oversimplifying. Neither of use will convince the other here. But if you want to send me references, I'm always willing to learn new things.
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
(And yes, I do drink alcohol and in the past... smoked a LOT of weed. But I did just cut my hair short for the first time in 5 years so I guess my name's off the great Freak Rollcall of Honour...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe