Slashdot Mirror
Transcript of Talk with Richard Stallman
An anonymous reader writes "This is the transcript of the talk with Richard Stallman, the father of GNU in the background of the 4th International GPLv3 Conference being held at Bangalore where RMS is a prominent delegate. He answers questions related to GPLv3, DRM and a couple of other queries."
I've seen the light. I mean STALLMAN has spoken! Let's create a Stallmanic Bible so we all, oh, believers can use and adore every minutes of our, oh, so insignificant life. Alleluya the holy trinity, Father Stallman, Son Linus and Holy Jobs (yeah, notthing to do with freeware but he **IS** a saint indeed, isn't he?)
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Why on earth anyone feels like it is up to the FOSS community to provide them with some kind of framework for building a successful business around FOSS is beyond my ability to comprehend. FOSS does not need to support business models, it does not exist to do so, and most of us do not care if anyone is ever able to turn a profit using it in any way at all. We are all tired of the implication that somehow FOSS will evaporate unless we can put together a plan for making money off it.
Oh yeah, that and FUCK COMMERCE!
What makes the goal of one world government evil? In todays envirmonment it may be about impossible to bring about, but the end result of a unified single world governement is probably the best chance of world peace our messed up specices has.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
You make money by doing something *else* than software development. In RMS's World, software development is a *hobby*, just like solving jigsaw puzzles. Selling sloved jigsaw puzzles shouldn't cross your mind as a way of making a living, even if you're good at it.
In other words, software developers aught not be paid for their efforts; it should be something they freely contribute to some global software collective. Software developers should instead find another way to make a living.
1 4188526128&q=stallman
Stallman has never suggested that software developers should not be paid. In fact he's said many times that FLOSS creates economic opportunity. He's even detailed how its earned him some decent consulting fees.
You can see him discussing that on Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-16476263
He's not actually saying that developers shouldn't be paid, but rather that they don't have to be paid, which is an important distinction. He doesn't mind if people do get paid, but he thinks if they don't get paid it's not that big a deal as long as software still gets made.
But yeah, Stallman really doesn't care that much about the interests of the professional programmer in particular. His goals are for the freedoms of computer users in general, (people in general, ultimately) and if proffessional programmers have to take a paycut or enter a new field entirely, so be it. Making proprietary software is (as he sees it) unethical, so why should they feel entitled to make money that way? Of course, if you asked him, I imagine he might say that programmers are (ultimately) better off with free software but small paychecks than they are with decently sized paychecks but unfree software because unfree software is just that bad.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
This is neither the time or place for people to ask a Why? to RMS about free software. Sure, it was a place to ask a Why GPL v3 or about DRM licensing or patent protections, but the questions that were asked was almost total bullshit. Yet again, I'm not speaking from personal presence there - I've just talked to people on irc and read their blogs.
Was one of those weeks when I wasn't in Bangalore ... but RMS was in Kerala (where I am now) and the discussions here were more practical than those quoted from Blr. The ones here were really about the freedoms and mostly by students or political decision makers versus the armchair activists from the software industry.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
RMS is a true believer. Writing software for him, is more akin to, say, creating art simply for art's sake than creating art for a commercial purpose like advertising. If I have to have a job to make a living, and I like to compose music in my free time, it doesn't necessarily follow that my vocation should be a musician. Free software is, in itself, an end and doesn't require that it be the means to a financial goal. Basically, RMS probably should have stated that he couldn't care less about an entrepreneurial approach to free software because it is incidental to the philosophy of free software.
Are you going to appologize for lying? We don't need your shilling for software companies on slashdot. Here is an selection from an RMS interview
JA: How do you react to the opinion that non-free software is justified as a means for raising dollars that can then be put into the development of completely new software, money that otherwise may not have been available, and thus creating software that may have never been developed?
Richard Stallman: This is no justification at all. A non-free program systematically denies the users the freedom to cooperate; it is the basis of an antisocial scheme to dominate people. The program is available lawfully only to those who will surrender their freedom. That's not a contribution to society, it's a social problem. It is better to develop no software than to develop non-free software.
So if you find yourself in that situation, please don't follow that path. Please don't write the non-free program--please do something else instead. We can wait till someone else has the chance to develop a free program to do the same job.
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.
JA: What is the distinction there?
Richard Stallman: Non-free software is meant to be distributed to the public. Custom software is meant to be used by one client. There's no ethical problem with custom software as long as you're respecting your client's freedom.
The next point is that programmers are a tiny fraction of employment in the computer field. Suppose somebody developed an AI and no programmers were needed anymore. Would this be a disaster? Would all the people who are now programmers be doomed to unemployment for the rest of their lives? Obviously not, but this doesn't stop people from exaggerating the issue.
If he thinks others should be limited in their choices by what he believes to be morally acceptable (like - horror! - working for a proprietary software company), I'd like to see how he behaves if all his sources of money were taken away and he was tossed out on the street and had to fend for himself in some rundown neighborhood where the locals would listen to his ranting and think he was just another homeless psychotic released from the loony bin.
It's easy to pontificate about how others should earn a living to support your family when you have no worries at all in that regard.
Ever hear the phrase "wackademic"? That's RMS.
OK, his ideas about free software are definitely a great positive contribution to humanity. But he's still nuttier than a fruit cake and totally disconnected from reality.
Of course, his contributions to free software are probably the result of his zealotry...
Well, and there is a significant source of paid programming work that he is (intentionally?) not mentioning. It's when a company that develops some software product for internal use recognizes that it would benefit if the product is released to the public, even if it is only bug reports that it's going to get, and even if they can never hope to sell (er, should I have said license?) the program.
I myself have participated in several such projects. Moreover, I'm always actively on the lookout for things that would *benefit us* if GPL'ed. I actually have a very easy time convincing people of that. The story goes like this: it happened several times that we took sources of an open project, added to it internally (things like bugfixes, features etc.), but the management refused to release the changes back, citing things like "why should we share our work" and "it's now the company's IP". However, what invariably happened was that our internal source code stagnated, since we found it increasingly hard to migrate our changes whenever the new version of the outside software was released. Ultimately, things came to a screeching halt, when we had no internal updates for a year, while the outside version continued developing. (To be more concrete, one of the examples is when we decided to use XParam (xparam.sf.net).
What I did then, was schedule an appointment with a senior boss and explain him, as clearly as possible, the situation that we got ourselves into. Now, that may be sheer luck, or his good humor at the time, or maybe my persuasiveness :), but I got out of that meeting that, in principle, we are permitted to release any software, provided that we explain that it will not *hurt* the company bottomline (compare to the previous situation, where we had to explain that releasing would *mightily help*, otherwise there was nothing to talk about).
So, to summarize, there's a large source of GPL'ed code coming from paid programmers: it's when companies understand that it serves their interest to make it free rather than keeping it close to the chest. That's not right for any program though...
In Stallmanland, there are two distinct categories of software:
- Infrastructure Software
- Bespoke Software
The second is easier to look at. Pretty much all bespoke software is already Free Software. You would have to be slightly mad to pay someone to write software for you, to solve a particular problem you might have, without granting you the FSF's four freedoms.The second is the problem a lot of people have. Currently, much infrastructure software is proprietary. Things like operating systems come into this category. Everyone needs one. It doesn't make sense for everyone to write one than it makes sense for everyone to pay someone to lay a road in front of them as they walk. And, once the costs of development are paid, it doesn't make sense economically to keep paying for it. It does make sense for people who need new features to pay to have those developed, and for people who need security to pay for periodic security audits.
It is easy to see how bespoke software would be developed in Stallmanland, because it is exactly the same as how it was always developed; and this represents about 90% of the software market. Infrastructure software is slightly different. Some would likely come from academia, much like Mach and BSD UNIX. Some would come from individuals scratching an itch and releasing their code, some from corporations employing someone to scratch their itches (see IBM, Sun, and Novell's funding of Free Software for examples).
The first poster likened Stallman to Lincoln. This is not entirely inaccurate; both were trying to help people who had had their freedom taken away. Stallman is trying to help more people, Lincoln was trying to help people who had had more freedoms removed. The difference, perhaps between a police officer catching a spammer and a murderer. A murderer who kills one person takes 91980000 person-seconds of life (assuming that the person would live for 70 years). A spammer who takes a minute and a half from a million people does the same damage to society. If you are the person being murdered (or enslaved), then it makes a huge difference to you, but overall the impact is similar. Stallman may well end up having an enormous impact on future society. Personally, I hope he does.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News