He has a point. Given the number of times Google or Yahoo! or other random company has turned up at a hack day, said "build stuff against our APIs!" and then said APIs disappear six months later because someone in Silicon Valley had a meeting and said that they need to pivot or iterate or something... it's kind of ridiculous. (I mean, I don't expect any different: they are commercial organisations, they are there to make a profit.)
But then, my current non-work hacking is mostly building against APIs that are open in the sense of being peer-driven community projects that produce open data and are hosted on open source software (OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia etc.). It's often more work, but you are playing in a free ecosystem rather than a vendor-controlled walled garden. If open data services go away, you buy some hosting and load up the last data dump...
Writing a program to a closed API is like writing a mod to a online game. At any time, that program can be made useless forever.
Of course, if there are multiple implementation of the same API, or architecture to swap API's, this would be different. Exception cases exist, but in the general case, one should be careful to lock the programs fate together with the API.
That's what all of these articles about RMS kind of approximately indicate - he has a point, and his point being completely unassailably valid doesn't detract whatsoever from his being a despicable human being.
Sure, and I think that it's a great example of where RMS and other more fundamentalist free software people could engage. Go along to hack days and show the things that the free software community are working on.
Not everyone is going to go along with Stallman's free software puritanism. But a lot of those people produce free and open source software, or would be willing to help.
What a completely vacuous and hateful story. You probably have that man to thank more than anyone else alive that when you have a problem with your rails rest API you can actually go see why instead of filing a bug (if you could afford a support contract) and waiting six months for a point release.
I didn't think it was an attack, and I think it mostly comes down to your initial impression of whether the author agrees with RMS.
I personally read it as a socially awkward gray beard wandering through, imparting wisdom that will inevitably fall on deaf ears - they're going to have to learn it the hard way.
In this context, the comments serve as a contrast against his wisdom. Despite his disheveled appearance, RMS happened to be the smartest person in the room at that particular moment.
But many people seem to be reading it in a context of "weird old guy walks in and says something silly", which could fit the text too.
Personally I think RMS is so right about this issue that I didn't even consider it the other way at first.
I don't think the line is blurry at all. It comes down to whether you have the source code + data for a service.
If so, the company hosting it is providing a convenience. You can fork it, modify it, extend it as you like.
If not, the company can dictate how and when the service is used.
If they were writing against APIs provided by an open source library built on Overtone + Clojure (in some JVM-less form), I would hazard a guess that RMS would not have disapproved.
An ad hominem isn't just any time you say something mean about someone. An ad hominem is when you say that some thing someone believes is wrong on the basis of some irrelevant personal characteristic. ("John may tell you that the Higgs-Boson exists but he is a convicted felon!")
This may be sarcastic, it may not portray RMS in a good light (I disagree: I think everyone knows RMS is principled to the point of pig-headed; it doesn't change my opinion of RMS at all, just simply confirms what I already know). But it isn't an ad hominem.
People claim things are ad hominem falsely so often that some people have even started referring to it as The 'Ad Hominem Fallacy' Fallacy. http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html ;-)
True, but a common argument against stallman's arguments is often "I don't want to listen to some smelly hippy with a greasy beard" rather than debating his points directly.
I'm not sure if that is the case with this article, but it does put a lot of text into describing his appearance rather than discussing what the implications might have been if the hackday had been focused around free software music projects (stuff like LMMS , ardour etc).
I don't think it's an ad hominem at all. The event is billed as "Come build the future of music", but if all they're doing is building a bunch of web apps against some APIs, then they're really just doing the music API developers work for them, arent they? So RMS is completely right, as usual.
Instead of doing all that free work, perhaps they should be building something they can own?
"Beard matted into a bizarre pizza crust flapping off the end of his chin... He waddled... RMS intoned gravely... he turned about on a heel and marched out... with a grad student in tow."
If that's not ad hominem, I'm not sure what is, you scruffy-looking nerf herder. But um, what's even more bizarre is that you're saying it's not ad hominem and then you're taking RMS' side.
P.S. The AGPLv3 is kind of nice; it's the GPLv3 extended to cover web app usage. I asked the FSF about a Lesser AGPLv3 but they said they needed lawyers a.k.a. money.
Ad hominem implies abusive, but abusive does not imply ad hominem. Fair enough. The reason I still think it's ad hominem, is the implication that because RMS is this crusty old weirdo neckbeard legend that doesn't exactly fit in with a bunch of young hip-to-be-nerdy hackathoners, his arguments about Free software (using RMS capitalization) don't fit in with hip and modern web API-using programs. But, of course they do, hence the AGPLv3.
Of course, the implication isn't stated explicitly. Say what you will about that.
I think you're projecting your own dislike of the guy onto the article. It would be ridiculous to pretend that he doesn't have some major flaws and eccentricities. What this article illustrates is that, above all else, he's reliably RMS.
"Beard matted into a bizarre pizza crust" ... "waddled up". Not an attack, but hardly respectful: a smug, substance-free attempt to make light of him and his concerns.
Appreciated - wasn't an attack and I was there. I didn't stand super close to RMS when the exchange occurred, so wanted to be clear I was paraphrasing.
I feel like the easiest solution to this is to insist that closed APIs must be made opensource in the event that they are ever shutdown (for whatever reason).
Create a movement and a website that lists closed APIs with this 'terms of service' condition.
That way, startups and large companies can still make kickass APIs and profit off them, but developers are never left hanging.
The only problem is from an acquisition POV, this likely decreases the value of the company. e.g. Face.com, Tokbox. But that's only an issue if the company cough facebook decides to shutdown the API.
I think you're confusing the two meanings of "free". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_Libre. RMS is likely advocating for free as in free of restrictions, not per se "at zero cost".
Sure, and there is the possibility of free-as-in-freedom libre software-as-a-service. And web APIs that are free software. The OpenStreetMap API, for instance. The software that runs it is open source, the data is freely licensed, the system that it runs on is open source (Ubuntu Linux, Apache, Ruby on Rails)...
no, I mean free in the libre sense.
There are plenty of free SaaS providers out there, basically anybody who provides git hosting, apache/php hosting, wordpress hosting or email hosting (using a free stack) is doing this.
I haven't read the whole thing, but one thing that jumps out at me.
"Windows has a back door with which Microsoft can forcibly change any software on the machine"
Does he mean Windows update? or something else?
Most free GNU/Linux distros provide some method of automatically updating software also which is enabled by default but can be disabled (same as Windows).
I think that yes, he means the software update. I'm afraid you're mistaken on where the defaults lie, though.
An out-of-the-box Windows will download and install the software and then automatically reboot the PC. You have to explicitly change the settings to avoid that.
On Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch and Mint (the desktop distros I've used at one point or another) you will be notified that the updates are available but you have to explicitly say that you want them installed. If they require special privileges, you will be asked for a sudo password. If they require a restart, you have to approve it explicitly as well.
I suppose that is true, but it seems disingenuous to suggest that automatically installing stuff like security updates as a default option is somehow bad for the user.
It's not really a "backdoor" either, Windows update makes itself very obvious and tells you what it is doing.
RMS seems to have worded this to suggest that MS have built in some secret way to fiddle with your computer for nefarious purposes.
It is a back door because the user (even a sophisticated one) has no visibility into what's being installed (all the information the user sees is being controlled by Microsoft and the user has no way to verify it because of the closed nature of the system).
This means that fundamentally, the user has to trust Microsoft every time time an update is being rolled out. And as any other large corporation, Microsoft doesn't always do things that are in the best interest of their users.
Mind you, this is the back door that we know about. I don't want to go get into the conspiracy territory, but one of Stallman's points is that the user really can't know whether there's a hidden back door or not. And even if there isn't one now, they can use the Windows update to put it there.
Richard Stallman feels very strongly about this. Others may not. Depending on which side you're on, you may either make this a big deal or say that Microsoft (or anyone breaking and hijacking the system) is trustworthy so this is nothing to worry about.
How you talk about the facts is retorics. But at least on this subject he's not saying anything that isn't true (he may be bending the truth on other issues -- I haven't read the article so I can't honestly say).
But then, my current non-work hacking is mostly building against APIs that are open in the sense of being peer-driven community projects that produce open data and are hosted on open source software (OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia etc.). It's often more work, but you are playing in a free ecosystem rather than a vendor-controlled walled garden. If open data services go away, you buy some hosting and load up the last data dump...