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RMS Weighs in on BitKeeper Debacle
mshiltonj writes "You know its what we've all been waiting for: RMS weighs in on the BitKeeper debacle. An excerpt: "I want to thank Larry McVoy. He recently eliminated a major weakness of the free software community, by announcing the end of his campaign to entice free software projects to use and promote his non-free software. Soon, Linux development will no longer use this program, and no longer spread the message that non-free software is a good thing if it's convenient."
PAYING for software is not wrong either. RMS belives it's WRONG for programmers to recieve money for what they do...or at least the high and mighty corporations that employ them. I am sorry. After listening to the interview the Linux Link Tech Show did with him, I like him even less then I did before. I AGREE with him, FREE/FREE is the best, but sometimes you got to pay to get some piece of software that does something mundane that FOSS developers don't want to work on. For example, print spoolers or job schedulers better than cron (there are better schedulers then cron....even open source ones). There are not that many options on either of these fronts in the FOSS area. In the non-open area, there are alot of them. Some do some pretty cool things with print, but because it's not a Desktop Environment or a COOL Windows Manager, it gets pushed to the wayside....for Linux geeks at home, cron and CUPS may be enough. In the corporate world, we need more sometimes. Sometimes noone else make something you need Open Source and you got to buy it. RMS thinks buying software is a mortal sin and I frankly do not agree.
Gorkman
Then he'll blow something up!
Where did I see RMS breaking into Berkley to listen in on CS lectures ....Hmmmm.....
Look it up for yourselves....
I basically believe in his misssoin, but sometimes he can be a bit....well....radical.
Blah blah blah.
I'm a free software bigot.
Blah blah blah.
Non-free programs are dangerous to you and to your community. Don't let them get a place in your life.
He sounds like he's trying to run a Cambodian re-education camp.
As Gunnery Sergeant Hartman said "What is your major malfunction, numbnuts?"
...at how much? 250 pounds, 300 pounds, 350 pounds? :D
disclaimer: i'm a fatass too.
do() || do_not();
I guess you're the sort of person who admires Dubya then.
[ducks and runs for cover]
Whatever. RMS is spewing more of his socialist drivel. His whole line of thought is induced by some acid trip from the seventies. Reread the thing, his stance represents the the worst of what free software and open source is about. He just wants you to give it all away, give and give, because of some notion that free means completely unencumbered. It's an idiotic standpoint, one that was maybe seminal in the start of this movement, but as the movement matures it begins to sound real silly.
Some argue that the world did not improve because of the existence of BK, that's the whole point
BitKeeper doesn't have an obligation to improve the world, just to make the company that owns it money. There is no moral imperative here.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
In today's world, if it were GPLed, it coudn't be (at least not sustainably). Unless, of course, you bundle it with some other product that making the GPLed software useful depends on - like some piece of non-GPL software (or, in Red Hat's case, a support contract).
If you are going to accept people taking things apart to see how they work, then why make it difficult?
Because it's the "difficult" part that allows the first person to create the product the head start they need to recoup their initial investment.
In the physical world, you get this "difficulty" via a combination of patents, ramp-up time and the pure impracticality of creating certain items (eg: no-one can fab their own CPUs at home).
In the software world, you get this via a combination of the time it takes to reverse engineer and the time it takes to reimplement.
When you lose that window (eg: by trying to sell GPLed software), you lose the opportunity to make money to recoup the initial investment.
Do manufacturers of radios try to make them specially hard to disassemble?
No, but I'd challenge you to take a radio apart and then build a duplicate *from raw materials* in the same time it takes to recompile a copy of RHEL from source.
The Stallman ethos is that information wants to be free.
No, the Stallman ethos is that you shouldn't be able to sell software (more accurately, you shouldn't have to pay for software).
*Services* that software depends on ? Sure.
*People time* to create software ? Sure.
Software in and of itself ? No. [*]
[*] Stallman often talks about how he thinks programmers should be able to sell software, but it's never seemed more than lip service to me. Personally I think his belief that you can "sell" GPLed software software is rooted back in the days before dirt cheap duplication and redistribution. Certainly, his license appears to be specifically crafted so as to make selling GPLed software on its own to be practically impossible, his only suggest business plans are either hopelessly naive or dependent on product+service bundling. I've also yet to hear of anyone actually making a living from creating and selling GPLed software (Red Hat is probably the closest, but a) they don't actually do the bulk of the software development their product requires and b) they tie their product to a service).
Eh? Eugenics was massive in the US for ages. Where you do think the Germans got so many of their ideas from?