Slashdot Mirror
Stallman — 20 Years of Explaining Free Software
H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "The first recorded talk by Richard Stallman on free software was in 1986, so I've picked from the 2006 recordings and have made a transcript of a recent talk: The Free Software Movement and the Future of Freedom. Those two are the only transcripts of his general free software talk. Others that exist are on specific topics such as patents, GPLv3, copyright, etc. For those who've been reading Slashdot during the gradual evolution of Stallman's pronouncements, it's interesting to see what has changed over 20 years."
Nothing for you to see here; move along.
Truer words never 403'd.
[
How about posting audio streams/downloads of all Stallman recordings, and accepting publicly submitted transcripts on a Wiki? Let the community decide what Stallman said, including comments by Stallman. Such a project could be completed for cheap, fairly quickly - the open source way.
--
make install -not war
Here, actually seems more interesting than TFA (This is Slashdot; I didn't read TFA). To quote:
I work within the political system of the European Union to ensure that the development and use of free software is not hampered by new legislation. The best known example of a legislative project I worked on is the "Software Patents Directive".
it has been twenty years and three showers ago since his first speech. Amazing.
You see when people adopted the monkier of open source software. . .
So that Microsoft could exploit the ambiguity of the word "open" to claim that their software is open source? I'm afraid the word "open" is just as open to interpretaion as any other non-technical word.
Of course RMS provided a technical defintion of what he meant by "Free Software."
The reason a lot of people prefer to use "Open Source" isn't because the term "free" is ambiguous (although I recognize the existence of the "libre" crowd); it's because they the disagree with the specificity of the term. The definition of "Open Source" is more, ummmmmmmmm, "Open."
ESR, for example.
KFG
The difference is that Windows is an operating system, Linux is just a kernel. You can do quite a bit with Windows on its own. But there's not much you can do with Linux on its own, without anything from GNU.
I have viewed a couple of videos of Stallman's speeches and have transcripted one of them. Listening him speak, I couldn't help thinking that he has all the qualities of a leader. His speeches strike a cord and entertain at the same time. He has very good oratorical skills.
Linux Help
for all things on Linux
It depends...
"Liberty" sometimes sounds honorable, like something out of the US Constitution. "Free" sounds cheap... like "free soda".
In the business world, it's not unusual to hear something like "Oh, MySQL? Oh, we don't support freeware." The perception is often that "Free" == "Cheap and unsupported". In reality, MySQL is a good product, and support is available in several forms.
Get your free painted Liberty silver dollar here!
I guess that's why some people prefer "Libre".
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
He will never get over it.
When mswindows 95 appeared, it wasn't called "the DOS system". It was the Windows system, running on DOS. Okay, that's too much of a stretch.
mswindows nt/2000 was not the "kernel32.exe".
OSX is not "mach + some apple stuff".
An operating system is a lot more than a kernel, in the same way that a car is a lot more than its engine, even when it doesn't work without it. The user doesn't get to interact with the engine, and the car would be the same car, if the engine is replaced. That happens the same way with Operating Systems and kernels. Debian is not there yet, but they have several GNU distributions with varying kernels.
Linux is a good kernel, and plays an important role for the success of free software. Aside from that, when you get for example, Ubuntu, there is a lot more GNU than Linux included in the CD. And the platform is defined by the GNU system, not the Linux kernel.
When people say they know "Linux", for example the "Linux" console, they are talking about bash. When talking about "Linux" programming, it's usually GCC, the "Linux" desktop might be Gnome or KDE, of course, but it's not Linux either.
The guy will never get over it, because, in that particular issue, he is right, and the people who think different from him are just wrong. There's no way he will change his opinion on that issue.
I will usually avoid using "non-commercial use" material in my own work. For one thing, it is incompatible with say GPL-licensed software, since e.g. a CC-licensed "non-commercial use" icon would prevent a commercial entity from using it, defeating the purpose of the GPL.
GNU however could be replaced with something else. e.g. the BSD userland/libraries. Would we then be obliged to call the operating system BSD/Linux?
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
Conversely, if that recent Jack Black wrestling movie had instead been called "Free Nachos", it would probably have drawn larger crowds...
The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life. -FZ
How good is to be able to see the code, if you can't modify and redistribute it?
factor 966971: 966971
Or you could just do what most of the human population does and call it something simpler. i.e. Linux
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
A) fewer people will use the software (because it tries to prevent people from using w/o paying)
B) the software is less useful to people because they can't modify the original program
C) proprietary software is less valuable because other developers in lateral areas can't learn from it.
It seems pretty clear to me that his arguments failed on these pragmatic grounds and that he's had to shift his anti-ownership rational to far more nebulous and entirely philosophical arguments about "freedom" for its own sake.
The facts are:
A) Contrary to his "first level" of harm: proprietary software has vastly outcompeted open software despite its barriers.
B) Contrary to his "second level" of harm: that most users still prefer closed source software despite the fact that they can't tinker with it and despite the fact that it costs more/has more barriers.
C) Contrary to his "third level" of harm: that proprietary software still appeals more to its end users despite the fact that proprietary developers benefit little from the pool of open source code. This despite the fact that open source developers supposedly have a huge advantage over proprietary developers because they can exploit the GPL and other copyleft code to a level that their counterparts cannot.
In short, he's given up on his pragmatic rationale since they've been proven almost entirely wrong. I'll concede that there is something to be said for the sharing of code in some cases, but we're to choose rationally between no ownership vs choice of ownership (the status quo) that the latter is the only sensible and pragmatic choice given his own (old) arguments and the empirical evidence (or lack thereof) from his so-called copyleft movement.
Read your own quote "... his political point of view is that ... the developer can simply decide whether you have freedom or not...".
Linus chose to give us freedom, but he still believes that authors have the rights to deprive users of 'the four freedoms', should they want to.
Stallman believes that the user should have the right to those freedoms, regardless of the wishes of the authors. Therein lies the ideological difference.
Way to totally miss the point. The purpose of introducing passwords to the MIT lab back in the early 80s wasn't to protect user's content from people hacking into the system over a network. The purpose of introducing passwords was to give administrators control over the use of the computers. It doesn't matter if today we have large networks and buffer overflows and the assumption that every machine contains confidential information. That wasn't the purpose of introducing passwords. That wasn't what RMS, and other hackers of his era, found offensive. The key message to take away from the password incident is that some people don't believe that the person sitting in front of the keyboard should have complete freedom to do whatever they want to do on the computer.. and some people do. If you want a modern version of this message, think about DRM on home computers. Or region coding on DVD players. A computer is a tool. The operator of that tool should have complete control over how it is used. If we don't have control over our tools, we can never be free.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I appreciate most of what RMS says. I strongly disagree with his numbering scheme for the 4 essential software freedoms. Read people count starting at 1. It's stupid to have the leader of a movement use an inside joke when giving a public talk about something so important. Freedom zero.... How stupid.
Hey Richard, how many freedoms are there?
Four.
What's the fourth one?
There isn't one... Only a zeroth through third.
This nonsense has got to stop. The GPL is fairly readable, but this stupid geekism right there mixed in with the fundamental freedoms is IMHO just adding confusion where none needs to be. I would hope this renumbering will make it into GPLv3.
Well, basically, because it lacks many of the decent features of other RDBMSs (I won't say real RDBMS :-P), some of which are even OpenSource (see PostgreSQL and Firebird), while having quite a few misfeatures (the authentication model is utterly retarded. You have users, identified by user at host. And, you then have users - identified by user AND host - for table privileges. And databases. And columns. Heck, am I the only one that thinks that anything with more than 10 users will give you headaches for the years to come?), performance issues (SELECT * FROM foo is fine and all, but... The first thing that comes to mind is a cron script that runs every ten minutes and ANALYZEs a table, twice. It would refuse to use its index otherwise and take about 50 seconds, instead of half a second. And, let's just say that many a time I've found its locking mechanism getting stuck while trying to acquire a lock. That is, if - and, yes, this does belong in the misfeature bit - it won't give out an exclusive lock to two threads), compatibility issues (SQL is optional for it), and (and this one's actually pretty subjective), being marketed as 'Enterprise', nowadays.
:-)
Some of its design decisions (threads v.s. processes, they used to say transactions suck and they won't implement them, lack of focus on features at the beginning) were questionable, to say the least. Some of the way they implemented them is pretty mindboggling. The way InnoDB breaks whenever you as much as blow in the general direction of its huge ass files...
And, uhm, there are many examples I could give you, but I'm off home.
Here's my post directive review of that project. But there's more to do.
Something very important this year is GPLv3. Here's a transcript of RMS on GPLv3, and one of something I said.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
See the thought experiment. Take Photoshop: if you offered a user the choice to take Photoshop with no access to the source vs. complete access to the source, what do you think that most people would choose, all other things (including price) being equal?
The third level of harm doesn't have much to do with the end users, anyway. However, to continue the thought experiment: in an office environment, would you rather have open-source printer drivers you could get tech support to fix on-site (or vendor patches if already fixed), or closed-source printer drivers that require vendor support?
I think that your arguments focus on the wrong side of the point. Proprietary software is popular, true. That doesn't mean that open sourcing it would make it less popular.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Any misunderstanding of what Stallman said will not be corrected by allowing "the community [to] decide what Stallman said". Unlike the expressions of ancient speakers, we can hear his recordings, read the transcripts of what he said, and email him.
Also, such work is being done (albeit not on a wiki, which poses some minor technical advantages) thanks to the work of the FSF and FSFE.
Finally, it's worth noting that Stallman was not and is not a member of the open source movement. He started and remains a member of the free software movement which is philosophically distinct and over 10 years older than the open source movement. In fact, it is people's ignorance of this is directly addressed in the talk being referenced in this /. story:
Digital Citizen
- Anyone may read this specification and implement it.
- Anyone may read this specification, but there are conditions on implementations.
- Anyone who gives us a load of money can implement this specification.
The same is true of 'open source.' There is a legal definition on the OSI site, which is very long, and far less concise that the FSF's four freedoms, but without it the term is highly ambiguous. Is Microsoft's Shared Source initiative 'open source?' You and I might know that it isn't, but anyone can download the source and read it, so it certainly sounds open.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...his redefinition of the word "free" to make a point to first time I heard it - let alone the tenth time he jumped down some poor journalists throat for using the word the way the dictionary defines it He never tried to re-define the meaning of the word "free". "Free"(as adjective) has 2 main meanings (which are very different from each other). He just tried, and still tries, to explain to which one he referes when speaking about Free Software, but, in general, it seems that lot of people can't understand that point yet.