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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."
Who wants to bet it was Twitter?
Way to insure that people continue to believe (in numbers greater than anyone wants to admit) that the whole FOSS thang is nothing but an expression of Socialism.
Do us all a favor, Stallman? The next time you want to go off half-cocked like that, you stuff your favorite Che Guevera t-shirt in your mouth and bite down until the thought goes away?
Bitch!
Gates' legacy is that you don't have control of the PC (whether hardware or software) you paid for.
Gimme a fucking break, Taco.
It was you and JonP, not some "all-American football type".
Maybe if you stopped sucking your own cock every now and then, you'd have a better self-image.
And when Security and the police shot him to death, it would be a net gain for the Free/Open Software Movements and for the world in General.
RMS is to Free/Open Source Movements as Jack Thompson is to the Anti-gaming Crusade
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Free software is ironically both communist-ic (yay collective good) and free-market-istic (the price of the software is the marginal cost of production of one copy, or, um, zero!) It's rather fun. Not too many markets work out that way.
What "collective good"? That might be the case if rms (or FSF) is proposing that software need to be released into the public domain, but even with copyleft, copyright is still individual property*.
Just because something benefits the society as a whole doesn't make it communistic---if it were, Soviet Russia must've been a paradise.
* for imaginary values of property.
It seems to me that RMS is stuck in a little world of his own. He doesn't understand that proprietary software is here to stay, and he has now resorted to FUD and statements which are, to be quite frank, libellous in nature. He is disparaging a charity to claim that all proprietary software is evil, which I consider to be a deplorable method.
Shame on you, Richard Stallman. Shame on you.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
...a few hopelessly ignorant responses from people who honestly believe ... his giving away of billions in charity is all a ruse to justify his ill-gotten position of power.
There. Fixed it for you.
It would be nice if Stallman were as outspoken about the Web based folks who use GPL software and because of his obsession with Gates and Microsoft, don't have to give back. The free software movement is more threatened by these folks, like Google, than it is by Microsoft. If software and our data move to the cloud and the big Web guys can use GPL but not give us back what they do and a chance to audit it, we're more threatened than we ever were by Microsoft.
Except that he screwed over plenty of other people who weren't "ruthless capitalists", namely, 99% of those who's ever owned a computer during the past 20 years, thanks to their monopolistic practices towards hardware manufacturers who certainly didn't take the cost of Windows licenses from their profit margins.
If you really wanted to keep your "anti-business" stance (as illogical as it may be), you should be praising IBM who's found a way to drain huge amounts of money from many large businesses, while leaving "mom & pop" stores, and your average computer user, alone.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.