One thing that all these so-called intellectuals fail to take into account in their calls for revolution, is the fact that authors - people who actually take the time to sit down and write, for their readers, something worth reading - have a right to not have their works consistently and persistently changed.
The right to not have their works consistently and persistently changed -- where does it come from? It's possible that such a right exist, but if it does I'd like to know on what grounds. (I'm assuming we're talking about moral rights, not legal ones. I'm also assume you mean they have that right with respect to every copy of the work, not just the first one or the ones the author controls.)
The right to be extends to authors. If I have published something, I have a right to not have that thing be constantly changed and altered by the world at large.
I'd agree that each individual has the right to (try to) be an author. The "right to not have that thing be constantly changed and altered by the world at large" does not follow from the right to be an author (and you didn't say it did), but (again) where does this right come from?
People who have something to say, have a right to be heard. That right includes the stipulation that, if you are relaying what someone has to say about something, to someone else, you have a responsibility not to alter that work.
A right to be heard places the responsibilty to listen on the rest of the world. No such right can exist. (But a right to free speech, which places upon the rest of the world the responsibility of not hindering you from speaking without proper grounds probably does exist). I'd agree that one shouldn't alter someones message when relaying it, but not because the writer/sayer of the message has rights with regard to the content of the message, but because the relayer has a duty not to lie (most of the time), and that includes not liying about the sender of a message or it's content. The relayer also has a reponsibility to keep his (implicit) promise to the sender to deliver the message unaltered, and so on...
Its an absolute, and we all know how impossible they can be, but change for the sake of change is destructive...
The rights you suggested are not absolute (that is the absolute you'e talking about, right?), they're a definite maybe. Change for the sake of change is pretty useless, yeah.
Animals (most of them anyway) aren't ours to make food, clothes or hard-drives from. It's pretty amazing what "products" parts of the dead end up in... I hope this technology never makes it out of the lab.
You don't recall very correcty: Ogg (not OGG, it's not an acronym) is a container format, replacing AVI. Theora is a video codec, replacing XviD/whatever. Also, AVI files cannot have Ogg sound tracks since Ogg is not a audio codec. I believe avi has it's own framing for vorbis (through OggDS).
I don't know if it's of any interrest to you, but since vorbis-tools-1.0.1 oggenc can take flac input, so you really only need to encode to flac and then you can very easily reencode these to vorbis (tags preserved!) when you need it.
Perhaps the only competitor of rock climbing for the canonical geek sport, cycling
Is there any sort of data to back up the claim that either rock climbing or bicycling is a popular among geeks? Among the geeks I know some sort of martial arts is far more common that rock climbing or cycling (i.e. I don't know anyone who climbs or cycles, but many who do martial arts).
Errr, perhaps they could host the.torrent files, if the.torrent is > 5 MB... which it's never (~30 KB is normal). As for the content, freecache won't help a bit, since it caches files over http and the bittorrent data stream isn't just a file request over http (IIRC, only the negotiations are done over http).
So I wanna bet as much money as you have that this won't be used for seeding torrents.
Funny you should say that, I always enjoyed watching defrag while I was still using windows. Sort of like a lava lamp. I've even concidered writing a defrag-emulator to relive the joy of it:)
What I'd like is a file system for which there is actually a defrag-tool. Sure, ext2/3 may try to reduce fragmentation as much as possible, but when it happens (as is likely when you have a near-full disk) you've got little or no way of fixing it. Or actually there is a defrag tool for ext2 (not ext3) but my experiences with it are not the best -- it took forever and I don't know that it actually did anything to the disk (fdisk didn't report a 0% fragmentation level afterwards anyway).
Alot of people do have a above-modem connection, but 10/100 definitely isn't the norm. Maybe for people like me at student dorms, but there are few commercial ISPs that give that much bandwidth (and most give less up than down which mean for sharing information it's severly limited). My guess is most people who have "broadband" have ADSL (which isn't very fast) or 1-2 Mbit. Anyway, 10 Mbit for everyone would be a reasonable start and alot of people are still on modem (some by choice of course).
A free society is one where the people control the government in an indrect way.... This isn't up for debate, this is what a free country means.
Oh, and why do you get to define what a free country means? Perhaps the word "free country" is often used to mean a country having representative democracy, but that the population of those countries are actually free? What if all the choices are the same, or if the barrier to voting is so high that not all people can afford to cast their vote? Even in a representive democracy where everyone votes, it's still the dictatorship of the majority. This may be a reasonable compromise (although I think there are better alternatives), but that doesn't make the system "free".
Furthermore, having the freedom of {speach,movement,whatever} doesn't automatically mean that you're free or have control over your life since the most important power is weilded not by government, but by corporations.
I see (errr, hear maybe) AC3 audio in movies I download quite often. Now the lib that handles this seems to be A52. Why is this -- is AC3 and A52 the same thing? Is AAC also the same thing or is it unrelated?
The site is/.ed, but from what I can make out from the front page, this is making IE CSS standards compliant. Does it also work some magic to make it compliant with HTML (or even better, XHTML) standards (which would be far more useful), or is that just impossible?
In any event, this may allow me to actually use some CSS 2, a standard that was published in May 1998 (almost 6 years ago!) and still isn't (fully) supported by the leading browser in the world...
Water cannot be a "basic social right." By definition, water must be purified by someone. Someone must do work to produce drinkable water. Therefore, water is a product for a consumer.
Although water costs money to clean and transport it is a basic social right to have access to it. It does not follow that something is a product for a consumer just because it takes work to be produced. We can commoditise things that cost money, examples would be water, public transportation and health care. Although all three cost money they have been commoditised to the point where they are free or affordable by all, and it's viewed as a social right to have them. The same can be true for software. Although it will take resources to produce and someone will have to pay, we can make it a commodity item, available to all regardless of social status. A precondition would of course be shelter, electricity and maybe internet, so perhaps that should a higher priority right now.
I would cut and paste the story here, but it's copyrighted.
Errr... copyright isn't the same as not being allowed to make a copy, it means the copyright holder decides who can make a copy, and this time he decided you could make a copy.
"Copyright 1996 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved."
No, I don't see it as any better when women dominate males than the other way around. The problem lies in that the norm is the male being the dominator. Porno isn't a bad thing per definition, but I think in its current state it's only helping to enfore the patriarchy and keeping men and women separated. If people want to do the things that happens in porno (anal, facials, whatever) at home that's no problem, but it's not good that majority of porno is all the same and gives a severly distorted view on sexuality.
Well you're not watching what I'm watching... I've seen all sorts of stuff where women are the central objects of domination, including of course lesbian action...
Correct, not all porn is of the same character. As for lesbian porn, the basic idea is that men should fantisise about having two women at the same time, and we all know that what a pair of lesbians really wants to do is pleasure a man, right? Besides, when did you ever see two men getting it on in the middle of a "normal" porno movie? No, female homosexuals are something cute and male homosexuals are something strange to put on a different shelf.
the market of supply and demand is there, people get paid to do it, stop calling it exploitation for crying out loud! If you're not comfortable with it, you don't have to watch it, condone it, or pay for it.
Your capitalist point of view is too simplistic. The economical sustainability of an industry is completely irrelevant to its ethical implications or whether or not someone is exploited. Just take a look at the meat industry, or any of the industries which uses underpayed workers in the third world (bordering to slavery sometimes) to see that economics and ethics have nothing to do with each other. I'm not comfortable with it, I don't watch it, I don't condone it and I don't pay for. But I'm not going to shut up about it.
This is an offtopic rant, but I must object to this posting. Colored ASCII movies is cool of course, but what has porn got to do with anything?
You have toyed around with aalib or maybe you use it all the time to watch your pr0n:)
Is the assumption that a slashdot reader watches porn? I must point out that not all do, and that porn is not OK. Porn is not just an innocent fantasy, because real people (men and women) are being exploited in this industry where surface is everything and people are only instruments to give you and orgasm and the porno company money. It doesn't matter if you're paying for it, you're still lending your support to it.
Even if there were indie porn it still wouldn't be ok as long as the value system where the male orgasm is the center of the universe is in place -- ask yourself when last you saw porn where the man is licking away between the womans legs with an obedient look on his face, and where the woman rushes to squirt the man in some odd place as the orgasm comes closer, the man smiling not getting an orgasm of his own.
I can't stop anyone from watching their "pr0n", but don't make that assumption about all of us!
should the FSF (GNU project) sue SCO for license violation?
No, this is about Linux, not GNU or the FSF.
Another post suggested that "IBM/FSF/REDHAT/SAMBA/WHOEVER" should sue SCO, but the FSF surely can't, and Samba only could if they have some stuff in the kernel (perhaps they do, I don't know.
[rant] It's not ideal to call any system that uses Linux "Linux". It confuses a part of the system for the whole and now has some people believing the whole operating system is "in danger" from SCO's sillyness. Linux is Linux, GNU is GNU and GNU/Linux is both, or at the very least, Linux isn't both. [end rant]
The only people who can sue here are kernel contributors. The FSF has no buisness in this except perhaps as legal advice. They "just" provide the license, and have no say over projects that use it (e.g. Linux).
I wish FSF would spend more time to promote current leaders of open source and encourage others to follow in their footsteps. But all I see on their page is critisism:
The FSF won't promote anything "open source" -- it's the Free Software Foundation. But anyway, you want the FSF to help promote leaders of FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) projects? I guess that might sound cool, and they do in their own little way with the annual Free Software Awards. However, this isn't what the FSF is for. The FSF provides the licenses, has lawyers if you need them, provides funding for the GNU project and so on. Yes, the FSF are very much concerned with the philosophy of it all, and "ideological purity" is keeping the freedom of software in the first room. I guess sometimes the tone and message coming from the FSF gets a bit tiring, but there's no reason you have to be "ideologically pure" or always follow their advice. It's probably a very good thing that we have the FSF's hard-line approach and OSI's apolitcal, more pragmatic approach balancing each other.
Personally, I do think the FSF and RMS are the perfect leaders, because like them, I tend to think about things politically and idelogically. The line that the OSI is driving -- "how do we make this appealing do decision-makers in the board-rooms" -- doesn't appeal to me at all.
That's interresting. I hate the windows buttons too, not because they do anything, but because they remind me of that other operating system.
In fact, I dislike them so much that just earlier today I took them off and used that stuff you use to polish wood (sorry, I'm not an english native speaker, so I don't know the word for swedish "sandpapper"). Anyway, now they're just gray buttons, so perhaps now I can bind them in fluxbox without feeling bad about pressing the evilOS-button:)
I know little about decompilation or these tables you talk about. But more generally, wouldn't it be simple to modify a debugger (say, gdb) to follow execution and actually analyse the calls that are actually made. If there's a security hole size 10 in a function which is hardly ever called, that wouldn't be as serious as a size 4 security hole in the main program loop.
Or actually, come to think of it... a security hole is not just a bug -- the bigger the hole the bigger the problem as the attacker would find a way to have that code executed no matter where in the code it is.
You make some very good points, some of which I have to admit I conciously ignore for the time being, because I _want_ to believe.
Anyway, I'll try to reply to some things you said.
When you make something non-existant, you destroy or remove it. I stated this and you reaffirmed it.
Yes, except you claimed he wanted to destroy people who made money on software, and I claim he wants to destroy those making proprietary software. You claim that it's mostly the same thing, and perhaps to an extent obliterating proprietary software will make writing software less profitable, but that's a side effect, not the goal. The way you initially phrased it made it seem like RMS was like "gaah, you can't make money you filthy hoarder! I hate you and I hate the world. Everyone has to be a waiter!" I don't know, maybe RMS really does hate some makers of proprietary software, but not because they make money. Think for a minute that the richest people in the world have become rich by writing and selling proprietary software. Doesn't that seem odd? In other words, making software a less profitable buisness isn't as much destroying as it would be bringing it down to a sane level.
About the "free-as-in-freedom will always mean free-as-in-beer". You're certainly right that it's a hell of a lot harder selling something if it's available at no cost somewhere else. There's the classical argument that you sell manuals, services and such, but as you say it only works for certain sorts of software. For example games would be darn close impossible to finance if you didn't charge for the actual software, and I'm not sure we will ever see alot of really high quality games released as free software. To be honest, I don't really know what to say other than that freedom comes first, practical "inconvenice" (like not having a job) later. If making all software free means that less programmers will be able to make a living of their craft, that's what will happen.
In just over a month I'll be starting a 4½ year education (computer science & engineering) with the end of making a living writing or supporting free software. If I can't do that, I don't know if I'd want to write proprietary software, I feel stronly against it right now. Yes, it's idealistic, but I am also a vegetarian and a wannabe socialist/marxist/whatever, so that's the way I am. Some people will inevitably say "that's not the way the world works", and perhaps rightly so. The world doesn't currently work the way I'd like it to, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to accept it as it is. Free Software is political, I don't try to deny that.
Stallman actively seeks to destroy anyone that wants to get paid for writing software
That statement is simply laughable -- you clearly have never listened to RMS speak, or read any of his writings...
RMS (and alot of his followers, me included) seeks to make proprietary software obsolete and non-existent. Does mean that noone can charge for software? No, it simply means that all software would be free as in freedom, price is mostly irrelevant. Does it mean that all software would be forced out into the open for everyones grabbing? No, you're perfectly entitled to write your own private software and not show it to anyone. You're equally entitled to make a private branch of Emacs and do whith it what you will as long as you don't distribute.
(he spins it as "no one should be forced to pay for software", "information wants to be free", etc.)
Oh please... He would probably say "all users of software should have certain freedoms" or "proprietatry software shouldn't exist because it keeps users divided and helpless". Good luck finding a reference to RMS saying that "information wants to be free". Personally, I think it's a misdirected thing for anyone to say, because information doesn't want anything -- people do. I want _some_ information to be free (software for example), but I hardly think that information about my private life should be freely available.
Stallman will do anything if it means that his vision of free software (his "final solution" if you will) will be realized.
Perhaps. I think it's beyond great that he puts in as much effort as he does. Without him, we would have substantially less freedom in the software world today. You don't need to agree with his goals, but at least don't lie about them.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I haven't read the book
The right to not have their works consistently and persistently changed -- where does it come from? It's possible that such a right exist, but if it does I'd like to know on what grounds. (I'm assuming we're talking about moral rights, not legal ones. I'm also assume you mean they have that right with respect to every copy of the work, not just the first one or the ones the author controls.)
I'd agree that each individual has the right to (try to) be an author. The "right to not have that thing be constantly changed and altered by the world at large" does not follow from the right to be an author (and you didn't say it did), but (again) where does this right come from?
A right to be heard places the responsibilty to listen on the rest of the world. No such right can exist. (But a right to free speech, which places upon the rest of the world the responsibility of not hindering you from speaking without proper grounds probably does exist). I'd agree that one shouldn't alter someones message when relaying it, but not because the writer/sayer of the message has rights with regard to the content of the message, but because the relayer has a duty not to lie (most of the time), and that includes not liying about the sender of a message or it's content. The relayer also has a reponsibility to keep his (implicit) promise to the sender to deliver the message unaltered, and so on...
The rights you suggested are not absolute (that is the absolute you'e talking about, right?), they're a definite maybe. Change for the sake of change is pretty useless, yeah.
Animals (most of them anyway) aren't ours to make food, clothes or hard-drives from. It's pretty amazing what "products" parts of the dead end up in... I hope this technology never makes it out of the lab.
You don't recall very correcty: Ogg (not OGG, it's not an acronym) is a container format, replacing AVI. Theora is a video codec, replacing XviD/whatever. Also, AVI files cannot have Ogg sound tracks since Ogg is not a audio codec. I believe avi has it's own framing for vorbis (through OggDS).
I don't know if it's of any interrest to you, but since vorbis-tools-1.0.1 oggenc can take flac input, so you really only need to encode to flac and then you can very easily reencode these to vorbis (tags preserved!) when you need it.
Is there any sort of data to back up the claim that either rock climbing or bicycling is a popular among geeks? Among the geeks I know some sort of martial arts is far more common that rock climbing or cycling (i.e. I don't know anyone who climbs or cycles, but many who do martial arts).
Errr, perhaps they could host the .torrent files, if the .torrent is > 5 MB... which it's never (~30 KB is normal). As for the content, freecache won't help a bit, since it caches files over http and the bittorrent data stream isn't just a file request over http (IIRC, only the negotiations are done over http).
So I wanna bet as much money as you have that this won't be used for seeding torrents.
Funny you should say that, I always enjoyed watching defrag while I was still using windows. Sort of like a lava lamp. I've even concidered writing a defrag-emulator to relive the joy of it :)
What I'd like is a file system for which there is actually a defrag-tool. Sure, ext2/3 may try to reduce fragmentation as much as possible, but when it happens (as is likely when you have a near-full disk) you've got little or no way of fixing it. Or actually there is a defrag tool for ext2 (not ext3) but my experiences with it are not the best -- it took forever and I don't know that it actually did anything to the disk (fdisk didn't report a 0% fragmentation level afterwards anyway).
Alot of people do have a above-modem connection, but 10/100 definitely isn't the norm. Maybe for people like me at student dorms, but there are few commercial ISPs that give that much bandwidth (and most give less up than down which mean for sharing information it's severly limited). My guess is most people who have "broadband" have ADSL (which isn't very fast) or 1-2 Mbit. Anyway, 10 Mbit for everyone would be a reasonable start and alot of people are still on modem (some by choice of course).
A free society is one where the people control the government in an indrect way. ... This isn't up for debate, this is what a free country means.
Oh, and why do you get to define what a free country means? Perhaps the word "free country" is often used to mean a country having representative democracy, but that the population of those countries are actually free? What if all the choices are the same, or if the barrier to voting is so high that not all people can afford to cast their vote? Even in a representive democracy where everyone votes, it's still the dictatorship of the majority. This may be a reasonable compromise (although I think there are better alternatives), but that doesn't make the system "free".
Furthermore, having the freedom of {speach,movement,whatever} doesn't automatically mean that you're free or have control over your life since the most important power is weilded not by government, but by corporations.
3rd paragraph: ...
For those of you unfamiliar with SVG, it is a file format for scalable vector graphics
What are all these A* things?
I see (errr, hear maybe) AC3 audio in movies I download quite often. Now the lib that handles this seems to be A52. Why is this -- is AC3 and A52 the same thing? Is AAC also the same thing or is it unrelated?
Perhaps it's slashdot that needs to be made standards compliant! It would seem that someone doesn't want us to know how compliant it is.
It seems WDG had better luck getting through, but look at all those errors!
The site is /.ed, but from what I can make out from the front page, this is making IE CSS standards compliant. Does it also work some magic to make it compliant with HTML (or even better, XHTML) standards (which would be far more useful), or is that just impossible?
In any event, this may allow me to actually use some CSS 2, a standard that was published in May 1998 (almost 6 years ago!) and still isn't (fully) supported by the leading browser in the world...
Water cannot be a "basic social right." By definition, water must be purified by someone. Someone must do work to produce drinkable water. Therefore, water is a product for a consumer.
Although water costs money to clean and transport it is a basic social right to have access to it. It does not follow that something is a product for a consumer just because it takes work to be produced. We can commoditise things that cost money, examples would be water, public transportation and health care. Although all three cost money they have been commoditised to the point where they are free or affordable by all, and it's viewed as a social right to have them. The same can be true for software. Although it will take resources to produce and someone will have to pay, we can make it a commodity item, available to all regardless of social status. A precondition would of course be shelter, electricity and maybe internet, so perhaps that should a higher priority right now.
Errr... copyright isn't the same as not being allowed to make a copy, it means the copyright holder decides who can make a copy, and this time he decided you could make a copy.
"Copyright 1996 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved."
No, I don't see it as any better when women dominate males than the other way around. The problem lies in that the norm is the male being the dominator. Porno isn't a bad thing per definition, but I think in its current state it's only helping to enfore the patriarchy and keeping men and women separated. If people want to do the things that happens in porno (anal, facials, whatever) at home that's no problem, but it's not good that majority of porno is all the same and gives a severly distorted view on sexuality.
Correct, not all porn is of the same character. As for lesbian porn, the basic idea is that men should fantisise about having two women at the same time, and we all know that what a pair of lesbians really wants to do is pleasure a man, right? Besides, when did you ever see two men getting it on in the middle of a "normal" porno movie? No, female homosexuals are something cute and male homosexuals are something strange to put on a different shelf.
Your capitalist point of view is too simplistic. The economical sustainability of an industry is completely irrelevant to its ethical implications or whether or not someone is exploited. Just take a look at the meat industry, or any of the industries which uses underpayed workers in the third world (bordering to slavery sometimes) to see that economics and ethics have nothing to do with each other. I'm not comfortable with it, I don't watch it, I don't condone it and I don't pay for. But I'm not going to shut up about it.
This is an offtopic rant, but I must object to this posting. Colored ASCII movies is cool of course, but what has porn got to do with anything?
You have toyed around with aalib or maybe you use it all the time to watch your pr0n :)
Is the assumption that a slashdot reader watches porn? I must point out that not all do, and that porn is not OK. Porn is not just an innocent fantasy, because real people (men and women) are being exploited in this industry where surface is everything and people are only instruments to give you and orgasm and the porno company money. It doesn't matter if you're paying for it, you're still lending your support to it.
Even if there were indie porn it still wouldn't be ok as long as the value system where the male orgasm is the center of the universe is in place -- ask yourself when last you saw porn where the man is licking away between the womans legs with an obedient look on his face, and where the woman rushes to squirt the man in some odd place as the orgasm comes closer, the man smiling not getting an orgasm of his own.
I can't stop anyone from watching their "pr0n", but don't make that assumption about all of us!
No, this is about Linux, not GNU or the FSF.
Another post suggested that "IBM/FSF/REDHAT/SAMBA/WHOEVER" should sue SCO, but the FSF surely can't, and Samba only could if they have some stuff in the kernel (perhaps they do, I don't know.
[rant] It's not ideal to call any system that uses Linux "Linux". It confuses a part of the system for the whole and now has some people believing the whole operating system is "in danger" from SCO's sillyness. Linux is Linux, GNU is GNU and GNU/Linux is both, or at the very least, Linux isn't both. [end rant]
The only people who can sue here are kernel contributors. The FSF has no buisness in this except perhaps as legal advice. They "just" provide the license, and have no say over projects that use it (e.g. Linux).
The FSF won't promote anything "open source" -- it's the Free Software Foundation. But anyway, you want the FSF to help promote leaders of FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) projects? I guess that might sound cool, and they do in their own little way with the annual Free Software Awards. However, this isn't what the FSF is for. The FSF provides the licenses, has lawyers if you need them, provides funding for the GNU project and so on. Yes, the FSF are very much concerned with the philosophy of it all, and "ideological purity" is keeping the freedom of software in the first room. I guess sometimes the tone and message coming from the FSF gets a bit tiring, but there's no reason you have to be "ideologically pure" or always follow their advice. It's probably a very good thing that we have the FSF's hard-line approach and OSI's apolitcal, more pragmatic approach balancing each other.
Personally, I do think the FSF and RMS are the perfect leaders, because like them, I tend to think about things politically and idelogically. The line that the OSI is driving -- "how do we make this appealing do decision-makers in the board-rooms" -- doesn't appeal to me at all.
That's interresting. I hate the windows buttons too, not because they do anything, but because they remind me of that other operating system.
:)
In fact, I dislike them so much that just earlier today I took them off and used that stuff you use to polish wood (sorry, I'm not an english native speaker, so I don't know the word for swedish "sandpapper"). Anyway, now they're just gray buttons, so perhaps now I can bind them in fluxbox without feeling bad about pressing the evilOS-button
I know little about decompilation or these tables you talk about. But more generally, wouldn't it be simple to modify a debugger (say, gdb) to follow execution and actually analyse the calls that are actually made. If there's a security hole size 10 in a function which is hardly ever called, that wouldn't be as serious as a size 4 security hole in the main program loop.
Or actually, come to think of it... a security hole is not just a bug -- the bigger the hole the bigger the problem as the attacker would find a way to have that code executed no matter where in the code it is.
You make some very good points, some of which I have to admit I conciously ignore for the time being, because I _want_ to believe.
Anyway, I'll try to reply to some things you said.
Yes, except you claimed he wanted to destroy people who made money on software, and I claim he wants to destroy those making proprietary software. You claim that it's mostly the same thing, and perhaps to an extent obliterating proprietary software will make writing software less profitable, but that's a side effect, not the goal. The way you initially phrased it made it seem like RMS was like "gaah, you can't make money you filthy hoarder! I hate you and I hate the world. Everyone has to be a waiter!" I don't know, maybe RMS really does hate some makers of proprietary software, but not because they make money. Think for a minute that the richest people in the world have become rich by writing and selling proprietary software. Doesn't that seem odd? In other words, making software a less profitable buisness isn't as much destroying as it would be bringing it down to a sane level.
About the "free-as-in-freedom will always mean free-as-in-beer". You're certainly right that it's a hell of a lot harder selling something if it's available at no cost somewhere else. There's the classical argument that you sell manuals, services and such, but as you say it only works for certain sorts of software. For example games would be darn close impossible to finance if you didn't charge for the actual software, and I'm not sure we will ever see alot of really high quality games released as free software. To be honest, I don't really know what to say other than that freedom comes first, practical "inconvenice" (like not having a job) later. If making all software free means that less programmers will be able to make a living of their craft, that's what will happen.
In just over a month I'll be starting a 4½ year education (computer science & engineering) with the end of making a living writing or supporting free software. If I can't do that, I don't know if I'd want to write proprietary software, I feel stronly against it right now. Yes, it's idealistic, but I am also a vegetarian and a wannabe socialist/marxist/whatever, so that's the way I am. Some people will inevitably say "that's not the way the world works", and perhaps rightly so. The world doesn't currently work the way I'd like it to, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to accept it as it is. Free Software is political, I don't try to deny that.
That statement is simply laughable -- you clearly have never listened to RMS speak, or read any of his writings...
RMS (and alot of his followers, me included) seeks to make proprietary software obsolete and non-existent. Does mean that noone can charge for software? No, it simply means that all software would be free as in freedom, price is mostly irrelevant. Does it mean that all software would be forced out into the open for everyones grabbing? No, you're perfectly entitled to write your own private software and not show it to anyone. You're equally entitled to make a private branch of Emacs and do whith it what you will as long as you don't distribute.
Oh please... He would probably say "all users of software should have certain freedoms" or "proprietatry software shouldn't exist because it keeps users divided and helpless". Good luck finding a reference to RMS saying that "information wants to be free". Personally, I think it's a misdirected thing for anyone to say, because information doesn't want anything -- people do. I want _some_ information to be free (software for example), but I hardly think that information about my private life should be freely available.
Perhaps. I think it's beyond great that he puts in as much effort as he does. Without him, we would have substantially less freedom in the software world today. You don't need to agree with his goals, but at least don't lie about them.