
Richard Stallman is Not the Bad Guy - nice1
http://boycottnovell.com/2009/09/26/richard-stallman-smeared-for-truth/
======
jballanc
I think reading about the early history of the MIT AI labs and the history of
LISP machines really helps to put RMS in context. Before reading about how
that all played out, I was one of the ones who respected RMS's broad goals,
but decried his almost radical attitude.

I don't think like that any longer. Instead, I now see RMS as a sort of
holocaust survivor warning against complacency when dealing with dictators. If
RMS seems overly concerned with corporations co-opting free software, it's
only because he's been there!

(P.S. Sorry for not providing links to the LISP machine history.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine> and <http://funcall.blogspot.com>
are probably a good jumping-off points. The tl;dr of it is: MIT AI labs
developed LISP, Symbolics took MIT's work and commercialized it without giving
back, the MIT AI lab guys responded by going off and forming their own LISP
machine company, and that left RMS all alone at MIT and hating commercial
software)

------
joe_the_user
One big problem I have with Mono is that it seems terminally buggy. A Mono
application I was thinking of getting involved with had untraceable memory
leaks to it that seemed to doom an otherwise excellent app to second-rate-
ness.

Further, the whole '.NET' architecture seems to be structurally so elaborate
that any open source implementation would _have_ to be buggy and incomplete
since no one person would have the time to really finish or even understand
all of it.

So I think that even without the thread of patents, .NET is a bad thing for
open source because it gives folks a continual impetus to go to the working,
closed-source MS implementation.

~~~
jacquesm
So, then here is a question: If .NET is so big, the spec is unmanageable and
so on, why even attempt this ?

There was a time when DEC shops were turning out projects between two and five
times the speed of a comparable IBM shop. The advantage was that the defaults
were sane and you could actually know the system. It was stable and a breeze
to develop for.

By bringing 'mono' or something like it into the open source community we are
attempting to match microsoft at its own game, which is imho completely
stupid.

If open source is to succeed it should not attempt to copy the kind of
architecture that you can only build and maintain with an army of programmers
that will slog away at it simply because they get paid to do so.

------
TomOfTTB
Stallman isn't a bad guy but he's a zealot and like in every other aspect of
life following a zealot generally isn't a good idea.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against him speaking his mind or his supporters
speaking theirs. The difference here is between "Mono and de Icaza are evil"
and "I think Mono is the wrong approach and here's why"

Stallman always jumps to "people who disagree with me are evil" and that's why
even his supporters are starting to wonder if he's doing more damage than
good.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Read this and tell me whether it says "Mono and de Icaza are evil" or "I think
Mono is the wrong approach and here's why":

 _Why free software shouldn't depend on Mono or C#_ by Richard Stallman

<http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono>

Some quotes:

 _"This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. Free C#
implementations permit users to run their C# programs on free platforms, which
is good."_

 _"The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and
other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them
too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and
using them is taking a gratuitous risk.

We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C# implementations as
little as possible."_

Also related, the next news article:

<http://www.fsf.org/news/2009-07-mscp-mono>

~~~
jeroen
Read this and notice that rms calls de Icaza a traitor:

[http://www.osnews.com/story/22225/RMS_De_Icaza_Traitor_to_Fr...](http://www.osnews.com/story/22225/RMS_De_Icaza_Traitor_to_Free_Software_Community)

Looks more like the former (evil) to me.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Traitor doesn't mean "evil".

If you understand (not necessarily agree with) the reasons Stallman gives for
being cautious about Mono/C# then you'd understand why someone who'd done so
much for Free Software in the past, who is now driving Mono, could be
described as _"basically a traitor to the Free Software community"_ i.e.
someone who used to promote their ideals, but now threatens them.

It seems strange that Stallman, widely regarded as some kind of maniac,
regularly gets grief for single word choices or off-hand comments. Would this
be a discussion if he'd said "his actions no longer align with the best
interests of our community"? If he's really that crazy why didn't he go on
some venomous tirade and character assassination like some political shock-
jock?

~~~
jacquesm
Stallman is a 'polarizing figure', it's the if you're not with us you're
against us mentality that gets a lot of people up in arms all over the world.

I'm a great fan of free software. I think all software should be free, and in
the long run I hope that that will be the case, but I doubt that that will
actually happen.

There will always be niches so obscure or unpleasant that the only way to get
someone to code that stuff is to pay them for their work.

And that's good, it certainly does not brand them as 'traitors', unless you
want to consider open source software versus closed software as a war. I think
that is not the right way to approach the problem.

I think it is more along the lines of two competing business models that duke
it out in the market, with market share being the yard stick by which you can
measure the success of both methods for software development.

So far, open source software has done pretty good, but calling ex open source
contributors 'traitors' is actually helping closed source, and hurting open
source.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
There's a few misconceptions here, first, though kind of off-topic but you
_can_ pay people to produce Free Software, lots of people do.

Two other misconceptions: He didn't call anyone a "traitor" for producing
proprietary software, nor did he call anyone a "traitor" for stopping
producing free software. That's kind of the point of using that specific word
as it wouldn't apply in those circumstances though some people seem to be
taking it as just a general insult.

He did use the word to describe someone who used to be a leading light of the
Free Software movement. Remember de Icaza is the guy who started Gnome because
the QT licence meant that KDE wasn't "free" enough, even though it was open
source i.e. what most folks round here would call a Free Software zealot.

He's now, amongst other things that the FSF find dubious, advising a project
specifically set up to create open source software which _isn't_ copyleft with
the clearly stated aim that it can be used in proprietary software. This is
promoting Open Source (though only as a subordinate of proprietary software)
but not Free Software which, for some people, is a very important difference.

If you don't understand that you could dedicate your life to the business
success of _open source_ and not impress Richard Stallman then you might want
to read this:

[http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
point.h...](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html)

~~~
jacquesm
> but you can pay people to produce Free Software, lots of people do.

Yes, of course. But the subject here is not whether or not it is possible to
pay people to develop free software, the subject is whether or not paying
people to develop closed software or software under a different license than
the GPL is somehow morally repugnant. I think it isn't and it shouldn't be,
and any person that pretends to say this with high standing in the open source
community is not helping open source but hurting it.

It is insulting to large numbers of programmers that do both.

If de Icaza has decided that you can't change microsoft from the outside but
that he stands a better chance of effecting change from within - and he seems
to be successful in that - then that's fine with me and it should be
completely his freedom to do so without being spoken of in derogatory terms by
RMS.

> This is promoting Open Source (though only as a subordinate of proprietary
> software) but not Free Software which, for some people, is a very important
> difference.

So what ? Let the marketplace decide which is better. If 'real' (as in gpl'd)
open source is better then that should stand by itself. Personally I will not
touch any of microsofts code with a 10 foot pole because I suspect a catch,
but I'm not going around calling people names.

It's the worst way to handle this sort of thing. The best would be to judge
the offering on its merits and if there ever is fall-out from the licensing
issues to use that as the reason to brand the code 'unusable', not to resort
to personal attacks.

It's petty, mean, childish and a whole bunch of other things beside, _and_ it
hurts the open source movement as a whole.

This is not a war, and to resort to words like 'traitor' attempts to divide
and hurts all of us.

------
jsz0
I'm sure he's not a bad person but he is clearly intolerant of other peoples
opinions when they are in conflict with his own. He also has a bad habit of
going overboard in the way he vilifies people and technologies sometimes.

------
idan
Regardless of RMS's position and community's reaction, that was just a poorly
written, rambling paean to RMS.

I'll concede that there are some valid points to be fished out of that article
and ruminated upon but the rampant amount of RMS adulation practically drowned
it out.

(Full disclosure: I _do_ indeed think that this is paranoid "they're all
making fun of me" tripe. But that has no bearing on the above.)

------
artificer
I liked this article, especially for the last known picture of RMS when he was
shaved, and (more seriously) Stallman's quote at the end. This sums it all up
quite well in my opinion.

------
Semiapies
As old as the net.

1) Some guy says something obnoxious.

2) Bystanders observe, "What a dick-move."

3) Guy complains that people are trying to censor him because they dare say
that they disapprove of or disagree with him.

The main innovation in modern days is that for some folks, fanboys will take
care of step 3 on behalf of the guy who's "under attack".

~~~
omouse
_Some guy says something obnoxious._

In this case we basically only have one source for the statement. I don't
remember seeing _anyone_ else aside from the OSNews guy mentioning that
statement.

Some other blogger tried to get a transcript of the Q&A that Stallman was
giving but the FSF apparently doesn't keep transcripts of Q&As (they probably
didn't record video :/)

~~~
Semiapies
Please.

If it's so dubious, why do the fanboys _not question_ that remark, but
immediately leap to defend it and either try to redefine "traitor" as meaning
something else or declare that they agree about the supposed "treason"?

Now, to be terribly fair, it's probably true that even if he didn't say it,
everybody would be acting the same way. _Nobody_ , even his fans, really
doubts _that_ he would say it. It's his style, and it's the exact sort of
obnoxious remark his fanboys are used to defending and supporting.

EDIT: Ultimately, my complaint is about the fanboys. Someone made a dickmove.
That someone is an icon to the fanboys, but he hasn't actually _done_ anything
in years besides be an icon to them, so it's barely even a story before the
fans get involved.

------
rimantas
Sometimes I want to retain my freedom not to have freedom in certain cases.

------
kib2
If I remember correctly, Stallman also launched a war against Tcl some time
ago. But I never really understood why he did it.

Any hint ?

~~~
tjr
<http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/tcl-not>

~~~
kib2
thanks tjr!

------
known
RMS sees everything in Black and White. Hence he is very Sensitive.

------
borism
I looked at the link and couldn't understand a thing what exactly is RMS or
author's problem again. The "article" is more of a collection of links and
quotes joined together by some rant. Domain name is quite telling as well.

I have seen RMS in person, I have heard his inspirational speech (that was in
the days we battled EU software patents directive), I respect him as an
activist and as a Hacker. I also donate to FSF.

But I'm way too tired of all those internal OSS scuffles that RMS seems always
to take part of.

~~~
rit
Oh, not just the domain.

The actual path of the article is:

/2009/09/26/richard-stallman-smeared-for-truth/

Which makes me think he rethought his headline after originally writing it.

Again, reiterating my earlier statement... If you want to boycott Novell,
start with digging out every piece of code they have touched directly or
indirectly to Linux, starting with Gnome, Mono, and a whole ton of other stuff
that will reduce Linux back to 1996-level functionality.

------
ComputerGuru
Sure he's not... He just has a tendency of taking things a wee tiny bit
overboard, such as accusing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of not
giving a damn about helping the millions in Africa:
[http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/richard-stallman-expert-in-
the...](http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/richard-stallman-expert-in-the-art-of-
fud/)

~~~
alecco
The icing on the cake: You are actually the same guy! Check out ComputerGuru's
profile:

    
    
      about: Founder and director of NeoSmart Technologies (http://neosmart.net/)
      a non-profit software development and research organization.
      Specialization in high-performance webapps and OS kernel design.
    

The "art of fud", indeed.

~~~
Semiapies
So, you noted that the guy linked to his own blog?

That's some detective work.

~~~
alecco
Fair and funny.

~~~
Semiapies
Well, you're a good sport about it.

