The Free Software Foundation: 30 Years In

An anonymous reader writes: The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. To paint a picture of what computing was like back then, the Amiga 1000 was released, C++ was becoming a dominant language, Aldus PageMaker was announced, and networking was just starting to grow. Oh, and that year Careless Whisper by Wham! was a major hit. Things have changed a lot in 30 years. Back in 1985 the FSF was primarily focused on building free pieces of software that were primarily useful to nerdy computer people. These days we have software, services, social networks, and more to consider. In this in-depth interview, FSF executive director John Sullivan discusses the most prominent risks to software freedom today, Richard M. Stallman, and more.

Comments

C++ dominant?

[Anonymous Coward]

C++ was only 2 years old in 1985, and hardly anyone had heard of it. It was nowhere close to "becoming dominant."

Microsoft and Borland didn't introduce C++ compilers until after 1990, which is when it really took off.

C++

[Anonymous Coward]

C++ wasn't becoming a dominant language in 1985. That didn't happen until the IDEs supported it about 5 years later. Turbo C became Turbo C++ and then Borland C++. Microsoft was recommending Glockenspiel until they could get their own support done. 1990 really.

Was there, got the T-Shirt.

I disagree

[Psychotria]

In 1985 C++ was not becoming a dominant language. C was certainly high on the list of "dominating" languages, but so was ASM (often C and assembly language for critical sections were used together) and so was Pascal, Modula-2, COBOL, Fortran, Lisp, etc, etc, etc and a bunch of languages (some still very much in use today), but C++... C++ was a newcomer and far from becoming dominant. It might be accurate to say that C++ was gaining support. It might be accurate to say that C++ was encouraging or spurring on the acceptance of the OOP paradigm (whatever that is), but no... I don't think that C++ was beginning to dominate anything at all at that point in time.

Re:We're worse off

[FranTaylor]

Stallman was always a PRAGMATIST, not an IDEALIST.

emacs and gcc were written to run on HPUX and Solaris long before linux existed

he knows full well that he will never achieve his ultimate goal of free software everywhere, but he has to push his agenda

Most people are idiots about non-free binary blobs. Your cards and motherboard are all filled with binary code, whether it's burned in at the factory or loaded at runtime is a moot point.

Re:We're worse off

[Anonymous Coward]

Stallman has no problem with binary blobs as long as they cannot be updated without the user's consent, and as long as they cannot be used to abuse the user, e.g., by providing a backdoor or otherwise altering the rest of the system. In his own words:

The phone network firmware comes preinstalled. If all it did was sit there and talk to the phone network when you wish, we could regard it as equivalent to a circuit. When we insist that the software in a computing device must be free, we can overlook preinstalled firmware that will never be upgraded, because it makes no difference to the user that it's a program rather than a circuit.

Unfortunately, in this case it would be a malicious circuit. Malicious features are unacceptable no matter how they are implemented.

On most Android devices, this firmware has so much control that it could turn the product into a listening device. On some, it controls the microphone. On some, it can take full control of the main computer, through shared memory, and can thus override or replace whatever free software you have installed. With some, perhaps all, models it is possible to exercise remote control of this firmware to overwrite the rest of the software in the device. The point of free software is that we have control of our software and our computing; a system with a back door doesn't qualify. While any computing system might have bugs, these devices can be bugs. (Craig Murray, in Murder in Samarkand, relates his involvement in an intelligence operation that remotely converted an unsuspecting target's non-Android portable phone into a listening device.)

In any case, the phone network firmware in an Android phone is not equivalent to a circuit, because the hardware allows installation of new versions and this is actually done. Since it is proprietary firmware, in practice only the manufacturer can make new versions—users can't.

Putting these points together, we can tolerate nonfree phone network firmware provided new versions of it won't be loaded, it can't take control of the main computer, and it can only communicate when and as the free operating system chooses to let it communicate. In other words, it has to be equivalent to circuitry, and that circuitry must not be malicious. There is no technical obstacle to building an Android phone which has these characteristics, but we don't know of any.

He's wrong, though. There is a technical obstacle to creating an Android phone with his desired characteristics: THERE'S NO MONEY TO DO IT; as said before, it's a damn shame Stallman never created a viable business to fund his ideas. Instead, he has always relied on fools who don't comprehend what he's saying.