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Stallman Unsure Whether Firefox Is Truly Free
Slatterz writes "Among the theories Stallman bandies about in this Q&A are: Facebook may not share private data with the CIA, Firefox isn't really 'free software,' and his dreams of a day where nobody is involved in developing or promoting proprietary software. Agree or disagree?"
You could offer a homeless man on the street a free sandwich, and if he had to walk a block to get it, Stallman wouldn't think it was free.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
He in fact says:
You could offer a homeless man on the street a free sandwich, and if he had to walk a block to get it, Stallman wouldn't think it was free.
He'd also have to make it himself, and not use any sauce with a logo on the bottle.
If the CIA needed access to the Facebook databases and were unable to get it (either through social, legal or technical measures), I would consider that to be a massive display of incompetence. If the world's most highly funded spying agency isn't capable of accessing Facebook accounts from a cooperative company, then it (the CIA) should be shut down, since it's clearly going to be of no use at all against more determined opponents.
Ideally, they are the same. Pragmatically, there are differences.
Agree or disagree?
Yes.
No he isn't. He appears to support the idea of paid software development and paid services, but insists that the users of that developed software should have the right to copy, modify and redistribute it.
Anyway, I agree with him. Having worked for 2 years with a contracting company that was almost 100% Linux and open source, I can say that the open source software development and services arena is very profitable. We never had a customer complain that the solution we delivered was either based on open source, or that our changes would be open source due to the GPL or whatever. What customers cared about was a) did it work and b) did it not crash (the two are somewhat related). As long as we checked those boxes, they were very happy - you'd be surprised at the number of contractors who try to deliver overly fancy solutions but fail on those two basic points.
More software developers should ask themselves "What's the worst that could happen if my customers could modify and redistribute this software"? For proprietary software, it means you can no longer hold customers to ransom and insist on yearly revenue generating "updates". For developers who get paid for hours worked doing actual development and support, this is no problem. I prefer the latter - getting paid for actual work just seems more honest.
It's understandable, the keys is all right next to each other.
Oh, the woe! Stallman is trying to get people to voluntarily stop engaging in practices that create artificial scarcity for the purposes of artificially inflating stock values. If he succeeds, the CEOs of our companies will no longer be able to justify their huge compensation and golden parachutes, and will no longer be able to dangle the promise of riches, in the form of stock options, in front of us so as to trick us into accepting lower pay, long hours and lousy benefits.
What a bad, bad man he is.
It is not. The Firefox logo is not free. Thus, any software that includes that logo is non-free also, and Debian developers know it very well
MOD THE CHILD UP!
Nobody is asking them to. The developers that wrote the F22/insurance/hospital software would still get paid, because the software has to actually be written, and they'll get paid for modifications and support too. What they can't do is get their customer reliant on some bit of closed software, and then jack up the cost of that software a couple of years down the line when replacing it with something else is almost impossible.
What's the worst that could happen if hospitals actually used open source systems? That open standards would be developed and utilised, and that information interchange between systems would be many times easier? That patients might have some degree of control over their own data? That vendor lock-in, the type leading to the failure of the "£50 billion, largest civilian IT programme in the entire history of the world" might be avoided? I could support that.
I have no personal evidence that he is currently free, thus he falls into the same category for me as Firefox does for him.
More disturbing (from TFA)...
I wonder which of these is true:
He's said in the past that he doesn't have a problem with Trademarks as long as it is easy to remove them.
It's all part of the idea that you should make it clear that you modified the program so that the original programmer's reputation isn't harmed by any bugs you introduce.
Isn't idealism just pragmatism with an eye to the future?
Pretty much, yes. RMS's point - with which I agree entirely - is that it's impractical to give control of your data to someone else. If you go with proprietary software, that's exactly what you're doing. The other party may very well treat you respectfully, and it may even be in their best business interest to do so, but that says nothing about whether they'll stay in business or whether the giant corporation buying them will be so customer-oriented.
People talk about using proprietary solutions for their practicality. That might be true in the extreme short term, but in the long term that just doesn't make sense. Idealism is pragmatism. The two are inseparable.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The -- ahem -- "idealist" says "these are my principles, I don't violate them".
The "pragmatist" says "I just want this done by Friday and will violate my principles for the sake of that."
At first glance, it looks like the second person values action and results more than principles. But that's actually not the case: She just has a different principle: expedience, "getting it done by Friday", and values this more than her other principles.
Thought experiment: make it so that the thing won't be finished on Friday unless the pragmatist kills someone. You will discover a closeted (horror!) *idealist. In most cases, the thing won't be done on Friday.
To sum up: this is a false dichotomy, and a tiresome one.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
"You can even be a programmer. Most paid programmers are developing custom software--only a small fraction are developing non-free software. The small fraction of proprietary software jobs are not hard to avoid." Richard Stallman
"Programmers could develop custom software by day, develop general purpose free software for fun. Or pay people for developing free software. Or sell support, or copies of free software." Richard Stallman
It seems RMS fully supports the idea of paid software development. I wonder why so many people think differently - poor reporting, or just personal bias?
Specifically, you say:
Stallman [should] stop begrudging others the right to make their own products and sell them
Stallman has been very clear over the years that he has no issue with people monetizing software, making money off of programming, or even selling software. He merely emphasizes that anyone who obtains software must have access to code.
You seem to think that consulting is the only way to make money in an all-OSS software ecology. I don't think that's the case. In addition to programmers being paid by the hour to code, it's not hard to imagine situations where well-organized "payment requests" are created. Someone codes v1 of a product (or releases a beta), and then requests funds to deliver the completed version. Once the requested money has been sent in (by interested buyers), the full version (with source code) is delivered. (The buyer could be other companies or many individual consumers.)
Would that be different from current software business methods? Yes. But I don't think it's impossible (the main reason it doesn't exist more routinely today is because everyone finds it simpler to just do the same thing as everyone else), and companies could continue to make profits from selling innovating new software. I'm not trying to specifically advocate that this would be better; merely pointing out that Stallman's "software should be free" is not in conflict with people making money. (You may not like the details of alternate money-making models, but that doesn't mean they are not viable.)
I just don't think it's fair to say that Stallman is against selling software, or that consulting is the only way to make money off OSS.
That, of course, doesn't make the problem less anoying to distro makers
Pot? Hello, Kettle! The distro makers are all doing the same thing. You can take the source code to Fedora Core and make your own Fedora-like distro, but you can't use the the trademark 'Fedora Core' nor can you use the Fedora logo or any other trademarks.
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Well his views are freedom at the cost of freedom. He wants a world where all the software is free. However by enforcing this he restricts people on their freedom of choosing how to license their software. I am OK if you choose to release it via GPL but I don't like being harassed if I choose to release my code via closed source, or a non RMS Approved Open Source License.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So, presumably there would be no problems with my calling myself Richard Matthew Stallman, and setting up a Free Software Foundation of my own?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You want to dictate how I, as a computer user, can use my computer. You think uses of software you wrote are things you can control. You can... :P
Point is, either we decide original developers of software get to define policy or we frown on letting anyone define policy and let people do what they want with it. Many in the opensource community favour some form of the latter
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
You talk about freedom, but want to dictate how I, as a user, can use, share, and modify software.
The fact that something is the product of your effort doesn't grant you sovereignty over that thing's use. The luthier doesn't get to determine what songs I play on the guitar he made.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood