SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
An Indian site, YourStory, has an unusually broad ranging interview with Richard Stallman. While much of the background and goals will already be familiar to SN readers, the interview is interesting not only for its scope but also that India is starting to take an interest in these matters.
To know Richard Stallman is to know the true meaning of freedom. He's the man behind the GNU project and the free software movement, and the subject of our Techie Tuesdays this week.
This is not a usual story. After multiple attempts to get in touch for an interaction with Richard Stallman, I got a response which prepared me well for what's coming next. I'm sharing the same with you to prepare you for what's coming next.
I'm willing to do the interview — if you can put yourself into philosophical and political mindset that is totally different from the one that the other articles are rooted in.
The general mindset of your articles is to admire success. Both business success, and engineering success. My values disagree fundamentally with that. In my view, proprietary software is an injustice; it is wrongdoing. People should be _ashamed_ of making proprietary software, _especially_ if it is successful. (If nobody uses the proprietary program, at least it has not really wronged anyone.) Thus, most of the projects you consider good, I consider bad.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by vux984 on Wednesday August 30 2017, @09:35PM (9 children)
I'd say proprietary software would be worth 'very little' under that regime. And I suspect RMS would be happy with that regime, since he'd be free to do whatever he wanted with any code he received. Admittedly you aren't making his job EASY by not providing the source, but he can dump it, disassemble it, modify it, run it, and then share it. But its doubtful there would be a lot of proprietary software... because why bother. Anything 'valuable' enough to want to copy, someone would dump, disassemble, clean up, and re-distribute and they'd be free to do it.
Some of the more modern DRM and signed code restrictions on embedded equipment would probably still offend him. But 'mod chips' and other defeats for such would likely be readily available too with no legal means to defend against people (including large corporations) making and distributing them.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 30 2017, @10:18PM (8 children)
The GNU Project began because RMS was too unskilled and too lazy to reverse engineer a printer. His attitude since the beginning has been, "Fuck you! Give me your source code!"
Says so right here in the first chapter of his biography, "For Want of a Printer"
RMS is a high-level-language programmer, that is his skill, with which he hammers every problem like a proverbial nail. He needs that source code, as the GPL says, "the preferred form of the work for making changes".
From the epilogue to his biography, "Crushing Loneliness"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @12:05AM (6 children)
A civilization that requires you to constantly reinvent the wheel is a ridiculous, inefficient society.
One might even call it stupid.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @12:55AM (3 children)
Too incompetent to disassemble executable code, RMS decides to ask for the source code...
Denied! Obsessed with the shame of rejection, RMS begins lifelong crusade to bully everyone into releasing source code, to compensate for his own inadequacy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @01:42AM (2 children)
That leaves out a big piece of the story.
Did the professor and/or his minions reverse-engineer that?
...or did he get it from the company and was under an NDA?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @02:54AM (1 child)
RMS is an idiot who asked for the wrong source code.
And then RMS went on a holy crusade over one conversation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:10AM
Some folks are glad that he did.
This guy's "bargain" monitor wouldn't have been a bargain at all if he didn't have the source code for his video device driver.
Why FOSS Is Important (Video Is Tweakable Beyond The Basics) [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [goodbyemicrosoft.net]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @02:43AM (1 child)
The entire purpose of GNU is to reinvent BSD with a different kind of free license. RMS is a stupidly inefficient man who could have been satisfied with BSD instead of wasting his life on GNU.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:02AM
It's clear that you don't understand 1 of those--possibly neither.
BSD preserves the freedom of the developer.
GPL preserves the freedom of the user.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 31 2017, @03:14PM
The man may be many things, but lazy is not one of them. You should read the part where he duplicated the work of an entire team of programmers for months because he was mad they weren't sharing the source (link [oreilly.com], about halfway down--start at "The most aggressive in this strategy")
.
We can't all be hardware guys, but saying that makes us fundamentally lazy is uncalled for. Are you even a programmer at all?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"