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Stallman Attacks Gates, Microsoft, & Charity Foundation
An anonymous reader writes "Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, has an article in the BBC in which he maintains that Gates' departure from Microsoft doesn't mean the end of proprietary software and that the free software community needs to stand strong to undo the damages Bill Gates, Microsoft, and other proprietary software vendors (explicitly naming Apple & Adobe amongst them) have done. And he slips in a claim that the Bill and Melinda Gates charity foundation doesn't really help the poor; it just pretends to while actually subjecting them to greater harm."
If RMS is high on your list of respected people, you have never actually listened to what he says.
That's not what he's saying, you stupid gnulot. What he's saying is that they'd just buy something else and all arguments to the contrary are idiotic.
Which is...you know...true.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Like it or not, without RMS, Linux would never have been anything but a 386 assembly-language pet project, the Mozilla project would never have happened, "Open Source" would never have happened, and Microsoft might even have a full-blown monopoly on web technologies by now.
Agree or disagree with him, if you can't imagine why anyone would respect RMS, then you need to research what's happened over the last 25 years.
Bullshit.
Sheer, unadulterated, bullshit.
We've known RMS for 35 years. RMS did NOT create the free software ecosystem. It existed before RMS showed up, and it would have thrived quite well if RMS had never appeared.
What drove free software in the 1980s were events having nothing to do with RMS. BSD UNIX. The demise of the PDP-10. The microprocessor.
RMS caused considerable harm to free software. He created a personality cult, focused around himself, and rather than take on proprietary software has spent the overwhelming bulk of his efforts attacking those he sees as heretics -- the people who do free software but do not subscribe to his cult principles.
RMS isn't really that great of a programmer either, as anyone who has actually seen his code (as opposed to someone else's code that he made some cosmetic change and claimed as his). The reason why HURD never got off the ground is that he has no experience in doing operating systems.
Back in the days of ITS he was forbidden from touching the ITS OS sources because he would break it. The whole reason why Symbolics moved their sources out of RMS' reach is because RMS broke them one day with a massive, unilateral, change to how variables were named. He didn't finish it by the time he quit for the day, and everybody else who depended upon these sources was stuck.
The harm to free software that RMS has caused is enormous. In case you haven't noticed, there really isn't very much free software development these days. Oh, it may look like a lot, but basically it's just a rehash of the same old shit that we've been running since the 1970s. How many reimplementations of the same old UNIX programs do we need? But now it's all worship at the altar of RMS.
RMS is the Robert Mugabe of free software; ultimately destroying the very thing that he claims to have dedicated his life.
I don't care much for Bill Gates or Steve Jobs either; both are overrated self-promoters. But RMS is the master in that department.
When RMS is gone, there will be a huge sigh of relief from the real people who do free software, semi-anonymously with little fanfare, that they no longer have to deal with idiotic and endless tirades as to whether GNU or BSD or Apache or XYZZY license is better.
The real free software people don't give a damn about licenses, nor do they seek to use their software to change the politics of others. They just want to write neat stuff, give it away, and not particularly care what other people do with it. And if someone else doesn't share their views, that's OK; either those folks' software is useful and available or it is not.
NO. The founding father who fought for copyright specifically did it so the author of the works can make money, and the public can benefit. Just not at the same time.
Interesting that the 'poor widow' who needed to make from their work argument was trotted out.
What tge founding fathers Did Not Want, was anybody to be able to lock up copyright for a long period of time.
That was due to the damage copyright was doing to English society for the past 100 years before America was created.
From what I have read, I'm pretty sure if the founding fathers saw what's happening today, copyright in the constitution wouldn't be there, and they might have gone with one of the original idea to outlaw corporations; which also was doing series harm in England.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"You compare 'company making money' with 'desktop market' . You never heard of servers ? They make the most difference in money , and a high percentage of those is running Linux , because it's a lot cheaper , and just as good ."
I think it was obvious when I mentioned OSX, which is a desktop OS. When I talk about not being able to make money with linux, I am talking about the fact that the majority of linux users aren't willing to pay for software applications written for it (and also expect it to be open source)..which means no software market.