In a world of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Open Source, I wonder if FSM is actually successful. Sure it's had successes, but success-ful, I would hesitate to call it.
Also, I'm pretty sure the original commenter was implying that RMS is a bad spokesman because he is so polarizing/unattractive (idealogically).
How much did it cost you to learn to program? Before Free Software, it would have been a lot. Now you can learn and create amazing software without spending any money. And there is a culture of sharing that's made software one of the most successful fields to date.
This stuff is always difficult to figure out with any certainty, because the "what if" world will always remain hypothetical.
For instance, the FSF is fairly successful, but in an alternate universe, with, say, David Hasselhof (or, KITT, for that matter), as their spokesperson, maybe they would have been vastly more successful.
With regards to the availability of free software, who knows how much is due to them, how much is due to BSD type sharing, and how much is simply due to the economics of free software making a lot of sense for some kinds of programs.
BSD predates the FSF by almost a decade. pcc predates GCC by about the same amount of time. I know that you know that projects like Perl have nothing to do with the FSF as well.
BSD however, was not BSD licensed untill the early 90s, and they clearly stated this move was in response to GNU and the GPL, to use BSD before that point required an extremely expensive AT&T source code license.
Regarding the cost of learning to program: That's thanks to free-as-in-beer software, which is quite different from the FSF's free-as-in-speech software. (Though it is true that free-as-in-speech software also tends not to cost anything, since it's basically unsalable.)
And the culture of sharing exists outside of Stallman's highly restrictive copyleft bubble. Ordinary open-source software falls short of Stallman's demands, but it actually grants the user more freedom than GPL software does.
Since we value individual freedoms the most, the author decides what do with their software. Author's Choice. If you dont like the license on GPLd software, recode it and release as BSD. Go compete in the marketplace of ideas.
Perhaps you are not aware that the vast majority of open source software does qualify as Free Software by the FSF's definition. Certainly BSD-licensed software does.
BSD as it currently is(the "new" BSD licenses from 1999 on), because that's GPL compatible. The original BSD license does not count as FOSS as far as the FSF is concerned.
The original BSD license was free too, it was just not GPL compatible. The FSF has always recommended against it, but they have always called it a Free Software license.
I very much doubt that, since the definitions are very similar. Just because you could look at the source doesn't make it Open Source, as defined by the OSI.
The Apple II, the first mass market personal computer, predates the "Free" software movement by several years, and came with Basic-- the most popular language at the time for hobbyists-- installed, by default, for free.
For the most part, Apple has given away development tools for free, or at very low cost, primarily to cover the overhead of offering them.
Since Mac OS X has been out, development tools have been free, and in the box. (Though now you download them rather than get them in the box, of course.)
I'm not from the US and my first computer bought in year '94 was 5 times cheaper than an Apple.
It came with MS-DOS 6.22 and had QBasic. But it was useless. You see, I wanted to create games. And not shitty games using ASCII-art, but the kind of games I played daily.
I then got a pirated Turbo Pascal and I learned the ins and outs of it. But it was also useless -- I had to develop my own graphics primitives, but the environment was extremely limited. What I really needed was a C++ compiler that could compile executables for 32-bits protected mode and a library that already had graphics primitives optimized for something better than 320x240 Mode X in 80286 assembly.
Then I got to DJGPP, a GCC port for MS-DOS and Allegro. It was heaven-like from initial testing, but reading on DJGPP I began reading about Linux and for the first time I got the feeling that I was using an obviously crippled environment, because it was. And for Windows 95, since it was getting deployed everywhere, Visual C++ and Borland Delphi were expensive, too freaking expensive.
You may feel nostalgic about Apple II and that lovely Basic you loved so much. But it was also useless. And the "free development tools" from OS X? The compiler itself is GCC and the command-line environment is composed of lots of tools proudly wearing the GNU mark. Only in recent years has Apple started to consider other options, like LLVM, but that's because GCC has some technical issues, but otherwise it is the most mature and widely deployed compiler on this planet and has served Apple well.
You see, OS X wouldn't be OS X without the GNU tools and I really don't get how OS X can be used as an argument.
Don't you think Basic was the most popular language at the time because it came for free with many home computers? C and other compilers were hideously expensive at the time, no wonder these languages weren't particularly popular.
And have you considered that one reason for OS X development tools being available free of charge these days might be because Free software changed the development tools landscape dramatically in the last two decades?
For the most part, Apple has given away development tools for free, or at very low cost, primarily to cover the overhead of offering them
There was no freely available compiler for the mac between System 1 and OSX. My fifteen-year-old self had to make an at-the-time pretty significant investment to buy Metrowerks Codewarrior.
Stallman and GNU effectively ended the market for high priced proprietary dev tools. As a tool builder and user this is good and bad. That whole market segment has been removed for consideration and now the tool builder/user can sell their creations (the part that solves non-builder's problems while now giving away the tools they create while solving the user's problems). This transition has been very liberating. Now anyone with a modest hardware investment can have some of the best tools in the world to solve problems with. Amazing times.
My first C/C++ compiler cost nearly as much as the machine it ran on. This will never happen again and we can thank the GNU ecoSystem for jump starting the new ground rules.
I dumbfounded by all the awesome software I can use to build larger systems with everyday, literally millions of dollars worth of assets. Anyone anywhere could do this, with only food, water, hardware, electricity and internet.
RMS/GNU played a role. However, they had very little impact on the non-*nix space until prices of development tools had already dropped pretty sharply on DOS and then Windows. (Borland had a lot to do with it.) Tools, especially the pro editions and a lot of add-on libraries, were still a long way from free but the price points were coming down markedly. Ultimately though, I agree it was open source that drove the final nail into dev tools as a standalone business for most purposes.
GNU tools have profoundly changed the Microsoft platform, I remember when http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/ came out, everyone could get a legit C compiler for DOS/Windows. This was a huge deal.
Microsoft did its damnedest to kill Borland and its inexpensive tools.
Proprietary dev tools still exist, true, but the landscape is so vastly different. Even my favorite IDE IntelliJ has the source released under a BSD license, I actually reupped my license when they did this.
No, it did not come 'for free'. It's included in the 'asking price' of Apple II. The money it cost Apple to bundle basic with the system was spent in order to make it more attractive and that cost is in turn part of the final price the customer pays when buying an Apple II.
They're completely free. The total cost of the Mac developer tools is zero; I bought a Mac and Apple packed them in. I didn't buy XCode, I bought a Mac. (Though, to be fair, there was a time when they were like $5 for an upgrade. Then they weren't.)
Now, they don't fit the FSF's definition of "free software", but I have little use for the redefinition of words to attempt to push a political viewpoint, so, y'know.
I'll cop to playing their game in jest, but more seriously: my definition does not exclude freedom. Nginx, for example, is free of charge. It is also permissively (one might say 'freely'!) licensed.
Stallman's, on the other hand, rather sadly attempts to pervert the discussion with such headscratchers as (say) "Visual Studio Express is nonfree." Well, no, it's quite free, I just downloaded it and they said the corporatey equivalent of "use in good health" (though this was, as is their sort of thing, buried in a EULA that was many many pages long). If they said "VS Express is not freely licensed," well, yeah, sure. Instead the FSF and similar unfortunates attempt to reverse the overload (underload?) of the word 'free' to mean only the meaning of 'free' that is politically appealing to them.
So, you're right, there's only one party committing etymological warfare in anger--though I'll cop to doing it in jest to get my point across. :)
You're completely missing the point. Or rather, the context. RMS/the FSF never tried to pervert the meaning of "free" to only mean "libre". It's just that in the context of their work, it makes little sense to use the other meaning of free (as in beer) - they acknowledge it exists, but it's rather irrelevant to them.
When you hear RMS using the word "free", it will mean "libre". So if RMS says something is "unfree", then it's glaringly obvious what he means, and in no way "etymological warfare".
You could just as well complain about the English language being ambiguous. It's quite unfortunate that free (as in Freedom) and free (as in beer) mean completely different things depending on the context, yet use the same word, but there's little we can do about that.
"Visual Studio Express is nonfree."
Well, no, it's quite free
Try developing a plugin for it. That's lack of freedom right there.
Here, let me define freedom for you:
the state of being free or at liberty rather
than in confinement or under physical restraint
Or here's another one:
exemption from external control, interference,
regulation
Both definitions do not apply to Visual Studio Express, no matter how much wishful thinking you're trying to push ;)
ALSO, VS Express is not free as in cost either, as long as it only works on Windows, you do have to buy Windows Licenses. It's basically a complementary product. With GCC on the other hand you don't give a crap what platform you're using or what platform you're targeting. Well, actually you do give a crap because that's an extra benefit. Depends on your perspective.
It's silly to say that XCode or Visual Studio Express are free, as in speech or beer. XCode is a fundamental component of the Mac OS X operating system, and though Apple doesn't put a price on it, it still figures into the cost of every Apple device, it just doesn't have a line item. Most of the components in a computer don't have line items, they all have a cost.
Visual Studio Express is the same basic deal. Microsoft doesn't give it away for free. They grant license to use it to anyone with a Windows license.
XCode is just recently free, it always cost something before now. Without GCC being out there, would it have been free this whole time? I don't know either way, no one does, but I cheap != free. GCC has always been free.
The development tools might be free, but OSX certainly isn't, especially when you factor in the overpriced hardware. This is the number one reason I picked Android development over iOS.
I learnt to program from magazines that had "free software" written out in BASIC. It was free (cost and freedom). After that we used to download free software from BBS's. Fractint etc.
Free software existed before, it'll always exist. It's existence has nothing to do with Stallman.
About as irritating as hearing 'Crockford invented JSON'.
Was it actually free as in libre? Did the magazine include a license for the code samples? If there was no explicit license then it was absolutely not libre due to copyright.
Free Software is successful because Apple and Google would not have been successful without it. OSX & iOS are built on BSD, and Google's entire back end is based on open source software (Linux, Java, et cetera).
BSD does not use GNU software, IIRC. The BSDs use a separate re-implementation of the Unix base software under a BSD license (instead of a GPL license).
That said, I'm a little fuzzy on how much FSF may be inspired the BSDs to exist.
edit: I was overstating what I actually meant when I said that they don't use GNU software. I don't know about the current crop of BSDs, but I was referring to the original BSD system not being built on top of the GNU base.
There are a lot of tools and major projects within the various BSD's that are GPL'ed software. This includes but certainly isn't limited to gcc, gdb, grep, binutils, diff, and more.
It is only recently in the last few years that the BSD projects have started removing GPL'ed software from their base trees and replacing them with BSD equivalents. clang is slowly being accepted by FreeBSD (a BSD compiler developed by Apple), tools like grep and diff are being redone under the BSD license, and OpenBSD is looking at pcc to replace the gcc compiler for their base system.
The main reason is simply because they want to create a fully BSD distribution of components, where none of it is under the GPL license, secondary only recently has there been a new compiler available that is as good as gcc and could be a viable replacement.
For people who care there are big differences between "free" and "open" and other similar terms.
BSDs are open source, and free as in beer, but there have been years-long flame wars between RMS (and FSF advocates) and Theo de Raadt (and BSD advocates).
Stallman may say that free software has not been successful when people use the term Linux instead of GNU/Linux. (and yes, I am aware that there exist Linux Kernels without GNU userlands.)
Also, I'm pretty sure the original commenter was implying that RMS is a bad spokesman because he is so polarizing/unattractive (idealogically).