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.
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.