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.
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RE[2]: Call It Like You See It
by Hiev on Thu 24th Sep 2009 17:21
in reply to "RE: Call It Like You See It"
Member since:2005-09-27
RE[2]: Call It Like You See It
by jpobst on Thu 24th Sep 2009 19:29
in reply to "RE: Call It Like You See It"
Member since:2006-09-26
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"...
Great answer except one more thing. Mono is an open implementation of MS's spec. They didn't ASK permission, they just did it. It is cleanly reverse engineered and "legal"...
So if that makes Samba ok, it makes Mono ok as well.
RE[3]: Call It Like You See It
by Ed W. Cogburn on Fri 25th Sep 2009 09:50
in reply to "RE[2]: Call It Like You See It"
Member since:2009-07-24
Mono is an open implementation of MS's spec. They didn't ASK permission, they just did it.
The GP's wording is misleading.
Samba is an open implementation of a CLOSED interface. They didn't bother to ask, because they knew what the answer would be (no).
Mono (except for Winforms) is an open implementation of an OPEN standard (ECMA). They didn't need to ask, because MS can't stop anyone from implementing an ECMA standard.
As Mono will always be 2 steps behind .NET, I'm sure MS doesn't even care about the Winforms implementation, not only because nearly everyone using Winforms is really targeting Windows anyway, and because Mono's Winforms support will always be the part that is furthest behind .NET, and finally because Mono's existence also gives them political cover (see judge, look at Mono, we do play nice with those FOSS guys).
So if that makes Samba ok, it makes Mono ok as well.
Samba was never OK with MS, after all, they used legal action to try and stop Samba development later. So no, these are 2 completely different situations.
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.