From: Matthew Gingell (gingell@gnat.com)
Date: Tue Jun 19 2001 - 18:00:08 MDT
Mike Lorrey writes:
> Christian Szegedy wrote:
>
> > Mike Lorrey wrote:
> > > This is untrue. Robert Stallman is on record specifically admitting that his
> > > goal in creating the GNU license was to destroy and bankrupt any software
> > > developer that ever made a buck on software.
Mike, when attributing specific on the record admissions it's
conventional to cite the record specifically. It would also be good
to get the man's name right.
> I am only communicating what I've read in Boardwatch Magazine,
> which quoted RMS from I beleive a BYTE mag interview from some
> years ago. RMS said that he felt violated at his intellectual
> atmosphere being violated by the commercialism of his colleagues
> who went off to found successful software companies and vowed to
> make them pay.
If you can cite a quote in which Stallman vows to make someone
(anyone) pay, I'll cover your NRA dues for life. He takes a fairly
extreme ideological position and there's plenty to argue about there,
but the the FSF is not a bitter act of vengeance against
ex-colleagues made good and, were you to read anything he's written,
I think you'd find RMS doesn't make a very credible villain.
> Whether the open source business model(s) work or not is irrelvant
> to this historical fact. The market will decide whether they do, or
> not. According to the president of Red Hat at a recent conference,
> they don't.
Most anything is irrelevant to historical facts when you make them
up.
I agree it's beside the point, but I find it odd the president of a
corporation would announce his business model doesn't work at a
public conference. It seems somewhat counter to his interests - I'd
expect him to handle such a realization more delicately.
> However, that is immaterial to the reason why RMS originally was
> motivated into writing the GNU public license.
I agree with you here: Computers are neat and software is fun to poke
around with, it sucks when the government makes figuring out how
things work a criminal act, if you give something away no one else
should be able to sell a derivative work if you don't want them to,
etc. Money is another issue.
> Personally I like open source software, as I am generally a
> skinflint, and at present I am also only working part time, as well
> as the fact that I generally don't need much support beyond talking
> to other users for free
Given that you're not presently in a position to blow a few hundred
bucks on a wiggling paper clip, you might take a moment to consider
who wrote the tools used to develop the alternative.
> (the presence of other users willing to share info for free is one
> weakness, IMHO, of the open source business model, when your chief
> competition for revinue works for free, its a bit difficult to make
> money off of anybody but people who confuse CD players with cup
> holders.)
I work for a free software company maintaining an Ada complier.
Developers writing code to control, for instance, wingflaps on
airplanes need a compiler that produces correct code, and when it
doesn't they need more followup than they're going to get on
Usenet. 'This has been broken forever - maybe someone will fix it for
the next release' is unacceptable if software that doesn't work costs
you money: Databases, web servers, anything else which needs to be
fixed quickly when it stops working.
It's not true of things like Solitaire, but if software does
something important then people will pay to make sure it works. In
the same category, if you need a tool, it's likely to be cheaper to
adapt something freely available than it is to start from scratch
Since tools of any significance are huge, complicated things - it's
probably cheaper to hire someone who's been working on it for years
than spend six months bringing an expensive team up to speed.
( To get a direct feel for why people pay money for this sort of
stuff, you might try to following experiment: Subscribe to the gcc
mailing list and pretend to be a vendor trying to market some new
embedded chipset. Post something like: 'Hey! I need a compiler for
the board I'm selling, otherwise no one will buy it, but people who
can write compilers are really expensive. :( Could someone spend a
month or so and port gcc for me? Thanks in advance free software
community!' )
> In that interview, RMS, after writing his GNU public license, found
> that it was difficult to recruit others into his plan simply out of
> reasons of spite and economic jealousy, so he had to create a
> manifesto of positive reasons for open source along the lines of
> GNU. Today, the propaganda is what open source proponents hype, and
> are in denial about the possibility that RMS might possibly have
> had other reasons when he first set out to create the GNU movement.
> This seems to be something of a case of unintended consequences,
> where Stallman's rationalizations have real world validity
> irrespective of his personal motivations. The market will tell.
Up to this point your remarks are within the reasonable bounds of
ignorance / clumsy rhetoric, but you cross the line into paranoid
fantasy here. Based on a quote from an interview in some magazine, as
requoted by some other magazine, which you recall reading a couple of
years ago, you've concluded that RMS is a spiteful luddite out to
destroy the software industry, has given away millions of dollars in
software out of economic envy, and the ideology he's been eloquently
and persuasively expressing for years is, in fact, a deliberate trick
intended to recruit the weak minded into a pathological, likely
communist, scheme to avenge himself against the red blooded engines
of legitimate progress? The market will of course determine whether
the cult he's invented has itself any merit, but this is beside the
important point: RMS is a bad, bad man?
I don't understood how you could possibly come to that conclusion, or
how it could have seemed like a good idea for long enough to write it
down.
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