Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 24th Sep 2009 13:35 UTC, submitted by Hiev
If you don't like personal, blog-style reporting, you might want to skip this item. A few days ago, during a speech at Software Freedom Day in Boston, Richard Stallman has, at least in my book, crossed a line that I thought he would never cross.
Permalink for comment 386005
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-07-17
Why doesn't RMS deride the SAMBA guys in the same manner?
Because they've written a piece of software purely for compatibility reasons because there is demand. They're not actively recommending that everyone rewrites everything for it nor are they actively recommending and pushing new features and software that Microsoft has written that no one uses yet and doing it as a third-party proxy. The Samba guys aren't on the board of Codeplex, as de Icaza is, which is an organisation masquerading as the open source and free software community he claims to represent.
Relationships are two-way - you give something, they give something back. That's not happening there. The guy is a bona fide apologist now, probably always has been, which is sad considering how talented he is. I'm sure that Microsoft job that he's always seemed to want is not far away now.
Great answer except one more thing. Samba is an open implementation of MS's spec. They didn't ASK permission, they just did it. It was cleanly reverse engineered and "legal" until Novell (the company he works for, and listens to him) threw the Samba team leader under the "patent" bus the minute they bought SuSe. It should be blatantly obvious anybody that "loves" Free Software should get the heck away from this guy. He's taking devs away from building competing technologies like Ruby, Pyton, D-Bus, KHTML and spending the time copying whatever (mis)direction MS is printing this month.
He's probably not "evil" but he's a businessman trying to chase Microsoft's coattails because their might be money there... Open Source (not Free Software) is just an means to that goal. He keeps compromising OTHER people's project ideals (like Samba) and signing deals nobody in the community approves of (accepting that OTHER PEOPLE's Free Software is "cheating" on IP) on a regular basis. Guys like Shuttleworth shouldn't even be taking his calls at this point or using his products.
ACTIONS say he is an enemy of Free Software in favor of the more legally nebulous (and profitable) Open Source. It's WAR out there. What guys like Linus and ESR don't understand is that companies like Novell have promised to pay large corporations royalties for Linus's or Community's Free Software work... with the flick of a pen, somebody else "owns" their IP.