Just to throw out an extreme example for discussion: the Mozilla Foundation would seem to be one of the free-software organizations that RMS critiques.
One initiative they've supported is Software Carpentry: http://software-carpentry.org/scf/partners/
One of Software Carpentry's packaged lessons is for MATLAB: http://software-carpentry.org/lessons/
To be fair, the current MATLAB lesson plan includes asides for how GNU Octave can be used...but the fact that the curriculum is titled "Programming with MATLAB" certainly counts as promotion of non-free software.
Edit: by "extreme", I mean that Mozilla is in most people's minds a passionate advocate for free software, and the number of their affiliations with proprietary software lessons is extremely small as far as I can tell.
Edit 2: FWIW, RMS's definition of non-free software may be much more expansive than most people's:
https://stallman.org/airbnb.html
> Airbnb requires you to run nonfree software (an app, or Javascript). It puts you in a data base easily available to Big Brother (just like a hotel).
JavaScript is many things, but nonfree isn't one of them.
I understand your frustration, but the cult of free software initially was about being able to fix the issue by oneself in any case involving software -- lots of us still value that aspect.
The real alternative is Python + Scipy. It's A LOT better than Matlab. Depending on your application domain, you might also want to look at R or Julia.
I understand your frustration, but Octave's problems are not because we're incompetent developers or because we have a broken shit cult of free software. We're doing the best we can, but it's hard when the talent we attract is mathematical, not language devs.
Maybe our real problem is that we don't know how to turn Octave into a business while keeping it free. It is disheartening when everyone tells us we should just kill Octave and make everything Python.
In the cases you mention, surely it would be trivial to prove if the problem was Ghostscript or not by demonstrating graph 3 or the missing data points were output or not by Octave before Ghostscripts png conversion.
Surely modularity makes it easier to isolate bugs to a module ?
Were these bugs fixed ? You should go back and see.
Ignore my tangent.
I certainly don't agree with RMS on many points, but the fact that most Javascript code on websites are "non-free" according to FSF's definition is pretty clear.
Javascript is often minified, and it's generally important to the Free Software movement that you get the original source. Otherwise, a company could comply with an open source license by providing you with a compiled binary, which does have all the functionality the source code describes.
The other issue might be that you get to view the Javascript source, but might not be able to redistribute it or modify it.
An analog could be claiming to support vegetarianism, but running a minor course on butchery.
In this particular case the code is not freely licensed and so (by rms' definition) is not free.
I believe he is referring to the license to use/modify the JS being delivered by Airbnb specifically in this case, not the language itself.
From the link:
The basic point of the free software movement is that
nonfree software is unjust and should not exist.
Aside: Interesting that Apple's insistence on not supporting Flash became a bigger influence. Albeit motivated more by battery drain than ideology.
If you don't think that is a fair analogy, then maybe you can start by explaining how the heck the free-speech to free software analogy works in the first place.
That said, this tribal religious you're-either-100%-with-us-or-you're-against-us and I'm going to "condemn you" ("nor have anything to do with it, nor even talk about it except with condemnation.") attitude makes it almost impossible to be sympathetic to his cause and puts him on the level of other rigid religious fundamentalist radicals.
If he IS talking about Red Hat here, as others have theorized, then he is worse than a fanatic, he's a self destructive jerk.
Red Hat just recently came out and said despite other companies abandoning GCC for Clang (See Google, Apple, FreeBSD, Android, even the Linux Foundation) they were still investing in GCC. Without GCC there is no more "GNU slash Linux" it's just Linux at that point. There are other C libraries, other userlands, but Linux still needs GCC and Red Hat is backing GCC. Keep condemning allies like Red Hat and soon they'll wonder why they even try to be your friend.
As soon as llvm.linuxfoundation.org gets Linux written in C instead of GCC, there will be no more GNU slash Linux or GNU plus Linux or whatever RMS wants it called. FreeBSD, Android, and then Linux will be fully capable of ditching GNU, FSF, and RMS and GPL'd software (save for the kernel which is GPLv2 and only nominally so, they never actually sue for violations like binary blobs) altogether. And who would be sad? Linux didn't "win" because of the philosophical views of RMS. Linux won because it worked. What happens when Linux, and companies like Red Hat, don't need this kind of garbage anymore?
I also think that open source is nice, but by far it's not the most important thing there is to software.
As RMS says, "I also think that open source is nice, but by far it's not the most important thing there is to software." is a valid viewpoint but it's against the goals of FSF (not mild support, but opposition), so RMS would kindly ask you to cease claiming any endorsement by FSF in this case.
This totally ignores that there might not be free software for that use case, the free software alternative might be worse (very often the case). This article totally ignores those concerns and thus depreciates them as less important.
What you're doing is calling me an idiot, you could have at least tried to come up with a counter-argument.
Note that radicals don't necessarily support passing laws to get what they want - the goal of most political radicalism is to cause a change in society, not to force society at gunpoint to do something it doesn't want to.
RMS tried to prevent emacs from having code completion through clang, modularity in gcc and puts software following his definition of freedom before the software being able to fulfill its task in a good way.
Beware the fallacy of composition. What may be "right" in a transaction between individuals can be "wrong" over the entire population. One example of this is the mob effect: if one person takes the time to disagree with you it is not a problem. If thousands of people send you messages of disagreement it becomes an unbearable burden.
Likewise for software. One person using nonfree software made by another person is not much of a problem. When thousands of people use the same nonfree software it becomes a problem due to lock-in, network effects, etc.
I think this issue is philosophically contentious, and interesting. Even if you don't accept that premise, I wouldn't describe this as a fallacy.
I think fallacy is best used to describe a logical non-sequitur/invalid conclusion. It's independent of whether we agree on the assumptions.
Premise 1: Socrates is a man. Premise 2: All men are mortal. Invalid conclusion: Therefore Pigs can fly.
Many legal and ethnical systems have limitations on what you can consent to. You're not allowed to consent to work for less than the minimum wage, for example
I find the FSF stance a bit inconsistent here.
Revoking a government-granted monopoly is very libertarian. Revoking mutual consent is the opposite.
RMS' movement allows for little wiggle room when it comes to 'free software', because it is a movement. Unless you're willing to join a movement, its perfectly okay to criticize it from the skirts - but the point is, RMS has set those skirts at a boundary of his choosing, according to an ideology.
That ideology has done a lot of good for the world. It is worth considering seriously, just what the world would be like today without a Free Software movement happening, as it did, over the last 40 years. 40 years of software development culture has existed with this ideology in its midst; what of the world, were it not so?
RMS's ideology seems to work better than the mainstream one.
1. If a person is uninformed about the consequences of their decision and the alternatives that they could choose from, is that a voluntary decision? I think it would be very difficult to actually defend the position that the majority of software users decide voluntarily to use proprietary software.
Sure, if someone voluntarily buys cigarettes and smokes, I guess they should be free to do so as well. From that it does not follow that you shouldn't object to cigarettes existing (and in particular to them being offered by vendors to the unsuspecting public).
2. Economists know a concept they call externalities. Those are effects that one's economic transactions have on parties not involved in the transactions, like, for example, pollution of the environment that other people live in. Non-free software very often has negative externalities, in particular due to network effects that lead to de-facto monopolies and lock-in. Negative externalities are a good reason to object to what other people decide to do voluntarily.
Would a vegetarian say that if a person voluntarily buy animal factory meat, then there is nothing wrong with it.
Would a environmentalist say that if a person voluntarily buy a polluting car, then there is nothing wrong with the manufacturer selling it.
Would a anti-war activist say that if a person voluntarily join the military, then there is nothing wrong with war?
I am looking at a list of political movements, and I can't see a single one which would say that they are fine so long the thing they are working against is done voluntarily.
> if a person voluntarily buy a polluting car,
Everyone is affected by the pollution, so a bad comparison.
> person voluntarily join the military,
Again people are involuntarily affected by war.
> I am looking at a list of political movements, and I can't see a single one which would say that they are fine so long the thing they are working against is done voluntarily.
How about "No means no" campaigns? Sex is fine as long as it's done voluntarily by all parties.
That's a question I often ask. From what I know, RMS got some money in the bank that allows him to live the way he chooses. That is : spare some of its time advocating and building the free software movement. He's also very charismatic (well, in its very own way, I must admit).
He basically incarnates one thing : there's no compromise. He proves his position by shutting him off the proprietary world. And that's super tough to do. If he ever used non free software, his uncompromising position would be weakened.
So, FSF needs to be able to replace that sort of, non compromising, super talented and really smart person.
Has anybody ever seen someone close to that ? Then only one I see is Eben Moglen (although its technical talent is not in IT)
These all have validated what RMS has been saying for years, and you actually have to be quite ignorant at this point to just dismiss his viewpoint.
I am mostly browsing HN during my european daytime. Lots of people seem to comment on stories during my daytime. Do you mean his detractors are predominantly American? Do you think they have a particular political allegiance too?
What he's good at doing is pointing out that certain things are not in our interest.
I think free software as a concept is great, but everything I've ever read from RMS sounds psychotic.
Everything I've ever read or heard from RMS sounded extremely consistent, logical, common sense and down to the earth to me.
I always thought that people don't like him because he's stating some inconvenient truths about proprietary software and because they are pissed that they cannot use GPL'ed software for their closed-source, proprietary products.
To me, RMS is basically a modern reincarnation of Socrates.
Everyone is affected, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
Even consentual sex can have such impacts when--for example--overpopulaton leads to starvation.
Hi, that was me.
There wasn't a fundraiser, just a thank-you card for jwe, Octave lead dev. We get some money from FSF donations but not enough to support a single dev. We mostly use the donation money to pay for travel expenses for the yearly Octconf.
I used to have an Octave job, but my current job is unrelated to Octave. I've been trying to court Enthought and Continuum Analytics to try to hire me or any other Octave dev to work on Octave again. My pitch is that while moving people off Matlab is a laudable goal, there's a lot of Matlab code out there that could be used as-is while they write new code in Python or Julia or whatever. With stuff like Pytave that glues Octave and Python, Octave could help their customers transition off Matlab.
I have personally been affected by more than a couple of ghostscript bugs that have drastically impacted my use of Octave over the years, either crashing, busy waiting, or memory grabbing. My first response has always been to start digging into ghostscript to find out why it's screwing me over and try to fix it myself or come up with a workaround.
Not making an excuse, just offering that for myself one of the immeasurable advantages of working with completely free software is that I feel empowered to at least try to identify and fix problems when they happen.
What counter argument do you want? FSF explicitly states their position, which seems incompatible with your position, so they acknowledge that your position is what they want to fight against, you are their "political enemy" and ask you to not call yourself their ally/supporter or claim FSF endorsement, as some of the targeted companies do.
It's a statement of values and goals, which are obviously different for different people and organizations.
I expect no counter argument or faulty ones if I'm right in my view, and good ones that change my view if I'm wrong. I don't expect to be attacked just by insults without any explanation why I'm supposed to be wrong.
I just pointed out with my original comment that the FSF doesn't tolerate other definitions of liberties and doesn't care if it tramples on them on their way to "replace and eliminate"(from this article) everything that doesn't follow their definitions. It also puts its own cause above everything else.
This seems pretty extremist and totalitarian to me
(Not from the US)
Even if things have changed such that only a third of HN users are in the US, that's still a lot of people sleeping. Though I suppose I am implying that more of RMS's detractors are from the US. On one level, it wouldn't surprise me. Even though RMS's reputation is global, most of his writings are in English, and his homepage is currently focused on North-America-centric topics: https://stallman.org/
But I'm going to make a guess that HN is still busiest when America is busiest, judging by the time frequency of submissions currently in the /new section, as compared to what it will look like at 9am east coast time.
People care about free software as much as they care about politics : only a few know enough to make a difference...
For example, from https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.mac.announce/... :
"allowing system software to be distributed free of charge via these organizations has limited our ability to convince Apple resellers to distribute and promote Apple system software products to their customers."
Others at the time were also discussing the propriety of IP, and eventually agreed in favour of a limited form of it. Over time, it got strengthened further.
Perhaps a BSD style license is what you personally prefer. RMS has argued against such licenses for decades. Even if you disagree with him, please don't blame him for being inconsistent or defending a view that is not thought through.
Also, if you do not like the GPL, then you should perhaps be consistent and not use GPL software at all.
The reasons one sometimes has to use GPL software are quite similar for the reasons one sometimes has to use proprietary software. So the answer for GPL haters should rather be: avoid using GPL software (if possible), but more importantly: don't contribute to GPL software and contribute to software with "better" licensing so that one can (in future) create devices that are proprietary-software-free and copyleft-free at the same time.
And a statement last week from the former Debian Project Leader: http://gensho.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2016/debconf16/...
Because it is the closest thing to a drop in replacement, which is what you need when taking a class or following a tutorial based on MATLAB. Trying to use a different language and follow along is a much more advanced challenge and can be borderline impossible for a MOOC with an autograder or a class with a dusty professor.
I wasn't very happy with octave and I wouldn't use it for an independent project.. but I can't say how much of that is the pesky little octave specific bugs and how much is that I wouldn't like MATLAB's syntax when it is perfectly implemented. I suppose I could make the same criticisms of R as much of its frustratingly odd behavior comes from its history in emulating an old proprietary language's syntax..
Well, and I guess it already says enough that I actually had MATLAB installed, but still preferred using Octave.
Just the minor annoyances in MATLAB like it taking probably a minute to start up, being in general really sluggish and having an annoying (read: not particularly bash-like) command-line were already enough to make up for the just as minor compatibility-problems I occasionally had to correct before handing in.
So, at least up until the stuff that you can get to in one semester, the compatibility was pretty good and I only really once had a problem which couldn't be fixed by a simple find+replace.
And in that case, it was actually something where I didn't understand why it didn't work in MATLAB (if I remember correctly, you for some reason couldn't use `hold on/off` with multiple `ezplot`-instructions in it).
So, yeah, I don't think at all that it was Octave-specific bugs bugging you, especially also because the MATLAB-syntax is actually even more annoying than Octave's.
Well, and I guess it already says enough that I actually had MATLAB installed, but still preferred using Octave.
That is exactly what happened with me. And then we started doing more advanced stuff next semester and Octave fell flat on it's face.
The matlab-like syntax for getting slices of arrays is the only really non-pythonic thing I can think of.
Also, RMS doesn't insist on any freedom of end users to distribute without cost. Only on you not limiting their redistribution.
Now, that makes some licencing models impossible, sure, but those are hardly the only way to sell software.