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The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty
An anonymous reader writes: It was March, 1985 when Richard M. Stallman published the GNU Manifesto in Dr. Dobb's Journal of Software Tools. Thirty years on, The New Yorker has an article commemorating its creation and looking at how it has shaped software in the meantime. "Though proprietary and open-source software publishers might appear at the moment to have the upper hand, Stallman's influence with developers (among whom he is known simply by his initials, 'rms') remains immense. When I asked around about him, many people spoke of him as one might of a beloved but eccentric and prickly uncle. They would roll their eyes a bit, then hasten to add, as more than one did, 'But he's right about most things.' I told Stallman that I'd spoken with several developers who venerate his work, and who had even said that without it the course of their lives might have been altered. But they don't seem to do what you say, I observed; they all have iPhones. 'I don't understand that either,' he said. 'If they don't realize that they need to defend their freedom, soon they won't have any.'"
The core principle of any democracy is knowledge must be free. Democracy ceases to be such when knowledge is priced beyond the reach of majority and they are forced to vote based upon ignorance. Computers are the best tool in making knowledge accessible and as such should never be priced out of easy access to the majority. Every citizen should have the right to readily access all the knowledge they want, in order to make informed decision about their democracy. Not selected highlights, not edited with secrecy, not distorted by lies but factual, validated information backed with explanations and when required, taught by suitably qualified professionals. Denial of information about the society they form a part of, in order to manipulate their consent, is autocracy by ignorance.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
He's right about most of the things he says, and that's also the reason why there are so many haters.
He also pulls no punches when it comes to saying uncomfortable unpleasant things. It's even worse that some of those have come to pass.
Anyway, I also predict this thread will be full of wild claims about RMS many of which are flat-out untrue and demonstrably so. Because almost every thread involving RMS winds up that way.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Stop blaming those other people for all the issues in the world, because they are blaming you right back. The idea that utopia can happen if people do it exactly my way, is not realizing the diversity in people and their particular needs.
Just because RMS is right about a lot of thing doesn't mean he is always right. The same with everyone.
Open source has its place, but it is also the cause for many of these outsourced jobs. As it gives people in poorer areas acces to advanced computing software, so they can apply and say they have such skills and then undercut people who live in a higher income area.
It is nice to be good and Nobel, but you still have bills to pay, not everyone can work at a not for profit, government, or educational institution and do what they train for. They need to work in the corporate world, to keep this job that pays the bill you need to be sure the company stayed in business, so you make software that they attend to sell closed source.
Because...
1. The software is easy to use so there is no money in consulting services.
2. Access to the Internet means there isn't much money in distributing your software.
3. The software fills a niche that is important but doesn't get enough attention to survive on good will.
4. You need to work with other vendors who has patented code, or closed licenses. But they are vital to the overall product.
It is not that open source is bad, it has its place mainly in infrastructure based systems OS, Web Servers, Web Browers, Office products, Developer tools. But once you get into general purpose it gets much harder
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I was pleasantly surprised by the New Yorker's coverage of the shift from "free software" to "open source", which while less detailed (unsurprisingly) than other sources such as Free as in Freedom 2.0 also presented it simply as a thing that has happened, rather than either of the extremes that are usually applied: it's the worst affront ever to software freedom, or as the liberation of programmers from the crazy extreme ideology of RMS. Personally I'm more interested in free software than in open source: the source code is a means to an end, not an end in itself. But it's good to see that view handled as a view and the events (and responses to them) presented, without turning the story into a justification or rationalisation of the view. BTW, still waiting for that planned Chaosnet support...
A lot of software developers are doing what RMS says a lot of time. It's just that almost noone does it all the time.
It's clearly evident from the amount of GNU and GPL software out there that wasn't written by RMS that people are following his ideas. And that those ideas have succeeded, simply by the success of that same software in the marketplace.
It's not a failure of the ideal when developers of open source also write proprietary software to pay the bills.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
Yes, to see the proof of your claim just look at the cooking industry. Recipes cannot be copyrighted (they are explicitly excluded from copyright protection under international law). Which is why there are no chefs. Oh wait sorry, it's why all the chefs keep their recipes strictly secret and only provided finished food and none of them ever publishes a cookbook... oh wait.
For the nitpickers: yes a cookbook can be copyrighted but the recipes inside it cannot, you are always free to copy one, modify it, use it and even put it in your own cookbook modified or not.
Software is a lot more like a chefs recipes than it is like an authors book.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Convenience trumps ideals more often than not.
Ideals are not there to achieve convenience. They exist to steer us away from convenience, to avoid short-term gains that would push us into some long term dead-ends.
So ideals are not useful because we live by them on a day to day basis, but because they warn us when we deviate too far from them. Of course, having a few idealists that *do* live by their principles is a useful reminder for the rest of us that agree with them, but are nonetheless swayed by convenience.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Well done, you managed to find the one (not entirely serious) off hand comment that seems a bit extreme in a manifesto that was, at the time, way out there. The very fact that the rest of it is pretty much taken for granted now shows just how visionary and plain right Stallman was.
These days no-one would dream of claiming that people won't work on OS for free, or that commercial companies wouldn't contribute. No-one would question the value of having OS software exist, or the high quality it can achieve, or that it is essential to our freedom in an age of NSA/GCHQ spying. You might not agree on a philosophical level but you can't really deny that this is a document that changed the world and the nature of computing, and was able to define how OS would develop over the next three decades.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC