
Why Software Should Be Free (2002) - finolex1
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.en.html
======
idid
While I resonate fully with the ideals encompassed by free software, I find
that the "logistics" of supporting them "in real life" are a completely
different story, that has little to do with the ethos behind them.

This comes as a singular, personal data point, or course. There's wider
context behind my trials and tribulations, but, succinctly put, starting a for
profit company around my 5 year-ish old OSS project was the only way I managed
to find to safeguard its continued existence and development. This road
involves a lot of uneasy compromises that don't fit in the original discourse
around free software.

Perhaps, what I'm lacking, is a "how to get there" guide - the ideals are
clear, the way to achieve them is not so much so.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I agree with supporting the ideals, but hitting a barrier in features and
usability. For my wife and I, our Apple Watches, AirPods, iPhones, iPads, and
MacBooks are a net (I use this word purposely) that holds our digital life
together and make working (she is my editor, and even in retirement I write
every day for a few hours) and our digital lives easy and pleasant.

On the other hand, I love Linux, have a zillion GitHub repos with open source
projects I do, etc.

I dream of a world in which I could use open hardware and free software, but
how would something like an Apple Watch ever be open hardware and software?

~~~
devcpp
If people stopped buying the proprietary version, manufacturers would make
open products. They don't really care either way, they just make a bit more
money with proprietary licenses.

So, the answer is: it's on you.

~~~
jseliger
_I agree with supporting the ideals, but hitting a barrier in features and
usability_

You could reverse this and say that if open-source advocates would make usable
products with features on par with commercial products, people would adopt
them. There's a chicken-egg problem here.

People interested in these issues should read _Working in Public_ by Eghbal,
which is about open source culture and sociology. I just finished it.

~~~
dTal
The trouble is that the commercial products have marketing departments that
aim to convince people that _their_ feature set is the most important. So
although open products have unique features of their own - including openness
- people are likely to overlook them.

------
TheOtherHobbes
This fails because we only have one formal kind of payment - money - and in a
monetised economy, nothing compares with it.

Money solves one problem - how to get people to do things that may be useful
to others which they wouldn't otherwise do - but causes much worse problems in
return.

The most obvious is money is such a riotously inefficient way to decide what
is and isn't genuinely useful, especially collectively.

OSS doesn't really solve the usefulness problem. It's good at producing
software that's appealing to people who like using and tinkering with OSS
software - but no one else really cares unless it's handed to them inside a
product which has been assembled to be useful. And even then it's about the
product, not about a largely imaginary "freedom" which is inaccessible to most
users because it specialised skills, advanced knowledge, and plenty of free
time.

This doesn't make it useless, it just gives it a different domain to operate
in. There's some overlap, but there are many potentially useful projects that
don't happen because they don't appear inside either the commercial or the OSS
circles.

~~~
elviejo
Free software in this essay means software that respects your freedom. Not
"Gratis".

So every company has the right to charge you for their software but once you
acquire it you can use it however you wish.

~~~
Osiris
Don't most FOSS licenses explicitly allow for redistribution though? So once
one person gets itm they can then redistribute it for free or a cost with the
original developer not benefiting (directly).

~~~
drwiggly
Sure but the end user of this product doesn't know or care about the parts.
This matters to those of us in the plumbing business and those businesses that
would hire us to do their plumbing.

------
anoplus
> Eventually the users will learn to support developers without coercion, just
> as they have learned to support public radio and television stations.

The crowd funding culture is evolving. In recent years I follow and donate to
a couple of public initiatives in my country from free media, environment, and
other public services. People are excited to donate and be members in projects
that solve real problem, conduct transparency and communicate with the
members.

Its all about trust.

~~~
nske
From the perspective of user, it's not as simple, at least for some.

a) At a personal level, it forces the user to make choices. Making choices is
exhausting. Should I donate $1, $10, or $100? Should I donate based on my
perception of how much each project lacks funds, based on how much value I
extract out of the software -which is not easy to quantify anyway- or just
send an amount that I wouldn't miss? Should I donate one-time and forget about
it or set a recurring donation? If recurring, shouldn't I monitor the
project's development to decide if a recurring donation should continue? Then
would it not be fair to hunt down every single free software project I'm using
and evaluate its needs and value in order to donate to that as well?

Personally I admit that I rarely donate to free projects as an individual,
unless they explicitly ask for a fixed amount that I find reasonable, because
I dread the process of such decisions.

2) At a business level, usually there is a complete detachment between the
value drawn out of a piece of a free software and the process of donations.
The company is there to maximize its profits and minimize its costs, donations
exist at a separate sphere that has more to do with financial/tax or PR
incentives than the intrinsic value of the free software project, so all
donations tend to get send to recognized charity organizations.

Very often the people who understand the value that a piece of free software
brings to the business, have the right mindset and want to donate, but there
is no process to make it easy for them to do so (it would be awkward to put a
purchase order to the finance department for a donation).

For that reason, I would encourage every free software project that cares
about funding to sell something at a fixed price, that can pass for a standard
purchase in the eyes of a non-technical person -i.e. call it
support/maintenance plan, or premium forum access. Even if in reality it adds
nothing to the value of the software, it makes it easy for IT departments to
support projects they are using that they would otherwise not be able to.
Speaking from experience, it's very frustrating to see how much a company
spends for bullshit and not be able to donate even a small amount to projects
that bring much higher value to the company.

~~~
phone8675309
>At a personal level, it forces the user to make choices. Making choices is
exhausting. Should I donate $1, $10, or $100? Should I donate based on my
perception of how much each project lacks funds, based on how much value I
extract out of the software -which is not easy to quantify anyway- or just
send an amount that I wouldn't miss?

I can't speak for what society should do, but I adopt a "value for value"
mindset.

If software saves me time, I drop a donation that is in proportion to the
value it has to me. This is sometimes hard to quantify, but as a rough
estimate, if it's in a professional capacity, I start my hourly rate
multiplied by the time it saved me, and if it's in a personal capacity (think
used with hobby work), I start with half my hourly rate multiplied by the time
it saved me. You should never feel like you should give more than you can
comfortably give.

> Should I donate one-time and forget about it or set a recurring donation? If
> recurring, shouldn't I monitor the project's development to decide if a
> recurring donation should continue?

It depends on the project - often I'll ask the author. Some software is backed
with recurring donators, so a one-time donation to help pay for some hardware
or software the project needs is the most helpful, but some software is not
backed by recurring donations, so a smaller, recurring donation will help
sustain the project for longer (especially with hosting bills or other
recurring expenses). My number one suggestion to free software authors that
accept donations would be to specify whether one-time or recurring donations
would be more helpful, and if one-time, if there are specific expenses/amounts
that are needed that could have a high impact on the project.

> Then would it not be fair to hunt down every single free software project
> I'm using and evaluate its needs and value in order to donate to that as
> well?

Disabuse yourself of the notion that life is fair. For me, there is certain
free software that I use almost constantly (Debian and Emacs, say), and some
free software that I use one-off that saves me a large amount of time. Both
are examples of projects that I would consider donate to. Something that I use
once or twice a month for a short amount of time and has many alternatives I
may not donate to.

~~~
ohthehugemanate
> If software saves me time, I drop a donation that is in proportion to the
> value it has to me.

Love this idea. Can you give some example amounts? How much have you donated
to OpenSSL? NTP? Postfix?

The bulk of OSS is invisible "plumbing" that provides the critical
infrastructure for the software we actually use on a day to day basis
(proprietary and OSS). I'm happy to hear that you contribute to some projects
and that's great, but you haven't exactly solved the tragedy of the commons.

~~~
phone8675309
>Love this idea. Can you give some example amounts? How much have you donated
to OpenSSL? NTP? Postfix?

Sure!

For regular one-time donations:

    
    
      - Debian => $500 once a year (typically in the summer)
    
      - Free Software Foundation => $500 once a year (typically around the new year)
    
      - MetaARPA membership on the SDF => $36 once a year (in August)
    

For regular ongoing donations:

    
    
      - $60/half year to the OpenBSD Foundation for OpenBSD (once for each release - I used to buy each CD set but they don't sell them anymore)
    
      - $20/month to the OpenBSD Foundation to support OpenSSH, LibreSSL, and OpenNTPd
    
      - $5/month to a niche forum that I post to on occasion
    
      - $5/month to a podcast that I listen to
    
      - $6/month to a BandCamp artist that I listen to
    

For other projects, I'll keep an eye on their calls for donation for specific
things and support them one-off as I can. GnuCash says I've donated about
$5000 over the last ten years or so doing that.

------
crocko
> The feeling of attachment is one that programmers can cultivate when it
> suits them; it is not inevitable. Consider, for example, how willingly the
> same programmers usually sign over all rights to a large corporation for a
> salary; the emotional attachment mysteriously vanishes.

It is because they are getting paid they willingly hand over the rights. Also
a lot of full time employees do take personal ownership of their code maybe
not in a legal sense but they feel it is their responsibility.

This is why I cannot stand Stallman. There are plenty of good arguments for
open source software. However completely ignoring the fact that when you are a
full time employee you are promised pay and some benefits by the employer is
as far as I am concerned completely disingenuous. His whole premise is faulty.

~~~
cogburnd02
Well, compare/contrast the emotional attachment a programmer has for code with
the emotional attachment a parent has for their child.

No amount of money would make the emotional attachment of a parent to their
child go away; I think this is his point.

~~~
crocko
Yes let’s compare looking after your a new life in the world with source code
like they are they in anyway equivalent.

This is exactly my problem with characters like Stallman and why people should
actually read the more robust arguments against GNU/Free software movements
sad the more robust arguments gives you a reality check against a lot of
Stallman’s nonsense.

~~~
cycloptic
It's not equivalent, that was the point. Any responsibility one might feel
towards their employer's code goes away immediately when they find a new job
somewhere else for better pay. If you follow that, this whole line of
reasoning really doesn't have anything to do with FOSS versus proprietary. You
can observe the same effects happening at tons of Linux companies too, i.e.
employees who don't care one way or another about the OS or the license and
are just there to put in their time and collect a paycheck.

~~~
crocko
You are using the his language.

The language is that many developers take ownership of a project while they
are working for an employer. The fact that people make these comparisons
between children and source is the problem and what you are doing is framing
it the way Stallman wants to frame it. This leads you to his conclusions. If
you actually take some time to look as some of his assertions you can see they
are far more nuanced that he would like you to think. It is disingenuous of
him to frame it like that in the first place, he isn't stupid and therefore I
cannot accept it is an oversight.

I would rather Software development was more seen akin to be a plumber or a
carpenter and that is exactly how I try to work. People have to get over the
fact that programming is a profession, it has a market and things need to be
paid for.

The whole activism for free software is completely missing the point as it
focuses on source code and not specifications. If there is an open spec then
anyone can make a opensource or proprietary implementation of that spec. The
"freedom" of that software is irrelevant because it adheres to the
specification.

The current model for monetising free and open software software has lead to
making money via support contracts, which leads to things like SaaS where you
are perpetually renting something rather than actually owning a license. When
you are perpetually renting from a large company you are then tied into what
they want to do and you are probably in a worse situation than using a
proprietary product especially if your data is held up in that service (that
why Microsoft and Amazon want you to use their proprietary NoSQL
infrastructure and price it so cheaply compared to something like Postgres of
SQL Server).

This is such a difficult thing to get across I end up rambling on tangents
because there any many many things wrong as the presuppositions are just
incorrect or aren't as concrete as many assert.

~~~
cycloptic
>The language is that many developers take ownership of a project while they
are working for an employer.

For most employees this seems to be factually untrue unless they have
significant stock ownership in the company. And even with that, it's still
common for projects to be regularly scrapped, postponed, sold off, redesigned
from scratch, transferred to different departments, you get the picture. It's
just business.

I have no comment on the rest of your post, I request that you please not make
assumptions about what conclusions I've drawn. My only point is that that
emotional argument makes no sense, it makes even less sense now in 2020 than
it did when the article was written.

~~~
crocko
> For most employees this seems to be factually untrue unless they have
> significant stock ownership in the company. And even with that, it's still
> common for projects to be regularly scrapped, postponed, sold off,
> redesigned from scratch, transferred to different departments, you get the
> picture. It's just business.

I know many developers that are quite happy working and improving particular
systems for years on end and consider it their project. Richard Stallman over
simplified the relationship between employer and employee and the project they
work on. I believe that is disingenous.

> have no comment on the rest of your post, I request that you please not make
> assumptions about what conclusions I've drawn. My only point is that that
> emotional argument makes no sense, it makes even less sense now in 2020 than
> it did when the article was written.

When did I state anything about what your motivations maybe? I didn't.

Well that is a shame you don't have any comment on the rest of my post because
it is quite important when it comes to discussion about this. You cannot
ignore that Richard Stallman in some ways has shown companies that engineers
will create stuff for free and they don't have to pay. OpenSSL debacle proved
this, they were quite happy to let the engineer who was maintaining the
project basically live poorly until HeartBleed vulnerabilities. This is never
discussed but this is direct consequence of Richard Stallman and his activism.

As for it being an emotional argument, it really isn't. All I am simply saying
is that Richard Stallman ignores nuance when it suits him and invents it when
it doesn't exist and by using his language that he invented (he redefined the
word free).

IIRC he said on a mailing list that he specifically tied the plugin system to
GCC to the main part of the program itself so plugins would be forced to use
the GPL license. Forcing other people to be tied to your license is anti-
freedom. But it is okay when he is a hypocrite about it, people will make all
sorts of excuses for the hypocrisy because of the "GPL Freedoms" but the GPL
is less free than many other licenses.

------
hi41
Why did rms choose to remain poor when he could have earned a lot of money.
That must’ve been a difficult choice. Programmers who are a lot less talented
than he is earn a lot more money. I also noticed that other open source
programmers also were poor. There was an article on hn about the programmer
who maintains ssl.

~~~
wackro
Why does everything have to be about money? This view is really prevalent on
HN and it's actually really tiring to read week after week.

It boils down to this: some people prioritise other endeavours. And if your
response to that is 'but they could be doing the same thing AND getting paid
£££' then I guess they just don't care as much as you might do.

~~~
A4ET8a8uTh0
It doesn't, but a lot of doors open with sufficient amount of money at your
disposal. And it is very easy to get lost in the pursuit, because there is
never really enough and someone always has more. I am not excusing it, but I
understand the strong pull.

For the record, I agree with you. There are things that I effectively add
money with no hope of money return. From a purely monetary perspective, those
should have been ended a while ago.

------
pgcj_poster
> I am not saying that a toll road is worse than no road at all. That would be
> true if the toll were so great that hardly anyone used the road—but this is
> an unlikely policy for a toll collector.

With "toll road" as a metaphor for "proprietary software," it seems like the
current situation requires an even more radical stance than Stallman could
have envisioned back then, because software companies today aren't content
with merely operating in a socially suboptimal way. Instead, many now have a
net negative impact on society: through spying, engineered addiction, echo
chambers, etc. For instance, I think society would be better off if Facebook
simply ceased to exist, even if it wasn't replaced by some type of privacy-
protecting alternative and everyone just had to go back to email and personal
home pages.

~~~
rimliu
You are confusing social media with software companies.

------
neilobremski
The systems I work on tend to be comprised of free software but "business
logic" is private. I don't know if this would please the GNU founders but a
lot certainly runs on open source and I can't imagine this changing anytime
soon. It helps everyone to see the foundation and plumbing but then there's
diminishing returns as you move into particulars of opinionated design.

For my part, one of the biggest wins has been freely available and HIGH
quality development tools and languages. I still have PTSD from C++ compilers
licensing. I'm still hoping that Office tools will get there.

And as for the possibility of "less software developers" ... unlikely! Again,
there will be (and are) fewer low-level power-programmers but many many more
high-level business coders. You don't want your guru working on that stubborn
input field validation but you DO need SOMEONE to do it

------
gjvnq
I think most software should be at least semi-free. You can read the source
code and distribute changes but you can't redistribute the software (code and
binaries) without approval from the author (i.e. paying them).

Basically I want people to be free and able to fix and improve what they paid
for.

~~~
andrepd
Of course. Long gone are the days you could tinker with your machines and
appliances, fix your problems, replace oartd, hack together improvements, or
simply take it apart to show your kid how it works. Okay maybe not long gone
but certainly on the way out. Appliances and computers and even cars are
getting ever more encumbered in terms of being able to fiddle with them, both
physically but above all in terms of software.

------
onyva
Maybe forward to PG who seems to be veering into Peter Thiel territory lately.
Might remind him why startups are even a thing he can brag about to AOC.

------
api
Edit: I rewrote this to add a lot of substance.

This was written in 1991. The world was very very different then. The Internet
was small. Hardware was commodity. Most of the power in the industry belonged
to proprietary software vendors like Microsoft and there was a danger they
would totally monopolize the future.

Things have changed quite radically. Today hardware has been effectively de-
commoditized, on one hand by the escalating difficulty of building a high
quality machine and on the other hand by vertically integrated cloud vendors
whose hardware becomes "special" by virtue of its location at a highly
connected secure data center. The Internet is also huge, and it has made
network effects powerful and has created a new form of closed called "SaaS."

Today software is commoditized, hardware is proprietary, and SaaS is where the
power is centered. Everything depends on the cloud. Much of the software that
powers the cloud is open source, but that doesn't matter. Having source or
being able to run your own copy is irrelevant if the value is in the
centralized network location of the runtime and the fact that the cloud has
all the data.

RMS's strategy for freedom is obsolete. If software is totally free and un-
owned, all the power belongs to the owners of physical capital and SaaS
systems that leverage that capital to create network effects around
centralized _instances_ of software.

SaaS is more closed than commercial software ever was. I can still run a 1980s
proprietary application in a VM on my own system, but I cannot run 2008's
Facebook or Google. SaaS operators have total visibility into everything we do
and the power to rescind capabilities at any time. It's a pure panopticon.
Today we need open and liberated _runtimes_ more than we need open and
liberate _source_.

Those of us who care about privacy and freedom need to change strategies to
cope with a changing world, but the problem is that RMS's views and the views
of others in the 1990s FOSS movement have been dogmatized and transformed into
a religion.

It's not a religion. It's a strategy, and one that _was_ largely successful at
checking the power of Microsoft and other commercial software vendors. The
trouble is that it's a strategy that also undermines the economic
sustainability of software, thus handing all the economic power and muscle to
those who control other aspects of the stack. Those other aspects of the stack
now rule us by virtue of the golden rule: "he who has the gold rules."

The FOSS movement is fighting the last war.

What we need is a new model that hopefully can retain the openness of free
software but that recapitalizes the software layer and allows the center of
gravity to shift more toward the physical and economic edge of the network. I
was hoping for a while that cryptocurrency would furnish this, but it was
taken over and destroyed by scammers. Some are exploring "source available"
licenses like the BSL, but that feels like a stopgap to me. There has to be
something that preserves the freedom of open source at the individual level
while restoring revenue streams to software and limiting the ability of the
for-profit cloud to exploit FOSS to create its silos.

~~~
ghmdh
This has been the elephant in the room for more than over a decade, but hardly
anyone mentions it apart from occasional posts on HN.

Stallman has largely ignored the web developments. Pushing for the GPL works
(almost) as well for companies these days as pushing for the BSD license.

I think most new OSS developers are distracted by the thousands of social
issues that are made up by corporations to give them the illusion that they
are doing meaningful, socially relevant work.

So they no longer care about software freedom and overlook that elephant in
the room.

~~~
zozbot234
> Stallman has largely ignored the web developments.

See [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-
really-s...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-
serve.en.html) for Stallman's take on Service as a Software Substitute
(SaaSS). He seems to broadly agree with parent's points wrt. this industry;
he's certainly not "ignoring" them.

~~~
crocko
It is irrelevant though whether he is paying attention. The most successful
work under the GPL (the Linux Kernel) development is steered by the companies
that he attempted to wrestle control back from.

------
jokethrowaway
> Eventually the users will learn to support developers without coercion, just
> as they have learned to support public radio and television stations.

It's funny because users freely buy software from developers without coercion
and they're coerced by the government to pay for public radio and television
under threat of imprisonment.

------
pjmlp
It works when everybody is singing love songs in rainbow coloured clothing,
but at the end of the day there are bills to pay and only a few lucky ones get
to live from donations and they surely aren't arriving at the bank with
donation extracts for a credit renewal.

------
brownbat
Well...

(1) If you believe prices trend towards marginal cost, and,

(2) the cost of acquiring a new user trends lower for more useful products,
then it follows that...

(3) capping the price of software would generally improve its overall quality.

(Don't worry, I'm mostly joking. Still...)

~~~
MaxBarraclough
It's a GNU/FSF article about software freedom, it's not about pricing.

~~~
brownbat
The libre/gratis distinction is important, sure. But when rms argued against
"programs as property" here, there were certain implications about pricing
models that came along for the ride, whether that was his primary intention or
not.

My argument is really a (somewhat tongue in cheek) rebuttal to people who
think libre software, which incidentally tends to be gratis, can never be high
quality or sustainable.

------
throwaway50978
Richard Stallman is a genius, he didn't deserve to be cancelled from his
position at the FSF.

~~~
samblr
Could you expand on cancellation part a bit. Why was it done?

~~~
throwaway50978
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Resignation_f...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Resignation_from_MIT_and_FSF)

------
TruthSHIFT
When was this written?

~~~
richardwhiuk
Copyright at the bottom suggest originally 1991:

> Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2017, 2018, 2020
> Free Software Foundation, Inc.

------
oneil
RMS is a brilliant mind and someone I have had the luxury of meeting. Every
now and then I like to look at his rider list and have a little chuckle:
[https://github.com/ddol/rre-
rms/blob/master/rider.txt](https://github.com/ddol/rre-
rms/blob/master/rider.txt)

I came across a site that just rotated pictures of him, using his laptop in
some strange places: [https://rms.sexy](https://rms.sexy)

~~~
kgraves
As much as I respect his ideas, god he is cringeworthy.

~~~
wizzwizz4
He's like Cassandra, except a tad insufferable instead of cursed.

Social skills are boring to work on, but he's a political activist; those
should be a priority for him. He's usually right, but that doesn't mean he has
to say things _all the time_! (Or, rather, he could probably pick more
opportune moments, while retaining most of the frequency, and be listened to
more.)

Plus, the kinds of jokes you make with your friends are _not_ necessarily the
kinds of jokes you should be making on stage, during a talk about free
software, in front of a wide audience of strangers. Though I hear he's got a
lot better at this in the last half-decade, so perhaps this criticism is no
longer warranted.

~~~
pessimizer
His social skills are fine, and he has been immensely successful and changed
the entire face of computing. I find it strange that people condescend about
his appearance and manner because he has as of yet failed to transform the
entire technological world to his vision.

The reason FOSS exists is because of how charming and convincing RMS was and
is.

~~~
wizzwizz4
I condescend about his _manner_ because when he slipped up, he slipped up
_big-time_. Not just a single-word blunder, but entire paragraphs. (He does
this less nowadays, from what I can tell.)

He was charming and convincing within the environments in which he needed to
charm and convince people. I reckon those were largely informal settings, in
what I've heard referred to as "tech-bro" cultures. Those skills don't
generalise.

The easiest way for eccentric people to gain social acceptance is to fit in.
That was never an option for Richard Stallman, so he _must 've_ been charming
and convincing. I couldn't have done what he's done. That doesn't
automatically mean he's good at _every_ kind of social interaction – and he
most certainly _wasn 't_, in the early 2000s. He made enough public slip-ups
that I might need two hands to count them!

He's a political activist. One slip-up is enough for your enemies to discredit
you. He can't afford as many as he's made, and certainly not any more. That's
why I say he needs to focus on social skills; there's still work to do, and
he's still one of the few people doing it, and he _needs_ social credibility
to be able to do so.

(I suppose his biggest mistake was spreading himself across so many causes,
and hence making himself a lot of enemies… But I'm not going to criticise him
for that; it's better than I've ever done.)

~~~
roenxi
> I condescend about his manner because when he slipped up, he slipped up big-
> time

In his failure he seems to have achieved success greater than pretty much
anyone else in the tech industry. The GPL and the laughably successful
strategy behind it is one of the main planks underpinning the modern tech
industry, and Stallman was one of the key characters to set in motion that
agglomerative process that is the modern OSS stack.

Stallman has arguably had a more transformative impact on the software
industry than any CEO in recent history. It is a weak argument, because any
one man can only do so much, but it is there. More than can be said about most
people.

If that is his contribution with slip-ups you must have high expectations for
him.

~~~
wizzwizz4
I do. He's Richard Stallman.

The slip-ups I'm referring to were largely spur-of-the-moment social blunders;
there's only one general principle I know he has that I think is wrong. If he
hadn't made those, there'd be less fodder against him, so he could do more.
I'm glad he's not making them as much, but he's still doing it enough that he
had to resign from the FSF to prevent it from being dragged down by
association with him.

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tus88
Speech or beer?

~~~
jonathanstrange
Free as in 4 freedoms.

~~~
schemy
Freedom zero should be only for people.

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umvi
What's disturbing to me is that this idea is under attack by people who
believe we are morally responsible for the users of our software. Meaning,
software should not be free for everyone, only free for people that won't use
it immorally.

