On June 29, 2007 the Free Software Foundation released the GNU General Public License, version 3. What happened since then? Federico Biancuzzi had the opportunity to discuss many subjects with the FSF's founder and president Richard Stallman.
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Member since:2006-01-28
Stallman created gcc and the gnu debugger gdbug and sold them commercially for many years, which he used to live and to start off the Free Software Foundation.
He hasn't drawn a check from MIT in more than two decades and has lived off his work and a McCarthy genius award.
You seem to have very little respect for somebody that has completely changed the way major IT companies do business. There were naysayers claiming that JAVA would never enter the FLOSS realm and they were proven wrong.
Flash may eventually end up in the same place. Adobe would gain financially by having the flash format and spec fully documented under a permissive license. They could always sell flash-based content creation tools. I see no point to keeping their player and the format closed source.
Edited 2009-04-15 09:07 UTC
Member since:2006-02-05
I wouldn't go that far. He had an idea that was adapted and changed by a great many people, and that ended up changing the way major IT companies do business. ESR is what made the Open Source message palatable to people outside of academia, and RMS considers open source to completely miss the point of what he was trying to do with Free Software.
And Java is not a good comparison to flash. Sun was shipping the full source to their API for years before it went open source, and platform decisions were made through the JCP, which was basically a consortium. The big thing for them was that they didn't want incompatible forks kicking around called java. Adobe published the flash file format spec, but thats about as far as community driven as flash has ever gotten, it is a proprietary product developed in a proprietary fashion.
Member since:
2005-12-02
"RMS would answer your question simply: if you don't enjoy writing software you probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
That applies to most everything. The fact of the matter remains in that, I would guess, at least 80% of people do not truly enjoy their jobs. You know, the thing that actually puts food on the table, and which Stallman has held only briefly, then moving into that fantasy world of Academia? People write software to make money, though there may be a few who actually enjoy it and don;t want to make money off of it.