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RMS Objects To Support For LLVM's Debugger In GNU Emacs's Gud.el
An anonymous reader writes with the news that Richard Stallman is upset over the prospect of GNU Emacs's Grand Unified Debugger (Gud.el) supporting LLVM's LLDB debugger.
Stallman says it looks like there is a systematic effort to attack GNU packages and calls for the GNU Project to respond strategically. He wrote his concerns to the mailing list after a patch emerged that would optionally support LLDB alongside GDB as an alternative debugger for Emacs. Other Emacs developers discounted RMS' claims by saying Emacs supports Windows and OS X, so why not support a BSD-licensed compiler/debugger? The Emacs maintainer has called the statements irrelevant and won't affect their decision to merge the LLDB support.
Excellent point, open and free but only in the way he sees freedom... We are talking about the man who is insisting to call Linux, GNU/Linux and likes to flame people for speaking up their minds, with different world visions...
I believe his position is that the mainline GNU Emacs should not accept patches that cater to non-GPL licensed plugins. The freedom exists for any user to apply those patches anyway. RMS is the original author of Emacs, and personally has copyright of a lot of that code. The current maintainer has said he will apply the patches anyway so it's really a non issue. None of that seems to be mentioned in the summary at least.
You've made a good point, and I want to emphasize that the LLVM License *IS* an open source license, it's just not as restrictive as the GPLv3 license in terms of how the software can be used. RMS wants software to be free, but GPLv2 is more free than GPLv3 because GPLv2 has fewer restrictions on how the software can be used. RMS is marginalizing himself with his crusade against commercial software.
The current maintainer has said he will apply the patches anyway so it's really a non issue. None of that seems to be mentioned in the summary at least.
That part IS mentioned in the summary
The Emacs maintainer has called the statements irrelevant and won't affect their decision to merge the LLDB support.
You can be sure Stallman is miffed. Publicly calling his input irrelevant on code he wrote is one step away from calling him irrelevant.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If you apply handcuffs to someone you can't then claim they are free. you say freedom is a matter of self control, this is true, UNLESS you are under the GPL where freedom is dictated to you under strict terms.
that says you must share *all* of your code simply because it uses some LGPL library somewhere.
If it's full GPL you do, if it's LGPL you don't.
That's why everything useful is LGPL instead of GPL.
You could argue that LGPL isn't compatible with GPL and shouldn't be included in Linux >.>
Rick has forgotten that there are many licenses to open source. Back when he lectured at the University of Saskatchewan in the early-mid '80s, there was none of this bitter diatribe about BSD and such that I can recall. He's become old and crotchety.
As long as the source code for the .el component is licensed under the GPL, RMS has gotten all he has a right to ask for through the GPL. If he thinks the GPL is about ensuring no one can ever use code unless they also use the GPL, he needs to revisit his own paragraphs on linking of code.
*sigh*
It's a shame, really. He was such a visionary. Now he's just a ranting old man losing touch with reality. :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Excellent point, open and free but only in the way he sees freedom... We are talking about the man who is insisting to call Linux, GNU/Linux and likes to flame people for speaking up their minds, with different world visions...
So he tries to persuade people to agree with him, perhaps passionately, perhaps vehemently, maybe even not so nicely ... but (to my knowledge) he has never used force or fraud to coerce people into behaving the way he thinks they should. That sounds perfectly freedom-loving to me. I'm really not seeing the problem here.
If your opinion of the guy is correct, then his methods will cause fewer people to listen to him and he will thereby undermine his own efforts. This means such a situation would be self-correcting. I've never heard of RMS using force or threat of force to make you call it "GNU/Linux". The degree of power he has over you is determined entirely by how much you decide to listen to him*. The ability to recognize this is generally called perspective.
It's as though some people have an entitlement mentality, a manner in which they are self-centered. It leads to them feeling like they've been wronged or mistreated somehow when they discover that someone doesn't agree with them, won't support or otherwise validate them (probably the part that really bothers you), and speaks against them.
* I started to add "and use his software", but then I realized that's not true - you could use Emacs with the LLVM debugger ... or not, whether anyone else likes it or not, because the GPL and LLDB's NCSA license are compatible. RMS deliberately chose a license allowing this to happen. Did you fail to recognize the significance of that? That freedom means people might do things with which he disagrees does not remove his right to disagree. Are you suggesting it should? If not, what exactly are you trying to say, if you are not in fact expressing another entitlement mentality?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The current maintainer has said he will apply the patches anyway so it's really a non issue. None of that seems to be mentioned in the summary at least.
That part IS mentioned in the summary
The Emacs maintainer has called the statements irrelevant and won't affect their decision to merge the LLDB support.
You can be sure Stallman is miffed. Publicly calling his input irrelevant on code he wrote is one step away from calling him irrelevant.
Whenever you relieve yourself of a responsibility by giving it to someone else, you accept that that person is not you and may not make the same decisions that you would make. If Stallman is to be blamed for anything, it should be in the form of Stallman blaming himself for choosing a maintainer who does not more closely share his views.
Now that persuasion has failed, I suppose he could fork it.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
RMS isn't against commercial (for profit) software at all. He's against software that is not completely transparent to the user about what it's doing (and that you can't fix yourself if it breaks).
The software that he is objecting to supporting is completely transparent.
You can also fix it if it breaks.
Here is the god damned svn: http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-proje...
So why is he complaining here? What we can take from this is that your comments are worthless shit.
Your complaint is shit, because the point is both well known, and obvious to anybody who bothered to understand the background.
The point of the Free Software movement embodied in the Free Software Foundation is to create and support software that actively protects the users freedom by ensuring not only that the original software was transparent and user-modifiable, but also that it would protect you from being embraced, extended, and extinguished. Not everybody agrees with this position, but it is a well known and easy to understand position.
The counter argument isn't just, "hurr, whu? huh? you're shit." The counter argument is actually that if users have enough freedom available, that they can simply switch to something else and that "embrace, extend, extinguish" has been countered mostly by user demand for portable data formats, and SCOTUS decisions protecting the right to inter-operate.
The counter-counter argument is that users who really want Software Freedom can choose GPL software and not have to remain vigilant about each little example, each case where somebody is trying to include some proprietary bit and then get you to "need" it. They can instead simply remain vigilant about one thing; using Free Software. And then they're protected, and they can make business decisions with a higher level of predictability.
Most people can read these arguments and easily choose which one they prefer. The subjective choice, as with most subjective choices, are easy. But not everybody arrives at the same choices! And it is clearly in error to claim that one side didn't have a good point, or is "shit." They're just different points, based on different values and concerns.
I just wish there was a version of the debate where becoming a package maintainer and thrusting a new paradigm on the users was recognized as a removal of freedom, a form of "embrace, extend, extinguish."
It's a discussion you retard. He's arguing there are negative effects of supporting LLDB, other people are agreeing with him and others are arguing that isn't the case. He isn't censoring any of them, he isn't "throwing a tantrum", they're just having a discussion.
People like you are the reason these discussions should be closed instead of public. You make it public and every idiot with little grasp on the arguments will move a mountain to prevent the project from advancing an inch.
BSD licensed software allows someone to take it, modify it in some meaningful way, and not share those changes back with the community at large
The thing that a lot of GPL advocates usually miss is that this is often an intermediate step. Several big FreeBSD contributors have taken this path. First they take our code and incorporate it into a proprietary product. Then they realise that some of their changes are making merges difficult but are not giving them any competitive advantage, so upstream them. At this point, we're already doing better than if they hadn't used our code in the first place. Over time, the amount of code that they decide isn't part of their core competitive advantage grows until it's almost all of their stuff. In a few cases, their proprietary fork ends up having changes that simply wouldn't make sense for anyone other than them.
The other issue is companies that don't distribute software. Google's modified Linux that runs their datacentres, for example, is never distributed and so they never had to share their changes. I've worked with companies that use GPL'd software in this way but won't admit to it publicly for fear of liability (even though they're completely compliant with the license, as far as I can tell), and so who won't send patches upstream. Meanwhile, the same teams will happily send bug fixes for BSDL'd libraries that they use, because there's no chance that they're infringing the license and so they're happy to admit to using it.
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So why is he complaining here?
He's complaining because this is about GCC.
AFAICT, he's seen in the past that GCC can be used as a tool to make hardware vendors open up their platforms because writing a new compiler is just too damn difficult compared to getting support into GCC, and the latter required distributing the source under the GPL.
With LLVM, that kind of hardware vendors can keep their source code to themselves.
Thus he sees LLVM as a threat in the long term.
I think most people in the Emacs community understand his point, but disagree that adding support to Emacs will change anything. LLVM will thrive whether Emacs supports it or not.
You may be right, but there is such a thing at making your grip on something so tight that it escapes you grasp (e.g.g if you grip dough too tightly).
LLVM is a good case in point. The GNU, via the GPLv3, has created a situation in which companies such as Apple who are not interested in the politics of Open Source or Free Software, and aren't seeking a competitive advantage in compilers became unwilling to work with the free software community because the free software community tried to do an embrace and extend on them.
As Linus pointed out, the GPLv2 license was a good license because it imposed fairly acceptable conditions on companies. The GNU thought they had the likes of Apple by the balls, so to speak, and they tried to squeeze. Apple and others (including the BSDs) simply went to LLVM, and it is looking like LLVM is going to surpass GCC in all metrics that matter.
In fact, Apple originally worked to relicense LLVM under GPLv2 with upstream GCC https://forums.freebsd.org/thr... , but was denied by GCC developers. So GCC lost what was potentially a very good contributor Apple is now the largest company in the world - can you imagine how much better GCC could have been with a company the size of Apple working to improve the quality and performance of the compiler?
Now BSD and Mac OSX can be argued to have access to better compiler technology than GNU and Linux (although LLVM can be used under Linux). With Apple's support, free software could have been even further ahead, but politics ruled. The FSF/GNU could find itself made irrelevant if they continue to put petty politics and ideology above ensuring that free software is among the best software by engaging companies like Apple where it makes sense to do so.
Can you imagine if Apple had acted like GNU with respect to Samsung. Even when Apple was fighting Samsung on one hand, they were still prepared to buy a lot of gear off Samsung in a mutually beneficial relationship, and Samsung was willing to supply its biggest competitor with chips and other electronic gear that was going into products that were competing directly against its biggest moneymaker. Both companies, however, acted in a grown up manner to reach a mutually beneficial arrangement while continuing to kick lumps out of each other in the courts, in advertisements and in the markets. GNU acted all childish over LLVM and Apple's (and BSD and Linus) contributions to issues such as GPLv3 and accepting code that would enable GCC to work better for everyone, not just Apple.