The target audience is a critical difference between what happened in the early days of computing and what the open source movement brings to bear. The open source movement targets business with its message because the goal is to help business be built (and that is certainly consistent with the message of Hubbard's article here). Early computer software development was available to anyone who wanted to learn but the goal was not to help build a business. As the first sentence of the open source definition tells us, being "open source" is not just about access to the source code.
It's unfortunate that this article appears in the New York Times because of their role in promoting the invasion of Iraq based on lies (everyone from Judith Miller up the chain of power through Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. at the head of the Times organization should be fired or resign). Thousands and thousands of Iraqis died because of this war based on lies, hundreds of American servicepeople died because of this war based on lies and the Times was a big conveyor of the lies. As a result, all of their articles (even ones which call for reasonable measures like this article does) will be thought of as less than what it could have been.
Listen to the last segment of Democracy Now! today or read this chapter of "The Exception To the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers and the Media That Love Them" and you'll hear an argument for putting a social stamp of reduced value on the New York Times. I would rather people judge all articles in all publications ad-hoc, in a case-by-case basis and then promote those that call for reasonable things (like this article promoting electronic machine source code mostly does) and dismiss those that are lies (like Miller's articles promoting war against Iraq). But I doubt people will somehow become so independant.
It was proper to fire Jayson Blair and his superiors for his lies, but nobody died because of those lies. The Times apology is half-baked and there largely for political sake. At the Times, Sulzberger Jr., Miller, and everyone in between them at the Times still have jobs and the Times is still seen as the imprimateur of high quality journalism. It should be obvious to everyone now that that is shameful and inappropriate.
I wouldn't say the same is true of both ESR and RMS. What RMS says and does is far more sensible than what ESR has been known to stand behind. For instance in this kerfluffle, ESR chimed in with an essay which contained this example:
"You claim that 'To date no other product comes to life in this way', presenting Linux as a unique event that requires exceptional explanations. This is wrong. Many other open-source projects of the order of complexity of the early Linux kernel predated it; the BSD Unixes, for example, or the Emacs editor. Torvalds was operating within an established tradition with well-developed expectations."
But to those who know the history of the two movements it comes off oddly, as though ESR were trying to get credit for work he didn't do; to claim that the Emacs text editor was in any way an "open-source project" doesn't jibe with the timeline of what work started when. Emacs was started by RMS for the movement he helped found -- the free software movement. This work and the work of the other two examples ESR gives all occurred before the open source movement began, so it seems like a revisionist view to push aside the important philosophical differences of the two movements. I'm reminded of an essay by fellow open source advocate Mark Webbink (chief lawyer for Red Hat) on software licensing which dishonestly uses the concept of copyleft to break up various licenses for better understanding without giving any credit to the FSF folks or using the word "copyleft" which predates the essay by about 20 years. Torvalds may find some philosophical common ground with the open source movement, but the Free Software Foundation continues to tell us that they stand for a different philosophy than that of the Open Source Initiative.
I wanted to thank the two respondents -- Radon Knight and rbulling -- for posting genuinely helpful and substantive replies (I hope you'll forgive me for breaking threading). I have since enabled tap-click on my Fedora Core 2 installation and pointed a friend to how he can enable tap-click on his MacOS X laptop. For those who don't use trackpads, this may seem like a small unimportant thing to talk about but after getting used to using the trackpad this way and then not having it one notices the difference. Here's hoping that trackpad configuration will make its way to the GNOME userland as it has in MacOS X.
I just upgraded my FC1 installation to FC2. What I'm noticing is how many things have been improved but not to the point where I can say that I've used no better desktop systems. Unfortunately the problems I notice exist in virtually every GNU/Linux distribution, so they don't all have to do with FC2 per se. A little about me: I am a programmer and quite familiar with the benefits of having software freedom. I understand a lot of the underlying technical issues for making an OS that "just works". As I grow older I no longer care about following the details. My attention turns toward bigger picture items now, like how can I easily make backups of my documents, how can I easily uninstall software, how can I easily move from one application to its competitor.
I am becoming a firm believer in clean installs rather than upgrades because upgrades so often just don't work. No operaing system provides everything you need, so people routinely install third-party software and even on MacOS X (which is touted as being far simpler and far more unified, hence far better for the desktop user) I have not yet known anyone to be able to avoid problems with system upgrades. Clean installs also offer people a chance to do something they too often never do: make backups.
Some of the major issues I've come across: touch-click trackpad support is gone (where you can touch the trackpad twice in succession as an alternative way of clicking the left mouse button). I never knew how much I missed it until I tried a friend's Apple iBook running MacOS X which does not have it and has no readily apparent way to turn this on. I thought this feature would be there in FC2 final release (it wasn't there in prereleases) and it apparently isn't there. I've been told that this is a Linux kernal feature so if I want the feature back I would have to become out of sync with kernel upgrades supplied by the Fedora Core project and lose the ability to easily upgrade my kernel via FC's up2date. I don't care how easy it is to recompile a kernel once you've gotten the swing of it, I've got much more important issues on my plate and, while I appreciate the software freedom aspect of the Linux kernal, I value my time; I value being able to get on with what I use a computer to do. I'm looking to make things easier on myself, not introduce more maintenance.
The sound system in GNU/Linux is still not unified and smoothly working. I still can't be sure that I can simultaneously play bzflag while listening to some Ogg Vorbis files (or a streamed downloaded) with XMMS or Rhythmbox. On other systems (like later versions of NeXTSTEP and most if not all versions of MacOS X), sound is easy to use and simultaneous sound sources work right out of the box. This is one area of desktop usage where I am content to dissuade letting a thousand flowers bloom (in terms of what is shipped to the end-user) because I would prefer instead to have a single simple (no-setup-needed, it just works right out of the box) sound system. But I don't know (or care to learn) the technical details which prevent this from working smoothly. I figure that this is something that should be provided by any distribution. Recording sound is also a mess: the GNOME sound recorder program still crashes in such a way that no Bug Buddy is brought up to help me easily submit a crash report to the developers and there are way too many sliders on the sound volume panel to know what I want to do without having to learn grotty details about something I should be able to just use. I doubt this situation would remain acceptable if measured against its competition on other operating systems.
I understand that some users want e-mail and calendar integration, so Evolution looks like an attractive program. I think more users want trainable spam filtering and I don't see where Evolution 1.4 (the version of Evolution I got with FC2) provides trainable spam filtering. So Evolution is a non-starter for me. I'll take Mozilla mail or Thunderbird over Evolution because I don't co
This is not an open source vs. closed source issue: GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, is no more "open" to plugins than proprietary compilers.
Doesn't Cygnus' work prove this to be not true? Brad Kuhn, executive director of the FSF, recently came to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and gave a talk about free software. Kuhn mentioned one or two other consulting firms like Cygnus which did GCC work. He said that one of them was booked for a long time in advance (a year, if I recall correctly -- I don't have a transcript of his talk to refer to) because they were in such heavy demand. So it seems to me that GCC is quite extensible and ready for improvement by dedicated hackers. Difficulty of doing the work is one thing, but at least GCC can be legally shared and modified (unlike proprietary compilers).
It also seems unfair to not recognize that GCC was conceieved and originally written by and for free software hackers (first among them RMS, if I recall correctly) for the free software movement years before the open source movement started. I'm guessing that Dr. Wilson wouldn't like his work being credited for a movement that doesn't stand for the same values years after his work was started. RMS sure doesn't like that and today's GCC does build on his work. The open source movement has done a lot to bring people to software freedom, and I'm really grateful for all that hard work, but we're not going to be able to properly interpret history if we don't understand what "open source" and "free software" stand for and then give credit where credit is due.
That's a virtually nil statement -- I imagine most software is available on such terms. If I'm willing to give up my software freedom, I could sign an NDA with a variety of businesses and then inspect and modify the source code to a variety of non-free programs. Obviously software freedom is not satisfied by any NDA. Furthermore, I am aware of no free software license that requires a signature.
One of the legal consequences of the SCO affair is that people are going to start to pay closer attention all the time to how free software products are put together. They are going to discover that what really matters is how you deal with the questions of, for example, possible lurking work-for-hire claims against free software. They're going to discover that in this respect, too, Mr. Stallman was quite prescient, because they are going to recognize that the way they want their free software put together is the way the Free Software Foundation put it together since now more than twenty years. The way we're going, they're going to discover that they really would like to have it, is for each individual contribution of code to a free software project, if the guy who contributed the code was working in the industry, they would really like to have a work-for-hire disclaimer from the guy's employer, executed at the same time that the contribution was made. And the filing cabinets at the Free Software Foundation are going to look to them like an oasis in a desert of possible problems. We saw that problem coming. We have tried in our act as stewards over a large part of the free software in the world to deal with it. People are going to want to have that up front for everything that they can possibly, and they're going to be much more reluctant to rely on software that wasn't assembled in those ways.
If you are thinking about working in the law of free software, and gosh, I hope you are, one of the things you might want to be thinking about working on is the software conservation trusts that are going to be growing up around this economy in the next five years. I'll help you make one, or you can come to work in one of mine. We're going to need to spend a lot of time doing work which is associated with trustees. We're going to be spending a lot of time making sure that things are put together and they are built well. And we are going to be doing that on behalf of a third-party insurance industry which is going to be growing up, is growing up before our very eyes now, which is learning that it really cares how the free software is assembled.
Sage words when one's software's source code history is being questioned.
If mplayer did this on non-i386-compatible platforms, and if it did this with a program for which there was complete corresponding source code available under a free software license, I'd say you have made an excellent point. However, I believe that the only reason mplayer plays RealMedia is because mplayer calls the same library Real's player does. Which makes mplayer little more than an alternative RealMedia front-end; the library which does the actual decoding work is no more trustworthy because it being called by mplayer than if it were called by Real's own front-end.
When mplayer is just another RealMedia front-end, mplayer's programmers effectively become a buttress of the RealNetworks monopoly (to borrow an excellent phrase from the FSF). This is precisely the point I was warning against in another thread.
It's interesting that this story is pitched as "100% Open Source" because that highlights the difference between open source and free software. This is a perfect example of how the open source movement is not about giving all people (including users) software freedom; this is a player program that depends on an uninspectable, unmodifyable, unportable binary core. This program in its entirety is being pitched as "100% Open Source" -- a clear invitation to become dependant upon RealNetworks for getting updates to the meaningful part of the player without regard to what the community has shown a predilection for doing time and again (in fact, just recently we had a front-page Slashdot story about how the Linux kernal was ported to yet another CPU, thus expanding its popularity while retaining and underlining the importance of software freedom).
Innovation like this underscores the need for relying on free software (or, put
differently, the problem with relying or recommending non-free software).
It's an easy trap to get into when you use an i386 GNU/Linux distribution
(as most GNU/Linux users do, I suspect) because there are so many
opportunities to get hardware that only fully work with non-free software
(like nVidia video cards that require non-free kernel driver software to
operate fully). When you become dependent on non-free software you lose
portability which prevents easily moving to interesting hardware like this
one. Non-free video and audio codecs are similar; if you base your work on
some Microsoft library for decoding audio or video you won't easily be able
to read those files on a non-i386 platform.
Software proprietors won't supply the wide range of support the free
software community does. Software proprietors won't give you the power to
provide your own support or buy it from programmers and sysadmins in the
free marketplace.
The market will not care for everything.
on
Groklaw Turns One
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· Score: 1
While I'll agree that American justice is too often based on who can pay for it, I take issue with the suggestion that the market will somehow self-compensate for this shortcoming.
For every SCO (where I'll assume that you're ultimately correct that SCO will "lose" by some reasonable definition), there are far larger corporations that continue to not "lose" in any serious way; their misdeeds go unpunished and unnoticed. Edwin Black showed how the Nazis would not have been nearly as effective without the help of IBM and Tom Watson Sr.; I don't think Union Carbide's actions in Bhopal have been taken seriously by the US or international investors; tobacco corporations sell carcinogens with impunity to this day. These actions involve killing people or at the least making their lives seriously bad. Watch "The Corporation" (a new documentary in theatres now) for more examples of how unchecked corporate power leads to a society built on chasing profit and denying importance to anything else like people's lives and well-being.
I think you've hit a critical issue. Sadly many on Slashdot react favorably to convenience and entertainment at any price. So long as Apple provides something deemed worthy and wraps it up in a convenient package, we need not get into discussing more important issues of how business interests are not always compatible with social interests or scientific interests (put differently, we should all shoehorn our arguments into one that justifies and reifies the marketplace, never challenges it). Mention things like software freedom or not doing business with businesses that treat you poorly and suddenly you're taking issue with something sacrosanct. This also comes up when movies are discussed -- discuss a new movie coming out and how impressive the special effects are or how to get a copy of the ad (pardon me, "trailer") in a proprietary format and your contribution is moderated as informative. Bring up how that same studio works to stifle your ability to express yourself freely through increasing the scope or duration of copyright law (or exporting that copyright law internationally through trade agreements), and you're reminding people of the truth at a time they'd rather pretend the world was different.
For me, the technical interface needs work.
on
Suse 9.1 Reviews?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I had a similar experience with a recent attempt to install Debian. I've been using Fedora Core 1 since it came out and a colleague said I should try Debian. I want very much to not have to follow technical issues anymore, I'm simply tired of doing things that way. I don't want to give up my software freedom and I don't think I should have to. So I tried installing like a novice would do. My previous experience with Debian was fine (Debian Potato) but the installer was nowhere near what a novice should be expected to deal with.
Debian's installer (which appears to be textual, although in a lot of languages that look like they're using the right glyphs) is still not very good. Fedora Core's installer was a breeze to deal with (the graphics for things really do make things easier to handle and navigate). Not only was Debian's installer still asking questions it didn't really need to ask (my hostname? I know what this means, but this is far too technical and not completely necessary since my DHCP server dictates my hostname, also other GNU/Linux installers don't do this) but the disk partitioner isn't as nice as the Red Hat/Fedora Core's partitioning interface.
The showstopper for me was the dodgy networking interface software--the installer appears to proceed along two stages: the stage where you boot off the CD, and the stage after the minimal system has installed and the rest of the system is downloaded from Debian servers on the Internet. The first stage appeared to go well, identifying my wireless and wired networking hardware.
The second stage did not recognize my networking hardware and then the installer asked me if I wanted to configure PPP. There was no apparent way to tell it that I wanted it to use the same interface it had just used before rebooting and to go get Debian packages using that interface. I don't need PPP at all. I'm sure if I really cared more about this issue I could have done something to fix this and keep installing, but I wanted to go through this as a novice might, not as a longtime Unix user with some years of experience using the Linux kernal.
Given this constraint, I figured I had wiped a hard drive for nothing. I reinstalled Fedora Core 1, updated it, and then kept using the machine. FC1 doesn't identify my hardware correctly (kudzu thinks I am removing and reinstalling my wireless device), the network configuration profiles don't work correctly (I can't use the GUI to remove profiles or make a profile for an unencrypted wireless network connection and also have one with a WEP key), and the USB hotplug support is lacking (USB hard drive, USB key, and Griffin iMic support are not really working smoothly enough for novices to use). However the vast majority of the system works well enough for me to do a lot of real work. Other things that don't work well are things that will not work well in other distributions too (/dev device labels are a sign of a programmer's interface, not a user's interface -- use device brand names instead so I see "iMic" never/dev/dsp1, sound config is not easy and should not be necessary at all for the end-user, generally not enough focus on apps that "just work" and not enough work on documentation and too much focus on adding silly features that appeal to a few geeks and make the app hard to use).
Software freedom is worth supporting.
on
Suse 9.1 Reviews?
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· Score: 1
Linux doesn't monitor your internet activity and report back to it's creators without your knowledge as a standard practice.
That really depends on what software you install and run. If you run non-free software, you can't be sure what it is doing. It doesn't matter if this is non-free kernal modules or userspace applications like RealPlayer, Netscape, and Opera. An entirely free software system gives you the freedom to inspect your system (in addition to other freedoms which are also valuable) and change it to suit your needs. It's up to you to decide what's more valuable to you--the freedoms of free software, or the allure of non-free software.
Difference between movements often misunderstood.
on
Bitkeeper News Redux
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· Score: 1
The OSS scene suffers from the idea they are members of some religion and by using anything other then Open Source they are committing a crime against the movement.
This is not the open source movement's message. Open source is far more compatible with business interests, in fact the whole movement was defined to be more friendly to businesses. The reason they push aside software freedom is because the founders of the open source movement believed that "free software" made business leaders feel uncomfortable. So the open source movement founders not only dropped the phrase "free software", they also adopted a similar but more lax set of rules by which they would judge licenses. As a result, licenses that don't qualify as "free software" can (and some do) qualify as "open source". One is wise to be careful when evaluating licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative that they don't adversely affect your ability to continue developing your own software (such as having to choose between defending patents and licensing software, like the early APSLs did; or making embrace-and-extend possible, because the OSI has no criteria that is comparable to copyleft).
The charge of being a "religion" is nonsense, even when it is lobbed against the free software movement. It shows a lack of appreciation for what religions are and what the free software movement has been working on achieving since 1984. Nobody in the free software movement frames their argument in religious terms, in fact I've seen RMS take pains to avoid such reference. Their argument is based on what kind of society we want to live in -- one that caters to business interests or one where we and businesses can work as equals to give us all the freedom to make our computers do what we want them to do. I recommend you read the essay from the FSF that elaborates on the differences between the two movements and then reconsider the arguments the two movements are making.
The open source movement did not exist at the time the GPL, copyleft, the free software movement, and the GNU project started. It seems odd, therefore, to give credit to a movement that had nothing to do with creating these documents and forming these ideas. As it stands, you appear to be using the terms "open source" and "free software" interchangably, as though they refer to the same thing. However the open source movement stands for a different philosophy than the free software movement.
How ironic that your demand to give GNU no credit at all is worded so strongly. The FSF asks you to give GNU a share of the credit, it is not a demand. Lots of people (including Debian, one of the most respected GNU/Linux distributions) choose to do so out of respect for creating the free software community and the GNU General Public License. This is not a trademark infringement.
GNU is an operating system, it was designed to be so right from the start, just as the Linux kernal was designed to be a kernal from the start. Now you can run GNU without the Linux kernal; there are variants of GNU running with a NetBSD kernal and the official GNU running with the HURD kernal replacement. Neither of these are currently as popular as the variant of GNU with the Linux kernal, but they exist and are being developed. Calling things what they are is more technically accurate and it's reasonable to call works by the names their creators gave them. Giving credit where credit is due is a good thing to do.
I just can't understand why anyone would want to go to so much effort for so little reward. It's like scaling a craggy mountainside and getting to the top to find that there's no view!
Large scale projects routinely produce something less than desirable; this is a part of any creative process. I'm sure nobody knows what major flaws exist better than GIMP hackers (similarly, I'm sure Photoshop's developers can point out big flaws with Photoshop). I don't mind repeating flaws or bringing them to wider public attention, but I get no impression that this reviewer is aware of the process by which free software is developed and how that process includes the users far more than proprietary alternatives.
Also, along the lines of "why would people [bother]?", people bother because not everyone wants to become dependant upon a corporation that treats us like crap (remember whose actions held Dmitry Sklyarov in US jail?). Some people want software freedom and are willing to work to get it.
That this person paid for support they're not getting is unfortunate but that is just one firm from whom they could have bought support. The nice thing about a free market is that you can have multiple vendors competing for your business. Monopolies don't make this possible, software freedom does. All proprietary software are monopolies.
The font rendering demonstration--is that the result of not being able to leverage Apple's patented font rendering technology or a bonafide GIMP flaw? If the former, we see the same lack of software freedom hobbling the ability to provide competition. If it's the latter, is this flaw seen on other platforms too? I'm not against addressing real flaws, I'm against not having enough information with which to assess the problem.
How much of the problems noted have to do with the artist and not the program? Jimmac produces impressive work using The GIMP. How long did Jimmac spend with The GIMP and what difficulties does a long-time user see? This input would be valuable to know as well.
The GIMP needs work, no doubt, but so many points in this review leave me with more questions that I am left with a bad impression overall. I look forward to further GIMP improvements and revised reviews that track the progress of the GIMP.
What matters here is the terms of the license under which you or your organization had to operate. The same program would not simultaneously be licensed to you under a proprietary license (a license which limits modification or distribution or places such strong barriers to modification and distribution that you can't do it whenever you want and for whatever reason you want) and another license which qualified as being open source or free software. The same program might be licensed to you under different terms than that same program is licensed to others.
Microsoft's software, for example, is proprietary for most of their licensees while other licensees pay them enough to see and modify the source code. The license a typical Microsoft licensee gets is considerably more restrictive than someone willing to negotiate another license with Microsoft. Multiple licenses for the same programs exist, but only one applies to a particular licensee at once.
[W]hy, in every press release of companies who migrate to Linux, do they only mention licencing costs?
Because that's all they see to compete on; Microsoft makes their arguments from a similar framing of the issue when they compare OpenOffice.org to Microsoft Office or various GNU/Linux distributions to Microsoft Windows. They never discuss the value of the freedoms to share and modify software. The freedoms of free software are actually what is being leveraged in our community, but anyone who only knows to talk about price will never see software freedom as advantageous. This isn't unusual, economists are well known to not discriminate or evaluate based on things they cannot quantify. Freedom and ethical behavior are two of those things.
If you want to see more of the outcome of the myth of rational economic acting or various adverse outcomes which are not assigned economic value, I recommend "The Corporation"--a documentary which examines how corporations came to be and what kind of power they wield around the world. One of the most interesting questions the documentary asks is if a corporation is a legal person, what kind of a person it it? I recently came across a lower resolution version that aired on Canadian TV on archive.org but I the section where I found it has changed and I can't find the new location.
If we had gone open source (proprietary or software libre, either would have been better) we could hack rolled our own patch. But when you go closed source you are at the mercy of the vendor. And THAT is the advantage. Free as 'Liberty to make software soft'.
"Open source" and proprietary software are not the same thing. With Microsoft's software, you had proprietary software. The limitations of proprietary software is what gave your business such a hard time inspecting and improving the programs you were dependant on.
Ironically, your conclusion doesn't even support the philosophy of the open source movement. The open source movement does not talk about the freedoms of free software; the open source movement was designed to move away from talking about software freedom (which the OSI calls "ideological tub-thumping") to talking about practical goals which that movement's founders believed businesses (their chief audience) wanted to hear about more. So instead of talking about all computer users being free to share and modify software, the open source movement's philosophy talks about more people (not necessarily including the users) having source code access so the program can be enhanced faster and less expensively. I understand that you might think you're better off siding with the open source movement's philosophy because your experience came in a business setting, but your conclusion presents an argument supporting the free software movement's philosophy. The two philosophies are not the same. This doesn't make the two movements adversaries (in fact proponents of both philosophies get along well together), it makes them different.
When Valenti's "anti-piracy" tour came by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (as part of Roger Ebert's Overlooked Movie Festival), I too spoke out against Valenti. I was the first person at the mic and after I spoke a number of people came up to me on their own to tell me that what I said was interesting, and that they were glad I spoke out. I don't remember everything I said, but I did touch on the shortcomings of the copyright term extension for preserving commercially unsuccessful works and how the market doesn't seem to be interested in doing this when it costs so much to obtain permission from the copyright holder. I also told Roger Ebert that I hoped he would have a response to Valenti's talk; Lawrence Lessig would make a fine choice. Only one person in the aisle told me he thought I was wrong but unfortunately he didn't elaborate past that, so I don't know what exactly struck him as incorrect (or even if he knows any of the history of what Valenti repeatedly referred to as "piracy").
I had heard Valenti's talk before, so after a while (during the last two questioners) I stepped outside to the hallway. As people left the talk they approached me and asked me questions about the discussion, so I further explained my position on the matter and they told me they appreciated my response. It was one of the most productive set of conversations I had had that week. I made it clear that Valenti was either outright lying (like when he said the EFF wants to destroy copyright but failed to tell the crowd that the EFF has made a copyright license which they encourage others use) or only telling half the story (he talks a lot about "piracy" but he never mentions that William Fox who founded what became 20th Century Fox fled west with illegally obtained and operated equipment--a kind of "piracy" by Valenti's use of the term--thus helping to start the industry that Valenti now lobbies for).
One of the questioners at UIUC also took Valenti to task about fair use, and part of Valenti's lacking response included a dismissal of the public domain (saying that it had no value for him, his clients, or the public). If I could have had another turn at the mic I would have reminded him that one of his organization's most lucrative members, Disney, made a lot of money by building on what's in the public domain and their one-sided support of the public domain makes them appear hypocritical because Disney doesn't want to allow others to build on its work the way it built on the works of so many others. Another questioner asked about a previous Ebertfest moviemaker who had to "pirate" a copy of his own movie in order to get it distributed for home video (DVD, these days) because the studio was unwilling to do this. He took the reels his movie was on after it was shown last year.
The local corporate-friendly newspaper, the News-Gazette, ran a front-page article with a large close-up of Valenti's face. They didn't give any reasonable indication that they understood what many in the crowd were talking about when they raised a number of objections to Valenti. Also, I don't think they ran my letter to the editor which briefly gave the history on which Valenti didn't give the full story.
Neither the blog entry or the Usenet post pointed to mention one critical advantage that the mentioned software has over proprietary alternatives--software freedom. This means a lot to me running a business because I have the freedom to modify the software (which is great when software programmers go away, stop developing their fork of the program, or take their fork in a direction I don't agree with). Then I can share my fork of the software with others (and I do, sometimes for a profit). If the free software community teaches people to value software freedom and not just technical features they will have learned a great reason to stick with free software when free software doesn't offer the best set of features. If all we teach others is to value features and dismiss software freedom then we will lose whatever audience we have gained when a proprietor outcompetes us.
I don't see violent or extravagant writing there. I see thoughtful analysis which ties together the issues of leaving out credit for GNU, choosing Bitkeeper over free software replacements, and ending up with a kernel which is itself non-free but is ironically commonly taken as the symbol of the free software movement. These issues are related because the thought that leads from dismissing software freedom will give rise to encouraging people to make choices based on technical efficiency instead of software freedom, thus resulting in becoming dependant upon software that is not completely free.
Nowhere in the article do I see Bitkeeper described as "evil" and nowhere in your summary do I see you justifying your inaccurate description of RMS' words. To me, it's telling that this article is over a year old and yet we're still seeing the same profound shortcoming--the most popular variant of the OS built to be free includes non-free software.
Slashdot Mirror
The target audience is a critical difference between what happened in the early days of computing and what the open source movement brings to bear. The open source movement targets business with its message because the goal is to help business be built (and that is certainly consistent with the message of Hubbard's article here). Early computer software development was available to anyone who wanted to learn but the goal was not to help build a business. As the first sentence of the open source definition tells us, being "open source" is not just about access to the source code.
It's unfortunate that this article appears in the New York Times because of their role in promoting the invasion of Iraq based on lies (everyone from Judith Miller up the chain of power through Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. at the head of the Times organization should be fired or resign). Thousands and thousands of Iraqis died because of this war based on lies, hundreds of American servicepeople died because of this war based on lies and the Times was a big conveyor of the lies. As a result, all of their articles (even ones which call for reasonable measures like this article does) will be thought of as less than what it could have been.
Listen to the last segment of Democracy Now! today or read this chapter of "The Exception To the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers and the Media That Love Them" and you'll hear an argument for putting a social stamp of reduced value on the New York Times. I would rather people judge all articles in all publications ad-hoc, in a case-by-case basis and then promote those that call for reasonable things (like this article promoting electronic machine source code mostly does) and dismiss those that are lies (like Miller's articles promoting war against Iraq). But I doubt people will somehow become so independant.
It was proper to fire Jayson Blair and his superiors for his lies, but nobody died because of those lies. The Times apology is half-baked and there largely for political sake. At the Times, Sulzberger Jr., Miller, and everyone in between them at the Times still have jobs and the Times is still seen as the imprimateur of high quality journalism. It should be obvious to everyone now that that is shameful and inappropriate.
I wouldn't say the same is true of both ESR and RMS. What RMS says and does is far more sensible than what ESR has been known to stand behind. For instance in this kerfluffle, ESR chimed in with an essay which contained this example:
But to those who know the history of the two movements it comes off oddly, as though ESR were trying to get credit for work he didn't do; to claim that the Emacs text editor was in any way an "open-source project" doesn't jibe with the timeline of what work started when. Emacs was started by RMS for the movement he helped found -- the free software movement. This work and the work of the other two examples ESR gives all occurred before the open source movement began, so it seems like a revisionist view to push aside the important philosophical differences of the two movements. I'm reminded of an essay by fellow open source advocate Mark Webbink (chief lawyer for Red Hat) on software licensing which dishonestly uses the concept of copyleft to break up various licenses for better understanding without giving any credit to the FSF folks or using the word "copyleft" which predates the essay by about 20 years. Torvalds may find some philosophical common ground with the open source movement, but the Free Software Foundation continues to tell us that they stand for a different philosophy than that of the Open Source Initiative.
In another instance, the differences between ESR and RMS were noticed by one Usenet poster (also this article which refers to personal attacks from ESR).
I wanted to thank the two respondents -- Radon Knight and rbulling -- for posting genuinely helpful and substantive replies (I hope you'll forgive me for breaking threading). I have since enabled tap-click on my Fedora Core 2 installation and pointed a friend to how he can enable tap-click on his MacOS X laptop. For those who don't use trackpads, this may seem like a small unimportant thing to talk about but after getting used to using the trackpad this way and then not having it one notices the difference. Here's hoping that trackpad configuration will make its way to the GNOME userland as it has in MacOS X.
I just upgraded my FC1 installation to FC2. What I'm noticing is how many things have been improved but not to the point where I can say that I've used no better desktop systems. Unfortunately the problems I notice exist in virtually every GNU/Linux distribution, so they don't all have to do with FC2 per se. A little about me: I am a programmer and quite familiar with the benefits of having software freedom. I understand a lot of the underlying technical issues for making an OS that "just works". As I grow older I no longer care about following the details. My attention turns toward bigger picture items now, like how can I easily make backups of my documents, how can I easily uninstall software, how can I easily move from one application to its competitor.
I am becoming a firm believer in clean installs rather than upgrades because upgrades so often just don't work. No operaing system provides everything you need, so people routinely install third-party software and even on MacOS X (which is touted as being far simpler and far more unified, hence far better for the desktop user) I have not yet known anyone to be able to avoid problems with system upgrades. Clean installs also offer people a chance to do something they too often never do: make backups.
Some of the major issues I've come across: touch-click trackpad support is gone (where you can touch the trackpad twice in succession as an alternative way of clicking the left mouse button). I never knew how much I missed it until I tried a friend's Apple iBook running MacOS X which does not have it and has no readily apparent way to turn this on. I thought this feature would be there in FC2 final release (it wasn't there in prereleases) and it apparently isn't there. I've been told that this is a Linux kernal feature so if I want the feature back I would have to become out of sync with kernel upgrades supplied by the Fedora Core project and lose the ability to easily upgrade my kernel via FC's up2date. I don't care how easy it is to recompile a kernel once you've gotten the swing of it, I've got much more important issues on my plate and, while I appreciate the software freedom aspect of the Linux kernal, I value my time; I value being able to get on with what I use a computer to do. I'm looking to make things easier on myself, not introduce more maintenance.
The sound system in GNU/Linux is still not unified and smoothly working. I still can't be sure that I can simultaneously play bzflag while listening to some Ogg Vorbis files (or a streamed downloaded) with XMMS or Rhythmbox. On other systems (like later versions of NeXTSTEP and most if not all versions of MacOS X), sound is easy to use and simultaneous sound sources work right out of the box. This is one area of desktop usage where I am content to dissuade letting a thousand flowers bloom (in terms of what is shipped to the end-user) because I would prefer instead to have a single simple (no-setup-needed, it just works right out of the box) sound system. But I don't know (or care to learn) the technical details which prevent this from working smoothly. I figure that this is something that should be provided by any distribution. Recording sound is also a mess: the GNOME sound recorder program still crashes in such a way that no Bug Buddy is brought up to help me easily submit a crash report to the developers and there are way too many sliders on the sound volume panel to know what I want to do without having to learn grotty details about something I should be able to just use. I doubt this situation would remain acceptable if measured against its competition on other operating systems.
I understand that some users want e-mail and calendar integration, so Evolution looks like an attractive program. I think more users want trainable spam filtering and I don't see where Evolution 1.4 (the version of Evolution I got with FC2) provides trainable spam filtering. So Evolution is a non-starter for me. I'll take Mozilla mail or Thunderbird over Evolution because I don't co
From the paper:
Doesn't Cygnus' work prove this to be not true? Brad Kuhn, executive director of the FSF, recently came to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and gave a talk about free software. Kuhn mentioned one or two other consulting firms like Cygnus which did GCC work. He said that one of them was booked for a long time in advance (a year, if I recall correctly -- I don't have a transcript of his talk to refer to) because they were in such heavy demand. So it seems to me that GCC is quite extensible and ready for improvement by dedicated hackers. Difficulty of doing the work is one thing, but at least GCC can be legally shared and modified (unlike proprietary compilers).
It also seems unfair to not recognize that GCC was conceieved and originally written by and for free software hackers (first among them RMS, if I recall correctly) for the free software movement years before the open source movement started. I'm guessing that Dr. Wilson wouldn't like his work being credited for a movement that doesn't stand for the same values years after his work was started. RMS sure doesn't like that and today's GCC does build on his work. The open source movement has done a lot to bring people to software freedom, and I'm really grateful for all that hard work, but we're not going to be able to properly interpret history if we don't understand what "open source" and "free software" stand for and then give credit where credit is due.
That's a virtually nil statement -- I imagine most software is available on such terms. If I'm willing to give up my software freedom, I could sign an NDA with a variety of businesses and then inspect and modify the source code to a variety of non-free programs. Obviously software freedom is not satisfied by any NDA. Furthermore, I am aware of no free software license that requires a signature.
With their typical prescience, the FSF discussed this issue. Read the transcript of Eben Moglen's talk or listen to the talk and you'll find this segment about one hour into the talk (during the Q&A section):
Sage words when one's software's source code history is being questioned.
If mplayer did this on non-i386-compatible platforms, and if it did this with a program for which there was complete corresponding source code available under a free software license, I'd say you have made an excellent point. However, I believe that the only reason mplayer plays RealMedia is because mplayer calls the same library Real's player does. Which makes mplayer little more than an alternative RealMedia front-end; the library which does the actual decoding work is no more trustworthy because it being called by mplayer than if it were called by Real's own front-end.
When mplayer is just another RealMedia front-end, mplayer's programmers effectively become a buttress of the RealNetworks monopoly (to borrow an excellent phrase from the FSF). This is precisely the point I was warning against in another thread.
It's interesting that this story is pitched as "100% Open Source" because that highlights the difference between open source and free software. This is a perfect example of how the open source movement is not about giving all people (including users) software freedom; this is a player program that depends on an uninspectable, unmodifyable, unportable binary core. This program in its entirety is being pitched as "100% Open Source" -- a clear invitation to become dependant upon RealNetworks for getting updates to the meaningful part of the player without regard to what the community has shown a predilection for doing time and again (in fact, just recently we had a front-page Slashdot story about how the Linux kernal was ported to yet another CPU, thus expanding its popularity while retaining and underlining the importance of software freedom).
Innovation like this underscores the need for relying on free software (or, put differently, the problem with relying or recommending non-free software). It's an easy trap to get into when you use an i386 GNU/Linux distribution (as most GNU/Linux users do, I suspect) because there are so many opportunities to get hardware that only fully work with non-free software (like nVidia video cards that require non-free kernel driver software to operate fully). When you become dependent on non-free software you lose portability which prevents easily moving to interesting hardware like this one. Non-free video and audio codecs are similar; if you base your work on some Microsoft library for decoding audio or video you won't easily be able to read those files on a non-i386 platform.
Software proprietors won't supply the wide range of support the free software community does. Software proprietors won't give you the power to provide your own support or buy it from programmers and sysadmins in the free marketplace.
While I'll agree that American justice is too often based on who can pay for it, I take issue with the suggestion that the market will somehow self-compensate for this shortcoming.
For every SCO (where I'll assume that you're ultimately correct that SCO will "lose" by some reasonable definition), there are far larger corporations that continue to not "lose" in any serious way; their misdeeds go unpunished and unnoticed. Edwin Black showed how the Nazis would not have been nearly as effective without the help of IBM and Tom Watson Sr.; I don't think Union Carbide's actions in Bhopal have been taken seriously by the US or international investors; tobacco corporations sell carcinogens with impunity to this day. These actions involve killing people or at the least making their lives seriously bad. Watch "The Corporation" (a new documentary in theatres now) for more examples of how unchecked corporate power leads to a society built on chasing profit and denying importance to anything else like people's lives and well-being.
I think you've hit a critical issue. Sadly many on Slashdot react favorably to convenience and entertainment at any price. So long as Apple provides something deemed worthy and wraps it up in a convenient package, we need not get into discussing more important issues of how business interests are not always compatible with social interests or scientific interests (put differently, we should all shoehorn our arguments into one that justifies and reifies the marketplace, never challenges it). Mention things like software freedom or not doing business with businesses that treat you poorly and suddenly you're taking issue with something sacrosanct. This also comes up when movies are discussed -- discuss a new movie coming out and how impressive the special effects are or how to get a copy of the ad (pardon me, "trailer") in a proprietary format and your contribution is moderated as informative. Bring up how that same studio works to stifle your ability to express yourself freely through increasing the scope or duration of copyright law (or exporting that copyright law internationally through trade agreements), and you're reminding people of the truth at a time they'd rather pretend the world was different.
I had a similar experience with a recent attempt to install Debian. I've been using Fedora Core 1 since it came out and a colleague said I should try Debian. I want very much to not have to follow technical issues anymore, I'm simply tired of doing things that way. I don't want to give up my software freedom and I don't think I should have to. So I tried installing like a novice would do. My previous experience with Debian was fine (Debian Potato) but the installer was nowhere near what a novice should be expected to deal with.
/dev/dsp1, sound config is not easy and should not be necessary at all for the end-user, generally not enough focus on apps that "just work" and not enough work on documentation and too much focus on adding silly features that appeal to a few geeks and make the app hard to use).
Debian's installer (which appears to be textual, although in a lot of languages that look like they're using the right glyphs) is still not very good. Fedora Core's installer was a breeze to deal with (the graphics for things really do make things easier to handle and navigate). Not only was Debian's installer still asking questions it didn't really need to ask (my hostname? I know what this means, but this is far too technical and not completely necessary since my DHCP server dictates my hostname, also other GNU/Linux installers don't do this) but the disk partitioner isn't as nice as the Red Hat/Fedora Core's partitioning interface.
The showstopper for me was the dodgy networking interface software--the installer appears to proceed along two stages: the stage where you boot off the CD, and the stage after the minimal system has installed and the rest of the system is downloaded from Debian servers on the Internet. The first stage appeared to go well, identifying my wireless and wired networking hardware.
The second stage did not recognize my networking hardware and then the installer asked me if I wanted to configure PPP. There was no apparent way to tell it that I wanted it to use the same interface it had just used before rebooting and to go get Debian packages using that interface. I don't need PPP at all. I'm sure if I really cared more about this issue I could have done something to fix this and keep installing, but I wanted to go through this as a novice might, not as a longtime Unix user with some years of experience using the Linux kernal.
Given this constraint, I figured I had wiped a hard drive for nothing. I reinstalled Fedora Core 1, updated it, and then kept using the machine. FC1 doesn't identify my hardware correctly (kudzu thinks I am removing and reinstalling my wireless device), the network configuration profiles don't work correctly (I can't use the GUI to remove profiles or make a profile for an unencrypted wireless network connection and also have one with a WEP key), and the USB hotplug support is lacking (USB hard drive, USB key, and Griffin iMic support are not really working smoothly enough for novices to use). However the vast majority of the system works well enough for me to do a lot of real work. Other things that don't work well are things that will not work well in other distributions too (/dev device labels are a sign of a programmer's interface, not a user's interface -- use device brand names instead so I see "iMic" never
That really depends on what software you install and run. If you run non-free software, you can't be sure what it is doing. It doesn't matter if this is non-free kernal modules or userspace applications like RealPlayer, Netscape, and Opera. An entirely free software system gives you the freedom to inspect your system (in addition to other freedoms which are also valuable) and change it to suit your needs. It's up to you to decide what's more valuable to you--the freedoms of free software, or the allure of non-free software.
This is not the open source movement's message. Open source is far more compatible with business interests, in fact the whole movement was defined to be more friendly to businesses. The reason they push aside software freedom is because the founders of the open source movement believed that "free software" made business leaders feel uncomfortable. So the open source movement founders not only dropped the phrase "free software", they also adopted a similar but more lax set of rules by which they would judge licenses. As a result, licenses that don't qualify as "free software" can (and some do) qualify as "open source". One is wise to be careful when evaluating licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative that they don't adversely affect your ability to continue developing your own software (such as having to choose between defending patents and licensing software, like the early APSLs did; or making embrace-and-extend possible, because the OSI has no criteria that is comparable to copyleft).
The charge of being a "religion" is nonsense, even when it is lobbed against the free software movement. It shows a lack of appreciation for what religions are and what the free software movement has been working on achieving since 1984. Nobody in the free software movement frames their argument in religious terms, in fact I've seen RMS take pains to avoid such reference. Their argument is based on what kind of society we want to live in -- one that caters to business interests or one where we and businesses can work as equals to give us all the freedom to make our computers do what we want them to do. I recommend you read the essay from the FSF that elaborates on the differences between the two movements and then reconsider the arguments the two movements are making.
The open source movement did not exist at the time the GPL, copyleft, the free software movement, and the GNU project started. It seems odd, therefore, to give credit to a movement that had nothing to do with creating these documents and forming these ideas. As it stands, you appear to be using the terms "open source" and "free software" interchangably, as though they refer to the same thing. However the open source movement stands for a different philosophy than the free software movement.
How ironic that your demand to give GNU no credit at all is worded so strongly. The FSF asks you to give GNU a share of the credit, it is not a demand. Lots of people (including Debian, one of the most respected GNU/Linux distributions) choose to do so out of respect for creating the free software community and the GNU General Public License. This is not a trademark infringement.
GNU is an operating system, it was designed to be so right from the start, just as the Linux kernal was designed to be a kernal from the start. Now you can run GNU without the Linux kernal; there are variants of GNU running with a NetBSD kernal and the official GNU running with the HURD kernal replacement. Neither of these are currently as popular as the variant of GNU with the Linux kernal, but they exist and are being developed. Calling things what they are is more technically accurate and it's reasonable to call works by the names their creators gave them. Giving credit where credit is due is a good thing to do.
Large scale projects routinely produce something less than desirable; this is a part of any creative process. I'm sure nobody knows what major flaws exist better than GIMP hackers (similarly, I'm sure Photoshop's developers can point out big flaws with Photoshop). I don't mind repeating flaws or bringing them to wider public attention, but I get no impression that this reviewer is aware of the process by which free software is developed and how that process includes the users far more than proprietary alternatives.
Also, along the lines of "why would people [bother]?", people bother because not everyone wants to become dependant upon a corporation that treats us like crap (remember whose actions held Dmitry Sklyarov in US jail?). Some people want software freedom and are willing to work to get it.
That this person paid for support they're not getting is unfortunate but that is just one firm from whom they could have bought support. The nice thing about a free market is that you can have multiple vendors competing for your business. Monopolies don't make this possible, software freedom does. All proprietary software are monopolies.
The font rendering demonstration--is that the result of not being able to leverage Apple's patented font rendering technology or a bonafide GIMP flaw? If the former, we see the same lack of software freedom hobbling the ability to provide competition. If it's the latter, is this flaw seen on other platforms too? I'm not against addressing real flaws, I'm against not having enough information with which to assess the problem.
How much of the problems noted have to do with the artist and not the program? Jimmac produces impressive work using The GIMP. How long did Jimmac spend with The GIMP and what difficulties does a long-time user see? This input would be valuable to know as well.
The GIMP needs work, no doubt, but so many points in this review leave me with more questions that I am left with a bad impression overall. I look forward to further GIMP improvements and revised reviews that track the progress of the GIMP.
What matters here is the terms of the license under which you or your organization had to operate. The same program would not simultaneously be licensed to you under a proprietary license (a license which limits modification or distribution or places such strong barriers to modification and distribution that you can't do it whenever you want and for whatever reason you want) and another license which qualified as being open source or free software. The same program might be licensed to you under different terms than that same program is licensed to others.
Microsoft's software, for example, is proprietary for most of their licensees while other licensees pay them enough to see and modify the source code. The license a typical Microsoft licensee gets is considerably more restrictive than someone willing to negotiate another license with Microsoft. Multiple licenses for the same programs exist, but only one applies to a particular licensee at once.
Because that's all they see to compete on; Microsoft makes their arguments from a similar framing of the issue when they compare OpenOffice.org to Microsoft Office or various GNU/Linux distributions to Microsoft Windows. They never discuss the value of the freedoms to share and modify software. The freedoms of free software are actually what is being leveraged in our community, but anyone who only knows to talk about price will never see software freedom as advantageous. This isn't unusual, economists are well known to not discriminate or evaluate based on things they cannot quantify. Freedom and ethical behavior are two of those things.
If you want to see more of the outcome of the myth of rational economic acting or various adverse outcomes which are not assigned economic value, I recommend "The Corporation"--a documentary which examines how corporations came to be and what kind of power they wield around the world. One of the most interesting questions the documentary asks is if a corporation is a legal person, what kind of a person it it? I recently came across a lower resolution version that aired on Canadian TV on archive.org but I the section where I found it has changed and I can't find the new location.
"Open source" and proprietary software are not the same thing. With Microsoft's software, you had proprietary software. The limitations of proprietary software is what gave your business such a hard time inspecting and improving the programs you were dependant on.
Ironically, your conclusion doesn't even support the philosophy of the open source movement. The open source movement does not talk about the freedoms of free software; the open source movement was designed to move away from talking about software freedom (which the OSI calls "ideological tub-thumping") to talking about practical goals which that movement's founders believed businesses (their chief audience) wanted to hear about more. So instead of talking about all computer users being free to share and modify software, the open source movement's philosophy talks about more people (not necessarily including the users) having source code access so the program can be enhanced faster and less expensively. I understand that you might think you're better off siding with the open source movement's philosophy because your experience came in a business setting, but your conclusion presents an argument supporting the free software movement's philosophy. The two philosophies are not the same. This doesn't make the two movements adversaries (in fact proponents of both philosophies get along well together), it makes them different.
When Valenti's "anti-piracy" tour came by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (as part of Roger Ebert's Overlooked Movie Festival), I too spoke out against Valenti. I was the first person at the mic and after I spoke a number of people came up to me on their own to tell me that what I said was interesting, and that they were glad I spoke out. I don't remember everything I said, but I did touch on the shortcomings of the copyright term extension for preserving commercially unsuccessful works and how the market doesn't seem to be interested in doing this when it costs so much to obtain permission from the copyright holder. I also told Roger Ebert that I hoped he would have a response to Valenti's talk; Lawrence Lessig would make a fine choice. Only one person in the aisle told me he thought I was wrong but unfortunately he didn't elaborate past that, so I don't know what exactly struck him as incorrect (or even if he knows any of the history of what Valenti repeatedly referred to as "piracy").
I had heard Valenti's talk before, so after a while (during the last two questioners) I stepped outside to the hallway. As people left the talk they approached me and asked me questions about the discussion, so I further explained my position on the matter and they told me they appreciated my response. It was one of the most productive set of conversations I had had that week. I made it clear that Valenti was either outright lying (like when he said the EFF wants to destroy copyright but failed to tell the crowd that the EFF has made a copyright license which they encourage others use) or only telling half the story (he talks a lot about "piracy" but he never mentions that William Fox who founded what became 20th Century Fox fled west with illegally obtained and operated equipment--a kind of "piracy" by Valenti's use of the term--thus helping to start the industry that Valenti now lobbies for).
One of the questioners at UIUC also took Valenti to task about fair use, and part of Valenti's lacking response included a dismissal of the public domain (saying that it had no value for him, his clients, or the public). If I could have had another turn at the mic I would have reminded him that one of his organization's most lucrative members, Disney, made a lot of money by building on what's in the public domain and their one-sided support of the public domain makes them appear hypocritical because Disney doesn't want to allow others to build on its work the way it built on the works of so many others. Another questioner asked about a previous Ebertfest moviemaker who had to "pirate" a copy of his own movie in order to get it distributed for home video (DVD, these days) because the studio was unwilling to do this. He took the reels his movie was on after it was shown last year.
The local corporate-friendly newspaper, the News-Gazette, ran a front-page article with a large close-up of Valenti's face. They didn't give any reasonable indication that they understood what many in the crowd were talking about when they raised a number of objections to Valenti. Also, I don't think they ran my letter to the editor which briefly gave the history on which Valenti didn't give the full story.
Neither the blog entry or the Usenet post pointed to mention one critical advantage that the mentioned software has over proprietary alternatives--software freedom. This means a lot to me running a business because I have the freedom to modify the software (which is great when software programmers go away, stop developing their fork of the program, or take their fork in a direction I don't agree with). Then I can share my fork of the software with others (and I do, sometimes for a profit). If the free software community teaches people to value software freedom and not just technical features they will have learned a great reason to stick with free software when free software doesn't offer the best set of features. If all we teach others is to value features and dismiss software freedom then we will lose whatever audience we have gained when a proprietor outcompetes us.
I don't see violent or extravagant writing there. I see thoughtful analysis which ties together the issues of leaving out credit for GNU, choosing Bitkeeper over free software replacements, and ending up with a kernel which is itself non-free but is ironically commonly taken as the symbol of the free software movement. These issues are related because the thought that leads from dismissing software freedom will give rise to encouraging people to make choices based on technical efficiency instead of software freedom, thus resulting in becoming dependant upon software that is not completely free.
Nowhere in the article do I see Bitkeeper described as "evil" and nowhere in your summary do I see you justifying your inaccurate description of RMS' words. To me, it's telling that this article is over a year old and yet we're still seeing the same profound shortcoming--the most popular variant of the OS built to be free includes non-free software.