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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 30 2017, @07:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the must-read dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @12:05AM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @12:05AM (#561854)

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @12:55AM (#561887)

    Although Stallman knew plenty about computers, he was not an expert in translating binary files. As a hacker, however, he had other resources at his disposal. The notion of information sharing was so central to the hacker culture that Stallman knew it was only a matter of time before some hacker in some university lab or corporate computer room proffered a version of the laser-printer source code with the desired source-code files.

    Too incompetent to disassemble executable code, RMS decides to ask for the source code...

    In true engineer-to-engineer fashion, the conversation was cordial but blunt. After briefly introducing himself as a visitor from MIT, Stallman requested a copy of the laser-printer source code so that he could port it to the PDP-11. To his surprise, the professor refused to grant his request.

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @01:42AM (#561908)

      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)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @02:54AM (#561935)

        RMS is an idiot who asked for the wrong source code.

        “The code that Stallman was asking for was leading-edge, state-of-the-art code that Sproull had written in the year or so before going to Carnegie Mellon,” recalls Reid. If so, that might indicate a misunderstanding that occurred, since Stallman wanted the source for the program that MIT had used for quite some time, not some newer version. But the question of which version never arose in the brief conversation.

        And then RMS went on a holy crusade over one conversation.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:10AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:10AM (#561955)

          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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @02:43AM (#561931)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:02AM (#561953)

      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]