Submitted by Over the weekend, there has been a bit of a ruffling of the feathers over in the GNOME camp. It started with complaints received about the content on Planet GNOME, and ended with people proposing and organising a vote to split GNOME from the GNU Project.
Recap
The entire situation started when Lucas Rocha sent an email to the GNOME Foundation mailing list, stating that the Foundation had received complaints about some of the posts on Planet GNOME containing inappropriate content – iTWire claims this post by De Icaza was the catalyst. A legitimate discussion ensued about whether or not there should be rules concerning posting on PGO, and about the possibility of sending annual reminders to people listed on PGO that they can remove themselves from the planet if they want to.
Somewhere along the line, Richard Stallman weighed in, and this is when things got a little nastier. RMS argued that posts promoting non-Fee software should not appear on PGO, a position Philip Van Hoof sharply disagreed with.
“The people who work at VmWare also very often posted (and still post) about their work and appear on Planet GNOME. There’s nothing wrong with that. Same goes for Nokia and many other companies involved,” Hoof argues, “Forbidding those contributors to talk about their work goes directly and philosophically against the ‘Planet GNOME is a window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers and contributors’ slogan of the project.”
RMS replied, stating that GNOME should not provide a platform for the promotion of non-Free software. “They should not [talk about VMware], unless VmWare becomes free software. GNOME should not provide proprietary software developers with a platform to present non-free software as a good or legitimate thing,” he states, “Perhaps the statement of Planet GNOME’s philosophy should be interpreted differently. It should not invite people to talk about their proprietary software projects just because they are also GNOME contributors.”
The executive director of the GNOME Foundation, Stormy Peters, thought this was ridiculous. “Planet GNOME is about people and we display everyone’s full blog feed as it represents them,” she writes, “There are people that work on proprietary software as well as GNOME and that’s who they are. I don’t think we should reject people because they don’t agree with us 100% of the time.”
RMS replied to Peters, arguing that “GNOME is part of the GNU Project, and it ought to support the free software movement. The most minimal support for the free software movement is to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid presenting proprietary software as legitimate.”
And that’s when the bomb was dropped: Maybe GNOME needs to re-evaluate its membership of the GNU Project. Philip van Hoof was the one to propose such a vote. “You [RMS], as one of the key FSF people, appear to be keen on enforcing a
strict policy on how GNU’s member-projects should behave,” Van Hoof writes, “So I propose to have a vote on GNOME’s membership to the GNU project.”
Dave Neary warns for the possible repercussions such a vote could have for the GNOME project. “Such a vote, whatever the outcome, would have little effect on the GNOME project. The debate during the vote could cause a lot of harm & discord for the GNOME community,” he writes.
Van Hoof agreed with Neary, but argues that the fear of possible repercussions is not a reason not to hold such a vote. “We cannot be blind when the leader of the Free Software Foundation is requesting that the ‘minimal’ thing GNOME should do, is to support it by, and I quote, ‘avoiding presenting proprietary software as legitimate’,” van Hoof explains, “I fully understand that ignoring Richard’s request is the easy way. But his request cannot be ignored any longer. He really wants this as a ‘minimal’ commitment from GNOME. No matter what feels good for us. We’ve been ignoring this for too long.”
A questionnaire has been set up (results here).
When I grow up…
At some point, movements and organisations need to grow up. In the beginning, movements can afford to be radical, looking for boundaries, and preferably crossing them. This is the way to get noticed, to gain a foothold, to expand your sphere of influence. At some point, however, radicalism will only hold a movement back, instead of propelling it forward.
And here lies the crux of the problem. Free and open source software is no longer new or radical. I can pretty much guarantee you that everyone in your circle of friends and family is using Free or open source software – maybe they have an iPhone, they could be using Firefox, a web application built on top of F/OSS, or they have a router with embedded Linux on it. Free and open source software is one of the big success stories of the technology industry.
Free and open source software has grown up. It no longer needs radicalism and dogmas. It needs to leave all that behind, old leaders need to make way for new ones. It has become quite clear over the past few years that a lot of people working within the F/OSS community no longer like or care about RMS – heck, they may even dislike him thoroughly. We all respect his immense contributions to the technology industry, but that doesn’t grant him a get-out-of-jail free card.
This GNOME issue is about that. Many within the GNOME project believe that in order for the platform to survive and move forward, it needs to interoperate with proprietary software, whether they personally would use such software or not. This is a new reality that RMS doesn’t seem to understand; he’s still holding on to the days of yore when it was “us vs. them”, and he’s trying to impose this outdated way of thinking on the FSF and the GNU Project and its members – like GNOME.
The FSF needs to change. It needs to face the new reality, i.e., one wherein most people (developers) within the F/OSS community recognise the necessity for interoperability and cooperation with established proprietary software vendors. F/OSS is no longer developer-centric – it has become user-centric. It seems like RMS is oblivious to this change in perspective.
As such, I think it is a very good idea for the GNOME project to move away from the GNU Project. It is a symbolic move at most, but it would send a much-needed clear signal to RMS and the FSF.
According to the survey results 95% are against “Advertising a proprietary software product” and only 27% against “Mentioning a proprietary software product favorably”. The question is: does Icaza’s blog entry count as advertisement or as favorably mentioning?
That question is slightly misleading – or at least, the presentation of its results are. It was a checkbox question, where you could opt for multiple options at once. However, I disagreed with all of them, and didn’t check any of the boxes. This gets registered as a “skipped”, and dropped from the results, which is incorrect. There were a lot of people like me: 236.
The proper numbers would be this: 567 total respondents, of which 315 checked that box. Meaning: only 55% agreed with it, not 95.
He was definitely excited about it, but I think it was a genuine excitement as in “We will totally be able to do cool things with this” rather then “Hey guys, you should be using this for everything you do”. As an implementor, I think he should be allowed to talk about the things he is implementing, and the only reason for backlash is that he happens to be implementing an MS platform.
(small disclaimer, I think silverlight is retarded, and the only reason it hasn’t gone away yet is because microsoft doesn’t need it to be successful to keep throwing money at)
I have nothing against Mono. But how much of a Gnome developer is he nowadays? Of course, he is one of the founders of the project and contributed a lot in the past. But in my eyes he is more of a Mono developer than a Gnome developer nowadays. He does not develop for the Gnome platform anymore, he even doesn’t stand behind Gtk# any longer according to his blog post and he appeals for development of non-Gnome applications that don’t share anything with the Gnome software stack, for a technology (Silverlight) that is not even covered by the ECMA standards. So I wonder if Panet Gnome is the right blog aggregator for his blog. The Mono project has its own blog planet.
Moonlight has a Gtk# dependency, so I would assume that a SL4 port would continue using it. He also will talk about other projects he has a foot in sometimes, like GNUmeric and Evo. That being said, he main focus lately has been mono, and maybe he should move over there.
the guy implicitly believes that this mono stuff is the future of the gnome gui. I thought that was pretty clear, but maybe I’m too high level
That might be the case, but don’t confuse Miguel’s view as being representative of the Gnome community. I’m sure he’d be the first to acknowledge that his opinions are his own.
Miguel has always tried to bring into Unix the way Microsoft tools work.
– Bonobo is COM for Unix, based on CORBA;
– Evolution started as an Outlook clone;
– Then he started pushing for Mono.
Somehow I think he tries to compensate for the fact that he was turned down on a Microsoft job interview.
Nowadays I don’t have anything personall against .Net, but Mono will never be a 100% proper implementation of the ful API.
Norton Commander (the template of Midnight Commander) was not a Microsoft tool.
The irony of the whole exercise; Bonobo is being removed, Evolution is dead in the water as libcanvas is removed from GNOME but nothing has been done to fix the dependency issue – much talk about libfoocanvas but nothing done. Then there is mono – great idea, too bad all the parts that make cross platformness possible are patented up the wazoo by Microsoft, so all you have left which isn’t patented are a small number of things no one outside the *NIX would would be interested in.
I sometimes wonder why they even moved to the idea of Outlook when distinctive applications that work together would be an alot better solution; Balsa for email, and create stand alone address book, calender etc. Why didn’t they go that route? I don’t think that Miguel has bad motives, I just think he has been put into positions that are undeserved and based on hype rather than what you really need in those positions – ruthless pragmatists who know when it is a good idea is rather than blindly following the market leader assuming they’re the market leader because of a superior design/implementation.
Edited 2009-12-15 11:23 UTC
Turned out the whole saga is done by trolls.
http://www.the-source.com/2009/12/gnome-and-the-gnu-project/
The whole story on
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2009-December/thread…
I like it how the blogger compares talking about using proprietary software in to posting racist propaganda or porn.
Richard Stallman’s idiotic outbursts does more damage for the publicity of FSF (et al) than anything on Planet GNOME; so maybe we should have a vote to have his name disassociated from future GNU discussion?
I second this motion, Richard just makes appear FSF as a joke not serious enough to be considered for anything.
Edit: typo
Edited 2009-12-14 15:52 UTC
I have no problem as long as the software remains GPL.
I think most level headed people have jumped to the open source side of the fence by now.
No, they work for FSF-europe and support FSF-europe.
Richard may suck, but free software is the superior concept.
Certainly not based on results. It’s all ideology and nothing to show for it. Linux on the desktop is a joke and the only reason it’s good in the server room is because of the large number of proprietary entities contributing to the kernel, Apache and PHP.
My Linux desktop blows everything you have out of the water for what _I_ am doing with it
And Linux basically runs most of the internet PERIOD
That alone, even if it were successful nowhere else, makes it a huge success(along with Bind, Apache, sendmail, etc.)
I used to think the same until I started using Windows again and realized how nice it is to have software the works, looks decent and actually does useful things. Featurewise, there’s no comparison between GNOME/KDE and Windows 7. The latter have barely succeeded in replicating the functionality of Windows 98 or 2000, let alone the latest versions of Windows. Polish is lacking. And we’re always left waiting, hoping that the next version of X or KDE will finally be usable. It never is. I got tired of waiting and I think others will feel the same.
You didn’t read what I wrote. I use Windows/OSX/Unix, but for what _I_ want Linux is _by_far_ the best desktop OS. It may not be for you, but I don’t really care.
You want to waste time fixing broken configs, trying to get hardware to work and not being able to use non-RMS-sanctioned software? Seriously, just install cygwin and then you can have all your unixy goodness on an operating system that actually works. Better yet, use OS X where most Unix stuff works without installing something like cygwin. There’s really no reason to use Linux as a desktop OS at this point. There’s nothing it can do that other OSes can’t do and can’t do better (often much much better). If you can give me a good example (and not something like scrollbars act different), I’ll concede the point.
Don’t tell that I don’t know what is good for me. Trust me I know best what I want.
One example where Windows totally blows is working with git, which I just need. Do you understand that?
OSX kinda works for git, but I don’t like the UI. It is not customizable enough for _my_ needs and I don’t like the price point of powerfull expandable OSX hardware.
Another example is my EeePC with just 12 GB SSD. KDE 4.3 runs like a charm on that thing and it only uses 240MB RAM. I can install all my prefered apps and everythings updates automatically. Such a worry-free computer is not possible with windows. You need antivir etc. And each app has its own updater (if even that.)
My opinion:
Windows totally blows, security sucks. It is super bloated compared to Linux and you have to wait years for things to advance.
Trust me when I say that for me Linux works like a charm, I use it for 13 years now and _for_me_ it is the best desktop OS there is.
As I said, it may not be for you but I don’t care.
I use Git on Windows and it works just fine. It even has integration with Visual Studio.
Well that’s amazing for you because I couldn’t get KDE 4.3 to run well on my ThinkPad T43 and not for lack of tweaking. Of course, it’s also extremely ugly and unpolished, to say the least, regardless of your hardware. Things don’t work, are missing, performance is generally terrible, even if you turn off desktop effects, bugs don’t get fixed, etc.
This is one place where Linux is generally better, but in practice, it’s really not hard to install a few apps on Windows and have them self-update. All of the Microsoft ones seem integrated with the Windows package management system and auto-update system so they work fine. You also don’t have to worry about dependencies either. And honestly, you don’t need to update software as frequently on Windows as you seem to need to on Linux. Releases actually mean something in the proprietary world, unlike OSS, with its release early/release often mantra that just means a stream of crappy releases come out, leaving users on the upgrade treadmill.
On all the machines I’ve used, Windows has regularly beaten Linux in terms of RAM usage (most people don’t know how to measure this correctly anyways) and performance, both graphical and otherwise. There are a few areas where Linux shines, but it’s no longer enough to make the case to use it instead of Windows or OS X. It’s not really bloated compared to Linux anymore. Linux installs are now getting pretty big (unless you use some trimmed down WM and Vim). As far as security goes, well, Linux’s security model is now really no different than Windows or superior. In fact, Windows has SELinux-type capability built into the core system design and has had it since NT. That Microsoft allowed, for a while, users and devs to ignore that was a mistake that has since been corrected. Linux does NOT have a strong security model and has many attack vectors, which do occasionally get exploited. The lack of marketshare on the desktop and the unfortunate heterogeneity of desktop setups limits the value of desktop Linux as a target (as does the general savvy-ness of the users).
Guess you haven’t tried Windows recently for more than 2 minutes. Oh yeah, and let me know when OpenOffice can hold a candle to MS Office.
It was for me, but I just got sick of all the trouble, the lack of features, the lack of performance and the glacial pace of development. When Ubuntu lists theme and icon changes as top 10 features for a new release, I know it’s time to move on.
I stopped reading right there.
Sorry. I know it’s annoying when people use superior software. Of course, I’m a guy who uses Vi for all my programming on Linux and OS X. List of languages I’ve programmed in: C, C++, Java, Perl, Bash, PHP and now C#. I’m not just some VS junkie who picked up C# from a 24 hour book and doesn’t know what a pointer is. I’ve debugged software from hex dumps before. But Visual Studio is nice and beats the pants off of every Linux IDE except Eclipse (aside from Eclipse’s bugginess).
Visual studio is nice (though I wouldn’t use it myself), but you should try Qt Creator if you do some C/C++ development. It’s like eclipse, but not complex, slow or buggy.
It’s all relative to what you’re doing.
At home, I do multi-language (from C to Ruby, depending on project) development in vim7 with git for my source control, PGSQL database. I use virtual machines for testing things, and the production server is linux and I manage it with SSH. My local network has a NFS4 fileserver, from which I mount my home directory. For my test virtual machines, I don’t open their consoles — I boot them via the shell and use them with X11 over SSH. My desktop environment has lots of tools, hot-keys to custom written python scripts that do things over dbus, gconf, etc. I use focus follows mouse. I only have one Windows (win7) machine and it’s only for games, so networking with Windows computers isn’t an issue. I haven’t had any issues with Ubuntu’s default install on this machine since about 2006, most likely because I don’t need high performance 3D graphics and I watch movies and play games on my PS3 or game machine.
At work I use Windows 7 + Visual Studio 2008/Resharper. I hate it as a development environment. The cmd shell is crap and cygwin is poorly integrated (I use rxvt). All implementations of focus follows mouse don’t work properly and you can only scroll the active control with the wheel. This excessive clicking is especially bad if you spend many hours per day on computer. Remote desktop connection is terrible for development and testing compared to ssh -X, each server only supports 2 connections unless you pay for more licenses. Virtual machines require extra software, rather than being built in as kvm is, and the free MS VPC won’t let me hide the console window, snapshots take ages. Additionally everything uses lots more memory. Each Visual Studio instance uses like 350MB private memory, and Windows Server VMs use a *huge* amount of memory compared to a Linux server VM. Windows has serious problems with being unable to delete/overwrite files.
Typically on Linux I segregate the filesystem so that I perform development on a clone of the basic production environment but with my dev tools mounted at /opt/dev/{bin,lib,…}, and use the built in package management systems for managing what packages get installed on everything. That’s all a lot more of a pain with Windows.
I don’t. That’s why I use Linux, where all my hardware works right out of the box and I don’t have to mess with a broken registry all the time.
Hahahaha. This is a joke right? You must be using that magical subset of hardware from 10 years ago that Just Works with Linux. I suppose you don’t have an ATi or nVidia graphics card.
As far as the registry is concerned, you must still be living in the 90s. Registry problems are rare these days. I’ve never had one and not for lacking of messing around with my machine and deleting stuff directly in regedit.
Heh, you must be using old info, from about ten years ago. I did a clean install of Ubuntu 9.10 last night, and everything little bit of hardware on my lap-top worked without so much as pulling a driver from apt. My web-cam, my ATI x1800 graphics card, and my wireless card. (I didn’t test the card reader, but I don’t have an SD card I care about reading, so meh).
Well, that much is true. The Registry hasn’t had an adverse effect on the performance of Windows machines in a loooong while.
Hey, you know what? It’s almost like both of these platforms work, and have (distinct!) valid use-cases! Why, they might not even be mutually exclusive!
I have two computers:
One desktop PC with a slightly older Radeon card that has no drivers available for Vista/7, but works right away using the standard X.org “radeon” driver. Half-Life 2 (fully WINE compatible) works fine with that driver.
My laptop has a NVidia 9200 GPU. At least Mandriva ships the latest proprietary NVidia drivers by default. Other distros use Nouveau, but that driver is also very fine for using office work.
Webcam, WiFi, SD Card reader, touchpad, microphone, sound, multimedia keys, ethernet,… work without any configuration needed.
Have you ever tried replacing the Apple sanctioned Open source software? Its a pain to do correctly, and often too hacky to use darwin ports/ fink to do what you need.
Linux just works best with programs that were … wait for it… designed with Linux in mind! In general these programs are:
1) Free ( aka gratis et Libre)
2) High quality ( much better than the windows only shareware )
3) Hackable/ Extendable ( No “hidden” apis! No closed propitiatory formats!)
I really prefer them. I understand Vista and 7 have some wiz bang wizards for transferring pictures out of your camera and other tasks that confuse my parents. I , however, am not my parents. I need less hand holding and enjoy an environment that invites me to learn how it works and participate on an even level. There is no wizard coming down from on high that controls what I can and cannot do with it.
Linux is far superior, if you don’t mind or prefer getting your hands dirty. If you’d prefer polish, then fine get your polish but beware, it comes with mandatory ignorance.
LinuxMakesYouSmartâ„¢
LinuxTeachesYouComputerScienceâ„¢
LinuxIsFreeâ„¢ …if your time is worthless.
Argg, So I suppose you spent thousands of dollars ( if you’re a typical USA university student) to spend time in class because your time is worthless. Learning anything takes time. Using anything takes time.
Lets say the cost of your time is X, but you gain Y in value. Then the cost using any operating system for time (excess time t) is:
(X-Y)*t
If you gain more than you lose, this is how much you profit from the extra amount of time it takes you. Now if this is win 95, then a lot of time is blue screens, reboots and freezes and I wouldn’t gain much from it. Its an economic decision and not everyone’s is going to be the same.
A craftsman would prefer to work in a workshop, rather than a posh office. Trying to force him to do his work in a sterile environment is a bad idea.
So Windows 7 (which is the latter) has the functionality of Windows 98?
I don’t know what you are talking about, but if you mean that GNOME and KDE don’t have the feature set of Windows, then I have to disagree.
I actually have a dual boot setup with Linux (with KDE 4.3.4) and Windows.
Windows:
* Almost no flexibility in configuration options.
* Ani-malware tools are a requirement.
* Half my hardware needs drivers that have to be downloaded first.
* No decent window management.
* No consistency among applications (menu bar below toolbar here, menu bar above toolbar there, ribbon somewhere else)
* No centralized way to update all software at once.
* Clumsy default file manager.
KDE/Linux:
* Hardware works out of the box.
* Major leaps in functionality every six months.
* All my software updates with only 3 clicks.
* Powerful, yet easy to use file manager (Dolphin)
* Great configurability, incl. the ability to have different Folder Views on one desktop.
* Out of the box support for Cisco VPNs and an unobtrusive GUI for it (NetworkManager).
* Awesome image/document viewers (Gwenview, Okular)
* Great multi-protocol chat client installed by default (Kopete).
* Great window manager that has small, but useful features like snap window to edge since many years.
* …
I’ve also used Mac OS X for many years. Even Mac OS X 10.3 is still better than recent Windows versions.
If you are referring to GUI configuration, yes. But that sure has it advantages: Everybody who has used Windows since version 95 can use the next person’s Windows as well. No confusion, just start working.
I disagree. The noobs may need it, companies may need it. Advanced users and power users don’t necessarily need it, brain.exe should be sufficent.
Get past the XP days, please. Today, in most cases Windows 7 just detects everything and loads the drivers needed via Windows Update.
IMHO that is true for pre W7, but Microsoft has done significant improvements in that area for 7 and I like it a lot. My girlfriend is now fully on Windows 7 and trust me, the new taskbar works far better. And one feature that KDE now copies from W7 is very cool: Drag window to a side and it spans to half of the screen width. She uses that quite often, it’s very very handy and easy to understand.
Well, Linux is only consistent among apps if you use a small set of poster child apps. My favorite jukebox on Linux is Songbird, it looks totally different to anything else.
Only as long as it decides not to work 😉
That sure is an argument easily destroyed. If the Kernel version of yours doesn’t support a particular component, you are pretty much screwed. And look at different Linux forums, people do have problems and things may break when switching to a newer version of your distribution.
A lot of it is just catch up. You may give some examples.
Panther was my reason to switch to the Mac. But again, W7 has made huge improvements in usuability, the old thinking doesn’t apply here.
Why would anyone be confused over setting their own preferences? In what context should one “just start working” in another person’s account?
The vast majority of computer users aren’t advanced users or power users. Power users are a bit of a worry, because they often think they know more than they really do, especially about a closed system with secret internals. Therefore, a system which doesn’t require a computer-savvy brain.so to remain resistant to compromises is intrinsically better.
Windows update won’t have a driver for anything that Microsoft hasn’t got source code for, nor has purchased the driver code back from the OEM. This category will include almost every piece of gear that was out of production before Windows 7 release date.
Yet for all its expense, Windows 7 still lacks basic things such as multiple desktops.
If running your particular odball favourite application is important to you, Linux lets you do that. If running a set of applications with a consistent GUI is important to you, Linux lets you do that also (in this case, if your desktop is KDE, then use Juk or Amarok as your jukebox, not Songbird). That type of flexibility is not available in Windows world, some of your applications are going to have to be oddball.
No, the Linux kernel has loadable modules.
Far less so than the problems people have when switching to the latest version of Windows, and finding that the drivers on the CDROMs that came with their hardware are all XP drivers, and they don’t work with Windows 7.
What nonsense is this? Even my old, pre-Vista machines – heck machines bought when XP was only a few months old – have all their drivers pulled from Windows Update. Me thinks you’ve simply never tried Windows 7.
The driver-hunting argument is no longer a valid one when comparing Linux to Windows.
So basic, that I’ve never had anyone ask for them other than people that read OSNews – who are fully capable of downloading one of the gaziliontrillion applications for Windows tat implement this functionality. Please, Linux has a lot to offer – you can most certainly do better than this.
Just as you can be consistent on Linux, you can be so on Windows too.
…which have to be compiled if you happen to have a piece of hardware your distribution of choice doesn’t like.
…which are then downloaded through Windows Update.
Windows 7 uses essentially the same drivers as Windows Vista. There is a whole world of hardware out there that never ever got a Vista driver.
Tell that to the people whose hardware doesn’t work on Windows 7 or Vista.
Microsoft simply doesn’t own the code for a whole raft of hardware drivers. Period.
If Microsoft doesn’t own the source code, and the OEM no longer sells the hardware and hence hasn’t bothered with producing a new driver, then Windows Update won’t have a non-existent driver.
Windows doesn’t have it so no-one would want it? Is that your argument? Really? Do you realise how silly that sounds?
So you can get Photoshop, or an equivalently powerful raster graphics editor application (professional photographer standard), with a ribbon interface? And a personal finance application with a ribbon interface too? And a CAD application? etc, etc.
Which would be?
While most distributions don’t ship a complete set of drivers on a LiveCD, I don’t know of any that don’t at least have a full set in their repositories. What would be the point of omitting any such … the Linux kernel is the kernel after all, it is source compatible across all distributions.
As an end user, one just doesn’t have to compile drivers for Linux any more. That is so last century.
Except for the large set of hardware for which Microsoft does not have the source code, and for which the OEMs have not given Microsoft an updated driver to distribute via Windows Update.
Edited 2009-12-15 10:23 UTC
Just to pop in about the driver-hunting issue: yes, there are some devices out there for which Windows Update doesn’t carry the driver for. But the same applies to Linux too; not all drivers are in the repos or they don’t get installed automatically and you still have to resort to hunting information about which driver to install.
Do not try to spin it around as a Windows-only issue.
Well, what you say is correct. There is indeed some hardware that is an utter pita for Linux (mostly because of recalcitrant OEMs who refuse to disclose even programming specifications to Free Software authors). To try to pretend this is not so is silly.
However, your parting accusation is quite misplaced. It is by far more often the case that Windows supporters will try to frame a lack of hardware drivers as a Linux-only issue than the other way around.
Indeed, that is exactly what cheerleader Thom has just tried to imply.
Edited 2009-12-15 10:36 UTC
Personally, I find Windows 7 and Linux rather similar in terms of driver availability; there just doesn’t exist drivers at all for some devices under Linux, and while there exists drivers for some devices for Windows they are for older versions and don’t work in Win7, and there are no plans of anyone releasing Win7 compatible ones.
Also, both platforms boast a really large amount of functioning, available drivers nowadays, and both platforms offer very easy way of installing them too.
No, I did not. Do not put words into my mouth.
All I said was that the driver hunting issue in Windows is a thing of the past. Nowhere did I say anything about the issue being greater of lesser on either of the two platforms.
And you have some nerve calling ME a cheerleader.
That compiling is done in the background by automated installers. Users don’t even notice it. It just takes a few seconds longer to install.
As you confirm: GUI-wise almost no advances since Win95.
So ~95% of all Windows need it? Great…
I don’t have WinXP installed. I have Vista on my laptop. Half the hardware needs additional driver downloads.
Vista/7 doesn’t even have drivers for my desktop PC’s GPU.
So you confirm that Microsoft did play catch-up with KDE/Linux.
Thanks.
Wow, a single sub-feature of window management is copied by KDE, while MS copied the whole idea of windows management and it took MS only a single decade… great…
Songbird is not a typical Linux app. It aims to copy iTunes’ look and feel. On all platforms, including Windows.
On Linux there’s a smaller difference between typical GTK and Qt apps usability-wise than differences between MS’ own products (Office, Internet Explorer, Media Player).
Then the hardware is broken and works nowhere.
So is trying to use a Radeon 9200 graphics card with Vista/7. It’s a perfectly fine GPU for office work, browsing, emails, …
Yet current Windows versions don’t support it.
These days Intel and AMD develop their drivers in the open. In fact Linux got USB 3.0 support way before Windows did.
So? Windows users never have problems when upgrading? Riight…
* System-wide spell checking: KDE has it for many years (even before OSX), Windows doesn’t.
* Special netbook GUI in upcoming KDE SC 4.4.
* System-wide configurable shortcuts in KDE since years.
* Build-in support for Cisco VPN and many other VPNs in Linux/NetworkManager since years.
* Widgets on desktop: KDE/Linux has it for years, Windows only since 7.
* Decent window management: KDE/Linux has it for years, Windows only since 7, but KWin’s is way more configurable.
* Composite window renderer: While Mac OS X had it first, Linux followed a bit later. It took MS until Vista to copy that.
* Tabbed window management: KWin 4.4 will have it, Windows … hm… maybe Win8, maybe never.
* Activities — major leap from traditional virtual desktops. And Win can only do traditional virtual desktops with additional tools.
* Build-in web browser that supports web standards: KDE has it for years and leaped further ahead of Win/IE with the adoption of WebKit. IE8 is the first halfway decent browser to come out from MS since IE4.
* Syntax highlighting in default text editor: KDE has it for years, MS’ Notepad is just Notepad.
* Mail client that supports spam filtering: KMail has it since many years, MS needed to catch up with Windows Mail.
* If skilled enough: possibility to fix or enhance KDE/Linux by myself. FOSS does this since its beginning, Windows not.
Those are just a few features that Windows either lacks or MS was the catch up player. It isn’t a complete list, but you’ve just asked for some examples.
Right, because a completely new and advanced graphical stack, which renders everything using the GPU, is completely foolproof, can switch drivers without having to restart all your applications and desktop, which can crash and recover gracefully without losing any data is no advance?
And let’s not get started on the completely new graphical look, and the boatload of new window management features which KDE has only just started copying (which is good – good ideas need to be spread).
I don’t believe that. Windows Update has drivers for ALL GPU brands – Intel, NVIDIA, ATI, and even though I don’t have a VIA chip to test with, I’m sure they ae just as supported through WU.
Haha, good one. So, hardware that doesn’t work on Windows – Windows fault. Hardware that doesn’t work on Linux – hardware is broken. Right.
Both platforms have excellent hardware support out-of-the-box these days. It used to be that Linux was better out-of-the-box, and Windows better at installing third-party drivers – but the two platforms have grown towards one another on these, so far even that only zealots stuck in the past argue that either of the two is better in either of the two issues (third party/out-of-the-box).
Edited 2009-12-15 12:30 UTC
Learn to understand the difference between GUI and back-end. Then we can talk further.
Then try to use a Radeon 9200 under Vista. If you don’t/can’t, then stop guessing. I actually tried. There are simply no drivers for that so-called legacy GPU (that is perfectly fine for common office work).
Don’t put words into my mouth, troll!
You claimed that under Linux hardware suddenly (quote) “decides not to work”. If hardware “decides not to work”, it’s broken. No matter if under Windows, or Linux.
Well, that’s not a good example, is it? Firstly, the Radeon 9200 falls short fo the artificial cut-off point Microsoft made for Windows Vista, as it doesn’t have the proper level of DirectX support. You knew this before you bought and installed Windows Vista, so it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to complain about it.
Linux has issues with devices too – like my printer, which doesn’t work on Linux. I knew this before I bought the printer, so I have no right to complain that it doesn’t work.
Uhm, I think you need to re-read that. I was talking about the fact that there are devices which may not work under Linux, maybe after an update or something. If that’s the case, and there’s no fix from your distribution provider, you’ll have to compile a module on your own.
This has nothing to do with broken hardware, so you going all personal on my ass is misplaced.
It’s a very good example how Linux’ out of the box support for mainstream hardware is better.
Is this supposed to be an excuse why Vista’s/7’s out of the box hardware support is worse than Linux’?
Linux is the only modern OS that runs on my desktop PC with every piece of hardware supported right out of the box. That PC is perfectly capable to browse the web, use office applications, play some games (Half-Life 2, for example), encode videos, playback music etc.
It’s also way more powerful than current netbooks. As you wrote: artificial cut-off.
It’s a perfect example why the FOSS development model is better.
No corporate deals to artificially limit hardware support to enforce new hardware purchases.
This is exactly why the world needs a strong Free Software Movement — a movement that reverse engineers hardware to write FOSS drivers and/or lobby hardware manufacturers to release specs.
Don’t twist my words. I don’t complain. I explain why Linux is better in this case.
BTW I didn’t know it before I installed Vista and luckily I didn’t buy it. To be exact, it wasn’t even Vista. It was a evaluation version of Windows Server 2008, which is technically the same as Vista SP1 + server tools.
The Radeon 9200 has no way of working in Vista because it only supports DirectX 8 and Vista requires cards with DirectX 9 or higher. Complaining about this is like complaining about a 64bit OS not working on a Pentium III. It’s an old card that only supports older technologies. It’s nice when older hardware is still supported, but eventually you let it go so new features can be introduced.
Just a quick note to one item of yours:
Vista had widgets on the desktop. XP had compositing support (actually, I think 2000 had it too). KWin extra WM features are cute, but most people don’t need them. If you want them on Windows, download one of the extenders. They’re out there and probably work better than KWin’s sloppy implementation anyways. I don’t even know why you bring up web browsers because it’s so frickin’ easy to download Firefox or Chrome and don’t tell me about KDE coming with a good webbrowser. KHTML is shite these days and everybody knows it.
Most of your post just betrays your ignorance of Windows (as well as Linux, actually). Typical zealot crap.
What functionality are you referring to?
What do you mean by “usable”? My definition would be ” able to be used”. But I think you are referring to some lack of functionality. It would be nice to either specifically reference the things you miss.
I’m with the other guy. Linux works better for me. Even desktop wise.
Great man, so how do you replace windows WM with DWM? And windows userland with BSD? And custom installation procedures with portmaster or something? Do I get packet filtering, file and application servers, video transcoding, 3D editing, mathematical, financial software and developement tools on the same DVD nowdays? What about drivers?
I’d like to be a full Microsoft Windows user too! My mother would like that!
We don’t need Richard Stallman now, we can steal what he did in the past, give credit to Microsoft and live happily everafter! All of us!
Windows comes with the drivers you need, or they are installed by the OEMs, or they come with the hardware (which can’t be said for Linux drivers, where only the first is true). There are ALWAYS drivers for Windows, and there are generally drivers for Linux, but often well after a product has been released and they may never be fully functional. Video card drivers are notorious about this. As for the rest, yes you get file and application servers and packet filtering. The more advanced productivity software you have to pay for (what a concept!) but you can often download that directly from Microsoft and then pay for it and guess what…it’s generally leaps and bounds ahead of bugridden crap like OpenOffice and Octave. Of course, almost any software that runs on Linux can also run on Windows, so if you really need some piece of Linux software, you don’t need Linux to use it. The first three sentences point out things that really aren’t needed, but could be done anyways. You can use alternate shells in Windows and you are free to make one. They used to do that for XP (LiteStep for example). And you can always run an X server if you are a masochist and need that 1995 look and feel (and performance). There’s no value in a Windows userland with BSD, and only a tiny handful of people bother with that kind of thing even in the open source world. And you can install Windows software any way you want to. It has a package manager, but you are free to use your own system. Cygwin has its own custom system. It’s not a problem with Windows. In fact, I’m not even sure that complaint even makes sense.
There’s nothing wrong with OSS except that there are only a few shining beacons amidst a sea of crap. And OSS for a desktop is a miserable, miserable failure. It’s great in the server room. I wouldn’t use Windows for servers or even a fileserver/backend setup. Linux/*BSD does that better.
Most folks in the OSS world think Richard is at best a has-been. I don’t even know why you are bringing him up in this fashion. There’s no stealing of what he did in the past. There’s no giving of credit to Microsoft for his work (only giving of credit to them for actually producing useful and quality software — btw, this isn’t 1995; Microsoft software is of very good quality today and the Open Source world generally hasn’t provided much in the way of real competition for the cash cows of Office, Windows, etc.). I’d rather that people realize that Linux on the desktop isn’t going to happen and probably can’t due to the development model and that the idea of pure free software is antithetical to actually producing good software. Open source as a means by which companies and universities, etc. can collaborate (with community involvement as well) on software more openly seems to work best. We’ve seen it time and time again. Of course, it can only work for individual products. Producing an entire desktop stack that way has not worked out and honestly, nobody cares outside of a few enthusiasts and Canonical. They’ve had 15 years to produce a usable desktop and the market share still sits at 1% or less. Failure. There is no other word for it but failure.
“…I started using Windows again and realized how nice it is to have software the works…”
This implies that you’re saying the OSS options don’t work. Now I have to ask, do you mean that? If so, let’s consider the options *pulls out a razor owned by a guy named William*:
Scenario 1:
OSS doesn’t work; it just an elaborate, international hoax, complete with hundreds of thousands of conspirators creating the illusion of functionality across the many websites, forums, ircs, meetups, the various government/public/private institutions that have declared switching to the platform.
Scenario 2:
You couldn’t figure out how to set up your system to your liking. And the undertaking, much like an English native trying to learn Dutch, left you doubting that it actually does work. (credits to Jimmy Carr on that one)
For some reason I’m gravitating toward the latter as the more reasonable explanation.
I wouldn’t call it a hoax. I believe that OSS developers are serious about what they do and they do try to deliver the best software they can. The model is successful in some cases (Apache, PHP, Perl, Eclipse, PostgreSQL, GCC, KDE before 4, Linux Kernel, etc.) I argue that it’s not enough, however, to be competitive these days, mostly on the desktop. Server room is still great for OSS and Unix as web stats and supercomputer stats show.
I’m not one of those kids who hears that Windows sucks and slaps on Ubuntu and complains that World of Worldcraft doesn’t work. I started with Linux in 2004 with Fedora Core 1. Since then, I’ve used Fedora, Mandrake (back when it was Mandrake), SuSE, Ubuntu and Gentoo, which was what I used for the most part from mid-2005 to the present. I’ve helped administer Linux servers. I’ve written Linux software (for personal use), including, for fun, a terminal-based windowing system. I ran X.org from Git and fixed all the show-stopper problems manually or worked with the devs to get them fixed. So I am not some Linux n00b who couldn’t figure out how to change the desktop background. I customized extensively. I know what I’m doing.
But there are limits. I can’t make OpenOffice not suck. I can’t make Linux have a sane driver API. I can’t make KWin (KDE 4) perform better when the main devs are convinced the problem is just my drivers (even though compiz, xcompmgr, etc. all perform fine with the same drivers and settings). I can’t make the X devs come up with a sane architecture and actually implement it. Even if I became an X dev, they still need many more than just one. Believe me, I configured and configured with great regularity, tried bleeding edge versions of software just to get features that one would expect. But it’s just not enough and I’ve come to see the dysfunction in the open source community. It simply is not a model that can produce software of the quality you often get from Microsoft, Apple, etc. Are those companies perfect? Not by far. But they have the resources and the discipline to produce software that *works* and gets things done. And for those few things were open source has produced good software, I can use that on Windows or OS X.
Your history with linux sounds a lot like mine – save that I haven’t actually been involved with development at all (I am extremely lazy). I started in 2003 with Slackware 8 (I think it was), I also tried the Fedora, Ubuntu and Vector Linuxes of the day. And I’ve toyed with Gentoo (horrible experience!), Debian and Suse, and several other distro’s since. I also would say that know what I’m doing, and have a fairly decent understand of how everything fits together.
And at least some of your reactions echo mine. One nice thing about Windows is that things are much more likely to “just work”, and serious, persistent problems are rarer. I would agree with you that OOo reaaaly blows, and that a driver-loading API would be nice (a kernel module really isn’t the same thing). I would disagree that X’s fundamental design is flawed, or that KDE4 is particularly bad — albeit I’m mainly a Gnome user, KDE 4 has some tempting features, and it Works For Me pretty well when I log into it instead — but that’s beside the point.
While Linux (distros) certainly have problems, tho, I get enough out of them that I keep using them. I have one Ubuntu machine, and one Slackware/Windows dual-boot, with Windows mainly being for games. While Linux has flaws, certainly, I don’t consider them to be overwhelming — and for me, Windows isn’t much better.
I suppose I’m just trying to slip in an “even tho I’m still a Linux loyalist, I hear what you’re saying” before the nastier/more dogmatic responses hit.
X is not fundamentally broken. It just lacks the manpower and the vision to make it what it needs to be for a modern desktop. There are a lot of great ideas being pushed for it and they get partly done or take forever and there are many things that need to be done that nobody does, or one person sort of works on for a while, etc. Not a model of OSS success.
I would say that most level headed people either question the significance of the FS/OSS “divide” or consider themselves to be members of both “camps” to varying degrees. Remember that the FS/OSS “schism” is an artificial construct created by Stallman for his own personal political purposes.
Nonsense. I’m totally in favor of Open Source and think that the true Free Software movement (and its end goals) is actively harmful to computers and technology overall. Too much software will never, ever, ever be developed in a Free or Open manner for a variety of reasons, and to attempt to shut down development of that software because it’s “unethical” is crazy. I hope the next time RMS or another Free Software zealot gets sick that they refuse any and all medical treatment to make a statement about how unethical it is to use Closed software to save lives… at least that’ll thin out some of the stupid in the gene pool.
RMS doesn’t get it. He gets to live his idiotic ass off of grant money for years on end. If he has a dogmatic issue with a piece of technology, he gets someone else to use it for him. (Example: read some of his recent mailing list posts where he refuses to use SSL or access documents on HTTPS URLs. So if someone wants him to read content there, he has someone else download it and email it to him. That’s the kind of bullshit normal people don’t have the time for, and nobody with their head anywhere other than their ass can find far better things to do with their time even if they do have enough of it.) He can live in a different reality and he’s completely out of touch with what real, day-to-day computer users want, care about, or need out of computers, and he’s lost touch with what the impact of proprietary software and Free Software really is.
I tend to view the artificial distinction which RMS draws between members of what is essentially the same community, supporting pretty much the same code base, as involving axes of thought which are orthogonal.
One can feel that FOSS results in *better* software. One can feel that FOSS *can* result in better software. One can feel that FOSS is a moral imperative. Or one can feel that contributing to FOSS is simply a good thing to do when you can.
And I think that we need to be very careful to distinguish between where one happens to reside in that coordinate system… and simple fanaticism, which is a different thing.
Richard has confused the issue by comparing x and y coordinate values so often that people have come to accept it as a reasonable practice.
RMS is not evil because he believes that FOSS is a good thing. He is evil because he feels so strongly that FS is a moral imperative (Or is so obsessed with his own political ambitions. Or both. Not sure.) that he is willing to divide the community by means of what I will term here a “charismatic deception”.
He’s evil because he’s a fanatic.
Edited 2009-12-14 19:22 UTC
/agree
So doing what you believe is morally right is evil?
Lol wut
Edited 2009-12-15 03:59 UTC
No, but being a fundamentalist easily gets out of hand. The free software movement has lots of attributes of a religion, including a prophet, commandments and holy texts. So fundamental free software advocates renounce reality and facts if they don’t fit their belief system.
People having a fundamentalist belief system about software does indeed get out of hand.
The following false beliefs being spread by religious OS fundamentalists are particularly hard to disperse:
* The GPL is viral
* Linux would be just as insecure as Windows if most people used it
* Linux is hard to use
* Codecs are illegal on Linux
* Installing software for Linux means having to compile it
* Free Software means zero cost, and that is what it is worth
* Linux applications can’t do what Windows applications can do
* There is no guarantee with Free Software
The last belief is actually true, but it is also just as true with proprietary software.
The GPL is viral, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. If your goal is to ensure that changes to the code are shared with others, it is a good thing.
Linux would be just as insecure as Windows if it was as popular. Look at the Ubuntu malware that was hidden in the screensaver available at Gnome-look.org last week. These days, must malware is spread through social engineering and carelessness, not through security holes. Firewalls and UAC have done a good job of locking down Windows, but it doesn’t keep users from doing dumb things.
Linux is not necessarily hard to use, but there are still far too many things that need to be configured by editing configuration files. Linux needs to be better about implementing what Eric Raymond called “discoverability. That is, the quality that every point in the interface has prompts and actions attached to it from which you can learn what to do next.” Windows and OS X are very good at this, whereas Linux still has work to do. There can be great gratification in becoming intimately familliar with the internal working of an OS and how to best tune it to your personal needs, but Linux still needs to work at abstracting some of these things for the end user. Not everyone wants to know how the sausage is made, some people just want to eat it, as it were.
The codecs question varies from distro to distro and country to country depending on local laws, but for the most part Linux is good to go.
There is a lot of great software available in repositories, but far too often you find some cool program that isn’t in one of the repos and doesn’t have a nice deb or RPM package available.
The worth of free software if for each person to determine. Back in the day, I used to have fun spending time tweaking my OS to my desired preferences. Now, I would rather spend some cash to buy something “that just works”. The money spent is of far less worth than the time that I now save.
There are many Windows and OS X applications that Linux has yet to duplicate the functionality of. Where is the Linux equivalent of Final Cut Pro or Sony Vegas? Where is the proper CMYK printing in GIMP? Where are there DTP packages that compare to Quark or InDesign? Where are the pro level audio tools like Cubase or Pro Tools? Linux still needs to sort out the OSS/ALSA/Pulse Audio morass. Where are the native versions of games like Bioshock, Modern Warfare 2 and Dragon’s Age? Linux has a lot going for it, but it isn’t close to perfect and I am sick to death of the times when a missing package or option is pointed out and the answer is “You don’t need that” or “Code it yourself”. No, if Linux doesn’t offer it, I will hapilly spend a relatively small amount of cash on a Windows or Mac application to fill my need. Even a somewhat pricey app like Final Cut Pro is affordable considering the cost is amortized over years of productive use. My computer is an appliance to perform usefull tasks, not a second unpaid job.
I told you that these particular religious beliefs were hard to dispel.
Sigh!
The GPL is not viral, since the GPL applies only to GPL’d code. Viruses infect other organisms.
If you don’t want to be encumbered by the copyleft clause of the GPL, then don’t include GPL code in your project. Write your own code. It is that simple.
Any software is susceptible to trojans compromising the system via downloads from the web.
Only Linux systems, unlike Windows systems, give you an option where you can have a fully functional, powerful, blingified (if you want) desktop while never once downloading software from websites. It is called package management, and repositories. That system has an impeccable record.
If you run a Linux system, and you stick to a self-imposed policy of only using the package manager to get new software, you will not get any malware on your system. There is no equivalent to this for Windows systems.
True. But it still misses the point that Linux does provide a mechanism that does have an impeccable record, while Windows doesn’t. On Windows, downloading and installing binary executable stuff (which could be a Trojan) is a way of life, on Linux is is completely un-necessary.
Whereas the Windows registry is DESIGNED to be an even more difficult-to-use means of configuration, and to make it impossible to move or copy software to a different machine simply by copying files.
Purely a matter of opinion. I have introduced a number of people to Linux KDE desktop systems, and none of them have had any particular difficulty, any moreso than they would have had when new to Windows. A number of these people who had also previously used Windows in fact commented that the Linux KDE desktop was easier.
A Linux desktop system takes a lot less time than a Windows system to setup and install whatever software you want (if Linux has it). When it comes to adding new software, Linux is the timesaver, not Windows.
This is (partly) fair enough. If you are in that small percentage of people whose particular use for a system is not covered by the 25,000+ packages offered by Ubuntu/Debian (say), then you are indeed better off getting another system that does fill your unusual needs. Just as is the case that if you are one of the small percentage of people whose use for a system is in an area such as (as examples) cross-platform or standards development, or distributed computing, or electronic document archiving, or supporting embedded computing, or security/penetration testing, or network traffic analysis then you are far better off getting a Linux system.
BTW, KDE doesn’t have an OSS/ALSA/Pulse Audio morass, If you want to print CMYK use Krita, I would never suggest to anyone that they did or did not need something or that they should code it themselves, and most people these days who play games do so with a console (just walk in to an electronic games store to verify this).
Edited 2009-12-15 23:52 UTC
I would agree with you that Linux’s security system is better but not that it is either flawless, or resistent to a dumb user. I would expect that, if Linux had a large presence on home desktops, most un-skilled home users would just drop in their password anytime the gksudo (and/or whatever KDE uses) dialog came up. And, if there where enough home desktops operated by un-skilled users, then there would exist nifty downloadable “speed up your ubuntu PC!” applications that where just tarballs containing two things: a binary, “infectmypc”, and a one-line shell script, “RunMe.sh”, whose contents where:
quick bottom line: an uneducated, “close your eyes and open your mouth…” type user can be the Achilese Heel of the best security schemes imaginable.
Not the point.
Linux provides a useable system, via package managers and repositories, that has an impeccable record when it comes to keeping an end-users machine free of malware.
It is entirely possible for an end user without any particular security knowledge, simply by sticking to the package manager, to keep their Linux system up-to-date, fully functional and malware free, indefinitely.
One cannot have that with any other desktop system (AFAIK the BSDs included).
Edited 2009-12-16 00:14 UTC
These applications you speak of are specialists applications and it’s not like Apple or Adobe will even port them to every platform.
As for games, well we know that story. Windows is having a hard time with games because consoles are where it’s at, so what hope do other platforms have of getting native games like you say? Next to zero. DirectX is a ‘Windows only’ technology and the “Games for Windows” hasn’t gone down very well.
If you want to spend your money on those applications then go right a head. Just remember that Linux is used in industries like the film industry so each platform has their pros and cons.
RMS is charismatic?
You don’t get it. RMS is not now nor has he ever (to my knowledge, cite it if you’ve got it) suggested shutting down the development of any proprietary software.
What RMS wants is a world in which all software is developed as Free software. He wants to get there by all parties to voluntarily cease making non-Free software and relicense it as Free. If there is some useful non-Free software out there RMS is not above advocating that a Free clone be written. This does not shut down the original. If the original is eventually abandoned it will be purely on the merit of the Free clone. If the original is never abandoned… RMS will still advocate that its license should be changed.
There is nothing harmful in advocating that all software be Free software. No one is suggesting that anyone be *prevented* from writing non-Free software or coerced in to not developing proprietary software. That is not to say that it should be made easy to do!
RMS is a noble crusader who has taken the hard-line stance on his issue. I fully support what he and the FSF stand for, but I don’t tack that closely to the line. I’m typing this with Chrome, I’m using the nvidia driver for my video card, I’ve got commercial games installed. But, I think it is important that there by hard liners out there pushing in the direction I want to go; that makes it easier for me to go that way myself.
RMS has his moments and a lot can be said about him, but inconsistency shouldnt be one of them .. this latest round of bickering was cause by somebody complaining about mr, Icaza’s blog about silverlight and how fantastic it was and how people can write GUI cross platform application with it and bla bla bla ..read for yourself what he wrote: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Nov-23.html
some people including RMS said it was inappropriate for project under GNU to show such enthusiasm with proprietary programs and somebody(not RMS) complained about it
This rift is the latest in the long rifts caused by people moving away from the fundamentals that brought up the whole thing in the first place and most of those who get irritated by RMS are those who would wish to incorporate proprietary code in FOSS code ..
mr icaza sounds like a 15 year old girl with a crush the size of a planet when talking about anything microsoft … only the gods knows how far he will go if left unchecked .. free software view maybe annoying to sum, but are what keep the like of icaza from falling off the cliff
he is not a traitor, he is an embarrassment
That’s exactly the problem.
A great leader IS inconsistent. A good politician IS inconsistent. A great scientist IS inconsistent.
It’s called learning, adapting, working under new and different circumstances. This is what RMS and the FSF should be doing: adapting to new circumstances, new realities. Dare to be inconsistent – a fear of inconsistency is a recipe for stagnation.
This makes no sense. You’re just inventing your own definition of consistency, unless you think that contradiction == adaptation.
The FSF (and RMS) would not have achieved so much over the years if they had refused to “adapt”. Your comment reflects your own personal negative opinions of them, and not the reality of what they do.
Basically what you’re saying in the article is: “I use your software now, so you should give up the ideals (which I don’t understand or share) that led you and others to create it in the first place, for my convenience”.
You clearly misunderstand what I’m trying to say.
A lot of people have this perception that leaders NEED to be consistent AT ALL COSTS. That consistency in and of itself is a redeeming quality that BY DEFINITION makes you a good leader.
This is absolute bogus. Consistency makes you bad leader. A good leader adapts, dare to admits his mistakes, dares to change policies based on the ever-changing nature of the world around him. A good leader is not set in his convictions, he bases his convictions on the world around him.
That’s why even the biggest Christian party in The Netherlands supports gay marriage, euthanasia, and abortion: because Dutch society deems these things important, valuable, and a sign of progress, freedom, and civility.
Have you ever wondered why churches are running low on visitors in Western Europe? It’s because many church leaders refuse to adapt their convictions to the changing world around them. The FSF will go down the same route if it continues this way.
In summation: changing one’s convictions and principles based on the changing nature of the world is a GOOD thing. Radically holding one to one’s convictions in spite of the ever-changing world is a BAD thing – no matter how well these convictions may have served you in the past.
Thom,
fundamentals need to be consistent
a politician can be consistent on trying to improve the lives of the society and may change sides on how to best do that .. his fundamental position is improving the life of the society and can afford to “adopt” to present conditions to attain his goal
a scientist may be consistent in seeking the truth but may change sides on what is currently believed to be the truth or how to best seek it ..this scientist is fundamentally after the truth and knowledge on how the world works and can afford to “adopt” in a quest to achieve his goal
fundamentals need to be consistent .. and any leader need to be consistent on what they fundamentally believe in before they can get any credibility
RMS fundamentally believe in his 4 principles ..his positions has changed on how to best attain those fundamentals ..GNU wanted an operating system and accepted linux because it was better than their own is an example of them adopting to circumstances
That is a laugh. They accepted linux because after 20 years of trying, they still don’t have a usable kernel.
If you make your principals general enough, then there is no need to change them. That is correct. But the analogy of ” trying to improve the lives of the society” is not ” all software should be FOSS”. It would be more like ” Software should benefit provide the most people possible”. Or if you wanted something that was a political version of RMS it would be “Low Taxes is the best tool to improve the lives of society”.
I would argue that such a policy of Low taxes, needs to be changed depending upon the circumstances. And there may also be cases where GPL’d FOSS may not be the best choice.
Riiiiight. To quote Groucho Marx: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others”. Unfortunately, he was a comedian and you’re being serious.
This is what happens in politics, where the only real principle is “I’ll do or say anything that fits with the prevailing moods in my society (which sometimes I help manipulate) in order to stay in power”.
That’s all well and good Thom, and I’m glad to hear it. Given the self-proclaimed strength of your principles, I suppose that if 20 years down the road Dutch society starts thinking that all these things are now uncivilised again, that will be A-OK with you.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of this discussion. Free Software is not a religion, it is only called that by its detractors. Oh, and while we’re at it, its “tenets” are not demonstrably false.
What you’re describing is a good way to be absolutely feckless, with little hope of affecting any change unless you happen to jump on the right bandwagon.
Holding someone to their self-proclaimed convictions is radical? I’m sorry, but you keep throwing logical fallacies after non-sequiturs after etymological fallacies at me, and I have no desire to dissect them all.
It’s OK for you to only be temporarily principled, i.e., basically unprincipled, whatever. However, in your last and earlier posts you’re conflating politics, leadership and science, at the very least. Some ideas for you:
“Great leaders” have followers because they stick to their ideals, come what may (where said ideals are not “anything, so long as I’m the leader”).
The FSF has always stood for software freedom and the proliferation of free software (both as defined by them).
Scientists do have one uncompromising principle, also known as search for the truth. Falsification of flawed theories and subsequent reassessment of one’s understanding of how things work is the whole point of science.
One of the few good things that can be said about RMS is that he sticks to his morals. He believes that proprietary software is immoral/evil and sticks to it. The problem is that not only do most people not agree with him, but many who support his own movement don’t: hence the divide between OSS and Free Software.
It is a great thing for a leader to adapt and change when he makes mistakes, but backing off on what they believe to be morally correct is just plain bad. I, for one, think that it’s incredibly sad when churches change their views just because the general populace don’t agree with them. Morality doesn’t change just because people want it to.
I see nothing wrong with RMS believing that proprietary software is immoral, much as I disagree with him. The problem is that he imposes his beliefs on others. He’s not like a humble missionary trying to convert people to his god. He’s more like a crusader trying to cut down everyone who disagrees.
So, in principle, I agree that leaders need to adapt, but not on morality, not unless they can truly be converted. The issue here is how he treats those who disagree. His lack of tolerance is the problem. It’s okay to believe differently, but it’s not okay to persecute others because of it.
I mostly agree with you, except…
This is not true. First of all, I have yet to see him do anything more than ask that people adopt his views. One recent example was a post to the LKML concerning some issue with the kernel. He doesn’t have the power to insist and didn’t throw any kind of a tantrum. Instead he stated his position, clarified when asked and allowed people to do whatever they liked.
In this way he *is* like the humble missionary who advocates but does not pressure.
I see a lot of complaint about RMS’ behavior, but I have yet to see a single instance of his behavior that was actually objectionable. He sometimes sticks his nose in when he isn’t asked, true, but this not frequent and not unreasonable. Inevitably it happens when there is some issue that is not being addressed, in which case I think raising it is a public service.
In contrast I find certain Linux and BSD developers to be far harsher in language and attitude, but they’re rarely criticized for it. Perhaps it is because they’re only talking about concrete things, like code.
I think one’s opinion of RMS says a lot more about oneself than RMS.
OFFTOPIC: A church that accepts “Gay Marriage”, abortion etc is not based on the Bible nor what God wants for this here planet. The fundamental truths in the world never changes, but civilizations fall as they let go into decadence. This time its Western Civilization and its going to bring the rest of the world down with it I think..
Wow. So, in your world view, if the majority of a population decides uncontrolled murder is a good thing, we should all go along with that, no matter what our strongly held personal convictions / beliefs / religious values might say to the contrary?
Remind me to stay far, far away from your world.
Edited 2009-12-14 23:22 UTC
Was that comment directed at me ??!
I got modded down seriously,
kinda as expected .. :-S
Edited 2009-12-15 21:31 UTC
No, I was referring to Thom’s comment about leaders being flexible, “… changing one’s convictions and principles based on the changing nature of the world is a GOOD thing.”
I think you’re missing something here. There are two kinds of consistencies relevant in this context. One is consistency between all your current beliefs and another is consistency between your beliefs as they are today and what your beliefs were at various points in the past.
In the latter case being inconsistent can indeed be a good thing within a specific context. However, advocating this as a good thing in itself is a slippery slope towards advocating complete relativism of truth into a mere reflection of what everybody believes, as if truth didn’t exist to begin with (this is actually a post modernist view represented by too much of the philosophical academia and unsurprisingly politicians who are known for their lack of integrity).
The specific context I mean are cases where you genuinely realize that something you believed in was wrong based on new facts you gathered from observation of reality and your own logical thinking. In that case sticking to old beliefs would indeed be very bad and nothing but dishonest pretension, lying to yourself and others simultaneously. In that case changing your beliefs is a must.
But the first kind of inconsistency, the inconsistency within your current thinking paradigm / belief system is something that should not be tolerated in no circumstance because it means you’re in conflict with your own self. For a simple example one might believe that Earth was flat and at the same time be convinced that if you travel far enough in the same direction through the world you’ll end up back where you started. The latter depends on Earth being round and thus conflicts with the former belief so a person holding both beliefs at the same time is being inconsistent with him/her self and self-contradictory.
As for RMS.. he sure is very consistent when it comes to what he fundamentally believed in the past and what he believes now (as far as I can tell), but unfortunately the content of what he believes is not fundamentally consistent with itself and I’m not talking solely about four freedoms, but the underlying reason why he finds four freedoms to be any kind of a moral code. He doesn’t appear to believe in individual person’s right to contract given that he considers contracts in which one person agrees to get a particular program conveyed to him/her under the condition that he/she not copy it further, modify etc. as “immoral”.
This is ludicrous. I can agree to whatever I want and I can set whatever terms I want before doing something for someone. The key is that neither of us coerce each other to make the deal in the first place.
Yet at the same time he purports to support individual rights and freedom. But freedom essentially IS the right to contract (agreement), the ability to choose your acts and behavior for yourself and if you’re subject to any rules, for those rules to be ones you previously *agreed to yourself*.
He is therefore very consistently (in time) holding an inconsistent belief (self-contradictory).
A true leader, however, would appreciate the latter (consistency between *current* beliefs) far more than the former (consistency between past and present beliefs). He would admit when he changes his mind and why and show genuine concern for self-consistency and lack of self-contradiction, that is to say, a genuine love of truth.
That said, there is something unjust about the way software (and other intellectual works for that matter) is handled in today’s world, but FSF’s “four freedoms” are barking at the wrong tree. The problem is the belief in the impossibility that is the “intellectual property”. Fortunately, RMS gives some flak to it, at least terminologically. How far does he understand the underlying concept I’m not sure. When he speaks of IP he only seems to refer to confusing copyrights, patents and trademarks, which is missing the point in my book.
I wrote about why IP is problematic here: http://www.libervis.com/article/intellectual-property-a-violation-o… and here http://www.libervis.com/article/practical-implications-of-rejecting… .
Cheers
Edited 2009-12-15 01:59 UTC
I think you misunderstand entirely.
Free Software is collaboration. Free Software is “I’ll scratch your back, and you scratch mine, and we will both get a scratched back”. This does not preclude other people going to a professional backscratcher instead, if they prefer.
Stretching the analogy, proprietary software is the petulant child in the corner, shouting: “but I wanted to be the only backscratcher. I want to start a franchise, and to license backscratching! You can’t be allowed to scratch each other’s back! How dare you, I wanted to charge you money for getting your back scratched. There should be a law against mutual back scratching amongst the community”.
Free Software would hold that professional backscratching is in no way immoral, but also that attempts to prevent people from scratching each other’s back (if they want to) are indeed immoral.
Edited 2009-12-15 02:14 UTC
You’re talking past me, that is, you didn’t show how am I misunderstanding. I didn’t make any kind of distinction between “professional back scratchers” and others because they don’t matter to the point. The point is that one who wants to scratch backs can ask you to agree to whichever terms he wants before he scratches your back. If you don’t agree he wont scratch your back. If you do, he will. That’s it.
If some back scratcher wants you to agree that you never scratch anybody else’s back the same way he will scratch yours before he does it it’s merely a proposed contract. You don’t have to agree to it. If you do then you do and that’s it. It’s your choice. You can call such a contract draconian or ridiculous, but then if you believe it is such don’t agree to such contracts, period. But you finding such contracts ridiculous doesn’t give you the right to say other people are wrong to consider them otherwise and agree to them themselves.
Your scenario hasn’t got anything to do with the objections made by proprietary companies about Free Software.
I’ll try to explain: you said “If some back scratcher wants you to agree that you never scratch anybody else’s back the same way he will scratch yours before he does it it’s merely a proposed contract. You don’t have to agree to it. If you do then you do and that’s it. It’s your choice.”
I’d agree with you there, but that just isn’t the problem. The problem is the professional back scratcher wanting somehow to make it impossible for any other people to scratch each other’s back without involving the professional at all.
I didn’t do any such thing.
Agreed. That is exactly what I do do.
Right there is your misunderstanding. I don’t find such contract ridiculous or immoral.
What I find ridiculous and immoral is a professional trying to insist that ONLY contracts of that type are to be allowed, and that no other backscratching of any kind can be permitted.
Edited 2009-12-15 03:18 UTC
Well, I don’t represent proprietary software companies, but rather myself and like I mentioned in the end of my first post I do think there is injustice going on and pointed to intellectual property concept as having something to do with it (I expanded on the topic in the linked articles).
That said, you’re right to the extent to which what you say actually happens. Not all proprietary software companies seek to make different kind of contracts illegal or in other ways force competition out of the market. But for those who do I agree they’re wrong.
Cheers
There is a contradiction in your reasoning .. you can not have your cake and eat it too ..
for you to be free, certain freedoms must be taken away from you .. you can not have a right to live your life as you see fit and at the same have a right to sell yourself to slavery if you feel like it because your rights to do as you wish will be void the second you become a slave
to protect your right to be a free person, the ability to sell yourself to slavery must be taken away from you
to protect your right to live, you are denied the right to terminate your own life ..you can sell your kidney if you want, you can cut your nose if you feel like it but you can not terminate your life
you can not simultaneously choose to be bound by an EULA and at the same time have the four freedoms RMS is talking about
RMS message is consistent ..you should have those four fundamental freedoms ..for you have them, somebody else(including you) must not have the freedom to take them away from you by either slapping an EULA to them or adding proprietary code in it or closing it down
Taken literally, yes I can have my cake and eat it too, actually. That might very well be the whole point of me having the cake to begin with: to eat it. Sorry, but it’s just a very silly saying.
In any case, you’re trying to argue that I have a contradiction in my reasoning yet you say this:
“for you to be free, certain freedoms must be taken away from you ..”
I know it’s quite popular today to use orwellian concepts, but that doesn’t make them any less valid as descriptors of reality. Why Orwellian you ask? Because George Orwell in “1984” described “The Party” and society ordered under it with a slogan: “Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. War is Peace”.
That doesn’t work (nope, not even the latter “war is peace” no matter how much Obama, the peace nobel prize winner, wanted you to believe it).
Sorry if that sounded like a tangent, but I wanted to put it into perspective because the kind of reasoning you use reflects what a lot of others seeking to restrict people’s freedom’s use. They all do it in the name of the very thing they’re trying to restrict. We should learn to be vary of such tactics (it’s similar to what US Government already uses on you).
That said, regarding this “selling yourself to slavery” nothing you previously agreed upon is actual “slavery” precisely because you agreed upon it. It is a part of your own self-determination process. Should I agree to work for someone for 20 years of my life doing everything he tells me whenever he wants me and living wherever he tells me to live and on whatever food he gives me, WHO exactly are YOU to deny me this right? What if it’s an experiment I want to do with myself? Am I not allowed to do whatever I want with my life?
Yet this example is obviously far more dramatic than agreeing to certain proprietary software terms.
Regarding “right to life”, be careful what you argue for. I do not believe in such a thing, but before you take this completely wrong let me state quite clearly that I also do not believe anyone has the right to take your life against your will. In other words I believe in the right to suicide, but I don’t believe in the right to kill. If you’d deny someone the right to kill himself you’d basically force him to live.
That’s not freedom.
In short, don’t advocate restrictions of freedom in the name of freedom. THAT’s self-contradictory. It doesn’t work. That tactic is a dangerous Orwellian meme.
Edited 2009-12-15 02:55 UTC
yes, after you have your cake, you can eat it, but you will no longer have it ..the “and” in this phase is ambiguous ..you understood the two events as being sequencial but it is meant to be understood as being parallel .. you cant have your cake, eat it and continue having it ..if you have it, its because you havent eaten it, if you eat it, you will no longer have it
how exactly can you have a cake, eat it and continue having it? .. i just cant see how ..
how can you have the right to live and somebody else have the right to kill you at the same time?
how can you have rights if somebody else has the right to take them away from you? … for you to have rights, somebody else(including you) must not have the right to take them away from you ..
this seem obvious to me .. maybe our reasonings are odd because you think of these statements as occurring sequential and see them as occuring in parallel?
Ah, thanks for the clarification.
You can’t, I agree, but I’m not proposing that you eat your cake.
Please recheck my post. I tried to prevent precisely this misunderstanding by saying this:
I do not believe in such a thing, but before you take this completely wrong let me state quite clearly that I also do not believe anyone has the right to take your life against your will. In other words I believe in the right to suicide, but I don’t believe in the right to kill. If you’d deny someone the right to kill himself you’d basically force him to live.
So I don’t believe anyone can have the right to kill me. I only believe only I have the right to kill myself, albeit for the record, I don’t ever want to do that and regard suicide as cowardly. But I do think people are within right to do that themselves if they truly wanted.
I don’t advocate that someone have the right to take them away from you. I advocate that you have the right to take them away from yourself, that YOU decide for yourself. When you agree to a “restrictive” contract YOU are the one restricting yourself because you were given a choice and decided to do so. You essentially promise “I will not do this and that”.
Actually I think neither applies in this case (nor does that saying) because there is no such contradiction. When you agree to a contract by the virtue of agreeing you ARE exercising your freedom rather than “eating” it.
I could even take it as far to say that every decision you make in your life is also an acceptance of a restriction. If you decide to turn left on a crossroad you’ve essentially denied yourself the right turn in that moment. But we wouldn’t say that you are any less free because this choice was yours.
We must restrict some basic freedoms to hunt terrorists
all in the name of Freedom !
*chumps down on some freedom fries* 🙂
If someone realizes they are wrong they should definitively change their ways or what its called ..
Even if that makes one seem inconsistent ..
If it was a post by a compiler implementor about the next version of C++, would you have the same problem?
WPF as a GUI platform is hela-cool. It is miles better then any other gui framework I have played with, allowing you flexibility and downright elegance that you don’t see in GUI toolkits, at least in what I have used. I have some major problems with it, but I think it is a big step in the right direction for client side development.
Also, Miguel has been courted by MS for most of his professional career. He could have a job there any time he likes. He works in the Free software world because he believes in it, he just doesn’t automatically discount everything microsoft does because they are microsoft. He is one of the last all star developers who is still in the public doing linux-on-the-desktop work, and I think it is really sad how much the community loves to stab people like that in the back.
i would and a good fraction of people will too if the next version had proprietary extensions and the implementor was enthusiastically talking about implementing those proprietary extensions
WPF could be the best GUI toolkit in existence and the easiest to work with ..but it is proprietary and it should be expected those who are opposed to proprietary technologies will be opposed to it ..
.net/C# could be a “fantastic platform” but it has proprietary hooks in it that are problematic to free sofware people and these people will object to inclusion of the platform in a free software stack ..
Edited 2009-12-14 17:09 UTC
He wasn’t though. He didn’t mention video once.
This has been debunked so many times that the only people who are freaked out about it still believe that because they really want to. YES, you can use things in mono that are not covered by the ECMA spec, NO you don’t have to, and are in fact encouraged not to, since they are pretty much just there as a compatibility layer. There is a pretty big exception when it comes to propriatary codecs, but you can sidestep the whole problem by using moonlight and publishing your vids using Ogg or Dirac. In fact, the codecs require a seperate download from MS due to them not really jiving with the rest of the licensing.
Problems with mono should center around things like performance or memory usage, the only reason to even bring up microsoft in that sort of discussion is if you have a pretty bad bias.
Silverlight, for instance.
“[…] perhaps it is a good time to start a movement to create a suite of Silverlight-based desktop applications. […] I think I speak for the whole Mono team when I say that this is exciting, fascinating, challenging and feels like we just drank a huge energy boost drink.”
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Nov-23.html
Not encouraged?
Ok, so you do have a point. I know moonlight is very important to microsoft, and I highly doubt they would start suing over it, but it is not part of the open spec, and they do have the right to shut it down at any time.
I wrote a >30000 lines of code application using WPF. It has some nice concepts, but it mostly lacks MVC, which is a serious drawback. With Swing you can easily put hundreds of thousands of items in a listview or a treeview and the GUI will still be fast. Try to do this with WPF. WPF also has some serious performance issues. It is not possible to directly render lines or bezier paths to a bitmap. If you add lines or paths to a bitmap, it will build a scene graph, which is too much overhead for certain type of applications. From my experience WPF has a nice design but the lack of MVC and fast rendering to bitmaps makes it unusable for compelx applications.
From my experience with Java and .Net, .Net is worse then Java. Java has better APIs, memory mapped files, it is easier to do concurrent programming in Java, Swing is way better then Windows.Forms and still has advantages over WPF. Scala is much better then C#. The JVM optimizes much better then the .Net Runtime, the next version will support stack allocation, the garbage first collector is way better then the .Net one. I don’t see the need to reproduce .Net for Linux when there is already a better solution that is OSS.
And there is also Qt which makes it easy to write cross plattform applications.
There are many people working on KDE and GNOME, Firefox, GIMP, OpenOffice, Amarok etc. Icaza is certainly a great developer, but maybe he should do something original instead of just recreating MS technologies, which might be dangerous for the OSS ecosystem because of patents hold be MS.
Agreed. Also, over terminal services, WPF goes from slow to unusable. Approaching this as a web developer, I also can’t stand the XML. It is very verbose, and uses PascalCase, which makes the code itself very dense and hard to read. Additionally, it mixes structure, style, and behavior into one big ball of mud, and makes it difficult to pull the different bit apart.
That being said, if you are doing anything the least bit non standard, it is cake with WPF. The other things I like about it are things like bubbled events, how easy it is to do animations/eye candy, and the representation of complex object maps in XML.
Agreed on all counts. That is pretty much what I was saying, these are the reasons not to use mono, not the whole OMFG its from M<dollar sign> thing.
I’m talking about guys like Havoc Pennington, Seth Nickell, etc. At least in the gnome world, there are very few charismatic guys left to stand up and say “This is the way we should do things. Listen to me based my proven programming chops, vision, and dedication”.
Really?
var dv = new DrawingVisual();
var dc = dv.RenderOpen();
dc.DrawLine(…); // Draw a line
dc.DrawGeometry(…); // Draw a path
dc.Close();
var bitmap = new RenderTargetBitmap(128, 128, 96, 96, PixelFormats.Pbgra32);
bitmap.Render(dv);
There is no scene graph involved here. On most systems, the rendering will be done using hardware acceleration to a target in video memory, which makes it at least an order of magnitude faster than what you’ll find in other UI toolkits.
Every serious UI toolkit uses hardware acceleration nowadays. GTK+ (Cairo) does it via XRender, Qt does it, I think even Swing (Java2D) does it now.
Indeed, even AmigOS 4 has hardware accelerated window dragging etc and it’s hardly a big player.
Yes, every serious toolkit “checks the box” for hardware acceleration, but usually that is limited to simple things like variable width lines and solid color fills of convex polygons. The difference is that WPF can accelerate the whole stack because it takes advantage of 3D hardware. Other toolkits must drop back to software for things like stroke dashing, gradient fills and texture mapping.
KDE4 requires a 3D renderer. If it finds one, it uses it (either OpenGL or Xrender) for all rendering operations (e.g. anti-aliasing). If it doesn’t find a hardware accelerated 3D graphics render capability, is uses a software renderer (mesa).
KDE4 will only drop back to software rendering if it doesn’t find a capable hardware graphics driver running.
I expected that Qt might be the exception here. It is an excellent toolkit and, in my mind, the only one that sits on equal ground with WPF/Silverlight.
You obviously never tried to render some complex geometry using WPF. Where exactly do you think the information about the geometry is after you close the dc and before you render it to the bitmap? Hint: in a scene graph.
That might not be a big deal if you want to combine a few shapes or bitmaps. But if you want to draw thousands of small points or lines several times per second for a real time telemetry display (or even something more mundane like a scrolling stock ticker), it is a big performance problem.
3d acceleration does not help at all since the actual drawing takes almost no time. It is just the allocation and management of the complex data structure that holds geometry before it is rendered.
By the way: if WPF is so great for drawing complex 2D geometry, then why did microsoft come up with a high performance immediate mode drawing API called Direct2D? The only way to write serious graphics heavy applications in WPF is to let Direct2D do the heavy lifting. But the downside is that Direct2D is only available from vista upward, so in a conservative industry like banking or space operations you can not use it for the next five years.
Sorry to burst your troll bubble, but this thread was not started because of Miguel’s mention of silverlight, but rather:
From RMS:
“The presence of articles discussing vmware, for instance, conveys the message that GNOME sees nothing wrong with it.”
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2009-December/msg000…
RMS commented on the thread that was already in progress .. according to this webpage linked below, the thread was started by a complained made agaisnt mr. Icaza blog post
interesting quote is:
”
Updated, 2.40pm AEDT: It was initially not possible to ascertain definitely as to what post on Planet GNOME led to the complaints which Roche mentioned. But it seems fairly clear now that this post, about Microsoft’s Silverlight, by De Icaza was the catalyst.
”
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/29995/1090/
Sam Vargese knows nothing about why it was started. He’s *assuming* and we all know what that means.
And those people entirely missed the point, that personal blogs by Gnome developers do not represent Gnome itself, and if Miguel wants to talk about MS technologies on his blog, that that has nothing to do with Gnome or GNU.
The “planets” just aggregrate what is on developer’s blogs from a certain project. They might talk about GNOME, but they might also discuss KDE, movies, proprietary software or pizza. This whole thing is just silly.
RMS should just crawl back under that rock he’s been hiding under.
Stallman did NOT start the discussion. In fact he isn’t even a major part of it.
This bit of news prompted me to write a post on my blog about it. I suddenly realized that there is not a FOSS community. There are two communities: those who are in it for pragmatic reasons, and those who are in it to protect human rights to free software. They have always been there – ever since Linus used GNU software and the GPL with his Linux. These two communities think they are one, and this results in a lot of friction, because people in one think the other folks are bad apples.
That’s not news. It’s Free Software vs. Open Source, RMS vs. ESR.
It’s a spectrum: there are extremists on both ends, and then a lot of moderates in the middle, who just want decent, Open-Source software. I strongly suspect that moderates/the apathetic greatly outnumber the vocal extremists.
Note Stevie’s post directly above yours. He’s actually right.
The problem is mostly stallman, and his love of adopting politically charged words and ideas to rile up the youngsters.
consider how you just described it
Human rights are a very important and serious idea. We are talking life, liberty, equality under the law, etc. This is what Freedom means.
I don’t get insulted that easily, but putting software of ANY kind in that category is insulting to me. I’m a software developer, and I probably consider computers far more important then most people, but even I don’t think it comes even remotely close to a human right. Saying that demeans what these things really are, and pollutes a term that people give their lives to work for.
If Stallman stopped talking about freedom, and started calling it something closer to what it is, then I am sure there would be a hell of a lot less friction for the people who are in the movement, but still have some measure of sanity.
We are currently shaping the world/our society by this software. Humans have been trying to understand the world for ages, let’s not undo that by implementing & distributing obscure software. This is a matter of human rights.
No, it isn’t. You could say it was a matter of social justice, and I still wouldn’t agree with you, but I wouldn’t just say you are flat out wrong. The right to live and the right to source code are not even remotely on the same level.
The right to sourcecode in the end is a question if you have the right to IT-democracy, and if you lose IT-democracy you might possibly also lose political freedom. And you know if you lose political freedom youre likely soon living in a totalitarian dictatatorship which might eliminate your right to live. Its all connected, like a series of tubes .. 🙂
The FOSS movement is a political movement. It’s a movement for democracy in the realm of IT.
Eben Moglen held a talk about intellectual property law, the SCO trial, and (most importantly) FOSS in general and how it’s a modern civil rights movement: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6345039926759549406
Watch it.
I’ve heard Eban Moglan talk before IRL (and stallman, and ESR) Software source code being a civil right is better then it being a human right, but it is still kind of a disgusting thing to say. We are going from comparing access to source code being comparable to the right to live, to access to source code being comparable to protection against discrimination based on sex, race, or sexual orientation.
Saying it is a battle for consumer rights is closer to the truth. I don’t nessicarily agree with that battle, but that is what it is. It makes you sound a hell of alot more credible when you are in the company of rosa parks rather then consumerreports.com.
If you think that freedom is disgusting, you should move to North Korea.
Well, that someone who calls himself “Google Ninja” has no respect for freedom is no surprise, given how Google “respects” users’ privacy…
Edited 2009-12-14 21:11 UTC
Kurt, there really should be a corollary to Godwin’s Law for the kind of Internet forum post you just made.
I guess refusing to respond to anything past the first paragraph and personal insults means I win.
Yes, you win…. as it’s about winning here….
But when EVERYTHING is moving into the computer sphere, everything – what we publish of our views, what we do with our friends, our medical records, our banking.
Suddenly JUST computers, OSs, and software become so large a part of our life that the control of it IS pretty much talking about human rights ..
We could possibly call it a “right to fair use of Information Technology”, and that wont happen unless governments regulate what proprietary techs do or make sure there always is an Open alternative ..
Its pretty scary how stuff like Facebook and Tweeter and Google eat up of peoples lives now, with privacy unregulated .. Not to forget the good old MS that has its trojanhorse OSs on virtually every computer ..
Rule the Internet, Rule the OS, Rule the WORLD !!
The potential problems with sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google have nothing to do with open source vs. closed source. You could set up a social networking site that used nothing but free software for it’s APIs, but you would have the same problems. The issue is with private data/persona information. Personally, I don’t use social networking sites and the like because I value my privacy and I don’t trust any of my private data to anyone else. As for Microsoft’s “Trojan Horse OSes”, please explain. I have my tinfoil hat ready!
Naah, I cant explain, its more like a gut feeling there is some kind of world domination plan, particularily in 7 ..
And I agree that the issue about the social networking sites not being about FOSS or no FOSS, as long as someone puts his or her info on the web it can be considered to be spread on all winds, no matter what service we put it on ..
Though Id like a LAW that makes for example Facebook criminally liable if they dont delete peoples profiles if they ask to be totally and fully deleted. Though sure, what I wrote above always apply anyway so I guess its hopeless ..
Edited 2009-12-15 22:37 UTC
Reading the article and the stories behind, reading the comments and positions and everything I can only say – thanks to everyone in the FOSS community – without you I would probably read some dumb articles about how great mono and Silverlight form MS are
Seriously, this whole will/wont, right/wrong, stick/split means nothing for the community in the long term. You all know what it means choosing the red pill and then, after years, reversing the chosen action!?
It is all about faith, ideals and love in the end – it is more about emotions then ratio. You don’t have the human rights because of rationality but because of emotions, because you feel it is right. It is the same here – choose what you feel is right and stick to it. Do not jump left/right as with the jumping you will loose yourself and most notably love for why you where jumping in the fist place.
I respect RMS, I am a FOSS user, I do not like proprietary software but still have to use it and my opinion is that RMS has to defend what he is standing and fighting for. This is the only right thing to do. If he would not, he would mostly betray himself and the whole FOSS community – can you imagine hearing RMS say: “It is okay to use some proprietary software if they are more advanced or for any other reason.” Well, I can not imagine a world with this kind of RMS.
And have in mind: RMS did NO HARM to NO ONE – heck, the only HARM he did is to stand his ground??! And that is why we all CAN have this debate today and hopefully in the future – everything else are minor technical questions.
So, to conclude: Stick to what you choose and love
Cheers….
Edited 2009-12-14 20:02 UTC
Of course not. What he said was “You cannot talk about the inspiration for an LGPL product on a GNOME mailing list”
Education is a basic human right, and only Free Software based on the free and open standards of the Internet can make free access to education something possible.
(from wikipedia)
As you can see there, the right to education is there as a way to keep people uneducated based on their race, class, sex, etc in countries where such discrimination exists. How does free software and open standards on the internet have anything to do with that?
You mean “keep people from being uneducated”, right?
If you actually watched Eben Moglen’s talk I’ve posted in an earlier reply to you, instead of being disgusted of freedom in the realm of IT, you would have watched how in detail Eben Moglen explains that the free availability of source code means the free availability of free technical knowledge — you know…. that stuff that’s transmitted in education…
mountains of source code available of varying degrees of quality with (mostly) poor documentation is not related in any way to preventing discrimination in education. We are talking about not letting women into school, not allowing anyone to see how photoshop does what it does. Nice try though.
You should discuss your deep insight with Eben Moglen and how he as a highly educated professor is wrong when he says (quote):
“The goal of the Free Software Movement is to enable people to understand, to learn from, to improve, to adapt, and to share the technology that increasingly runs every human life.
The fundamental belief in fairness here is not that it is fair that things should be free. It is that it is fair that we should be free and that our thoughts should be free, that we should be able to know as much about the world in which we live as possible, and that we should be as little as possible captive to other people’s knowledge, beyond the appeal to our own understanding and initiative.
This idea lay behind my dear friend and colleague, Richard Stallman’s, intense desire, beginning in the early 1980’s, to bring about a world in which all the computer software needed by anybody to do anything would be available on terms which permitted free access to the knowledge that that software contained and a free opportunity to make more knowledge and to improve on the existing technology by modification and sharing.
This is a desire for a free evolution of technical knowledge. A descent by modification untrammeled by principles that forbid improvement, access and sharing. If you think about it, it sounds rather like a commitment to encourage the diffusion of science and the useful arts by promoting access to knowledge.
In short, the idea of the Free Software Movement is neither hostile to, nor in any sense at cross-purposes with, the 18th century ambition for the improvement of society and the human being through access to knowledge.”
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6345039926759549406
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/moglen-harvard-speech-2004.html
When you said “to keep people uneducated” I think you meant “to help uneducated people”, right? Well, in my honest opinion, the point here is discrimination, as you say, in “race, class, sex, etc”.
Proprietary software is discriminatory. Only an exclusive group of people has access to source code, although probably a significant percentage of that code is based on free software. Another problem, but of lesser importance, is that proprietary software licenses are available only for people who can afford them.
Education and the GNU Project:
http://www.gnu.org/education/
Why schools should exclusively use free software:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/schools.html
Why give precedence to Free Software at school:
http://fsfe.org/projects/education/argumentation.en.html
Edited 2009-12-15 13:02 UTC
I am convinced most of the loony anti-RMS crowd match your opinion on this. It’s a fundamental difference in the way they and I view the world.
I am with RMS on this one. Free software is absolutely about Freedom and it should be considered a right, along with other forms of expression. There should be laws giving specific limits on when non-Free software is permitted to limit your freedom. If you don’t see this as fundamentally important then of course you think those who do are loonies. I think those who don’t are hopelessly naive. This is the nature of the divide.
But, please try to understand, our difference is in point of view. We are not any crazier than you are and our actions are based on logic, reason and good faith. I try hard not to assume, when I read an anti-RMS post, that the poster is stupid, ignorant or evil. I really try. If you could afford the same consideration then that would be helpful.
I’ve never said FSF people are stupid, ignorant, or evil.
I grew up the son of a social worker, and have a great deal of knowledge, and respect, for civil and human rights, and the people that fight for them.
Like I said somewhere else, change the terms you are using from Freedom, or Civil Right, or Human Right to Consumer Right (which it is), and I won’t get angry. I may not agree, but I will be a hell of a lot more ready to listen to you then if you go adopting terms that are highly charged inappropriately. That is the point you are arguing, and while I may not agree with that point, I will be a great deal more inclined to talk about it with you in a rational sense.
My point is that it is not inappropriate.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. I think one of the reasons that the “outside world” sees these occasional spats as such a sideshow is that people are not at all aware of the “two worlds” issue. Most tech-savvy people have come to a general understanding of the various open source licenses and what the difference between them is in a pragmatic way, and understand that the choice of a license is based on ideology to some extent.
However, even though RMS has been very consistent in promoting his dogma, people get surprised every time he pipes up because most people just can’t grok getting dogmatic over a software license. I think it’s also that people are astounded each time that the leader of such a prominent organization is such a nut, but that’s another matter.
It helps if you think of free software like yoga. For most people in the western world, yoga is an effective form of exercise. But don’t forget that for some people, its a sacred religious ordinance. RMS is the high priest of a religious sect, and what we see as useful software, he sees as something akin to holy scripture. He walks among us, but he is not one of us.
I disagree with him, but I believe it’s good to have radicals like RMS.
It is important to have a spectrum of opinion, because the existence of the extremists is what makes the more moderate opinions seem moderate.
Being an extremist is merely being at the edge of a spectrum of opinion. If extremists like RMS weren’t there, the spectrum of opinion would be narrower, but those on the edge would still be viewed as extremists.
So those open source advocates out there who are seen as fairly moderate can thank RMS for that. Without him we’d be the extremists.
As for what the GNOME project should do, I guess they should probably leave the GNU.
The GNU was originally a grand plan to create an OS, but it will never achieve that; that task has been delegated to the Distributions. So what is the GNU now, other than a loose collection of software projects with a common set of values. So if GNOME doesn’t fit with those values any more, then it really doesn’t belong in the GNU.
Agreed. I may disagree with some of Stallman’s antics and points of view. But at least he believes in something, some organizations would benefit from having some purists at their hearts. And I think GNU is one of them.
I get a hoot to read the comments from people who trash Stallman, and I wonder how many of them have a similar track record regarding the organizations they have helped create… I think a lot of people trashing him, some doing so by using gnu-related tools, are just too chicken sh*t to actually stand for something.
Agreed. In fact, Darl McBride is the only person I can think of who is willing to stand by his ideals and beliefs anywhere near as strongly as stallman, and not let the rest of the world, or in fact reality itself stand in his way.
Good post.
I think it goes the other way: GNU should ditch GNOME. Since the GNU OS wont be done any time soon there is no imperative for its desktop environment to work at the moment. As such they should really choose the desktop environment that is best from a technical standpoint and back it. Just like the HURD is a great technical solution to an OS but is not presently as good as Linux in reality; this is no impediment to GNU because their goals don’t include short term commercial viability, their goals are simply to make things that are good (and Free, of course).
GNOME was never a great project. It was a desperate attempt to undermine KDE, based on the then non-Free QT. Admittedly it succeeded, and we should be glad, but there is little else to recommend GNOME or any of its technologies.
If it were me and I could make it go any way I wanted I’d get GNU to back GNUStep. OpenStep is still the only open specification for a cross platform GUI that doesn’t suck. The main issue with it is Obj-C, but there are many solutions for that.
How do you figure this?
Of the notable distributions: Ubuntu (via Kubuntu), OpenSuSe, Fedora, Mandriva, Mint, Arch, Sabayon, PCLinuxOS, Ultimate and Slackware all ship both KDE and GNOME desktop variants.
Pardus, Sidux/Knoppix and MEPIS ship only with KDE desktops.
That is an interesting concept. GNOME is currently a GNU project. AFAIK, it is one of the few GNU projects to refrain from adopting the GPL v3 (is that correct?).
OTOH, GNU itself is a Free Software project (and not simply an open source project).
If the GNOME board want GNOME to move towards being an open source project only, then a split of GNOME from GNU would seem to be quite logical. At least then GNOME would be what it is … open source, but not Free Software. Truth in advertising.
I have no idea what that would do to its relative popularity.
Edited 2009-12-14 22:29 UTC
KDE showing up on those distributions only happened *after* Qt was dual-licensed under the GPL. Prior to that (when Qt was effectively proprietary) it wasn’t supported by any commercial distro (AFAIR).
Agreed, and Gnome’s popularity wouldn’t be effected that much by this change. Its only the incorporation of proprietary stuff like Moonlight that would have a dramatic effect (up to & including some distros dropping it as their primary DE if that were to happen). Gnome’s association with GNU is not now important or essential to either one.
KDE was the desktop for Mandriva and SuSe distributions, and also for more minor distributions like MEPIS, Knoppix, PCLinuxOS et al. Only when KDE 4.0 was first released and still flaky did some of these distributions also make a GNOME option.
Now that KDE4 is stable once again, these distributions are all moving back to KDE4.
If GNOME starts to drift more and more towards proprietary, as appears to be on the cards, then I would suggest it might find waning popularity amongst individuals, but it might gain in acceptance by businesses.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/48972
Edited 2009-12-15 00:12 UTC
Not to pick a fight, but I don’t think that Gnome has been an install option in Slackware for some time. I installed Slackware 13 a while back and vaguely remember KDE, XFCE, and Fluxbox being options, and perhaps others but not Gnome. A quick check via Google shows a post by Pat V. dated 23 Mar 2005, stating it was being dropped and why.
Be that as it may, if GNOME finds itself in fundamental disagreement with GNU’s core principles, i.e. the four freedoms, it should do itself, GNU, and everyone else a favor be leaving gracefully. Personally, I don’t care what GNOME does or if there is a GNOME tomorrow, XFCE and KDE,are preferable DE’s for me, and I’d really rather use Fluxbox or LXDE than GNOME. Not sure why. Full disclosure: posted from Debian Squeeze, using Opera on an XFCE desktop. Oh, and … FSF dues-paying member.
Simple: Most distributions use GNOME by default. Even if this were not true, most applications use GTK. Even if this were not true, there isn’t a defacto DE.
If QT had been LGPL or GPL or BSD then GNOME would not exist and there would *probably* be a defacto DE and QT would *probably* be the most common toolkit. So, GNOME succeeded.
I have nothing against OpenStep or ObjC, but its ironic you seem to have forgotten the very thing that created Gnome in the first place: Qt.
Its now dual-licensed under commercial/GPL3/LGPL2, which makes it as Free and Open (if not more so?) than GTK, and is now *more* cross-platform than GTK is and likely even OpenStep (has that been ported to Nokia’s phone platforms?). At least the major platforms are all actively supported by Qt now: Win, Mac, X11, Embedded Linux, Win Mobile, plus Nokia’s Symbian and Maemo platforms.
Now for some people, Qt being written in C++ may be as problematic as OpenStep being written in ObjC, but probably like OpenStep, its got wrappers/bindings to use it with just about every other language out there.
Since Qt is (now) also an “open specification for a cross platform GUI”, to say that OpenStep is the only one is just false I believe.
I choose my words carefully, please read them carefully. Quoting myself:
QT is GPL, but where’s the QT spec so I can write compatible software? If there is I haven’t seen it. Plus, as wide as QT’s coverage is, it does not cover the full swath of technologies you need to make a desktop environment.
QT’s language of implementation is abhorrent to some, but as long as it has bindings for C, etc., this problem is not insurmountable.
Its 15 years old now and effectively frozen because virtually everything that Apple has added to their implementation since then isn’t open, so can’t be added to GNUStep’s implementation.
There is no unified “OpenStep spec” anymore, there is GNUStep, and then whatever Apple provides.
As a spec, its not really valuable, since only one player (GNUStep) is really sticking to it, and since the spec is not being updated…
The spec, however, *could* be updated if interested parties wanted to do it. It’s a good place to start and far better than flailing around with no plan.
but I do have a plan: use Qt.
and that plan doesn’t require me to wait around for that cold day in hell when Apple decides to update/renovate the OpenStep spec.
A de facto standard is not a standard of any useful kind, especially when it keeps changing. If you want QT to be the DE API standard, go write it up and propose it. Until it’s written there’s too little certainty.
Apple is not the only one who could update OpenStep. They might be the only ones who could *call* the updated standard OpenStep, but the name hardly matters.
With Qt, the only thing I need to write, right now, is the code for my cross-platform app. A ‘standard’ is useless without a useful implementation of it, and since OpenStep isn’t even a unified standard anymore, never mind that its now a fairly ancient one that isn’t being updated as new hardware & devices emerge.
Thats the kind of change I’m talking about, not changes to the API itself, but support for the hardware we are using now. Does OpenStep support touch-tablets, for example? The latest Qt version just added this support.
People don’t create cross-platform apps with specifications, they do it with cross-platform libraries – the actual code that makes cross-platform possible. The only modern OpenStep *implementation* that matters now is Apple’s, and that one, of course, is not open, is not cross platform, and its not even *called* ‘OpenStep’ anymore.
I don’t really understand your argument at this point. The OpenStep *specification*, today, is not a viable option for writing cross-platform apps to run on modern hardware, because there is no modern implementation of it (that is still open & cross-platform).
i who work as a sw developer find his very existence utterly embarrassing since stallman put me (and all those like me) in the same league as murderers and rapists, but to each his own opinion, i guess
moderate opinions does not seem such because they are “more moderate” than current extremists
they are moderate because they come from people who acts and reasons pragmatically (instead of dogmatically) and (more important) respects other’s opinions and arguments even when they dissent – common traits of moderate people, the opposite of what an extremist or radical usually is and does
except that being a character trait, what makes someone an extremist (or moderate) person, isnt strictly tied to a specific topic but affects all aspects of public conduct as far as expressing opinions (and discussin them with others) is concerned, or applies to all kinds of public endeavours where people don’t agree on something
current moderates have none of the traits (blind faith, leader’s personality cult, “black or white” “with us or against us” attitude wrt others and so on) of other extremist social, religious, political fringes (namely communists, fascists, talibans), so it’s not like they would be considered in the same league, if RMS and his followers (who on the contrary share the aforementioned traits) weren’t there
just, the FOSS one would be described as a single, friendly, open and pragmatical community
that would be funny, since GNOME stands for GNU Network Object Model Environment, ie GNOME is supposed to be an integral part of the GNU – i’m somewhat inclined to think that if GNOME spins off, the whole GNU ecosystem will start to fall apart in some time..
of which GNOME was supposed to be what the WorkPlace Shell was for OS/2, the official GUI and graphical environment
but the point is: what are those values?
at the very beginning, free software was (or was depicted as being) about giving something (value, power, customizeability, assurance, at least choice) to the user – thus FOSS was user centric (by definition)
immediately after that came the vision of a world without proprietary software, thus a world without people like me and without professional applications ( since, you know, individual hobbysts hardly have the time, programming skills, and field knowledge to implement another AutoCAD or Photoshop), and the exploitation of half baked, perpetual beta software to push one man’s agenda and values onto others (something that i’m personally disgusted by, and which has convinced me to quit touching linux or anything foss to even avoid dirtying myself with senseless idiocy)
Quite funny, since they already abandoned the Network Object Model part years ago.
Edited 2009-12-15 22:18 UTC
80% of the time he’s in the news, it’s because of some offensive remark he made.
Thats because he has his distractors who follow him around waiting for him to say something controversial and then amplify it to present him in a negative way to undermine his effort at spreading what he believes in
most of his distractors at the moment are on the “open source” camp who are lusting to incorporate proprietary techonogies in free code and see his opposition to this as an annoyance and wish him to just shut up or die somewhere ..
And most of the time the offensive remark turns out to be some candid remark taken out of context by people with way too thin of a skin and too much time on their hands.
He does have certain personality issues, but honestly so do 90% of people involved in this field.
That’s because the news is only picking those up. The discussion wasn’t even started by him, nor is he a major part of the actual discussion.
If that were true he would have had to have made an offensive remark to be in the news this time, right? What part did you find offensive? Please quote and link so that I can rip apart your argument precisely and conveniently.
What Stallman is suggesting doesn’t take anything away from the user. Of course there’s non-free software that builds on top of free; this is not a problem, but it’s not the goal. If you let this creep, you’ll compromise the reasons FOSS exists to begin with. If freedom didn’t matter, I’d have gone completely Mac; Linux wouldn’t be on my desktop for where open standards, transparency, and absence of marketing BS are important.
It’s curious to see this fact lost on a site littered with news of derelict operating systems like AmigaOS and BeOS whose progeny took many years to appear owing to the closed ancestry. Linux has kept on truckin’ while those operating systems nearly suffocated in the stiff grip of their companies du jour. Let’s not forget why.
I think that’s an important point. We can mock people who take the ideology too far, but without the ideology to sustain it, especially at the beginning, the useful free software that all the “pragmatic” people enjoy would probably have never existed.
If there weren’t “crazies” out there willing to struggle and suffer for what they believe in, how much great art would there be in the world? Would we have civic freedoms at all, or would be still be under hereditary monarchies? How much technology would we have? If every artists, author, philosopher, and revolutionary leader were guided by cold rationality and commerce, where would human civilization be today?
Agreed 100% with the both of you. To me pragmatism is only valid for projects where it makes sense: production environments with fairly well defined goals and restrictions: Use he correct tool, to get the job done on time and on spec. After all that is what computers and software really are: tools.
However, pragmatism makes absolutely no sense on other projects with far longer (and reaching) goals and roadmaps. Bitching about GNU’s politics, when these politics are the actual reason why the project was created to begin with reeks, to me at least, of wanting to have it both ways.
We live in a world where pragmatism for the sake of pragmatism has been converted in a positive quality just because. That is why we have now pragmatism considered a very positive quality in politics, when pragmatism is the actual antithesis of politics. It is like wanting to be a catholic because you like the buildings while wishing for an agnostic church since you don’t care much for the religious side of it.
Criticising Stallman for staying true to his word is probably due because those people trashing him have never stood for anything, and can’t really fathom why anyone would do such a thing: have principles and stick by them.
As I said, I may not agree with some of Stallman’s antics and points of view. But at least the guy has been consistent on his stands, has stuck to his ideals, and the organization he created allowed me to use some tools which have been fundamental for my work (and formation) as a researcher. For that I respect him immensely, and it would be a cold day in hell if I were to throw him under the bus just because…
The tech field is already dominated by too many grey, soul less, anti-social types… some spice and diversity is extremely welcome in my humble point of view.
Yay, let’s generalise and magically assume that people criticising RMS are automatically people with no principles and no spine.
Can you honestly not fathom that the criticism on RMS is founded? Do you truly believe all people who are critical of RMS are people with no principles themselves?
Heck, and you wonder WHY we criticise him.
*shakes head*
I do wonder why. I think people who are against RMS are either evil people promoting a scheme that harms me for their own benefit, or simply delusional.
Care to suggest an alternative hypothesis?
I’d say if you think that’s true then you’re either an evil person promoting a scheme to harm me (because of RMS had his way I wouldn’t have graphic drivers.) or simply delusional.
If RMS had his way you would have graphic drivers. Free ones.
RMS is not harming you by repeatedly asking for Free graphics drivers and repeatedly asking that you not use non-Free graphics drivers. You are free to ignore him, as you have done. If he eventually succeeds and all graphics drivers are free you win again!
Where’s the evil?
If by diversity you mean zealous fanaticism to an ideology that is clearly incongruent with reality then no, I’d rather not have that in the tech world. I’d rather the tech world be a break from that.
As for your comment about tech workers, it’s the grey anti-social types that are working behind the scenes to make sure the magical machines operate so people can watch American idol.
If the tech world is too cold and pragmatic for you then go into politics where there is much diversity in fuzzy thinking.
He built on top of a mountain of proprietary work. His ideology makes no recognition of the fact that proprietary software allows the modern world to operate.
There’s nothing wrong with being emotional and idealistic but Stallman is a loon that pushes a destructive ideology that is incompatible with software economic realities. He is motivated more out of spite than idealism.
If he never existed then FreeBSD would be the de facto free Unix. There would actually be more progress in the Unix world since there would be less fragmentation.
Stallman is a loon that should be ignored. Some of the most popular open source software is funded by proprietary profits. It’s totally ridiculous to run around screaming about the sins proprietary software when it is paying the bills.
FreeBSD LOL
Every FreeBSD “distro company” would have made its own proprietary extensions to their FreeBSD-distro. Companies are like that. That is why Unix died (ongoing process) and will be replaced by Linux.
Read this if you don’t believe me:
http://lwn.net/Articles/354408/
Quote:
”
All of these mistakes notwithstanding, one should not overlook the success of X as free software. X predates version 1 of the GPL by some five years. Once the GPL came out, Richard Stallman was a regular visitor to the X Consortium’s offices; he would ask, in that persistent way he has, for X to change licenses. That was not an option, though; the X Consortium was supported by a group of corporations which was entirely happy with the MIT license. But in retrospect, Keith says, “Richard was right.”
”
GPL is superior when companies have to work together, because they really _have_to_ work together.
You make it sound like Linux is leagues ahead of FreeBSD.
The main advantage of Linux over FreeBSD is hardware support which is more due to marketshare than the license.
I’m surprised by how well FreeBSD has done given the amount of investment into Linux by corporate tech giants. FreeBSD survives on a fraction of the budget yet is still the choice of many web hosts.
This idea that the GPL is needed for technical progression is a joke. There are plenty of examples that negate this belief.
The software world could easily survive without Linux. At the very least the sound problem would be fixed.
There is single FreeBSD and there is no need for hundreds of them, like in case of Linux, because FBSD is a complete operating system, not a bunch of random code thrown together. You may not want to believe it, but FBSD is doing okay and companies still use and support it (eg. Juniper). You just don’t see it in the news every day, because it didn’t become a religious movement just yet.
You seem to dig happily all the stuff journalists make up, but believe me, they have their regular production of annual buzzwords and “migration to Linux” is over. We have “The Cloud” today and some other BS no one really cares about tomorrow. Why not rather ask someone who works in a data center? We for example have consolidated lots of Linux servers to new AIX machines this year and replaced several Solaris machines with new Solaris ones. It is actually true, that IBM and HP would love to sell jut the hardware and have “the community” to make the OS for them, but it still is impossible because of one very simple reason: Linux is crap. Don’t believe in some kind of “historical reasons”. They would happily do the same thing that they did with Tru64 if Linux could do the job Unix is doing today.
Do we really want this? With proprietary software you have competition. With open source you get something like cartel. Which one is better?
I’ll explain my point again:
If there were no GPL and no Linux there would be lots of different JUNOS-like OSes and all of them would not share their code additions and the open source basis would progress at a much slower speed, as it happened with X.
That is what I meant, I might have been a bit unclear about that.
I find is hilarious that you make it sound like Linux has saved us from OS fragmentation when the Linux distros can’t even agree on where system icons should be stored. The FreeBSD team provides a working OS, not a kernel that is dumped downstream without any care for what happens to it or how many tribal wars are caused by not defining things like sound frameworks.
I’m also not sure why you think the GPL is needed to prevent endless competing commercial forks when Apache is ubiquitous.
I don’t think it. Keith said so in the LWN article.
And Apache is not the best example. Apache is not shipped with hardware to most of its users. OSes often are and Apache has lots of proprietary forks (big hosters like 1&1, Strato etc. all have their own additions for apache, like Google has for Linux.)
So in that case the license does not matter (You would need AGPL for that to work.)
It all comes down to this:
Companies like to keep their work for themselves and have a proprietary competitive advantage because suits don’t get the value of collaboration.
The value of collaboration is what the GPL taught the world.
The GPL hasn’t taught the world anything, since most of the world has no idea that it even exists. It’s simply an open source license that requires derivative software to fall under the same license as the parent.
Funny you mentioned Google since they give themselves a proprietary advantage while utilizing GPL software for profit. They make additions to GPL software all the time that they don’t give back since they aren’t required to.
Companies profit all the time from GPL software without giving back since most software is used internally. The GPL just prevents companies from profiting through proprietary derivatives. The GPL also allows companies to study GPL software to see how it works and then write their own implementation.
Linux is popular with companies because it is a free Unix clone, not because of the license. Hardware companies that fund development could just as easily fund FreeBSD. They are not in love with the GPL, they just want to sell hardware. Linux certainly gained inertia early on along with marketshare but the tech world could switch to FreeBSD if needed. At the end of the day Linux is a clone of a Unix monokernel, not some innovative OS created by tech hippies for which there is no alternative.
Well it taught the tech world that collaboration across companies on an OS kernel on a massive scale can work really well.
Duh, that is exactly what I meant (and mentioned the AGPL to avoid that from happening.
Sure they don’t love the GPL, but it forces them to work upstream or have very high porting costs, because the development on Linux is so fast. It is by far the fastest moving piece of software on the planet.
It is popular because it is cheap, powerful and modular and has good support for hardware.
Companies want apache licensed stuff. Like Android where HTC can ship their cool SenseUI without giving back code to upstream. That makes Android progress at a slower speed. If HTC would work upstream to get their code into mainline Android it would be better for the whole Android ecosystem. Companies don’t get that.
GPLed code unifies developement. BSD/MIT/Apache don’t.(AGPL would be best though.)
If Juniper had always contributed all of its JUNOS code to upstream FreeBSD would be better now, but they didn’t. What made that possible? The BSD license, they don’t have to ship the code with their products.
Right. I think the pragmatism that others are talking about is a luxury we can afford now that important pieces of IT are open, or at least have solid open alternatives. We wouldn’t have Linux kernels and ODF file formats unless someone had insisted on an open playing field that would be bound to stay that way.
Yes, RMS is a zealot, but he’s a zealot we need. I don’t always agree with him, but I don’t think his detractors would have the choices between free and proprietary software, or as many options to move data about, had it not been for insistence that imporant software which we depend on be free.
What I don’t understand is the idea that the mere presence of proprietary software in any way diminishes the value of free software. One could claim that the *lack* of a viable free alternative is a hole in the free software quilt, and then the fault lies with the free software community (as a loosely-defined concept,) but some would rather point the finger.
Sure, I could see the issues people have with software patents, the DMCA, etc., but those are completely orthogonal to the existence of proprietary software, i.e. the concepts are well-defined and completely distinct.
Say there are 20 things that software can do, and that all the proprietary software in the world can do 18 of them, and all of the free software can do 18 of them, with the 2 things that each can’t do different from the other. Those in the free software community, instead of bitching about how proprietary software is evil, should write the software to do those last two tasks. Then the onus will fall on the end user to decide how *free* he or she wishes to be. Likely, there will be no benefit realized by this freedom, so the choice will be made based on other factors
Sorry for such a pedantic response, but I can’t help but feel that these two camps, the pragmatists, and the idealists, talk directly past each other without carefully stating their arguments.
I think it’s more about where it leads. We have Adobe’s Flash player which is good enough so no one bothers writing a libre source flash player. The result is that we remain locked into Adobe’s Flash player which may be fine for now but screw us all later. Now for this, one also has to assume that no developer will be motivated to write a libre Flash player simply because it’s not motivated by a requirement to do so.
Personally, I will use the code that works. I’d prefer libre code but if the hardware is only supported through a closed binary module then I’ll be limited to that until a community project becomes competitive. With ATI, that mean the community driver rather than ATI’s borked code (previous to AMD buyout and specs release). With Nvidia, that means the closed binary that still managed to outperform the community driver on my system. With my XFI audio card, I’d be screwed for lack of a vendor provided driver if not for Creative being savvy enough to hand off driver source when they lost interest in developing it.
This touches on my belief that closed source hardware drivers are udder madness that benefits the end user in no way. Between vendor budgets going towards limited platform choices or vendors deciding that my hardware is too old for them to support leaving drivers unsupported; freaking madness. The hardware should be the product not the chunk of software that bridges it and the OS.
They cause mad cow disease? Sorry couldn’t resist.
Closed source drivers benefit the user by allowing the hardware to work. That’s the only thing the user cares about in the first place.
You can give long speeches about how hardware companies should open all their drivers but that won’t change the FACT that a lot of them don’t want to. It doesn’t even matter why since they make the hardware and you don’t.
Furthermore NVIDIA has already explained how a lot of their driver contains intellectual property that they don’t want to share with competitors. Operating system developers can choose to work with or against the needs of hardware companies and the Linux kernel devs have chose the latter. Not a wise strategy if your goal is to increase marketshare. How many years of the Linux desktop have we had so far?
I’m on my 10th, and counting
I guess you meant your desktop, or someone else’s, but I couldn’t care less about what other people use.
“We don’t own the patents which allow us to provide driver source”
Great. So provide a generic hardware interface you can provide specs for. Let that chip run infront of the “secret sauce”. Drivers can be written without risk of patent leak.
Allowing the hardware to function is the most minimal benefit. It limits what platforms can interact with that hardware (limits potential consumer base). It limits how long that hardware can work based on how long the vendor continues to develop drivers. It delays patching of critical and security related bugs.
In the case of Nvidia, they do provide a pretty solid driver and for lack of a competitive open driver, it works great. If the vendor can continue to develop a competitive driver including upkeep of bug and vulnerability patches then no worries. The bigger issue is companies which do not keep up with development or provide competitive performance to what reverse engineered community projects can provide; in that case the closed driver is a hindrance not a benefit. The hardware should be the product not the little chunk of software that limits it to a single platform.
And, in the end, are you seriously suggesting that if hardware vendors could provide detailed information, you would not see any benefit in that?
There are a couple of projects still (last I heard) working on this, like gnash & swfdec.
However, the impetus for an open player has gone down some because of Adobe’s own improving behavior towards the FOSS world. I suspect their change of attitude was not altruistic, of course, but in fact coincided with MS’s Silverlight, but still, they have/are improving and opening up Flash…
I finally made the switch to Xfce since about a month…
I believe there’s too much politics going on in the Gnome project. I don’t like Mono… I am a bit “iffy” when it comes to Gnome 3… I dislike KDE…
So there seems to be only one way for me: Xfce…
I have been a Gnome user since 2005.
I am on Xfce now (Xub 9.10), but still use some Gnome tools…
I heard Xfce 4.8 will have a better integration of “connect to server” in Thunar. Right now, using Gigolo is ok, but not as good as Nautilus…
But I will conclude like this: Xfce is the way !
How exactly do the politics of a project affect you if you are not a developer for said project? Sounds to me that if you are willing to change desktop environments because you are intransigent regarding the politics of the one you switched from… that looks a tad like projection to me, no?
Most of my issues with gnome come from a technical and usability standpoints. Politics is such an ethereal concept, that I have no idea how it permeates to the common user.
What, out of curiosity, do you thing Mono has to do with Gnome? Right now, there is one – just one – Mono-based application (Tomboy) officially included with Gnome. It’s just an application, not part of infrastructure that everything else depends on. And it’s easily replaced by GNote, a C++ equivalent for those unwilling or unable to use Mono.
Nor is there any serious talk by current GNOME leaders of integrating it further. For all the energy people expend screaming about the perils of Mono’s creeping influence, it’s really a non-issue. There are very few significant applications built in it, and even fewer that can’t be replaced by less controversial equivalents. There’s no desktop infrastructure that depends on it, nor any intention to build any. So why the fuss?
I suspect its because Miguel is just as much of a lightning-rod for controversy as RMS is.
It is my belief dat F/OSS should no longer try to promote itself by trying to outcast proprietary software by means of licenses, policies or by limiting free speech. But rather by showing that they are superior on actual merits.
It would truly be nice to see all products marketed based on what they do well rather than what mud the competition can be painted with. Sadly, it’s as likely to happen in the marketing of retail software as it is to happen in the next presidential campaign tour.
Even if it where to happen on one side, eventually the other side’s marketing spin would elicit a response which brings the “higher road” product defensively back to the mud pit.
I totally agree, but that’s more of the OSS way of looking at things than Free Software. Folks like Linus talk about how OSS produces better software. In such a case, it makes perfect sense for them to try to prove that.
The problem is that for the Free Software movement and folks like RMS, it’s not a question of better software. It’s a question of morals. RMS believes that you have a moral right to the source code of anything you run on your computer. As such, he considers proprietary software to be immoral and evil. Whether free software or proprietary software has better code is irrelevant to his views. He’d rather have a poorly written free software program than a stellar proprietary program any day.
Now, if the FOSS folks – be they OSS or Free Software – are going to get the majority of the world using FOSS, then they do indeed have to show that they can produce superior code because what most people care about is a product that works, not the license it uses.
Congratulations and welcome to 1998. You’ve just reinvented Open Source Software!
Some people creating Free Software got together and came up with a way to sell it to companies: pure pragmatism. “Don’t worry about the Freedom stuff, think of it as Open instead. The advantage is pragmatic: Openness makes things better, cheaper.”
And so here we are with a large number of people who have forgotten. They have forgotten that Open Source is just what we call it when we pitch it to companies, it’s *all* Free Software in the end and we like it *because* it’s Free Software.
People will continue to promote Free Software as Open Source, because on a practical level this works far better. People (usually *other* people) will continue advocating and promoting Free Software–which is largely the same thing, but for different reasons.
Nothing will or should change here.
The open source community has grown quite a bit passed that though. Linus has said a whole bunch of times he doesn’t give a crap about FSF ideals, he just likes the license. The python and ruby communities tend to be against the FSF, and will rag on anyone who releases a library under the GPL rather then an MIT-ish license. The apache foundation was pure pragmatism, created by a bunch of companies. There is an extremely vibrant open source community in the java and .net worlds that is very corporate and enterprise-y in nature, and rarely has anything to do with freedom.
If the line is drawn at idealism, I would argue that the open source camp at this point is quite a bit larger then the free software camp. If Idealism is ignored, then there is no divide at all, people pretty much get along fine. Except when something like this happens, the catalyst always seems to be RMS weighing in on a topic.
For every example you can site on one side I can site one on the other side.
Whether Open Source guys like it or not they all support Free Software when they choose a GPL-compatible license. Thus, vocally supported or not, the Free Software camp is by definition larger.
The employee some company paid to fix a bug in Apache? He’s supporting the FSF whether he wants to or not.
Since it’s not about ideology for them they do not note the fact, but the end result is the same.
FYI, Linus never cared about the license. GPLv2 was the second license he used for Linux; the first one was something along the lines of “Do what you like, send patches back to me so I can include them.” As I understand it he figured the GPL gave him the same thing with some actual legal teeth. The ideology of it was never on the radar.
They should choose someone even lightly moderate as spokesperson of FSF.
As is, FSF is to FOSS community what Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity.
Are you crazy?
The Westboro church promotes violence against people who do or believe certain things they don’t like. They tell people who disagree with them that those people are loathsome and disgusting, and a variety of personally insulting things of that nature.
The FSF, and RMS, ask that you not use proprietary software. Politely, as a rule. Occasionally some strong wording is used (e.g. anti-social) but no people are condemned.
What is the problem with that?
The questionaire seems to be seriously rigged against RMS.
Moderating p.g.o might make sense – not by blocking contributors, but perhaps by some kind of “report abuse” button that would remove the offending post after moderator review.
Of course that would be a bit STASI/thought police, but the line of “offending” could be drawn quite high. I guess Miguel overstepped a little bit by advertising Silverlight, but I see absolutely no issue talking about proprietary software in general.
Of course, it’s by Lefty Schlesinger.
Splitting Gnome from GNU is not the right solution.
The right solution is to entirely remove Mono from Gnome.
Mono should be just like Java. No more no less.
Why are there Mono applications included in Gnome by default?
Why is tomboy hosted at http://www.gnome.org?
Maybe they should change the name Gnome for Gmono. That would be more appropriate I guess.
I agree, they should remove Miguel from the GNOME land as well.
Good thing that KDE exist.
Mono/.NET will never be just like Java. It can’t.
Java is a true cross-platform environment and its more ‘Free’ than .NET will ever be since its not only GPL’d, and a fully open spec, but you don’t need to worry about patent issues, or its sole corporate master turning on you (because Java no longer has a single corporate master).
Quite right. Java has serious deployment issues and a very poor legacy interop story. Which is why it was DOA on the desktop.
Java is not DOA on my desktop (works fine), but .NET most certainly is, since I don’t run Windows.
‘cross-platform’ != ‘Windows-only’
Of course, this ignores the fact that there is no developer interest in producing desktop applications in Java. So while I’m sure that you have no trouble running a JVM, testing out all the Swing widget style examples, and occasionally fulfilling masochistic urges by running Eclipse, there really isn’t much useful, productive, or entertaining software developed on the platform in the context of the desktop.
I can’t quite see where I suggested such a thing.
You were the one who first referred to the ‘desktop’. From a Windows-centric POV, it does look like Java is ‘DOA on the desktop’, but Windows isn’t the only desktop out there.
As for ‘developer interest’, I really don’t care. Since .NET is not an option for me, it doesn’t matter how many developers are targeting it versus Java.
Devs who only care about Windows will use .NET, but devs who want to reach other platforms will have to look beyond .NET, and for x-platform support, Java is one of the options they can use.
Java works on *my* desktop while .NET doesn’t, so Java is not ‘DOA on the desktop’ from my POV.
Yes, I chose to clearly define the context of my argument and it is that argument that you are challenging.
Windows isn’t the only desktop out there, but there are no desktops where Java has any significant penetration.
As for non Windows-centric .NET, Ubuntu comes with Tomboy, F-Spot, and Banshee by default, and many users install GNOME Do. All of which are .NET applications.
Where are these cross platform Java apps that are in wide use?
Developer interest is important because the developers provide the applications and without applications, a platform is essentially useless to a user.
Clearly, the developers feel differently. They are not using Java.
I’m curious. Which desktop are you running where Mono doesn’t work?
I am a little tired of comparisons of Free Software advocacy with religion. A religious person is one that believes in something without physical evidence, frequently irrational stuff. I think that proprietary software developers always tried to make us believe stuff like this, such as during the 80s when proprietary software was something that should be used as a book. Now we must consider proprietary software as part of the hardware. I support free software because it seems a rational approach to the software, as opposed to proprietary software that attempts to create artificial scarcity protected by legal measures that often stifle innovation. Remember that RMS is a practicing atheist, Saint IGNUcius is a parody act. Please, stop comparing the FSF with a religious organization. The proprietary software industry seems more appropriate for this comparison. And with this approach, the BSA would be the Holy Inquisition.
as well as the absolute adherence to an ideal without tolerance of dissent.
RMS also provides a utopic plan and a moral guideline for followers.
I’d actually compare it to a cult since it was created by a single person who expects everyone to follow his will.
But the fact that they have a website describing Windows 7 as sinful says enough.
http://en.windows7sins.org/
Any topic can be considered religiously. I wouldn’t limit it to recognized religions or cults (unrecognized religions). FS ideals and the broken form of Capitalism that retail software competes in are both taken to the point of religion by some within. Talk to a business grad who’s entire world revolves around the idea that capitalism results in the highest profit from the best product based on consumer choice. You’ll find equally little room for “what if” scenarios with that particular topic taken to the extreme of religious belief.
Stallman goes well beyond individual fanaticism by creating a movement that has followers who push his fanatical beliefs. He also provides his own newspeak definition of ‘freedom’ which he wraps his whole ideological framework in.
He has created a movement that expects absolute devotion to his goals. His own carefully crafted definition of ‘freedom’ supersedes any criticism or concern. Adherence to the ONE TRUE WAY is the solution to everything. It’s a tech cult.
I believe that his site is incomplete. NVIDIA , Imagination Technologies, Broadcom and SiS are also sinful. But you don’t say anything because you are a windows troll.
If they published how to use their hardware (NOT HOW IT IS CONSTRUCTED) (charging the users accordingly to implemented standards) then they could have windows drivers for the luxury of windows users. But their attitude is not only sinful, it is also anti-competitive. They kill other platforms because they want to control how to use their silly machines.. wake up we are approaching 2010, have you heard about standards?
Personally I would have no problem with Windows if they implemented device support with standards, not with standardized OS specific software APIs (like USB mass storage). I believe this is what RMS is saying. He has no problem with Word if it is interoperable and I am sure that he would not have any problem with advertisements. But the situation is bad, the devices with small exceptions and office software implement no standards and this is cough…cough.. llegal … cough…cough anticompetitive also to GNU/FSF. He does not want proprietary software.It is a matter of choice ….
…. but is it really with non-stanardized HW and not standards compatible software? He is angry with the situation and he has all the right to be.
Why should Microsoft have to make any word documents interoperable with any other office suite? You do realize that they own Microsoft Word, right? This is not “Miracle Word” (gotta love Atlas Shrugged references). I’m not understanding what is illegal about creating proprietary software or hardware. Can you elaborate? I think your explanations were hidden by coughs or something…
I’m not a Windows troll, I’m against a movement that runs around defaming proprietary developers of all sizes when FOSS developers cannot even provide 1% of the software that is needed for our modern world to operate.
Stallman believes that writing proprietary software is a criminal act. Thus writing proprietary software that helps the disabled is a criminal act. Even if you are clearly helping the disabled you are still evil since you aren’t providing the source.
That’s insane.
Stallman is a loon. Follow him at your own peril.
Stallman believes that writing proprietary software is an *immoral* act which he’d make illegal if he could. Get your facts straight. 😉
Personally, I got my fill of all that in the 80’s with Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jerry_Falwell_portrait.jpg
Edited 2009-12-14 20:44 UTC
there is nothing wrong with those companies posting on the planet gnome website. the free software foundation needs to realize its not all or nothing, in the software eco system both free and non free apps will exist and there is no reason why the discussion of non free apps should be banned from the planet gnome site…
And why is that? Look what happened to FOSS in the last 15 years. It moved from a small idea into a mass movement.
FOSS desktop environments do no longer try to catch up with Microsoft or Apple, they are at the forefront now.
Today, most cellphones run on Free Software, be it either some incarnation of Linux (Android, ALP,…) or Symbian.
These days pretty much every piece of mainstream PC hardware works right out of the box with FOSS drivers under Linux.
Why’s that? It’s because of the relentless work from organizations like FSF and OpenBSD that made that possible.
Proprietary software is not a god-given law, just like there is no need for monarchy.
Seriously. GNOME is a GNU project — always has been. If you don’t like it, move along. Trying to appropriate it is digusting. What makes this whole farce even more laughable is developers (KDE) getting into bed with then proprietary software was they very reason GNOME was created.
the original post by De Icaza is smart and even visionary, and the topic is simply mono and moonlight. any open source shriveled penis who gets angry about that should climb a mountain.
edit: that said, to say “[Planet GNOME] should not invite people to talk about their proprietary software projects just because they are also GNOME contributors” is perfectly reasonable, and I agree that Planet aggregators should filter out unrelated blog posts rather than “display everyone’s full blog feed as it represents them”. That said said, De Icaza’s post is related enough to GNOME and should be included.
Edited 2009-12-14 17:44 UTC
Which part was related to GNOME? I only read about Mono and Moonlight/Silverlight apps.
mono itself is related enough to gnome IMO, and I’d probably say the same if he posted about C++ theory. but I’m not angry if you disagree
IMO a recipe for chili and administration tips for vmware ESX are the kinds of things to leave out, not miguel talking about gui software
Edited 2009-12-14 18:08 UTC
To me GNOME is GLib, GIO/GVFS, GTK+, Clutter, D-Bus, GStreamer, the HIG, etc. and open to any runtime environment (including Mono, but not just Mono). If Icaza wants a better GUI toolkit he should help improving GTK+ (make it more cross-platform, add declarative UI support, etc.) and bind it to his favourite runtime environment, but IIRC he was the first one against GTK+ 3.0.
The only thing PlanetGnome has to do with the Gnome project is that it is comprised of posts from the blogs of individuals who are prominent member of the Gnome community. The content is not restricted to information about the Gnome project (which is readily available throughout the Gnome website), and might contain posts on hobbies, opinions, musings, pet peeves and other personal items that you might find on anyone’s blog.
Right, which is why RMS’s demands are ridiculous in this case. PG isn’t an official mouthpiece for the Gnome Foundation, it’s simply what people affiliated with Gnome feel like talking about.
The following is my personal belief, firstly I have a great deal of respect for RMS, and anyone in either the the free software or the open source community should be in awe of RMS’s accomplishments, as neither community would exist without his work. Personally I probably fall on the Free Software side. That said I also believe that one of the core values held in common by both communities is that of free expression, so I will defend to the death both Migel’s right to drone on about proprietary software I will never use and RMS’s right to bore me to tears with his explanation of why Migel should have to drone on somewhere else. Then like most sensible people I will choose to ignore them both, I only hope the Gnome Foundation will join me in doing so, as splitting from GNU would split the community and listening to RMS would leave Planet GNOME a poorer less interesting place.
since it is filled with proprietary code.
Stallman should be truly consistent with his beliefs and completely free himself from proprietary software which means living in the woods and playing with an abacus.
For he shall give us the Freedoms that he hath defined for us to follow in accordance with his own will.
GPL 3:42
That’s why the FSF (among other organizations) is lobbying for Free hardware (“Free” not in term of “at no cost”, but freely accessible specifications).
Considering that AMD releases all specifications these days, Intel develops most drivers in the open, there are SPARC CPUs by Sun whose blueprints are GPLed, ect., I guess that quite a lot has already been achieved in terms of “Free” hardware.
I’m not even talking about drivers. I’m talking about hard-encoded software that all hardware contains.
But next time you visit a hospital make sure you demand open source medical equipment that follows Stallman’s definition of Freedom. Don’t let those evil proprietary machines touch your body. Die with your Freedoms* that Stallman has created for you.
*see Book of GPL for full newspeak definition
Well you know that what you write is just sad and because of the proprietary medical equipment and proprietary drugs many countries in the world can not afford that and people are actually dieing? I mean, this is the “MAIN” reason in the software land why free software was founded in the first place – to share freedom to have.
If it would be implemented into the medical industry that would be a major breakthrough. And I am not talking about generics or “chinese forks”, I am talking about free medicine and medi(whatever) development.
Think about it.
Edited 2009-12-14 20:12 UTC
Making the software that runs MRI scanners open source would not result in free medicine. It still takes money to build the machines, pay the programmers to maintain the software, etc.
Life saving technologies often take investments that need to be recouped through sales. You can sit and bemoan this reality but YOU ARE NOT PROVIDING AN ALTERNATIVE.
Let’s have an example:
Company A provides a life-saving proprietary software product that they charge for.
Company B provides nothing useful and lives on credit but points their finger at company A for charging and keeping the solution proprietary.
According to Stallman Company B is in fact more ethical even though they produce nothing and save zero lives. Company A is in fact evil for not providing the source. That is retarded.
No, but it might make producing MRI scanners *cheaper* which would mean more hospitals could afford more… which would not be a bad thing.
Only in the sense that by giving away intellectual property you devalue your product (along with your company) by giving secrets out to your competitors who can then reproduce your product without having to recoup research costs.
But for highly specialized hardware like an MRI scanner publishing the source would likely have no effect unless you published your hardware schematics as well, which could easily destroy your company which also means closing off further capital for future investments.
Giving away intellectual property can benefit consumers in the short term by allowing cheap clones but will harm them in the long term by closing off capital needed for research and development. It takes a highly skilled and organized team to create the schematics and software for something like an MRI scanner. By providing the source you allow a Chinese factory to undercut the development team who provided the majority of the work and funding. The GPL doesn’t account for this gross imbalance. It just declares closed source to be unethical without regard for how the vast majority of software development is funded.
To Stallman the state-owned Chinese cloning corp is ethically superior to a small proprietary US startup that produces life-saving, innovate software. In fact Stallman would take joy in hearing about a small proprietary software company go bankrupt thanks to their source being stolen and put on the internet. It’s a twisted ideology that puts Stallman’s desire to see proprietary software destroyed above all else.
He’s a resentful prick that pushes his own definition of “Freedom” which is just a guise for his underlying desire to destroy the proprietary software business model along with the hard work of others.
For a saner, more balanced view, one could read about buisness co-operatives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-operative
The actual aim of Free Software is to promote the four freedoms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software#Definition
I don’t see anything written in there about destroying small commercial startup proprietary software companies.
The aims of Free Software apply to Free Software. The aim is to always keep as Free software that software which the authors release as Free Software in the first place. The aim is collaboration, to make that Free Software better.
Free Sotware is a co-operative enterprise. You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours, and we both gain a scratched back. It is also about barter, with source code as the currency, instead of conventional money.
Rational people don’t have any problem at all with the concepts of co-operatives, collaboration and barter.
PS: If the GNOME Foundation board wants to move GNOME towards a more proprietary orientation, that is fine and dandy, it is simply a matter that following such a move then GNOME should no longer depict itself as Free Software.
Edited 2009-12-15 00:40 UTC
I don’t see anything written in there about destroying small commercial startup proprietary software companies.
A small startup whose profits are in software code that must be obfuscated to protect it from competitors would be destroyed by following Stallman’s newspeak Freedoms. Giving out trade secrets that give you an advantage over large corps is really, really dumb.
Stallman would delight in this destruction of a startup as he is on record comparing proprietary developers to violent criminals.
(1) There is nothing in the free software aims that requires a small startup to divulge its code. Either it does or it doesn’t release code, it is entirely up to the author of the code.
(2) Keeping one’s code as a trade secret does not protect any software author from other competitors. Only writing good software does that.
(4) If a small startup was to publish its code under a read-only open source license (such as the Microsoft Reference Source License, MS-RSL, for example), then the source code, although visible to everyone, is still the exclusive property of the small company. This is actually better protection than a trade secret, because if the trade secret leaks (e.g. by reverse engineering) then the code is no longer protected, but under a MS-RSL type of license, it is still protected. It is also better for people using the code, in that they can determine that it contains no hidden nasties.
(5) Stallman is a stirrer, so what?
(6) Some behaviours of proprietary developers are indeed equivalent to behaviours of violent criminals. On many occasions, for example, proprietary developers have sought to make it impossible or somehow illegal for ordinary people to write for themselves open source code that implemented some function (especially an interoperability function) that the proprietary company somehow considered as “theirs” alone. A completely trivial implementation of saving long filenames within FAT filesystems is perhaps one good example of this.
Edited 2009-12-16 04:12 UTC
Seriously, he has his followers, but his religious fervor has no place anymore. Like the fundamentalists of old, he needs to be driven from civilized society and forgotten.
And free software on the same level as human rights? Anyone who believes this does a great disservice to the real thing. I hope they dump GNU and move into a brighter future for GNOME.
For someone who claim to fight for freedom, Stallman sure likes censorship.
This is why I prefer BSD over GPL. No political ideology bullshit, just the freedom to use the software, even proprietary.
Edited 2009-12-14 19:08 UTC
Every democratic state does censorship. For example in many countries denying the holocaust is a serious crime.
The reasoning behind such laws is that spreading such Nazi propaganda hurts a free society more than selective censorship.
BSD is pure ideology. It’s just a different kind. BSD is anarchy in its pure sense (not that anarchy=chaos crap).
Anarchy is just the belief that a free and open society also works without rules.
In BSD’s case: Nobody should be “forced” to act in a free matter, but that beneficiaries of BSD code should act in a healthy way by free will.
If BSD has no ideology bullshit, why is there an effort underway to write a BSD-licensed C compiler? What’s wrong with GCC? That’s right, it’s GPL’d! Hello ideology.
LLVM/Clang is not about the license. It’s about better optimizations and a clearer code base.
Hello everyone, I’m a long time lurker here and love osnews for just this kind of spirited debate. I’d just like to say a few words about the ideological aspect of this issue if I may.
I’m currently half way through the third of my four year Politics & International Relations degree so I spend a lot of time reading about and considering ideology (or pretending to at least) and this discussion reminded me of the sociologist Daniel Bell’s work: The End of Ideology where he argues that the concept of ideology is no longer relevant to people.
Yes he was talking about political ideology there but I’m detecting similar sentiments here in relation to F/OSS; it seems that many people here and in the wider community (or did we conclude that there is no community :p) regard ideology as superficial, academic rhetoric with no practical merit; which I suppose to a degree it is; but consider where we would be without it…
I’ll say now that when it comes to computing I am not too swayed by ideology, I tend to side with Linus and use the best tool for the job. In my case that is Linux because it allows me to learn for free and tap into the wealth of knowledge within the community. I don’t feel dirty inside when I have to use Windows(R) on the Uni computers; despite only ever using Linux since my first computer (with the exception of my miggy :p)
This being said consider where we would be without ideology: No classical liberalism = no english enlightenment = no separation of church and state = no scientific or academic advances = no modern day life as we know it. Yes that’s an exaggeration but you see where I’m going right?
You could argue that if it wasn’t for people like RS and the FSF with their firm ideological beliefs there would have been no GNU and consequentially no Linux (or at least not as we know it.)
I guess what I’m trying to say is: even if you’re not RS’s biggest fan (which I am not) don’t attack him for sticking to his ideological guns because it takes esoteric, academic types like him to get the ball rolling. As far as I’m concerned ideology should always be welcome in computing; as well as common sense.
Just as an interesting aside my head of school Tim Ingold recently did an ethnographic study of the open source ‘movement’ and talks a lot about the community and culture; well worth a read if you can find a copy.
Apologies for rambling.
That is not what the GP was referring to. Ideology does not seem that important to LLVM devs (and many of them are also working on clang), but I’ve seen some of the comments by BSD folks about replacing GCC, and it is most definitely ideology that is driving the move by the BSD folks towards clang.
I was under the impression that a lot of the motivation behind LLVM had to do with Apple wanting an a compiler over which they had control. They can’t control GCC: if they want to introduce a new language-feature, the GCC team will probably tell them to screw themselves. The LLVM team, on the other hand, will be much more receptive, since Apple is one of their major patrons.
Note that I don’t mean to make that sound duplicitous or manipulative or sinister on Apple’s part.
Well, they could maintain patches or a branch of gcc.
GPL3 license isn’t really to their liking. Which, I guess, is as good a reason as any to move to GPL3 at accelerated schedule ;-).
Probably true, and why Apple hired Chris Lattner (and some of the others involved?). LLVM however existed for quite some time before Apple got involved. They didn’t create it, LLVM came out of Chris’s University/Thesis work. By ‘LLVM devs’ I was referring to the main ones like Chris who seem largely apolitical on the whole matter (aside from choosing a more liberal license to begin with).
No, it is the GPL3 that Apple doesn’t like. Up until that, they seemed to have no problem with gcc (they maintained their own separate branch of gcc anyway).
Naturally, a receptive LLVM team is easy to get if you can hire the brains at the top.
Make no mistake though, Apple’s involvement is only because of LLVM’s more liberal license.
Apple’s dislike of the GPL3 is well-known.
The only question now is whether their involvement with LLVM ends up in the long run making it an Apple-only technology, barely used outside of their own ecosystem, much like Objective C.
Personally, I hope not, I would love for a modern compiler development system like LLVM to become as ubiquitous as gcc itself. Anyone interested in doing a new language for example, has very few options for how to do the actual backend code generation, as gcc itself was never designed to be a flexible and easy-to-grok backend for others (and still isn’t).
I was under the impression that being able to steer the compiler’s development was more important than getting access to nicely-BSD’ed code (tho both would obviously be important). I haven’t heard about Apple hating the GPLv3 in particular — more than GPLv2 or other non-BSD-style licenses, anyway. Why would they hate GPLv3 in particular?
From http://etoileos.com/news/archive/2008/05/12/1719/
You’d probably need to do some research to find out why this is exactly, but I imagine iPhone to be the problem.
Edited 2009-12-17 11:40 UTC
AFAIK, IANAL, but isn’t the license of the compiler irrelevant? Unless they’re bundling gcc on every iphone it should not matter.
I don’t know what their beef with that is. Perhaps it’s just about maximum license hygiene by keeping gplv3 out at all fronts.
I think this would be highly unlikely. LLVM is good stuff and not going to go anywhere. In a worst case scenario gcc incorporate large amounts of it and it will live on that way (but I don’t think it will come to that.)
I think that would be the *best* case scenario, but I’ve heard nothing so far about anything of LLVM ever making it into GCC, mainly because LLVM is C++ and GCC is C.
There’s a GCC branch to fix/modify GCC so that it can be compiled with a C++ compiler, but I don’t know how far they intend to take that if/once its merged back to mainline.
As an example, GCC’s LTO feature was created after the advent of LLVM, yet its an independent (in C) implementation of the feature. As long as GCC is primarily developed in C, its very unlikely its devs would (or even *can*, considering the differences between C++ and C) borrow anything from LLVM.
What I fear is Apple’s influence preventing LLVM from becoming as portable as GCC is, not necessarily due to any explicit action on their part, but merely due to their (obvious, but understandable) lack of interest in non-Apple hardware.
Objective C is an example here. Apple only really makes sure their version of GCC (with their ObjC) works on their systems, they’ve never tried very hard to make sure ObjC works in GNU’s GCC on all the other platforms that GNU’s GCC works on. This is why the ObjC in GNU’s GCC is currently out of date compared to the ObjC implementation in Apple’s GCC – and that was the case before GNU’s GCC went to GPL3.
Apple simply has never shown any interest beyond their own playground, for better or worse.
I refer you to this
http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/
http://www.osnews.com/story/18621/BSD-Licensed_C_Compiler_Added_to_…
http://www.osnews.com/story/18771/More_on_OpenBSD_s_New_Compiler
Pay attention, especially, to the comments in the osnews stories where the BSD users positively glow about the idea of getting rid of the GPL’d GCC.
They’ll be using some LLVM stuff, I hear, but it’s still writing a replacement for GCC for ideological reasons.
Edited 2009-12-17 19:24 UTC
This advice that the FSF should “grow up”, leave Stallman behind and embrace proprietary software sounds so old and tired. It’s the same thing Eric Raymond and others were saying in the nineties, and where are they now? In contrast, Richard Stallman, the FSF and the GPL are much more relevant today than all their critics put together.
You may not agree with them, but it’s absurd to expect them to “adapt” by betraying their ideals. I’m not saying no-one in the FOSS camp should care about interoperation with proprietary software, but it’s definitely not part of the FSF’s job, which is to promote free software.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable for the FSF to have a policy against promotion of proprietary software for the GNU project. If GNOME developers disagree, which is also their right, they should stop being officially part of the GNU project, even if little is changed in practice.
As an aside, the only objection I have with rms is that I would prefer his position on IP to be a little more principled, consistent and comprehensive (yes, seriously!). But that’s beside the point.
Embrace prop…? What have you been reading? Where did anyone say that?
Indeed. It’s just that an increasing number of people are recognizing that Stallman is a loon. A charismatic loon, admittedly. But a loon nonetheless.
No. The pool of people using Free software is getting bigger and as it does a certain percentage decide that RMS is a loon. A certain percentage of the new people also support him.
I’ve rarely seen someone change from an RMS supporter to an RMS-is-a-loon guy.
I did. It was around about 1998.
At any rate, and strictly speaking, an increasing number of people are recognizing that RMS is a loon. And an enemy can do as much damage as 10 converts can make up for. Likely somewhat more.
Edited 2009-12-14 21:11 UTC
Hi, Thom. I’m talking about this quote:
By “embrace” I mean, of course, accept it and try to cooperate with it, as opposed to striving for its gradual elimination or irrelevance.
For instance, see:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Embracing
3)To include as part of something broader.
4) To take up willingly or eagerly: embrace a social cause.
So, I mean “embrace” mainly as in #3 (to include proprietary software in their long-term plans).
And yet, is exactly this “embracing” that has propelled FOSS into the mainstream.
Despite the FSF.
That’s only half the story. Sure, interoperability with proprietary software, formats and protocols made FOSS more visible, but consistent, principled opposition to them may have contributed to a growing trend towards open protocols and formats, and increased participation of developers in FOSS projects.
But it was not my point. My point is, it’s not the FSF’s job. It’s like asking Greenpeace to engage in partnership with top polluters, or asking HRW to praise ruthless dictators from time to time.
No. Quite the opposite. What has propelled FOSS into the mainstream is large amounts of code going into various projects to the point where it achieves a level of quality that people take notice of. That’s what counts.
There are certainly instances where you have to pay attention to what else will be interacting with your software, and pay attention to your licensing of libraries etc. However, it has been consistently proven that open source projects that follow an ideology of worrying about poprietary software interoperability, and having licenses to match, consistently fail to achieve the level of quality that proprietary developers expect and they fail to garner the hard code commits necessary.
The reason why the FSF came to prominence is because Linux used the GPL, which is a FSF license, and the GPL happens to be a pretty good license and have a pretty good philosophy for maximising code going into projects.
and the GPL happens to be a pretty good license and have a pretty good philosophy for maximising code going into projects
Ammong another pretty good damn liceses too.
I know of no other license that has been as successful as the GPL at getting code committed to a project rather than another poorly maintained branch or in a proprietary extension, which is the point I was making.
The GPL is why Linux didn’t disppear up its own backside via mistrust between contributors with a ton of disparate branches and proprietary driver extensions, which would have happened considering that a lot of companies contributing to Linux are competitors.
I know of no other license that has been as successful as the GPL at getting code committed to a project rather than another poorly maintained branch or in a proprietary extension, which is the point I was making.
That’s because you’ve living under a rock lately.
The garndparent is correct and not you, according to this research:
http://ostatic.com/blog/research-shows-foss-bugs-get-rapid-response…
That link it doesn’t talk exclusively about GPL, if ur gonna spam then make sure your links are correct.
Translation: Shit. He’s right.
If you have some examples of alternative licenses that do the same thing in terms of compelling code to go back into the project and keeping its integrity then I’m all ears, but you don’t.
Translation: Shit. He’s right.
No, translation, you are clueless and need more reading.
Wow, really? Do you have any examples of what I should be reading then, as I requested? If you don’t then yep, I’m afraid you have nothing germane to the discussion to say. It’s par for the course with you, as per usual, when you get frustrated.
Edited 2009-12-16 12:44 UTC
Perhaps you should read your own articles a bit more?
It would be nice if Gnome was attractive enough for people writing proprietary software to use first. 😉
The biggest problem with doing that of course is that you end up completely diluting the open source part of your work and your message to the point where there is nothing left for people to listen to. It’s kind of why Red Hat’s strategy of open sourcing and preferably GPLing everything seems to work and why a company like Novell’s ‘both source’ strategy is diluting their open source work whilst leaving legacy proprietary software as pointless irrelevancies no one uses.
Diluting the message that you give to the outside world, and the work you do, is a massive failure in any walk of life and in any industry.
Edited 2009-12-15 01:12 UTC
Oh boy, this is gonna be good. Time to start popping some corn, grab a beer, kick back and enjoy the drama!
Going to be? It already is. It was obvious what was going to happen as soon as the article went up: plenty of FOSS bashing, plenty of frothing RMS hate, the same old arguments getting rehashed. The original point of the article being more or less lost.
We need some of the usual bunch of trolls and provocatours (I can’t spell!) to start calling people Freetards and claiming FOSS projects have not accomplished no nothing never ‘cept for giving people cancer and ending the world, and it’ll all be pretty much typical. Because I don’t think I’ve noticed anybody whip out “Freetard” yet this thread.
Has anyone seen Rockwell? I’m becoming a bit worried. Something may have happened to him. Or maybe he’s simply decided to show up fashionably late… the little turd. 😉
Edited 2009-12-14 20:19 UTC
Right. We need a simple summary document that enumerates all the possible opinions and viewpoints, so we could dismiss them simply as “see canned response 31.222”.
Something like this:
http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
It might actually be fun to implement an osnews bot that scans for articles mentioning RMS, Mono, …, and posts random gibberish. It might pass the turing test for quite a while.
Edited 2009-12-14 21:32 UTC
Oh it’s barely even begun. Have the Freetards started threatening to fork GNOME yet?
Mark my words, this is the sort of “doctrinal schism” that people spend years bickering about.
Whoops, thanks for the reminder! That omission has been corrected.
It makes it sound that the issue just revolves around RMS.
Thom probably didn’t even read the entire thread and just handpicked a few quotes he read on other recap stories by authors who actually read the whole thread.
There are many people involved in the discussion, including “Lefty” who holds a personal grudge against RMS and uses every opportunity to spread bad words about RMS.
I’m not agreeing with RMS on every level, but at least he commented about the political aspects and did not flame against specific people like Lefty does.
Not exclusively, but it does to a large degree. The thread was well established in discussing the question, but was for the most part civil and practical until RMS joined in. I agree that the matter was inflamed by the responses of Lefty and others, but I’d have to say the trigger was RMS calling for what amounted to censorship of developer’s personal blogs. Because call it whatever you like, but that’s what it amounted to – an insistence that Gnome-affiliated developers should not talk positively about proprietary software…
You’re wrong. It’s not about censoring blogs or what they talk about.
It’s about what content is aggregated on Planet GNOME. That’s like a magazine not printing every letter they receive.
De Icaza is still free to drool in his fanaticism for MS software, but Planet GNOME is the wrong place for it, as much as mozillaZine feedHouse <http://feedhouse.mozillazine.org/ > is IMO the wrong place for “Postbox” posts.
I agree with RMS in this case, even though I had used slightly different words.
Edited 2009-12-14 21:20 UTC
Well, no. Planet GNOME isn’t a magazine, with limited space, and with editors picking and choosing letters to publish. It’s “a window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers and contributors.”, to quote from the site.
It’s not there to provide news about GNOME, it’s there to show what GNOME contributors are talking about. And if that includes proprietary software, so be it.
I’d like to know when some of those aggregated last committed any code to Gnome, or even so much as talked about what they were hacking on regarding Gnome in a blog post.
Planet Gnome has simply become a canvas for some very ex star Gnome hackers to paint pretty pictures with their own excrament and tell us what is in their fridge, possibly because there isn’t anyone new to aggregate or anything else to talk about.
Once you’re in you can stay as long as you want. From http://live.gnome.org/PlanetGnome :
“Q: I stopped contributing to GNOME two years ago. Can I still stay there?
A: Sure, no problem. We still love you
Past contributors often stay involved in areas that are of interest to GNOME (even if not directly related to GNOME), so we’re not worried about the content of your blog.”
Edited 2009-12-15 01:22 UTC
I actually thought you’d made that Q and A up until I went and read it. Wow.
Well, there’s the problem. If Planet Gnome diverges and largely isn’t about Gnome or even open source software any more………then what’s the point of it?
By that rationale RMS shouldn’t be allowed to speak for the GNU project since it’s been years since he’s coded anything. Instead of producing actual code (which other project leaders like Linus and Theo still do) he gets to regale us with sexist jokes about women being relieved of their “Emacs virginity” and tell people to quit their jobs if proprietary software is involved (bold words from a man who hasn’t had a paying job in years and lives off of grants and squats in other people’s homes).
Hmmmm, no. You’re making crap and non-sensical comparisons here so you can talk about something else.
Planet Gnome is supposed to be an aggregation of blogs by Gnome hackers primarily and/or people doing things directly for Gnome such as marketing. Very few of those aggregated on Planet Gnome seem to be doing either of those two thing.
RMS is right, but his solution is not viable.
As one of the commenters mentioned, Planet GNOME is oriented around people. If you are a GNOME hacker and you have a blog then all of your blog posts are aggregated on Planet GNOME. As such, to do what RMS wants you would have to
1) GNOME developers maintain a GNOME-specific blog
2) or, GNOME developers self censor what they talk about.
Neither of these is a reasonable solution.
Having some sort of loyalty test as a precondition to using Planet GNOME is not reasonable, fair or in spirit with the ideals of Free Software.
GNOME should not be used as a platform to promote non-Free software. However, Planet GNOME is not GNOME, but a window into the GNOME community. Individuals should not be coerced into particular behavior. They may be asked, but they may not be required.
Disassociating from GNU would be a mistake for GNOME and would have potentially huge impact on GNOME contributions, not even considering negative publicity. The potential is there, but I admit it could also have minimal impact on actual contributions. Regardless of actual impact on code the impact on apparent cohesion and the sense of viability and stability of Free software in general, and GNOME as a platform specifically, would certainly go down. This would negatively impact adoption of GNOME and Linux by people currently using non-Free software from stable companies.
The correct solution is technologically simple, socially acceptable and not burdensome to any parties. Most blogging software allows posts to be tagged; simply change the policy of Planet GNOME to only pull posts tagged GNOME.
A debate can then be had as to whether or not it should be required that posts tagged GNOME avoid mentioning non-Free software in a positive light.
That’s stupid. Every halfway decent blog software has a tagging feature with separate feeds for each tag.
What’s so hard in aggregating only “GNOME” tagged posts?
Because Planet GNOME *isn’t* about GNOME. It’s about whatever GNOME contributors are saying on their blogs.
When was the last time De Icaza actually contributed anything to GNOME? He’s currently vice president of some division. I doubt he does any coding anymore
Granted, he’s an odd case, not being all that involved in Gnome these days as far as I can see either. But the point still stands – PG isn’t a news site talking about GNOME, it’s the collective blogs of the people who contribute to it. Nothing more, nothing less.
Well if it’s not about gnome why not just call it Blogger or wordpress…
That was discussed on the mailing list, but the problem with that it changes the nature of Planet GNOME. Currently, it includes anything it’s members want to say – about GNOME, about Free Software in general, about things happening in the wider industry, or even what they’re having for dinner. Limiting it to GNOME-only excludes a lot of stuff that’s still relevant – it might not be GNOME specific, but I’m still interesting in knowing, say, a GNOME developer’s opinion of the latest KDE release.
Besides, discouraging people from speaking positively of proprietary software is stupid. If Microsoft have done good work with Windows 7, or with Silverlight, it’s stupid to pretend they don’t exist to avoid giving them publicity. Proprietary or not, they should be held up as examples, as inspiration for how open software could improve itself.
Qt does pretty much everything what De Icaza was drooling about. Yet he only looks to proprietary MS software, even refusing to look at Qt which is FOSS.
No it doesn’t, in fact it pretty much does nothing of the stuff that Miguel is talking about.
That’s no problem, just make the tag “planetgnome.” Any post which you think would be interesting to Planet GNOME can be so tagged.
That is a remarkably reasonable analysis, and a good idea. Heh, maybe you should actually chip that in in the pertinent Newsgroup discussion?
Who wrote this crap ?
The FSF needs to change. It needs to face the new reality, i.e., one wherein most people (developers) within the F/OSS community recognise the necessity for interoperability and cooperation with established proprietary software vendors.
Who speaks in the name of developers from the F/OSS community ?
Worse, the sentence is misleading :
I can understand what is “cooperation with established proprietary software vendors”, but can’t understand what is “interoperability with established proprietary software vendors.”.
Maybe some kind of implanted electronic interface, directly with their brain ?
Everyone can get involved in writing free code, but that doesn’t mean F/OSS HAS TO interoperate with proprietary software in order to survive. If you say it, prove it also.
Really, this article is a piece of junk, written to inspire FUD, without even assuming the responsability of the said words…
I am so sad OSNews relay more and more articles of this kind.
At first I also thought that the article is stupid. Now I’m more amused about it.
I’m amused how grown up and wise Thom believes to be. No way he could hold a candle in a discussion against highly educated “radicals” like Eben Moglen or RMS.
Heck, Thom obviously has no idea what “radical” even means. It is derived from the Latin word for root. So basically everyone is a radical who identifies a root problem somewhere.
The Free Software movement identified a basic root problem: Proprietary software excludes people and exclusion is bad.
Edited 2009-12-14 22:54 UTC
This is what your argument boils down to? Attack the messenger?
Dude, this discussion alone, as well as the countless number of ACTUAL DEVELOPERS out there who dislike RMS and his antics should be evidence enough that his time as a leader has gone.
You may disagree with that, and that’s fine – but don’t make it out to be as if I’m some sort of oddbal, the only one presenting the above opinion. I can assure you – it is you who is part of the minority, not me.
And please don’t start going elitist on my ass with Latin – you won’t win, and it serves no purpose. Latin is but one of many languages in my curriculum.
Oh, you counted each sender in said mailing list thread or are you just guessing that there were more “pro Icaza” senders than “contra Icaza” ones?
You claim that Free Software needs to “grow up” to advance further. Yet you have given no proof at all that the “radical” view is the childish one and not De Icaza’s drooling (his own word) or Lefty’s personal attacks against RMS.
Then give me proof. You in your great wisdom obviously have the proof somewhere. So show it to me that drooling over Silverlight and other “grown up” actions advance Free Software further than a “radical” approach.
Amusingly, it is KDE which embraces the Freedom aspect further and further (after using non-free Qt versions in the beginning). It’s KDE that adopted the “more free” GPLv3. It’s KDE e.V. that shares offices with FSF’s European branch.
From within the KDE you’ll read words like http://www.purinchu.net/wp/2009/12/12/gnome-slashdot/ and http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/4119
Despite your claim that a “radical” view hurts a FOSS project in a “grown up” world, KDE SC makes great advancements every six months.
Edited 2009-12-14 23:51 UTC
There is no single ‘leader’ of the FOSS world, for obvious reasons, nor has RMS ever claimed to be such. He *is* the leader of the FSF, that’s all.
As other posters have already said, the FOSS movement has grown rapidly, so there are relatively fewer folks who agree with everything he says.
Its only the folks who disagree with him so much that feel the need to point out he’s no longer represents the entirety (or even the majority) of the FOSS movement, but of course, he never was their ‘leader’ to begin with.
And the simple fact of the continuing existence of the FSF means his time as a leader has not gone at all. If that really bothers you so much, then just stop posting articles about RMS’s latest comments. After all, its the attention that *you* are giving him that makes him a leader (of something) in the eyes of many.
Ironically, the mere fact that you feel the need to post about what RMS is doing, suggests his ‘time as a leader’ is far from over yet…
Your logic is impeccable.
I’m sorry I don’t understand your point here. Etymologically speaking you could say a pencil is a little penis; does that mean I’m currently doodling with a penis? As interesting as etymology is it should be by no means used as a determinant for definition.
Please correct me if I have missed the point.
Funny….
I think you believe that saying crazy stuff like this furthers the cause of the FSF, when in fact it does the exact opposite. Normal people reading your comment will conclude that FSF and there supporters are lunatics hence by association that there cause is not sane.
YES USE LANGUAGE AGAINST A LANGUAGE NERD THATS THE WAY
I this article going to set a OSNews record for number of comments?
“At some point, movements and organisations need to grow up…”
I hate this point of view.
Free Software was created for real, practical reasons. Despite the great achievements of Gnu, Linux, and the rest, in many ways the landscape of software freedom is worse than ever. The rise of DRM, blackbox narrow-purpose devices, and web applications threaten the personal privacy and security of citizens like never before. Tech bloggers, and unfortunately contributers to this site often treat the “4 Freedoms” as some utopian (vaguely leftist hippie) ideology. In fact they are the minimum conditions required to guarantee that your CPU is doing what you expect.
A fitting analogy is the Bill of Rights. Just as the first 10 amendments are designed to counter autocracy Free Software (including all free licenses) prevents software vendors from taking (malicious or not) control of a user’s PC. Would Thom (?, the author isn’t clear) suggest that Americans need to “Grow Up” with respect to the Bill of Rights? I hope not.
If a majority thinks it’s naive or childish to want to know what your computer is doing, that’s a sad comment on the hopeless dis-empowering effect of consumer identity.
How many times do we have to read (on this site no less) about the latest Rootkit hiding on an Audio CD or Securom “Release Date Check” that screws up your system configuration, or social media using our personal data for malicious ends before we realize the value of Free Software?
All this being said, I find myself in complete disagreement with Richard Stallman on the issue of PlanetGnome’s blog content. While it makes sense in principle that a site representing GNU should not be a soapbox for proprietary software, in practice it’s pretty gross to censor personal blogs from people working to make Gnome better. As important as Free Software is, it’s unreasonable to demand that every coder on the project be in ideological lockstep. The hackers working on Gnome perform a valuable service to humanity (no hyperbole). I think they deserve editorial control over their blogs.
Perhaps it’s the web-based software project called “PlanetGnome.org” which needs to disassociate from the Free Software Foundation, not Gnome itself.
– theBishop
Edited 2009-12-15 00:09 UTC
The fact that you even draw a comparison between Free Software and the Bill of Rights is patently absurd. Access to source code is not a human right. It’s not even a civil right. At best, as google_ninja mentioned earlier, it is a consumer right.
If Stallman had argued for Free Software from the basis of consumer rights in the first place, his followers wouldn’t be as fervent, but they would be more numerous and the discussions would certainly be more rational.
I’m not saying free software is a human right or that free licenses are equally weighted in terms of historical or any other significance.
Both documents (1) identify a fundamental problem (2) identify the components of the problem and (3) establish a framework to nullify those components.
Both documents attempt to solve this problem as simply and methodically as possible. Although I’d listen to copyleft as a counter-example, copyleft is not a mandatory attribute of a Free software license.
My point being that any attempt to water down these documents compromises it’s objective. What’s democracy without a free press, for example? Likewise, software that doesn’t grant the right to modify it’s code cannot be changed if it’s found to perform unadvertised functions, and is therefore not free.
This is not a “radical” or utopian issue. The FSF may have political ideology that goes beyond software, but the GPL is a deeply pragmatic document. I resent being told to “Grow Up” on an issue of personal privacy and protection.
I appreciate your comparison of the GPL to the Bill of Rights as a document of purpose that attempts to solve a problem. But there is a fundamental difference. The Bill of Rights is effectively a document that the people have established to reserve certain rights and protections from a governing body composed of themselves. It is a contract among a group of people with shared interests. A software license, in contrast, is essentially a contract between two parties who often have differing interests. In a democratic government, the people grant rights and privileges to the governing body. Through a software license, the developer grants rights and privileges to the user. The GPL may appear to be a user empowering license, but the ultimate choice of whether or not to use the GPL still belongs to the developer.
I do agree that the GPL is a deeply pragmatic document, but I would argue that the FSF does more to dilute the value of the GPL than anything or anyone else possibly could because it wraps the license in its own political ideology. If the GPL were presented as a tool, and not as a weapon against proprietary software, the controversy around it would evaporate and it could be judged on its merits as a software license. In that case, I believe it could achieve the same goals without causing an ideological rift which does not belong in the software world in the first place.
In my view, the call to “grow up” is not directed at those who prefer to use only Free Software, but at ideologues such as Stallman who decry the very existence of proprietary software. Those who plug their ears and cover their eyes and pretend like proprietary software doesn’t exist are acting in an immature manner. Those who demand that others do the same, as Stallman has done in this case, are acting in ways that are entirely antithetical to the concept of freedom.
A democracy that attempts to censor the discussion of alternatives is not a democracy at all.
It is truly ironic that Mono has been such a thorn in the side of the FSF given that the whole GNU project was founded based on the goal of creating a free and open implementation of a proprietary system.
Basically, what happened was that some people were questioning a lot of posts on Planet Gnome and Stallman chimed in and said he didn’t think they should be supporting and talking about non-free software there.
Given that a lot of what I see on Planet Gnome is not Gnome related at all, is about Mono, .Net, Silverlight or something related to it, or VMware, and are posts from people who haven’t committed any hard code to Gnome for years (they get aggregated because of reputation) I think people are entitled to ask what’s going on. I’m also not the slightest bit interested in what you had for f–king lunch yesterday either, which is seemingly what Planet Gnome started to descend into years ago. Where’s the excitement over Gnome 3 and the ideas? Where’s the real work? All I see is bickering over philosophical issues like this.
It’s just another in a long line of happenings around Gnome that are just sliding it further and further into irrelevancy. The politics and flamewars about Novell, Mono and Microsoft from both sides have to be seen to be believed. I know we all have a view on that but it’s got nothing on these people.
Incidentally, a proposed split from the GNU actually admits that Stallman is right in this case.
It’s just another in a long line of happenings around Gnome that are just sliding it further and further into irrelevancy.
That may be your opinion, But that the fact some of its developers are thinking to drop GNU may be atractive for some, making more relevant to them. I think the one getting more irrelevant every day is RMS.
Edited 2009-12-15 01:10 UTC
While one can drop GNU, one can’t really “take back” Free Software and make it proprietary.
If you have written all of the code, then you own the copyrights, and you can certainly release the next version of your code as closed software (or under any kind of license you please), but that won’t stop the current version from being “out there”, and able to be further improved by collaboration and co-operation amongst the Free Sofwatre community.
A good example is the Linksys WRT54G.
In one of their routers, Linksys used Free Software (this was claimed by Linksys to be accidental). That wasn’t Linksys’s software to use, it was Free Software, Linksys didn’t write it. The original authors complained, and it turned out that Linksys had written so little of the software in the WRT54G router that it was easier to just publish the source code (in compliance with the software’s license) than to re-write it all as Linksys’s own original software.
Because the source code was available, the WRT54G router from Linksys became an open router.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRT54G
This router became the best-selling router of the time, it was HUGELY popular, and it spawned a whole raft of later models. Only the later models which also featured open source code were in any way popular or notably successful.
Because it was a Free Software router, other projects sprung up to improve upon the original source code.
Ironically, although Linksys didn’t own the code, and they had lost control of the WRT54G’s code, and there was now competing software for the WRT54G … Linksys still sold the WRT54G unit itself in huge numbers.
The ongoing business value turned out to be in the open-ness the router and copy-left of the code, and not in any proprieatry software solutions (as used in other Linksys routers) after all.
RMS’s concept of Free Software is not at all irrelevant. As more people come to understand it, it becomes more relevant every day.
Edited 2009-12-15 01:14 UTC
While one can drop GNU, one can’t really “take back” Free Software and make it proprietary
Wow wow wow, Where exactly did I claimed the contrary? stop overanalising everything.
RMS’s concept of Free Software is not at all irrelevant
Another missreading, I said RMS, not RMS concept.
At least read damn it.
Edited 2009-12-15 01:19 UTC
Gnome hasn’t exactly been the most committed GNU project over the years. Most of those involved at its inception are now those same people working for various companies doing lots of non-Gnome related things, so I fail to see how a split from the GNU achieves anything for Gnome at all. It’s merely a way of officially saying ‘business as usual’.
On this occasion, not when you see a very long line of blog posts on Planet Gnome that have nothing to do with Gnome.
Gnome hasn’t exactly been the most committed GNU project over the years
A good reason to decouple it from GNU w/o to much drama.
Another possible topic of discussion is the influence of the various Free Software licenses, in particular the GPL (given that it is so common).
Does the huge dominance of the GPL (or, for that matter, any non-P.D. license) have a “stifling” effect on development? By that, I mean that licensed code can’t be used for P.D. projects. If you want to do a public-domain project and search for code to learn from and use, there is (at present) not much P.D.
code out there.
P.D. code is unique in that it is the *only* code that can be used absolutely anywhere – no strings attached. No having to “re-invent the wheel” to do a particular thing – if you want to do something and there is P.D. code for it, then problem solved.
Once a Free Software app has been given a particular license (GPL or something else), should it stay with that license for ever, or should the devs look at releasing it as “public domain” after “x” number of years?
I’m a big fan of P.D. software and am working on a number of P.D. apps myself. I believe that an increase in the number of public-domain apps would be of benefit to Free Software, as it just seems like there’s too much of a GPL dominance at present. I think that the GPL does have its place, but so does P.D. , and that could be used for much more software than it is at present.
I think that because the GPL is so commonly used, and has so much mindshare, it is almost an automatic “reflex” choice when a license is chosen for a project, and P.D. doesn’t even get a look-in.
( Sigh…. maybe P.D. is so rarely used because giving away software as P.D. means that you don’t care how it is used – even if others take credit for it – and therefore you can’t have an ego. Maybe there just aren’t that many people like that around….
)
Edited 2009-12-15 01:41 UTC
P.D. software can be taken by a proprietary interest and sold to other people downstream. The proprieatry interest can take the work of the original author and profit from it, and the other “downstream” customers endure costs they should not have to. How is any of that fair? It makes patsies out of the original author and the downstream customers of the company that ripped off the P.D. software.
Hi – thanks for your comment!
Agreed – what you say is indeed true (that a company can take P.D. software and profit from it, unknown to that company’s customers). I guess that the best way for any customers to avoid that would be to do some research around the ‘net (to make sure that what they are about to be charged for isn’t already available for free.). And granted, not everyone or every company has the time to do that.
For myself, all I can say is that when my apps are ready, I’ll just be happy to see them used, whereever they’re used. Having come across some neat P.D. software over the years, all I want to do is add a bit more….
RMS replied, stating that GNOME should not provide a platform for the promotion of non-Free software. “They should not [talk about VMware], unless VmWare becomes free software. GNOME should not provide proprietary software developers with a platform to present non-free software as a good or legitimate thing,” he states, “Perhaps the statement of Planet GNOME’s philosophy should be interpreted differently. It should not invite people to talk about their proprietary software projects just because they are also GNOME contributors.”
The executive director of the GNOME Foundation, Stormy Peters, thought this was ridiculous.
I am appalled at Stallman’s views but not surprised. Peters is correct. These type of views might have been Ok when FOSS was for hobbyists but its mainstream these days. Many FOSS projects would simply die if “for profit” (wash your mouth out 🙂 ) organisations withdrew their support. Look at the difference between OOo and Abi Word! Tell me Stallman; which one do you think is the better?
Its about time we all moved on from this sillyness.
Regards,
Peter
Software Freedom has nothing to do with chraging money for software.
The GPL explicitly allows for charging for copies of the software. It also makes absolutely no mention of other ways of making money from the software … hence Red Hat’s business model, and Mozilla’s business model.
“Free Software” is not about the cost of the software, it is all about the freedom of the code and the freedom of people’s acess to that source code.
You are confusing “Freedom” and “Free Software” with “Zero cost”. You are probably doing this intentionally.
Edited 2009-12-15 03:25 UTC
I know exactly what I meant and am not confusing anything. The point I was making is that many organisations (Sun Microsystems for example with OOo and IBM for Ubuntu) provide a great deal of resources to FOSS projects. Without these contributions many of the more successful FOSS projects either would not exist or would not be as good a product as they are.
I believe that the mis-guided “purity” of no commercial input to FOSS projects is just muddle-headed.
Regards,
Peter
Well, why don’t we go to the original source? The entire aim, the origin of the whole concept, if you will.
It is documented here:
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
The original motivation is clear:
But there is a lot of confusion about that word “free”. In the quote above, it appears to be used both ways.
Are there any other clues?
Well, the fact that GNU is meant to be totally non-proprietary software is perfectly clear, that message comes through very strongly. But what was meant by “free”?
The footnotes, added later, provide the clarification we seek:
There is nothing at all wrong with companies contributing help, distributing the software, and charging for it via whatever business model they see fit. The important thing is that the source code remains open. That was what was meant by “free”. It was so right at the start, it is just as true now, and it will always be true.
The “Free” of Free Software does not mean zero cost. It does not mean no commercial involvement. It never has meant that. What it means is … no closed-source. No secret software. Everything open, or not included. No compromises on that.
“Free” Software means open software. Open source software. Freedom to change and improve it. Forever.
Edited 2009-12-16 08:47 UTC
Thom said: “At some point, movements and organisations need to grow up.”
Yeah, how much do you pay for taking this view, old guy?