Slashdot Mirror
When Stallman is Attacked
writes "Linux Tech Daily has an editorial slamming a recent Forbes.com attack piece on Richard Stallman and GPLv3. Loved or hated, do you agree with the author that the piece is FUD and completely unprofessional? Love him or hate him, is this unfair treatment of rms? Does he leave himself open to these kinds of attacks with his behavior?" The problem with the editorial of course is that many of the points made in the original Forbes piece are completely valid and true. So basically you get to choose between the linux zealot, and a writer who is obviously fairly hostile towards Stallman's ideas.
As far as I can tell, all the statements about Stallman's appalling personal habits are true. Eben Moglen, as quoted in Sam Williams' Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman and the Free: "...and of course, Richard is plucking the knots from his hair and dropping them in the soup and behaving in his usual way. Anybody listening in on our conversation would have thought we were crazy."
And that oft-repeted anecdote about Stallman sponge-bathing in MIT bathrooms—not mentioned in the Forbes article, but a common troll here on Slashdot? I've got a couple trustworthy friends, MIT alums, who claim to have witnessed this particular hygienic eccentricity years before Slashdot even existed.
I'm willing to believe it, too. At Columbia, I used to see (and smell) Eben Moglen on campus every now and again, and he's as dirty a hippie as they come. Of course I mean that endearingly.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
WTF is with all the fluff? I see a lot of words but you haven't said anything. You make a lot of criticisms but you give nothing to back them up, not even reasons for the criticisms. You should be modded down.
Sometimes ideas on the extreme need to heard to put things in perspective. Without a loud voice yelling, "All information needs to be free!" maybe no one would be working hard to make just some information free.
It's a little like having libertarians running for office. They remind us that the Republican suggestion of small government still means huge government.
Developers: We can use your help.
What have you done?
You mean besides your mom? Well, I've written software used by many large corporations including but not limited to: a Global 500 manufacturer, all current and potential customers of a large mortgage company, and over 70 hotels. And best of all I got paid for it instead of giving it away. Last time I checked this was a capitalist society, and I getz paid.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
Last I checked, this was a FREE society, and people can do whatever they want with their time. You don't have to respect people for giving their work away, but no one has to respect you just because you got paid for writing some software. Guys like you are a dime a dozen. People here care about giving back, and if you don't, that's fine, just don't whine about how no one respects you.
P.S. I tried to give your mom the dirty sanchez last night, but the dirty bitch kept licking the poo off my finger! What a whore.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Are you stupid? In what way exactly will the creation of a new license "cause irreparable harm" to anyone? Do you even know what a license is? I'll explain
A license like the GPL is simply a set of conditions stated by the author (or copyright owner) that must be obeyed by whoever wants the privilege of using his product. To put it in other words, it states the author's wishes about how his work may be used. The author can state whatever conditions he sees fit, as long as they do not impose any legal problems. When the author states them, we can only choose between respecting the author's wishes or not using his work at all.
So where does the GPL come in? The GPL is simply a pre-defined set of conditions that were compiled by RMS and the FSF in the past. RMS and the FSF sat down, wrote them up, adopted them in their works and also made the set of conditions available to whoever wished to impose the same set of conditions in their works. So in the end no one is forcing any author to adopt a certain license for his work. Whoever wishes that the users of their work obey the conditions stated in the GPL can do so but no author is forced to do it. The author is always free to define the conditions, whether he devises them personally or adopts another pre-compiled list of conditions.
So, now that you know that, where exactly does the compilation of a new list of conditions affect anybody? Where in fact can a new set of conditions do "irreperable damage"? It doesn't and it cant. It will only be a list and nothing more. To really affect anyone, first an author must adopt it as his work's license. But even then it will still be the set of demands that all users must obey to have the privilege of using someone's work. And then what? Will the author's demands do irreparable damage to anything? To what exactly? It's his work and he bloody knows what he wants to do with it.
This "sky is falling" paranoia which revolves GPLv3 is mind bogling, really.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
The retard answered to the question: what have you done with the wise words:
"Apart from your mum"
OK, we'll forget that since the dickless wonder probably can't find his cock and obviously doesn't know whose mum it would be. So next:
"Well, I've written software used by many large corporations including but not limited to: a Global 500..."
Well, EMACS was written by RMS. And that is used in MANY Global 500 corporations.
RMS also got paid for it.
Ergo, Techno-twat is LESS competent a programmer than RMS. By TT's own meandering "thought" processes.
That EMACS is unfriendly to someone trying to learn it is, therefore, irrelevant. It still is used and counterpoints the tosser's self aggrandisement (who is it? What companies? What code? without some of those answers, we don't know that prawn-balls even wrote "Hello World".