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Stallman On the State of Free Software 25 Years On
TRNick writes "What's the state of free software, 25 years after GNU's birth? TechRadar has an interview with Richard Stallman to find out. Stallman thinks free software is making good progress: 'Nowadays hardware developers are also increasingly likely to publish the interface specs so that we can develop free software that works with the hardware. Perhaps we are turning the corner, but we still have a big fight on our hands before all computer users have freedom.' But how many of us actually run an operating system that Richard Stallman would consider free? Many of the more popular GNU/Linux distributions, including Mandriva and Ubuntu, bundle proprietary code with their free software packages. Perhaps free software has reached a large enough install base that companies are happy to use it for their own gain, but aren't quite so willing to make their own commitments to free software development. How important this is to the success of free software depends on how strong your stance is on freedom is."
The arguments against binary blobs are perfectly valid and unrelated to crackpot fanatism. If nVidia goes down tomorrow or just drops support for your specific card, all your hardware will stop working in few months with the next kernel update. This is why I bought Intel hardware. It might not be the best, but I know I will be able to use the hardware and all of its features until it physically breaks. Stallman, unfortunately, is in the crackpot zone, where if you are not with him and refuse to use any proprietary software even if it is your only choice, you are against him. Even just allowing your users to use proprietary software if they so wish will win you a big GNU fatwa. Is that free software? Free as in gulag?
"While Linux Torvalds gets most of the plaudits nowadays for the Linux kernel, it was Stallman who originally posted plans for a new, and free, operating system."
In Germany, we have 3 different words for "free" when used as in beer, and a law defining what each word means, when used in business. There is "gratis", "kostenlos" (no cost), and some other term I forgot. Then of course there is the word "frei" (free) too. I noticed, that translating to German, and then translating all terms back to English, (both with dict.leo.org) gives me a pretty nice thesaurus. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
As someone that grew up with computers, I can understand Stallman's vision. I don't agree with it, but I can understand it. He would like to think there are 1.5 kinds of people in the world: those that write code and those that haven't gotten around to writing code. His sense of "freedom" is important to both parts of that, assuming that is all there is to humanity.
I think it is much closer to say there are three groups: those that write code, those that should not be writing code but are trying and those that will never, ever write code. Call the last group "users". What RMS misses completely is the last group is probably the most important. They are utterly at the mercy of the first two groups, and they are continually being disappointed by the second.
The ability to design computer software is an art and it is not one that is easily taught to people that just don't get it. Writing clear, functional, concise code that implements a design is much easier to teach but in the world of open source and free software these two roles are usually combined. And, from looking at a lot of code in the open source world, much of it is from the folks that aren't doing a good job of design and probably shouldn't be writing code either.
The future is not one where everyone is a programmer. The world is bigger than that. There are a lot of people that have no desire to ever be anything more than a user and for them being handed a piece of software that is intuitively easy to use, relatively bug-free and gets the job done for them is what they want. From both proprietary and open source software development users are continually handed non-intuitive, buggy software that accomplishes something less than 100% of the job. And, collectively speaking, our users deserve better than that.
Probably the biggest problem I see with open source is the lack of critical review. Without this someone that turns out garbage code will continue to do so forever. Unless they stumble upon their own code and have to maintain it for years. Even then, it takes a stern taskmaster to reinforce the idea that if it isn't maintainable, it wasn't worth writing in the first place. And that if all the users can't use it how they want to, it isn't doing the job either. Yes, I do mean all the users and all of what they want it to do.
Where is the professional society that builds up talented but rudderless newcomers? Where does someone that wants to be turning out a "professional" quality product go for help? Universities? No, I don't think so. Most commercial establishments are just as driven to produce something "good enough" that they just have a hope of maintainability and usability. Sometimes they get lucky, but most of the time they do not. And we wonder why software development gets a bad reputation?
RMS would like us to each be able to fix the bugs we find and extend usability to take something that does 50% of the job we need done and fix it so it does 100% for us. Nice idea, but it comes from a flawed premise - a sort of universality of programming ability. The reality is major talent will be always rare and it is up to these folks to help out and guide those with ability but undeveloped talent. And then there are the users. These will always be in the majority and they cannot help but rely on the people with ability and talent to do what they cannot do. I do not think the mantle of this responsibility can so easily be passed off on the users.
Sure, it'll be piece by piece, but there still needs to be a unified vision of an ideal to work towards, otherwise nobody will know what exactly is happening "piece by piece", and FLOSS wouldn't be a community driven force in the software industry, it would just be a strange phenomenon. In a way, RMS is the Steve Jobs of OSS. And people still buy Apple products even if they think Steve Jobs is crazy.
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