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RMS Views on Linux, Java, DRM and Opensource
An anonymous reader writes "All About Linux is running a transcript of a recent talk given by Richard Stallman at the Australian National University. Stallman discussed various issues facing GNU like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Digital Rights Management, about why one should not install sun's java on your computer, his views on Opensource as well as why he thinks people should address Linux distribution as GNU/Linux."
Or is Stallman just a brilliant guy with some signs of lunacy? I'm pleased as hell that he has led the charge for Free Software and cracked the gates of proprietary software wide open. The only other significant movement I ever saw in that area was from the US Government itself, and they go co-opted pretty fast.
But RMS seems to not be "with it" when it comes to actually closing the deal on the revolution. Computers taht really are by the people, for the people. Cryptic jibberish is OK, as long as it is Free cryptic jibberish.
Or maybe I'm just missing something. Its OK, it happens a lot.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
is that in order to truly spread the "philosophy" the product must succeed on its own without the "philosophy" attached. When the product succeeds because it is a good product then the philosophy will inherently spread. That is why it is good to call it Linux and not GNU/Linux. That way people will buy into just because its good and not because it is a physical manifestation of RMS's philosophy. This is analagous to all those people who bought American cars in teh 70-80's even though they were crap because they philosophically thought it was important to buy American cars. Therefore the product got worse and worse. He gets it exactly wrong by saying that it must be called GNU/Linux to spread the philosphy. I'm not looking for a philosophy; I'm looking for an OS.
Actually, RMS is more a John The Baptist than a saint - railing against the establishment, morally pure, living in the desert eating naught but locusts and honey and using over the top, fire and brimstone sermons to try and draw the masses towards salvation. And abso-fucking-loutley batshit crazy.
;-)
He is however, necessary if we are to make it to the promised land.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Well, go ahead and try, then maybe you will understand why RMS insist on the GNU/Linux name.
This is the best explanation of why he does that yet, IMO. I've always been a little confused and thought he just wanted more credit, which seemed petty. But by pointing out that its basicly advertisement of the GNU philosophy and Free Software makes a lot more sense. I'm not sure if I'm going to join him in doing so, but I'm a lot more likely to now.
Oh, and I know people are going to flame his last Q&A. I thought it was funny. Shows he doesn't need to take himself seriously all the time.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
"Booooooo!" was probably first said many tens of thousands of years ago so you've missed that one.
You probably need to make up a new word - for example, let me be the first to say "Ghaslespruthmeep"
AT&ROFLMAO
1) calling all software licenses equal is not Microsoft's position. They don't particularly like GPL, and wish they could stamp it out. They don't mind BSD license so much, they still ship with BSD code (some command line tools), had a BSD network stack for a while (NT 3.5 days or so, been ripped out completely in favor of MS code), and AD authentication is from MITs Kerberos, with some extensions.
2) Calling it "like Microsoft" is just an emotional attack. If he said "Linux thinks all licenses are valid" then he'd have to come up with a reason why this shouldn't happen. I've never bought his arguments.
3) "wrong to ever violate them". Stalman makes it sound like this is bad, but never gives reasons why. Can i violate GPL and he'd be happy?
In a way i wish RMS would stop talking about GNU/Linux and get back to the HURD. Instead of a decades old OS with various security patches on top of it to work in a networked world, have some ideas for a truly clean OS. Port stuff to it. WHy in this day in age do most machines have this all powerful root (or Administrator) user? Build in sub-permissioning from Day 1, don't add on later and wait for thigns to break. Why does a bug in glibc put my whole computer at risk? Why cant we re-engineer things to have message passing and isolated address spaces for libraries? Is the inefficiency of message passing vs. direct method calls going to kill a user who really just wants to be on the net safely? Use the HURD as a research project, get new ideas out into the OS world, where it's stagnating now.
And just how do you propose to get the behemoth that is the Linux Kernel compiling with something other than GCC???
I'm actually coming round to his POV on the GNU/Linux thing (X/Linux, KDE/Linux notwithstanding) - GNU was there first, they do still have a way to go, and "Linux distros" do use a lot of GNU stuff. OTOH, of course, there's nothing in the GPL that says you have to call the software a particular name, so he's kinda SOL on that.
Reading his reasoning behind the "Java trap" makes me chuckle, though. His main argument there seems to be that the Free Software implementations can't keep up with the proprietary ones, and therefore people should stop using the proprietary implementations. Surely the whole reason they're behind is that they waited until the Java gained traction before starting up on a Free version. If it hadn't had that traction, then it wouldn't have been worth doing a Free implementation in the first place.
Registering accounts later than some other chrisb since 1997
He needs Sun and Java and Torvalds and ESR and Red Hat and everyone else
No. Emphatically no. It's the other way around. The corps desperately need him. Most of them tried it the proprietary way for years and lost to Microsoft.
The best analogy I can give regarding a future with RMS serving the corps is an Animal Farm reference. The animals are running the humans off the farm right now. The animals are excited, no animals go into the house on pride. But pretty soon, the Pigs (red hat, et al) will be moving into the house. (I would argue they've already started) After that, they'll declare, "two legs good, 4 legs bad."
A corporation is imbued with extra freedoms beyond what individuals get in the U.S. in order to return a profit to its shareholders. Distorting RMS's message to serve that end is approved by shareholders.
RMS needs no corporation.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Ok. I just started.
While you are waiting, please call the GNU/Linux system by it's real name, thre GNU system with the Linux Kernel.
Like the OS/X System, with the mach kernel, or the Windows XP System, with kernel32
"But the more he goes around criticizing other concepts (open source) and other people who make his world possible (Torvalds), if not perfect, the more he will alienate them and the farther away his dream will be."
What an utter bunch of crap this is. So if one disagrees with something Linus does or says what is he supposed to do? Is he not allowed to say that he disagrees with the most holy linus? Linus is not a god, nobody is a god. It's perfectly allowable nay encouraged to speak your mind when you think somebody is doing the wrong thing. That's the way "open source" works.
RMS doesn't call people names, he isn't rude. He does not act like the slashdot hordes who insist on calling him a hippie, freak, smelly, unwashed etc. He talks about his ideas, he carefully explains where his ideals are different and contrasting to other peoples ideas. I have never heard him call anybody names though which is a lot more then you can say about his critics.
"He needs Sun and Java and Torvalds and ESR and Red Hat and everyone else. "
He does? Did you mean that you do? You need them because you want a free operating system that does the things he needs. I don't think he is thinking like you. I don't think he thinks he needs those people.
"t this rate however... calling Linus insufficiently political is not going to win him any more fans. And more fans is exactly what he needs."
GASP!. He called linus insufficiently political!. I bet Linus will never speak to him again.
Thank god Linus is not fragile as you make him out to be. I bet Linus is perfectly capable of being called "insufficiently political" without holding grudges.
evil is as evil does
Absolutely nothing. Where does Stallman say you shouldn't be paid money for writing software? Hint: nowhere.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
You don't want RMS to compromise. You want him to abandon his ideals and vision. For what exactly?
Sun has very onerous provisions on their java licensing which prevents inclusion of the JDK in a lot of Linux distributions. Why is this good for java? Why is it good for you (the java programmer) that I have to jump trough fifty hoops to install a JDK or a JRE before I can even run your program? Why is it good for you that the java implementation on my linux box is two years out of date and is slow?
How would RMS compromise to make all that better for you? How could Sun compromise to make that better?
evil is as evil does
For thousands of years music was played for enjoyment and not for profit. I personally know quite a few people who are rather talented musically, but who wouldnt ever try to earn millions upon millions of dollars each year to sell their music.
RMS's biggest contribution in recent years to the software community is in being seen a nutbar. We need him out there in left field to make people who are slightly off center to look more reasonable. People see Richard out there frothing and it makes other people like Bruce Perens look eminently reasonable.
"We need radical activism so that the moderates aren't ignored as a fringe element." - Tooker Gomberg
No. Stalman has been making money for over a decade writing very little software, but going around on grant money to make these closed software is evil and the devil and your going to hell for using it speeches.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
> He needs Sun and Java...
.NET/mono for that matter) are totally unneeded in the Free world, we get write once run anywhere from autoconf/automake not some crappy bytecode emulator for closed binaries.
Why? Care to explain why the Free Software world needs Java? The FSF is working on cloning it solely because ignorant people built up a lot of otherwise Free infrastructure on Java either not knowing it wasn't Free or not caring. Much like the early days of KDE where they just didn't care about QT being closed source, forcing RedHat to put up the money to help the FSF launch GNOME so as to avert a disaster. And now we have RedHat and the FSF working to clean up other people's mess over the Java fiasco.
Java (and
Just to be clear, I'm dissing Java the platform and mono the platform, not Java and C# the languages. Both are perfectly acceptable languages for those into the OO thing. Me, I'm a total neolithic curmudgeon who is still unconvinced of the utility of OO. Find me a non-trivial OO program that isn't several times the size in code, runtime image, cpu cycles and development time compared to an equivalent procedural program. And as for code reuse, a C library is about the ultimate in that department.
What I'd like to see is a new procedural language taking most of C except replacing the zero terminated strings with something sane and including a garbage collecting string library. Fix some of the other bits that made sense in the dark ages of limited ram/cpu but leave the essence intact.
Democrat delenda est
He's allowed to say whatever the hell he wants to say. As do I and you. I was merely expressing my opinion that these outbursts hurt him and his cause more than they help him. That's all.
Did you mean that you do?
No, not really. Without things like Java and advanced graphics drivers and real applications his vision is bust, because "the GNU system" can't expand and grow and take away market from Sun and Microsoft and everyone else. Or what exactly is his goal then? To just bitch about everything?
The beauty is that he actually blames Sun and Linus and everyone else for the inabilities of the people who follow him to provide alternatives to these "dirty" versions of Really Useful Things That Everyone Would Really Like To Have. Otherwise these wouldn't be issues to him at all. Perhaps you don't understand the importance of Java. I think he does.
I bet Linus will never speak to him again.
I bet he's pretty fed up with Stallman's constant broadsides, but I'm pretty sure he's perfectly capable of deciding if he's going to "speak" to Stallman or not.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
If I hadn't just burned my mod points, I would mod up MSfanboi just to piss you off further. You want people banned for being a "msfanboi". Screw you and the fascist horse you rode in on.
The net effect of the GPL is to cause software development to be economically effective only as a _service_, rather than as a product. If you want to keep getting paid, you can't rest on your laurels - you have to keep coding. And in a truly capitalism-based market, this is as it should be.
is to drive the cost of software not towards zero, but towards the true cost of coding it. Software costs nothing to copy; it only costs to code. So, why charge people per copy? Just charge all users for the effort to code it. If the users don't shell $$$ for it, it does not get done. You eliminate a lot of aberrations like Microsoft itself: it shells out $ 50.000 for developing MS-DOS, charges its users 10 million; then it shells out 500.000 for developing MS-Word, charges its uses 30 million; and so on. Feel free to ignore me.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
There would be no Linux with only GNU. We'd probably still be waiting for the perfect Hurd OS to come around. Just because GNU jumped on the Linux bandwagon and contributed their stuff doesn't give them the right to rename Torvalds' project. If they wanted rights in exchange for contributing their code to Linux, perhaps open sourcing it wasn't the way to go.
As it is, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, says it's named "Linux", and Richard Stallman and GNU really don't have much say in the matter. GNU failed to get an OS out the door and joined Linux. Get over it.
I know the RMS fans will mark me flame-bait, but trying to co-opt the project of someone who was able to accomplish what you couldn't really bugs me.
E pluribus unum
That's because he does not sell them. If it makes you feel better, make a donation or join the FSF.
Can i violate GPL and he'd be happy?
No.
The point of said, "violations," is to help your neighbor. Your obligations to people around you should always outweigh your obligation to Bill Gates and other greed heads. Public libraries are founded on this principle. Sharing and co-operation are good for everyone. Information, unlike all physical goods, has always been free to share. It is only recently that the US has made sharing information a crime. The laws do this are simply wrong.
Some people, who can't seem to finish their own OS after five years, would love to do what you suggest, so they can better screw their users. The laws they made, which keep them in business, prevent it. Microsoft is going to have to code or legislate themselves out of their GPL troubles. Their coding efforts appear to have failed.
OpenBSD: "Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years!"
Microsoft: Only one OS release in five years!
Free Software: Billions and Billions served.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The "GNU/Linux" thing has always stuck me as self-centered. I mean, sure it's both GNU and Linux, but... A name is not a chemical formula out of which a thing's structure can be parsed. Otherwise my OS would be something more like OnceKnoppix SortaDebianTesting Gnu/Linux/bitsOfBSD/Xorg/KDE/SunJava/OpenOffice.or g... and it wouldn't stop there. Heck I could just dump a list of my apt packages, their repository and version, but even that would be incomplete as it would miss out historical influences since purged.
At which point does a name come to encompass the totality of elapsed events since absolute tick zero?
I'll continue calling it "Linux" or maybe "Debian testing", because that's good enough and does nobody any special favours.
Stop this before it gets silly: "Announcing the GNU/Linux/Bell/GSM/Nokia 3477 phone that connects to the the DARPA/Al Gore/Internet for CERN/web browsing. The unit features a 400MHz Turing/von Neumann/Babbage/CPU and has a Faraday/battery providing 5 days of typical usage...."
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The guy must be rolling over in his grave!
What? He's not dead yet? He sure will wish he were dead when he finds out!
Has the nature of this debate changed in the last 5 years? I find it funny that RMS who has dedicated so much for freedom is so determined to tell others how to think. It seems a bit propertarian. RMS protecting his trademarks and all that.
Sure without Linux we would be using GCC on sun boxes, but this would be known by what percentage of even the IT community? If sun didn't charge $500 for a compiler I would have used thiers instead. Probably to compile expect on TCL or some other GPL distributed application, but ignore that, it hurts my position on this rant.
What other operating systems are named after the tools that built them or the apps that run on them, even if most of thier functionality comes from them?
This is the stubborn pedantry of a tenured accademic.
Maybe since so many GNU developers were brought into the fold by a stable operating system we should have to call our compilers "Linux driven GCC compiller" or we could type "grep-reverse-engineered-from-att-code" to do global regex searches.
Typed on my Mozilla/Windows system because thats what we use at work.
Rubbish. It drives the cost of software down to its value. Like everything should be in a free market. i.e. not using tricks like vendor lockin to artificially reduce developer efficiency, inflate prices and encourace incumbancy.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
correct me if i'm wrong, but shouldn't the people that write these amazing-line-of-sight-enterprise-ready-kung-fu-cri tical apps actually *know* what the fuck they are doing? you make it sound like it's a bad thing to be skilled.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
I'm not trashing anyone's ideals, if that means what I think it does. I believe every OS is good and bad in some way and that every OS has its day in the sun. At least I'm not pulling a Steve Ballmer on everything that isn't open source.
How about you post your opinion on the whole situation? Maybe then we can have an intelligent discussion like the mature people we are.
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
If you want to keep getting paid, you can't rest on your laurels - you have to keep coding. And in a truly capitalism-based market, this is as it should be.
Nonsense. In capitalism, profit is the goal, not innovation or competition. And selling copies of software as a product is brilliant in terms of generating profit. That's why it's still such a prevalent model -- because there is huge financial incentive behind it!
There's a difference between the name GNU/Linux and, say, OSX/Mach. The difference is that in the case of OSX the project to create an operating system was Apple's. They used the Mach kernel in that pursuit, as they used many other pieces of F/OSS. The operating system was Apple's and they called it OS/X.
The GNU/Linux story is much more complicated. The project to create an OS was definitely GNU's. However, the marriage between GNU and Linux was the doing of the Linux developers (at least as I understand it). So would it then come under the naming of Linux or GNU? There is ambiguity. Then the distributors came in, and there's this silly question of semantics: were they trying to create their own operating systems, or to distribute existing software? What's the difference?
GNU's project to create a Free operating system was and is important. I believe that a continuation of GNU's goals of freedom has resulted in the system that I use, know and love. But it's also a continuation of Linux's goals, those of creating the best operating system possible. So I call my operating system GNU/Linux, because it gives credit to both of these ideas. The two sets of ideas, complementary and often at odds with eachother. I'd only mention the distributor (or "meta-distributor", as I'm a Gentoo user) if someone was asking me about things relavent to package distribution or system configuration. Some people would be well, frankly, to list their operating system as KDE/GNU/Linux or Gnome/Linux (as Gnome/GNU would be redundant) because those projects bring a third set of goals to the table that strongly influences the experience of their users (by this I mean users of the full desktop environments and not so much those that merely benefit from the many quality apps made possible by those projects).
So I guess if an OSX user thinks that the goals and ideas of the Mach project aren't getting their due for doing the dirty work for Apple's operating system, that user would be fine by me to call the whole thing OSX/Mach. I don't think that what Mac users are presented with on a daily basis is the same kind of synthesis that GNU/Linux folk are.
So, do we have GNU/Solaris? GNU/AIX? GNU/HP-UX? No? Then why GNU/Linux?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I don't get involved in the internal politics of GNU/Linux, but Linux was only a few lines of code before it went GNU/GPL and it attracted most of the coding talent since then because of it was GNU/GPL.
In 1990, GNU was already organized and had a fair amount of software in development and in use, including emacs and gcc. In 1990, Linus was a student learning on Minix and had not written a single line of kernel code.
I find RMS to be more preachy than he needs to be, but like you, I agree that is he is still right on the issues. GNU is just as important as Linus when it comes to Linux and the acceptance it now has, and it does seem fair to give credit where credit is due.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
it does seem fair to give credit where credit is due
Now if RMS truly believes software to be free, then shouldn't it be totally free in that people can do whatever they want with it? Does he really draw a boundary of freedom in that you must give credit to the source? Can I freely take the software and call it mine or is it somehow "limited" in that I must give credit?
Now don't get me wrong thinking that I don't believe that credit should be given. I just wonder how "free" something can really be if it still has restrictions on it. Maybe the proper term should be "mostly free".
While I'm not exactly a fan of RMS, I can appreciate that he has been and will be a positive influence in the IT world. I won't agree with him on all issues (Java being an area of disagreement between RMS and I for example).
Jim
BTW, who does not give credit to gnu ??
Every vendor who labels their products as "Linux" when there is as much GNU software in the distribution as Linux kernel, or more. I think that is his point. I don't think it is about being "famous" but rather that Linux should do more than be better than Microsoft, it should promote the idea of software Freedom, and that is the entire reason GNU exists. Again, I don't get political about it, but he does have a valid point.
Just as you have "Microsoft Windows" (as opposed to XWindows) you have GNU/Linux. I might not say "GNU/Linux" when I converse, but if i am advertising a product for sale, it seems logical to add the GNU, since at the very least, all the software in that "box" was compiled on the GNU CC compiler and is chock full of other GNU software.
What Linus does is extremely valuable, no doubt, and I am even glad he is neutral about the politics himself. But without the GNU components (and other components not related to the Linux kernel), all you would have is a kernel that boots and sits there and does nothing else. So yea, I think RMS has a point. I've also said RMS looks like Jerry Garcia after an all-nighter and is a bit preachy for my tastes, but he is still right on this point.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
If a distro gave credit to all the software in the name of the operating system (i.e. distribution), we would have distros with names such as: RedHat GNU/MIT/Trolltech/Apache_foundation/AT&T/Berkeley/ Linux.
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