Richard Stallman's Dissenting View of Steve Jobs

Garabito writes "Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, has posted his not-so-fond memories of Steve Jobs on his personal site, saying, 'As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.' His statement has spurred reaction from the community; some even asking to the Free Software movement to find a new voice."

Comments

Thank god

[elrous0]

Look, I know no one likes to speak ill of the dead and all, but geez, last week's lovefest got WAY WAY WAY out of hand. Jobs was an important figure, no doubt, but the over-the-top platitudes were often more humorous and bizarre than heartfelt or touching. There were "expert" commentators on CNN calling Jobs the "most important person in the history of technology" with straight faces. People who didn't even KNOW the guy were crying like their daddy had just died. At one point I think I saw Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper make a teary-eyed pledge to throw themselves on his funeral pyre.

I doubt Jesus' apostles were as upset after the crucifixion as some of the supposedly objective "experts" and "journalists" I saw last week. It's not like I expected them to get into the more negative and tawdry aspects of his past with his body still warm, but I didn't expect such unabashed hero-worship and hagiography either. It was just shameful.

Re:Thank god

[jeffmeden]

I'd mod you up, had I the points. I even saw a somewhat disturbing piece on one of those Sunday shows asserting that Steve Jobs was indeed the FOUR most important people to influence technology in the past half century, since calling him the single most important person was apparently already too low a tribute. Steve was clearly very influential but to blindly say that he was "The most influential in history" is a huge reach. Just because there are certain groups of people who rely entirely on his company's products (not even a majority of those who use technology on a daily basis) that group (almost all of those in national media, it would seem) feel justified in glorifying him to no apparent end.

And hey, at least RMS won't need to worry about his funeral being picketed by the Westboro folks.

Re:Thank god

[plover]

There's plenty of other ways to get your news.

Exactly. Get your news like this great story, Apple User Acting Like His Dad Just Died from The Onion, America's Finest News Source.

What's the difference between The Onion and mainstream media? Everyone at The Onion knows their product is 100% fictional.

Re:Thank god

[BrokenHalo]

That seriously improves his image a lot...

...but not so much if you recall other aspects such as his denial of paternity of a daughter (with Chrisann Brennan), claiming he was sterile, then going on to father three more sprogs with someone else. Creepy. :-|

Re:Thank god

[Crayon Kid]

Steve may not have liked your taste in ripped music, your torrented TV series, or your third party apps, but he would defend to the death your right to run them, as long as that means you will pay an Apple tax to do so.

I think you're missing the point. RMS is about free software and has defined the fundamental software liberties already. Software made by Apple and that kept in its walled garden does not match those liberties. The values pushed by Apple don't even come close.

Let's not delude ourselves. As far as software is concerned, with some notable exceptions, Apple always took the hard proprietary line in order to protect and add value to their hardware. It's natural for RMS to point it out. Especially at this moment in time, in a controversial manner, because well, that's what he does.

And hell, if anybody is to talk dirt about Jobs, let it be RMS, a man every bit as influential, who has fundamentally changed things and who has his place reserved in history books as well.

Re:Thank god

[rgbatduke]

You mean because Buddhism isn't a religion and Buddha was neither a prophet nor a priest, but rather was a practicing social psychiatrist and ethicist? Like that?

But the issue Stallman is raising is that over many years, Jobs was about ownership and money as much as he was about anything else. He was not a leading light of the open source software movement. In fact, he and his company continue to be rather aggressively proprietary anywhere they can get away with it. They only moved to a Unix base because not to do so was fatal -- they didn't have a chance of developing a creditable non-Unix multitasking multiuser operating system to replace the long series of completely proprietary Mac OS's, at a time that even Microsoft was reading the writing on the wall (and MS had NT, for better or worse, and it took most of a decade to develop that to where it was capable of turning into e.g. XP and giving MS a consumer OS that wasn't doomed out of the gate.

Basically, the OSS community saved Apple's ass every bit as much as the Ipod did -- without OSX the actual Apple "computer" was dead and everybody knows it and knew it at the time (and Apple came within a hair of ceasing to exist because of it). So what, exactly, did Apple then do for the OSS community? Move to open standards for (say) music? Move to open standards for anything at all where the standards were not already dictated by the marketplace? Become an aggressive corporate presence calling for an end to proprietary software and hardware?

Hardly. Does the Ipod use a USB port to play music or charge? It does! Does it use a standard USB connector? It does not! Hence an instant, enormous aftermarket for a proprietary piece of cabling that won't work with anybody else's anything and that gains no particular benefit from the difference. Over decades -- printer cables, modem cables, mouse cable -- if it was Apple only Apple's version would fit on an Apple piece of hardware.

Software no better. I personally am neither glad he's dead nor glad he's gone because either OSS can make it on its own in spite of people like Jobs and Gates and companies like Apple and Microsoft or it can't, but Jobs was in a position to do the compassionate and ethical thing at least a time or two in there and I would not say that his corporate business decisions properly reflected the general Buddhist philosophy or ethos.

It was, and remains, all about the money and power and influence every bit as much as it was about the joy.

rgb

Re:Thank god

[GameboyRMH]

I disagree. I'm glad the FSF has someone as uncompromising as Stallman. Even if his perceived extremism is bad for corporate open source software, it's better for the free software to survive in its current state as a hobbyist movement than to devolve into openwashing and flourish, which is exactly what corporations want, to turn OSS into nothing more than a nifty marketing label while they control the product with an iron fist. This is why I support the GPLv3 and am against any "pragmatist" ideas of allowing for Tivoization and patent traps so that companies will be more likely to adopt and use open source.

Android is a good example of what happens to open source software when corporations get their way with it. It flourishes, but so what? Who benefits from the openness, apart from the few geeks who download the source code (for certain versions) and hack it onto a few devices? To the average customer it's as closed as iOS for all practical purposes. At the end of the day, this situation is at best, no better than the stereotypical obscure neckbeard-run FOSS project critics fear the "idealist" position would lead to in terms of openness, except that a company got rich by ripping off the open source community and contributing a little code back for the uber-geeks to tinker with. And it's a good thing there are a few tablets and phones out there with unlocked bootloaders and VMs are an option or the hobbyist wouldn't be able to do a damn thing with the Android source. If Google really wanted to tivo-lock Android, nothing's stopping them.

Re:Stallman and FOSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh. Stalman only cares about "sustainable" freedom. Apple, and Jobs, were NO champions of that cause. We all know the very good things about Apple, but Stalman keeps in mind the BAD things, such as extreme vendor lock-in, anti-privacy instances, market lock-in (closed app-store, anyone), extreme censorship against FLOSS, hostile behavior towards other companies and hostile behavior towards competing products...

We are already screwed if people take Stalman as the corporate image of Linux. But that doesn't mean the guy is wrong.

Sounds fair.

[L4t3r4lu5]

Jobs and his company are based entirely on control of other people's property. You can't put the OS on your own hardware, you can't run your own apps on the iPod Touch / iPhone without hacking it, you can't use products which directly compete with Apple's offering on either either (heh). Are you all forgetting iTunes prior to the catalogue being converted to DRM-free MP3s?

Horrible people can do good things just as good people can do horrible things, and a lot of the things Jobs did in computing were horrible. Pretty, and king of usability, but all a thing veneer on something fundamentally malign.

Re:Stallman and FOSS

[Kludge]

Richard Stallman has no merits to basically say he's glad Steve Jobs is dead.

He didn't say that. He said, 'I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone.'

Linux geeks ... are happy to see people die.

He did not say that. He said, 'I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone.'

apart from the a few geeks, people in the real world really don't care about his views or what he is trying to promote.

Maybe you don't know what web site this is.

Ubuntu has tried to fix that with Linux, but it's still far from Mac OSX or even Windows. ... I'm not exactly fan of Apple

Again, I think you're not on the right web site, and you probably really are an Apple fan.

Sorry to say it...

[blahplusplus]

... but I agree with stallman. Jobs figured out that you can make aesthetically pleasing stuff and make a lot of profit off simplifying hardware design for everyday people BUT this has a negative effect on those who actually use computers and computing devices as something beyond a toaster or glorified television. Jobs just turned computing devices into consumer items. The downside is that his companies success with walled gardens is giving a lot of other companies and developers the same idea of creating walled gardens where you never own anything, can't modify it, etc. A kind of kind of feudalistic computing.

I've watched gaming go downhill over the last 10 years with the rise shit like world of warcraft showing everyone the path to walled garden land because there are enough stupid people who don't give a shit about gaming that will just take it up the ass because they aren't passionate about games. So we get things like Starcraft 2 chained to online, no LAN, we get permanent online DRM being pushed and crap like onlive. At this point I really want to burn down the software industry. I remember a time when blizzard wasn't as evil as it is today and you actually were treated like a customer rather then a magpie with a wallet.

In the same way, people who work in computing, and do computing and are passionate about computing need freedom from corporate tyranny to innovate. Each generation of tinkering kids becomes the next set of developers/entrepreneurs/innovators. To lock everything behind a walled garden just creates a big mess and ensures solutions are suffocated or co-opted for someones personal greed with a net negative for humanity as a whole.

All great innovations are built upon mountains of others that came before them, locking them down is just a surefire way to suffocate progress.

I'm with Stallman on this.

[pecosdave]

Stallman is an asshole.

With that out of the way, he speaks true. I abandoned everything Apple for exactly the reasons he pointed out and I hope, as Stallman does, that Apple will become less anally retentive in the future.

Stallman is that guy who takes his job way to seriously. He loses touch with reality, he loses friends, his only friends are those with the same goals, but he even dismisses them for not being as committed as he is. In the end Stallman does the real work needed by the FOSS movement, he benefits the movement greatly, however he's like the overnight shift in a 24 hour production facility. Often the very best workers are on the overnight shift, not because you don't want the secrets to their efficiency accidentally leaked to someone passing through, but because the most talented people are often such eccentric weirdo's you only want the results of their work seen, not the workers themselves.

That last article condemning Stallman was just completely out of tune with the man himself. He wasn't hateful towards Job's himself, Stallman has a goal in mind and he wont rest until it's accomplished. He will never accomplish it. His goal of all software being 100% open source, patent free, and free in every way will never happen, and it's one of the places I differ with him. I support someones right to make money off of software, I do agree FOSS is the way to go and I do think even closed source software should eventually become open, but I do support someone closing source for a time to make a profit, and this is where I disagree with Stallman, who I see as an Old Testament Prophet of the Open Code.

Re:More to communicatio than being right

[drinkypoo]

Not only is there wisdom in knowing precisely what to say, there is also wisdom in knowing when not to say it.

The time to make the statement is while it is relevant. You wait until the initial storm dies down, and then you start your own. And it is critical that we receive this message — not you and I, maybe, but as many of the wide-eyed legions of Apple as can be reached. Because what Apple represents is precisely the same thing that Microsoft or Sony represents: a dearth of choice. Stallman might be an egotistical ass, but he is certainly the foremost champion of the rights of the user. Some programmers don't like that, so they don't like the GPL, and they don't like Free Software. They call it a virus and they would prefer to stamp it out rather than have to deal with something so confusing.

Other people can make the same point in a month, and a year, and reach other audiences, but this point needs to be made now and it needs to be made well. Stallman has done both.

Under the shadow of iPhones

[lucm]

> His statement has spurred reaction from the community; some even asking to the Free Software movement to find a new voice.

I agree with them. Furthermore, I propose that anyone making fun of Steve Jobs in a cartoon should be stoned with bricked iPhones. Don't let the Infidels smear the name of The Prophet. Inch' Apple.

Fair and Balanced

[organgtool]

I would agree with most of the people who are upset with RMS over this if it weren't for the way in which the media overreacted to Jobs' passing. I know it's typical to focus on the positive aspects of a person's life after they die, but the media rose Steve Jobs to the level of a god. They focused on his revival of Apple while ignoring the fact that he had a big part in its original downward spiral. They exalted Jobs' focus on good design principles while ignoring the fact that he created a corporate culture of trying to sue all of the competition out of the market. They trumpeted the success of the iPhone and iPad while ignoring the walled gardens they created. It's not my place to say whether or not Jobs' presence in the market was a net positive or negative, but I think it's fair for the media to cover both sides of a person's life as long as it is done with tact.

Re:Dear Mr Stallman

[n1ywb]

You don't have to have liked him, but you could have at least shown some respect rather than making the GNU (And by association, Linux, even though we hate you) community look like tools, instead of just yourself as you usually do.

Except that RMS is absolutely 100% spot on correct in his assessment. Some people (like you) just don't want to hear it. Nothing new here, really. For the record I am an ex Apple fanboy from roughly the Apple IIe days through OS8 when I finally gave up and moved to Linux on account of it being friendlier to software development.

Re:Ah yes, bring on the bad moderation.

[Monchanger]

Why does someone have to be a shill to disagree with you?

Because moderating 'flamebait' isn't a form of disagreement.

Your post was good example of a civil way to disagree. Abusing one's moderation power to cover up someone's opinion on the other hand is an act of violence, which generally happens when someone has an agenda to push. Hence you get accusations of being a shill or a fanboi.

drinkypoo was at worst answering an act of silencing in-kind, and even that sort of accusation seems too harsh.

Re:Dear Mr Stallman

[qortra]

Interesting indeed: I was, by contrast, quite proud of Stallman for this statement. I thought it was concise, respectful, yet completely honest. That takes a lot of guts, especially when public opinion is swinging a very different way. To give a point by point rundown Stallman does the following in this statement:

• Acknowledge the tragedy of Jobs' death
• Acknowledge the tragedy of death in general
• Acknowledge the success of Jobs' in the marketplace
• Acknowledge Jobs' as a pioneer in computing
• States that Jobs created a proprietary ecosystem that ultimately deprived users of computing freedom

With which, other than the last, do you have a problem? And with the last point, do you honestly disagree? Or do you just think that people shouldn't speak honestly about the faults of a man after his death?

Comment by S. LeBeau Kpadenou

[Per Wigren]

This comment on the readwriteweb.com article was so good I decided to paste it here:

Stallman is the anti-Jobs in many ways. But they"re both brilliant, driven, uncompromising geniuses. And to say that Stallman hasn't had as much impact on the world as Jobs is wrong on it's face, in my opinion. I reckon more devices have Linux installed than any Apple OS. How many startups would have been crushed by server OS costs without GNU/Linux as an option, even just by driving down the price of competitors? How many pieces of software that started as hobby hacking wouldn't exist with a free C compiler? App store? Linux had this years before the iPhone? Safari's engine started in KDE. Mac interface descended from X. Super-computing, internet plumbing, all dominated by Linux and GNU for a reason. Then there's Android.

If you don't like him, Stallman gives you plenty of ammunition. The same could be said about Jobs (personal emails to disgruntled users?) He spoke his mind, and a lot of people may not like what he said. In his mind, the world of software is a secret war for the freedom of billions of people. He believes proprietary software is a precursor to real live Soviet style oppression. He thinks Jobs is/was creating the world that appeared in the iconic 1984 Mac commercial. And if he believes that, blunting his words would be a disservice to history and posterity.

Steve Jobs was one to the most powerful on the planet. He's gonna have enemies. He knew that and didn't much care. I doubt his family is surfing Stallman's website looking for an epitaph.

As for the spokesman thing, I don't see RMS as that. He's the visionary. He's supposed to be unbending, uncompromising, theory based. He's not supposed to sugercoat. He's a coder, not a CEO.