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RMS Talks Net Neutrality, Patents, and More

Posted by samzenpus on from the straight-from-the-man dept.

alphadogg writes "According to Richard Stallman, godfather of the free software movement, Facebook is a "monstrous surveillance engine," tech companies working for patent reform aren't going nearly far enough, and parents must lobby their children's schools to keep data private and provide free software alternatives. The free software guru touched on a host of topics in his keynote Saturday at the LibrePlanet conference, a Free Software Foundation gathering at the Scala Center at MIT.

2 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. I know I'll get flamed... by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 0, Troll

    godfather of the free software movement

    But I disagree with the having Stalman as the locus of free software. There was free software before him (BSD, etc) and will be free software after him. Maybe capitalize it right. Yeah, he created the Free Software Foundation. Just call it that.. godfather of the FSF.

    Stalman has done a lot, but sometimes his ideas get in the way of actual software. Hurd? after decades still not shipped. gcc? Got out of hand until it got taken over by egcs. Was also the "Cathedral" in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" as the example of what NOT to do. emacs? Witness the hassle with xemacs and emacs.

  2. Re:A few problems with that by TylerJWhit · · Score: 0, Troll

    You completely missed my point.... I have nothing wrong with the GPL or BSD licenses. I love them. But Stallman has a communistic extreme mindset. I thank him for his extremism, because without it, the GPL wouldn't have gotten the motivation and the drive forward that it needed. Linus's kernel wouldn't have had the success it had without the building blocks that the GPL community brought to it. My point is Stallman's extremism. He criticizes and belittles everyone that disagrees with his GPL mindset. I know that the vast majority of /. is part of the open sourced community and that Microsoft and Apple are targeted. For good reasons. But the reality is, BOTH corporations bring a lot to the IT industry. And Stallman throws the baby out with the bathwater and wants nothing to do with anything closed source. I for one, can't find an adequate replacement technology for Active Directory in the open sourced community. Now I know that at its root, it uses the LDAP framework. But it does it well. The *nix community lacks a satisfactory replacement. The nuts and bolts of what I'm saying is that Stallman disregards anything that's not GPL. Your point about a Hammer... completely erroneous.