- There isn't a big pool of people willing to devote time to Free Software. If we had a big pool of people who are better than Stallman and more willing to work on the cause then we'd talk about them. Stallman may not be unique, but he is rare in being simultaneously 1) principled, 2) motivated, 3) willing to work very hard for not a lot of money or prestige in the circles of power and 4) willing to put himself out there pushing a message.
I can find any number of people who are 2/4 on that list. 3/4 is rare. A lot of people who want Stallman gone are going to trade off their principles when they realise that they can get invited to very expensive parties put on by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Or plan on just fading in to the background. I think there is an interesting wound to be reopened in the Eich v. Mozilla topic on this point as well.
- No related to this article, but people have completely unrealistic standards for volunteer leadership. The man is human and has flaws. Everyone has flaws. We can tolerate some flaws in people who are doing good work.
I will also point out that this is an anonymous blog post from someone who has published no way to contact them privately and has never posted to the emacs mailing list (at least from the domain of their blog).
It is a one-sided view, and I see at least one important inaccuracy. FSF and RMS were certainly not asked for their view. Given that, would it make sense for RMS or FSF to write anything about this post publicly to give it validity and attention? Very doubtful.
Given all that, I found this bit pretty amusing: "I'd be surprised if he or any of the people with any influence even read it", how would the author ever find out? lol.
It is sad that this person cares about emacs, but dropping a big dis track and walking away without even suggesting any practical solutions really does not help things. Emacs has a very few core maintainers, FSF has a small staff augmented by volunteers, this is not some faceless entity like a big corporation or government.
Update: the author has since published their email address. Good for them.
I'm not sure what sorts of "practical solutions" you could possibly imagine. The core problem here is that Stallman has strongly held positions he won't budge on which harms the competitiveness of Free Software, and that all of GNU is subject to his whims. Would you have been more happy if the post had ended with "GNU and the FSF must replace Stallman"? Maybe if it ended with "GNU shouldn't be under the BDFL model anymore, there should be a leadership committee"?
Whatever Stallman views are, you can always start a new org and express your views that benefit the Free Software instead of harming them. Thus you we'll naturally outcompete the FSF and improve Free Software competitiveness.
It's not like Free Software is exclusive property of rms and FSF. Many parties can take part in the fight.
Okay but a major point of the post, whether you agree or not, is that Stallman's views is harming the technical merits of GNU software, making copyleft software less competitive than it should be. That's not going to change just because you start a new organization which tries to evangelize for Free Software in a better way.
Well I agree that it is a major point of the post. An no, I don't agree with this major point, in that Stallman's views somehow harm GNU anything. Anyone who believes he can do a better job can try doing a better job. But for some reason most such critics want Stallman do a job according to their expectations. No, it is not how it works.
I also find Stallman's position on a contributor/project head positions imbalance to be perfectly reasonable. Contributor has to convince project head to do something. Project head doesn't need to do that. If a contributor is unhappy, he can fork the project, become the head himself (with all the problems that such position brings), and do a better job.
Nothing prevents such future FSF successor organisation from forking all GNU projects and setting a different contribution policy or whatever. You won’t be able to change/upgrade the licensing terms unless you get the blessing from FSF itself, but then, Linux seems to be managing fine on GPLv2 so maybe it’s not such a big issue.
> We can tolerate some flaws in people who are doing good work.
Sometimes people's flaws prevent them and the people they work with from doing good work.
A lot of people I'd describe as "principled" don't want to be anywhere near Stallman for various reasons, often related to their principles. Maybe he's just cleared his orbit of anyone else who actually fits your 4 criteria, so only appears to be unique. This seems like a rather common failure mode of personality cults, tbh.
HR issues are the subset of people issues that affect the functioning of a company. If there's no company there are no "HR issues", only personal legal issues. Has Stallman broken any laws?
Ok, let's make it, has he infringed upon the rights of others or caused them material harm, both of which have copious amounts of laws against them? Otherwise it's nothing more than you disagree with him or don't like him for whatever reason.
Companies aren't the source of truth, but they do represent a floor of acceptable behavior for people working together in a group. Which is what matters for this discussion.
> they do represent a floor of acceptable behavior for people working together in a group
Huh? Working together in a group at a company does not imply any kind of standard for behavior, although companies pretend outwardly that there is some professional standard they abide by. The truth is that work places are filled with all kinds of horrible human behavior, always have and always will be.
People work together in bands, on art projects, on house renovations, on family housework, on adventures, on radical political movements, and it is OK for them to have complicated human relationships while they do so and capitalist companies do not deserve to have a say.
Yes, all of that is true. It is also true that they have organizations can and will get rid of people that are too toxic to work there. Sometimes the system even works! I've known of several people who, despite being brilliant engineers, repeatedly said the kinds of things you just can't say in polite company and so were eventually let go.
Yes, it took too long.
The system (at two separate companies) eventually worked.
That's not the only reason companies will get rid of people of course, because they are ultimately capital-dedicated authoritarian organizations. But it is a reason, which is my point.
And across the industry there is something akin to a floor of acceptable behavior. I cannot go into the office nude. I'm generally not allowed to abuse the other employees (however the higher up you are/the more important you are, the harder it gets to remove you, and it always relies on reporting).
There is a floor, and it's in practice lower than I'd like, but it exists.
Welcome to the finish sauna located inside the office.
It always context dependent. Organizations and companies in particular have cultural filters. I know people who find it toxic when people mix alcohol and work, while other find it useful to grease the professional relationship. Personally I find having a work get together at the sauna more suitable then the bar, but I am pretty sure 99% of HN belong to cultures that disagree.
Not agreeing or disagreeing, however I believe their point is that companies care about profit over principles and as long as an employee Disable the produce or foster work that is used to produce profit, thats is really all that matters to them.
There isn't really an ideological bent there that can throw a wrench in the works unless you are doing harm as a company.
Companies keep who they perceive to bring profits. Sometimes this is actually what brings profits, sometimes it isn't. Why do you think companies tend to grow huge parasitic managment systems, as they grow bigger? Not because the judgment of a company is sacrosanct, but because a company is a system that breeds and favors a certain kind of individual if the company doesn't work against that tendency constantly.
>
Companies aren't the source of truth, but they do represent a floor of acceptable behavior for people working together in a group.
To give a counter-example: in my observation, in academia (in particular math and physics departments), there is a lot more tolerance towards excentric traits than in companies - and collaborating in a group nevertheless works.
Thus, companies are an insanely bad example to define a reasonable floor. Rather, the traits that are considered acceptable in companies are whether they are useful for making the company money. For example dark triad traits can be useful for that, so such traits are somewhat accepted in companies.
Yes, the behavior of people working under a rigidly hierarchical, authoritarian structure in which they sign over all their ideas and work and have no control over them. The complete opposite of what Stallman advocates. You don't find any irony in suggesting to regulate Stallman by this norm?
No. The confusion on your part is you think Stallman acting like this makes him part of some authoritarian structure, but it does not. He is not telling anybody how to do their work, because they can just fork his code. He is simply ignoring what they want for his project because they are not his manager or PM. Under these circumstances, what obligation has he to make nice with what some consider "acceptable behavior" for a company man?
Because people are literally telling you what to do everyday, and getting another job doesn't change that, only who tells you?
The whole point of FSF is that everyone can have control over their software and do whatever the heck they want with it, even if it makes no sense. Here you have an excellent example, and you're suggesting there's the same freedom in finding somebody else to control your work.
False equivalency - I agree Stallman might have had some outdated visions for his projects (word processing? Realy? Nobody cares about that anymore).
I also accept the FSF/GNU don't operate like a typical authoritarian company - although I do think there are probably more similarities due to the fact power structures and human psychology dictate certain behaviors than FSF or Stalmman care to admit. But we absolutely shouldn't expect him or the FSF to operate in a similar manner, corps are what produce the toxic behaviors in the first place (not human toxic, toxic to society).
Being nice and polite, and being forced to murder kids and pillage third world countries, that has always had the smack of pure evil to it to me.
Maybe being polite is overrated after all. Fuck off, hitler (or whomever the evil dictator is).
> they do represent a floor of acceptable behavior for people working together in a group
Companies represent a floor of acceptable behavior for people working together in a group in a company (and that's not even true between different companies).
There are an infinite number of people working together in a group that do behave acceptably but not in the same way a company would.
for example: politics, unions, military, volunteers, churches, research etc
When the parent is attempting to say that for-profit corporations provide a "floor" of acceptable behavior, and by implication that RMS wouldn't meet this floor, I believe it's a perfectly valid comparison.
> Maybe he's just cleared his orbit of anyone else who actually fits your 4 criteria, so only appears to be unique.
They can go start their own Foundation (and those sort of people probably will do exactly that). GNU sounds silly anyway, and all the licenses are FOSS compatible. We've seen schisms already, that generally end well.
The Open Source people already did that at a grand scale, it was a massive success. Stallman's entire ideology is perfectly compatible with people doing a great job out-competing him at his own game. We would be lucky to have multiple organisations working to promote freedom in the software world, in multiple different ways.
> We can tolerate some flaws in people who are doing good work.
Stallman's principles are important, the man saw really far into the future towards which we have been heading. However, in the GCC AST case these principles really got in the way of good work.
Free software is supposed to be the superior software. It seems obvious to me that superior software would be easy to interface with and build upon. GCC should have been no exception but he chose to make it hard on purpose because some proprietary software somewhere might interface with it some day and he didn't want to help those people. It's my understanding this is one of the many reasons why clang is so relevant today.
This unwillingness to help proprietary software shows up in other parts of the free software culture as well. For example, nobody seems to care much about binary interfaces, only source code that can be recompiled.
Eh kinda it is supposed to be superior because it doesn't have secret backdoors, fewer security flaws, more features usable by a wider audience...
The first one I think is pretty important, as the saying goes if the cure is worse than the disease its not worth it.
Security flaws is arguable, not enough people have an incentive to work on free software, not because it doesn't get used, but because companies themselves haven't and aren't built to contribute back. We could have solved this fairly easily, just not in the software world, but I digress.
Lastly, more features, by which I don't mean in the sense you are probably thinking i.e. the narrow mindset popularized by MVP thinking "can it do X". More in the sense, "can you do X in Y manner". If you have ever used software and thought "why does it do this stupid thing or take so long" etc., its what I mean. Corps often build MVPs and "working" software that is otherwise horrible, free open source software is often used and improved by end users. Technical users, often, but they wear a user hat as well. Users can complain and request things directly.
It can produce bloated software as well, but when you don't have a budget you can do things like refactor. It will take a while but it can happen, where I think often corp software is held back by layers of deadlines, product owners, and BAs - the users are so far at the end of the chain the software they learn to live with is an absolute nightmare. They use it for some business reason, not because the software is in the least bit good.
>> Free software is supposed to be the superior software.
Superior, yes, but only for "some definition of superior."
It's not meant to be "better in every way" and could never be that anyway since "best" of anything, is always a compromised nuanced collection of competing interests. With the FSF there aren't competing interests, there is one overriding interest and all others are subservient to that.
Thus GNU software is always the "most free", but is also unsuitable for most users. Emacs may be free, but my mom uses MS Word. Her definition of "best" might be different to mine, not least because her goal is writing a letter, not analysing source code.
To the original author I suggest the following - let the FSF be the FSF and decide for yourself what tools best suit you. There are plenty of alternatives to GNU software for anything that matters. If gcc doesn't do done thing the use clang etc.
The "pure" FSF approach to computing is not meant for the masses, it is meant for a tiny few. You are not one of those few. (I mean that in the pragmatic, not pergoritive sense.)
Programmers see computers as "a thing" - 99% of the world see it as just another tool to get through the day. My mom cares about her computer about as much as I care where, or how, paper is made. She cares about her software about as much as she cares about her coffee machine.
In one sense RMS is a visionary leading us all to software nirvana. In another he's irrelevant. In many ways he can be both at the same time.
It doesn't matter whether emacs does this, or gcc does that. We don't really need a more pragmatic FSF - there are already lots of open source advocates filling that space.
If you want to be pure, the FSF is the home for you. If you want to be more pragmatic then find somewhere else.
Personally I am not one of the tiny group of perfectly-pure users with no reasonable phone or laptop. Personally I think the FSF stance is absurd in most cases and out of touch in most others.
But I completely respect their mission, and I completely enjoy many of the freedoms that mission has brought me indirectly. Open Source exists because of the FSF stance - a happy side effect of it maybe - and that is a very important thing.
The world needs extremists who model an alternative extreme. Homesteaders don't make me want to live off-the-grid, but they do inspire a model of more sustainable living, I'm encouraged to use alternative water for some uses, perhaps install some solar and so on.
Long may the FSF set a standard for impractical, unwavering dedication to an unrealistic computing standard. They set a boundary for the rest of us to see in the distance, and they allow a middle ground far closer to that boundary than we would otherwise aspire to.
The FSF is gloriously irrelevant, and long may it last.
I will dispute this notion that volume of technical work is related to how famous someone is. Today, there are lots of people in opensource doing backbreaking work that we rely on, but whose name we don't even know.
Indeed, fame is often the result of them being outspoken.
> We can tolerate some flaws in people who are doing good work.
Not trying to be snarky, I'm genuinely curious. I know that RMS has been very active in the emacs-dev mailing-list. Not sure if he's become more active after he was forced to step down from FSF board, and what impact (if any) his return has made.
Aside from turning emacs-dev mailing list into a weird place where one has to be a bit careful even when asking technical questions, what "good work" has RMS done in the past decade?
Again, I'm not trying to downplay his achievements and accomplishments in the past, I'm sincerely interested to know about his work. I know he wrote tons of essays, but he doesn't contribute to Emacs codebase anymore, right?
> We can tolerate some flaws in people who are doing good work.
The real question is whether RMS is actually doing good work. I don't question his intent, but the outcome is… let's call it "debatable." And, arguably, the gaussian on that outcome very much includes negative results — not sure where the overall curve goes…
The outcome is several pieces of software that millions of people adopted as optimum solution for a long list of different needs, and that are stable and work really well.
How this could be tagged as not good enough work for somebody is beyond my comprehension.
The problem is, how many people has Stallman personally put off working in GNU software? Certainly me, and at least two of my friends. I can't know exactly, but I bet lots of others.
Maybe you aren't the sort of contributors he wants. If RMS were more milquetoast, perhaps you and your friends would contribute, but at what cost? How many hardcore free software zealots would be repelled?
The article quite clearly debunks 3, and all of the others are sort of redundant. Someone who is principled, motivated, and wrong to proselytize might better be described as "obstinate", and we don't generally like those people.
(To be clear, re #3, there exist people who have done as much or more for free software as RMS, but people don't idolize most, except perhaps Linus, to the same degree)
I read through the linked email thread discussing the need for a C++ AST in emacs, and I have to say I was stunned by the arrogance, rudeness, and completely ignorance of RMS. When faced with clear, specific evidence that he was out of his depth and confused, he doubled down and literally said he would no longer discuss the issue because the other parties were "trying to pressure him instead of convince him". This is IMO embarrassing and unprofessional behavior for an adult. Most engineering managers or architects in most jobs would be reprimanded or fired for behaving that way. I would never consider interacting with GNU in a professional capacity after reading those emails, so I agree with the conclusion that RMS should step down.
When all discussion happens in the open it's easy to get caught in a bad day. This applies to people as disparate as RMS, Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs. You can find plenty of anecdotes of how rude or arrogant they are specially after so many years. They have been leaders for decades.
What people would think of us if we were famous? I try to be very polite and reasonable at work but I know, for a fact, that I'm not always at my best. The alternative is easy: you start to talk like a big corp CEO or a politician. You say nothing or give pleasant lies. Your acts may be later despicable but somehow facts are open to interpretation while your words carry all the weight.
This isn't a "bad day" or one angry rant. The conversation around emacs completions appears to have spanned multiple years and multiple days at a time.
I'd argue that such things tend to happen when a mob tries their best to destroy your reputation by publicly associating you with crimes you haven't committed.
As an undergraduate, Stallman came to visit and I got to spend about 3.5 hours around him in a crowd of no more than 20 people. He acted like this the whole time. Come to find out, this is basically how he acts all of the time, to everyone. Every person I have ever spoken to who has interacted with him personally has had a similar experience.
Ash put it well, to describe Stallman as stifling GNU's success. At this point, GitHub, NodeJS, and PyPI have done more for open source software than any GNU axe-grinding. As Clang grows, the FSF and GNU software shrink away. NeoVIM is on Apache. GCC still doesn't have LSP bindings, and it's due at least in part to this petty email exchange in 2015.
And that isn't even getting into these dumpster fires:
> This is IMO embarrassing and unprofessional behavior for an adult. Most engineering managers or architects in most jobs would be reprimanded or fired
I don't understand why I keep hearing complaints about "professional behaviour" in an open source context, where it's most likely not the "profession" of the people involved.
Please stop asking open source maintainers to behave professionally, until you are paying them a full time salary.
How about asking them to behave respectably. A maintainer takes up explicit and implicit responsibilities to their users. If they are unwilling or unable to discharge those responsibilities in a respectable (“professional”) manner they should let someone else take up that mantle who is willing and able. Money changing hands is not material to this question, as not all responsibilities need to involve the exchange of money.
Just like we expect our neighbors to be respectful to us even when we don’t pay them for the privilege, there’s nothing surprising that users ask a maintainer to be respectful of their time. Yes, the users can go somewhere else, just like how we can move if we have a bad neighbor, but that’s just not a good way of going about things.
I can just ghost you. The only obligatory relationship possible between us is either of blood or money. As a private individual, I don’t really owe you anything. You have the previlege of not having to use my work, or fork it and make it your own.
There is no obligation to collaborate either. I can write a software, publish it and insult people who wrongly report bugs.
Of course I wouldn't expect people to love me for that, and it's not how I personally act; but if someone felt like acting in this way, it would be fully within his/her rights to do so.
I replied to a comment saying "a maintainer". If you had unilaterally decided to change topic without informing me… well in the future try not to do that.
The places where I have seen the least respect between humans in my life are all in professional contexts. Why would you equate the two ? They're almost opposite.
What? If I write code and stick it on github or whatever, be glad I let you clone it. But I don't owe you a damned thing. If my users don't like how I maintain the repo, they can fork it and maintain it themselves. Or find a different project.
This entitled attitude that maintainers owe their users anything is visibly driving people away from that work.
They can have this attitude, and so can you, but people like me will avoid working with you if you don't believe you should act professionally just because you're not getting paid.
These days, many of the people who pretend to act professionally are paid and do very little.
Periodically, they usurp huge contributions from outsiders and market the success to their employers as a project success without mentioning the actual author. Then they boss around the author until he/she rage-quits.
And while they were young, they were entirely rude and unprofessional. CoCs are a political tool to protect the inner circle.
At least RMS is not a hypocrite. Neither is Torvalds.
A professional is by definition someone who receives money for their work.
Are you paying RMS for work rendered? If not, you have no standing to demand RMS act professionally.
Not to mention, FOSS by its own definition excludes all facets of money and is in practice primarily driven by volunteers. You can't and shouldn't demand professional behaviour from people who are not professionals.
("professionally" also redirects to the above URL.)
---------------------------------
professional adjective
pro· fes· sion· al | \ prə-ˈfesh-nəl , -ˈfe-shə-nᵊl \
Definition of professional (Entry 1 of 2)
1a: of, relating to, or characteristic of a profession
b: engaged in one of the learned professions
c(1): characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession
(2): exhibiting a courteous, conscientious, and generally businesslike manner in the workplace
2a: participating for gain or livelihood in an activity or field of endeavor often engaged in by amateurs
a professional golfer
b: having a particular profession as a permanent career
a professional soldier
c: engaged in by persons receiving financial return
professional football
3: following a line of conduct as though it were a profession
a professional patriot
professional noun
Definition of professional (Entry 2 of 2)
: one that is professional
especially : one that engages in a pursuit or activity professionally
---------------------------------
The phrase you are looking for is perhaps "act like a gentleman", among many other ways to describe behaviour that is mature and reasonable, but in any case RMS is not a professional and thusly none of us can demand he act professionally.
That is but one definition and it's American-English, not English. The more complete definition from the OED says:
A. adj.
†I. Senses relating to a profession or vow.
1. Relating to or marking the occasion of entrance into a religious order. Cf. profession-ring n. at profession n. Compounds. Obsolete. rare.
2. Of or relating to a profession or declaration; that is avowedly (but sometimes falsely) the thing specified; professed. Obsolete.
II. Senses relating to or derived from (the conduct of) a profession or occupation.
3.
a. Of a person or persons: that engages in a specified occupation or activity for money or as a means of earning a living, rather than as a pastime. Contrasted with amateur.
Sometimes applied disparagingly to a person who makes a trade or profession of something usually associated with higher motives.
b. Of an event, activity, occupation, etc. (now esp. a sport): undertaken or engaged in for money; engaged in by professionals (as distinct from non-professionals or amateurs).
c. In humorous or derogatory use. Of a person: habitually making a feature of a particular activity or attribute, esp. one that is generally regarded with disfavour; inveterate.
4. Of, belonging to, or proper to a profession.
a. Relating to, connected with, or befitting a (particular) profession or calling; preliminary or necessary to the practice of a profession.
professional examination.
b. Engaged in a profession, esp. one requiring special skill or training; belonging to the professional classes.
c. Characteristic of or suitable for a professional person; (now esp. of equipment) of a type used by professionals.
d. That has or displays the skill, knowledge, experience, standards, or expertise of a professional; competent, efficient.
5. That has knowledge of the theoretical or scientific parts of a trade or occupation, as distinct from its practical or mechanical aspects; that raises a trade to a learned profession. Now rare except as merged with senses at A. 4.
6. Physiology. Designating or relating to a cell which is specialized for the ingestion of particles by phagocytosis, such as a macrophage or neutrophil (as distinct from a cell capable of occasional phagocytosis).
III. Senses related to the office of professor.
7. = professorial adj.Now rare.
B. n.
1.
a. A person who engages in a specified activity, especially a sport, as a paid occupation. Frequently opposed to amateur.
b. Chiefly colloquial. A prostitute.
2. A person engaged in a profession, esp. one requiring special skill or training; a professional person, or a member of the professional classes.
3. Scottish University slang. Short for ‘professional examination’
4. A person who does something with a high level of competence, commitment, or expertise.
-----
So the use in this case can be construed to be entirely correct, c.f. Sense II §4 and Sense III §2 and §4
Lmao now this is like reading email debates in the FOSS community!
I think when you get down to debating definitions you’ve probably lost some of that professionalism.
As a manager I probably would be reprimanding people debating definitions like this. We should be asking: “do we understand each other?”
The point of this entire argument is Stallman isn’t paid, dedicates his life to this work, probably is overworked and runs his org and does so completely openly (ie you’re likely to see lots of good and some bad). He’s not a professional; he’s a passionate, often crazed and zealous leader of an organization with an extreme position (free software being the exception not the rule).
I frankly wouldn’t expect anything from Stallman. Manners, personal relationship, etc.
I posted this to highlight the absurdity of the original posting of another definition. I perhaps could have been more explicit, but I thought that my tongue being in my cheek was established by making the point that the original excerpt was taken from an American-English dictionary. Should've started with "Akshually..."
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - Bertrand Russell
Yes, perhaps this pattern of behavior is to be expected from someone who's staked out such an uncompromising position and stuck to it for ~30 years.
But it's also really sad that, in acting this way, he undermines his own goals.
"workplace" is defined as "a place (such as a shop or factory) where work is done"[1].
"work" in the context of "workplace" is defined[2] as follows under definition 1:
---------------------
1a: to perform work or fulfill duties regularly for wages or salary
works in publishing
b: to perform or carry through a task requiring sustained effort or continuous repeated operations
worked all day over a hot stove
c: to exert oneself physically or mentally especially in sustained effort for a purpose or under compulsion or necessity
---------------------
Definition 1a is a direct reference to monetary payment for work rendered. Definition 1b describes the act of working itself. Definition 1c loosely refers to some sort of goal or need, which may or may not include money, as a motivator for working.
So in a very, very liberal context you can pedantically use "professional" in a non-monetary sense, but there are much more accurate ways to describe what you want to convey such that you wouldn't need to be liberal with your choice of words.
RMS isn't a professional, so he can't be demanded to act professionally.
An email thread discussing work that will be done on GCC is "the workplace" in this sense. If we took a vote I'd guess at least 90% of English speaking adults would agree with me.
The way I used the words "behave professionally" is very common in American English. You could use this phrase to describe a student, a volunteer, or even a dog at a dog show.
I'm very much aware "professional" is used as slang to mean someone who generally conducts themselves like an eloquent businessman.
However, slang is slang. Officially, the definition of a professional is whether you make money for work rendered. The slang usage of "professional" is incorrect.
The slang usage might get added to the dictionary and become correct some day, language evolves, but as far as I'm aware today is not yet that day.
Thanks for adding that definition, and it is sad that it is needed.
(though those who already act professionally already knew it ;) while other people will grasp at straws and try to find technicalities to justify their bad attitude )
> I was stunned by the arrogance, rudeness, and completely ignorance of RMS
Why were you stunned? The guy signs his emails "Dr. Richard Stallman" whilst only having an honorary doctorate. Clearly there are issues. It's as insane as signing emails "Dr. Bill Gates", "Dr. Clint Eastwood" and "Dr. Billy Joel" (all having honorary degrees).
I have problems with some of RMS's opinions and behavior, but I have no problem with him calling himself "Dr."
One of my professors used to talk about the difference between a Masters degree and a PhD:
"To get a Masters degree you have to learn something. To get a PhD the world has to learn something."
The world has learned a great deal from RMS. Regardless of what one thinks of him as a person, he's probably been more influential on how the world thinks about software than the vast majority of PhDs.
RMS actually did ask a few of the universities who granted him doctorates, if it was acceptable for him to use the title "Doctor". Some said no, some said yes, and some said he should use "Dr.(h.c.)"[0] (as in "doctor, honoris causa", where we get the term "honorary doctorate", even though, as RMS points out, it'd be perhaps more accurate to call it "doctorate for honor"[1]).
Of course, he took that as license to just do whatever he wanted to do. Personally I wouldn't even consider adopting any kind of title in the first place, but if I was of that bent, I would at least have the decency to append the "(h.c.)".
I do believe that RMS's contributions to the world have been significant, but, to me, at least, a doctorate is something you get after completing a doctoral program. If you don't do that, you should call yourself a "doctor, honoris causa" -- because that's what you are! -- not a "doctor".
But what do I know, I only completed a bachelor's degree, and even then only barely.
He could probably apply today and get a doctorate from a pretty good school in two years. That said i do find it weird that he'd use the title. He's a weird guy but also someone I look up to. :)
An honorary degree is not meaningless. It is an official degree typically bestowed by a bona fide institution (that also has non-honorary degrees). It is also given to individuals that had a deep impact in some area, arguably a much deeper impact than any freshly graduated PhD student has.
So it doesn't bother me if any of them signs Dr. Bill Gates, Dr. Billy Joel or Dr. Clint Eastwood as they, in all likelihood, are important in their fields, much more than I was when I submitted my thesis.
It is a rude digression to discuss RMS’s personal character flaws and mental instability. The FSF more importantly is a force for good and always has been. And we need them to try to be more relevant and effective in the coming age of completely locked, learning capable and vastly more influential proprietary software.
It just shows how out of touch he is. Almost everyone I've worked with in my career has had a PhD. Not one of them have ever included "Dr" in their titles on emails or anywhere else. I've even worked with a few MD/PhDs who transitioned to software engineering, and they did not include "Dr" in their capacities as software engineers.
Hell, most of the people I know who have PhDs are at least mildly embarrassed if you call them "doctor". Or at the very least they roll their eyes and think the title is silly. This is in the US; I don't know about how people feel in other countries.
Granted, these are mostly (or even all?) people who received their doctorates in the past 10 or 15 years, and as such are a good 30 years younger than Stallman, so perhaps there is a generational thing at play here too, where the respect/desirability of titles like that has been dropping over time.
Using "doctor" as a title or a form of address is common in the academia, including in the US. It's also very formal, especially in spoken language. Hearing it in situations where such formality is not expected can be awkward and embarrassing.
I only ever see it with people in the humanities. In science... weird - more than weird, in general seeing someone who uses the Dr. title is a good indication of "you're going to read the worst shit ever hidden under an insufferable amount of vague verbiage".
To give another data point: in France I remember the university having to ask the local profs. to put their titles (Dr, Prof, etc) in their mail signature as otherwise students thought that french teachers were much less competent than e.g. teachers from germany who would have three layers of Dr. Eng. prepended
One common situation is introducing an invited speaker at a conference. After the first mention, you refer to the speaker using a mix of pronouns and names. Full name or last name would sound weird. Using first name works if the speaker is your friend and many people in the audience also know them as a person. Otherwise "Dr. Lastname" is a reasonable choice.
Academic websites are full of short biographies of speakers, lecturers, PIs, and so on. They are often written in third person. Again, "Dr. Lastname" is often the form of reference that sounds least weird.
Academic spam is often addressed to "Dr. Lastname", especially if the sender is asking the recipient to do something. Using "doctor" as a title is a safe default choice. It sounds respectful, it's very likely to be correct, and it saves the sender from guessing the gender (and possibly marital status) of the recipient.
If they paid the $100,000 why would they be embarassed? There's probably a psychological explanation for their reasoning. M.D. is a "doctor", but a person with their PhD is a "Doctor of ..." If anything, I'm more inclined to believe someone with a Doctorate in anything other than medicine.
Perhaps the PhD holders don't want to be associated with the hubris that most medical doctors exude. For reference, google "endometriosis suffer" or spend some time researching medical malpractice.
It also is possible that a lot of kids coming out of the 80s got a bum deal on their education - or at least feel they did. Like, "it was too easy to get this degree" - from the standpoint of applying themselves, not the overall workload of getting a PhD. Medical Doctors who are board certified, that did all their rotations, and whatever else required, there's only one other doctorate that requires more workload, and that's psychiatry.
What should maybe be questioned is why someone needs a doctorate for "the world to learn from them."
Clearly you haven't had much interaction with German PhDs. It's very common to include titles in your name (this also includes lower ones) there. Although it admittedly has become less common.
Let's not even talk about medical doctors everywhere, or formal engineering qualifications, both are very often used in letters.
The argument is that they make a direct difference to the perception of the individuals competence (and I know that for medical doctors there is a direct effect on earnings). While I don't think it would make a difference for RMS corresponding with software engineers he might be thinking it does make a difference because of his interaction with other stakeholders. Not really defending it, just offering a different perspective.
The German "Dr. med" is a scam. They do 1 year of an irrelevant experiment that is sped up by p-value fishing and get the "Dr. med" thrown after them. They and their professors generally have no clue about the statistics used to validate the fake and irrelevant experiment.
They also omit the "med", which is much like omitting "h.c.". And they are very keen on using the title in general.
> While I don't think it would make a difference for RMS corresponding with software engineers
I think it does make a difference: many software developers might take him less seriously because of it. And that has nothing to do with the fact that his doctorates are honorary; same goes for someone who has completed a PhD program.
> Clearly you haven't had much interaction with German PhDs. It's very common to include titles in your name (this also includes lower ones) there. Although it admittedly has become less common.
Expat living in Germany here. You’re absolutely correct according to my experience. In fact, I’ve seen people with PhD put “Dr.” on the mailbox in front of their home.
This is false and insulting to people who earned real degrees.
He has an honorary doctorate. Which is about as worthless as if someone had the local trophy shoppe mint you a plaque that said "World's Greatest Hacker".
An honorary doctorate is still a doctorate, though. It doesn't have the usual academic requirements but it's not like universities just hand them out to anyone. It's supposed to denote a significant contribution to a field. Stallman did contribute significantly so I personally see no problem with it.
> but it's not like universities just hand them out to anyone.
No, but at least in the US, they're often given out for things other than achievement in a particular field, like as unofficial quid-pro-quo for large donations to the university.
Perhaps that doesn't damn the practice entirely, as many are awarded for extraordinary contributions, but it does add an unfortunate extra step, having to ask the question, "did this person get this honor because they did amazing things, or because they paid amazing sums?"
Moreover, it is completely aligned with how Stallman operates. Most people do not have doctorates, so universities and recipients can arbitrage the "doctorate" title by a socially acceptable lie wherein the recipient understands to not use it like one. Stallman doesn't do socially acceptable lies. You either give him a doctorate and let him use it like one or you don't give him one. Socially acceptable lies where people "agree to disagree" are how principles get bent and if he were also this way he would have bent long ago.
It's important to note that in Italy, the title of doctor works differently than in the German and anglophone world, and you are granted the title of "dottore" (doctor) with a bachelor's degree. A master's makes you a "dottore magistrale" and a PhD makes you a "dottore di ricerca" (research doctor)
> An honorary doctorate is still a doctorate, though.
A honorary doctorate is to a doctorate as a honorary citizenship is to a citizenship. It does not imply any rights or qualifications and trying to pass it of as the real deal may be (and in some places is quite explicitly) considered fraud.
Maybe universities should stop giving them out then. They can literary give any other honor but they choose to tie it to a doctorate and insult people who earn real degrees. How is Stallman the problem?
Sometimes, people create entire new fields of knowledge. The idea that somebody could teach Shakespeare about Shakespeare's work is ludicrous. The idea that somebody could teach what is open source to Stallman for a limited period of time does not have any sense. He coined the term.
Honorary doctorates are created for this cases, when the recipient is --the-- expert in the field. Is a shortcut to encourage this experts to became teachers and pass their knowledge. Win-win. Do we really think that somebody spending four years writing a these about emacs knows more than Stallman about a program that he developped since 70's?
Is abused to groom donors? Yes, Sometimes is abused, but is a perfectly legit way to became a doctor.
I know someone who does this. She also refers to other people with PhDs as "Dr" even if they don't typically refer to themselves that way.
I suspect it's some sort of cultural thing, and that with how much computer people tend to reject typical forms of formality we're just mostly on the far opposite side of whatever cultural thing it is.
This is very culturally dependent, you would be surprised at the # of openly proclaimed Drs in Central Europe - the academic culture inherited from the ancient German-speaking empires loves all sorts of titles.
But this is not relevant here, as Dr. Stahlmann doesn't work in Tübingen.
One exception that comes to mind would be Ferdinand Porsche. To this day the company is called "Dr. Ing. h. c. F. Porsche AG" (although I wonder if that changed with their recent IPO.)
I’ve worked with a handful of people with PhDs, that I know of, and about half of them signed off that way. One or two really wanted you to know about it.
Germany is also rather strict about it and using an academic title like doctor when you do not have the right to it can be considered fraud. A honorary doctorate is not considered equal to the academic title and has to be explicitly distinguished.
Is their choice not to use it, but is not a norm engraved in marble. For each one that declines to use the title, you would find ten in the Academia that will happily use it. It depends on if is a formal context or not.
As a math PhD (the usual, thesis-and-all kind), I really see no issue with Dr. Stallman identifying as such.
A doctorate is a doctorate. And if it makes him happier, why not? There's no harm or confusion (his qualifications are clear enough in any context where they matter). Unlike, say, the case of Dr. Phil.
There so many other things to have an issue with about Stallman, I don't know why this one stands out in particular.
...that said, the only time I've used the "Dr." next to my name was on obnoxious web forms which force me to choose between Mr/Ms/etc, and Dr. is the only non-gendered option.
An honorary doctor is in general significantly harder to get than a regular PhD. If we want to talk about people undeservedly getting the Dr. title, let's talk about medical doctors. The thesis to get the title is often a joke even compared to a masters thesis.
>Except Dr. Phil does have an actual PhD. Which he attended university and defended via dissertation. Unlike, say, RMS.
Well that's the point.
When RMS says he's a "Doctor", the expectation is "made a significant contribution to computer science" - which, arguably, he did.
When Dr. Phil says he's a "doctor", the expectation is "qualified and licensed to practice medicine in his field". Which he is very much not (in particular, he hasn't renewed his license).
Imagine that. The pedantic buffoon at the center of the ridiculous GNU/Linux naming controversy created an entire page dedicated to his title. Amazing.
>For whatever intimidation and injustice vie with decency and honor, let the Doctors arise, and arise they must, for within every one of us, there is a Doctor, a dormant Doctor, a supreme arbitrator, who can be summoned to intervene, when crises threaten the stabilities and well-beings of our heartlands. Now let's party!
If somebody is a doctor honoris causa, has been seen as deserving to be doctor by the only group of people that can legally grant this titles.
Anybody with a doctorate can decide to use the title, use it only in an ironic way, or just don't use it, as you wish. "Dr. Clint Eastwood" would not be a symptom of anything strange. Eastwood is clearly an expert in films, successful at both sides of the camera, so... why not recognize it?
I had once a rather long e-mail discussion with RMS, regarding some points that I believe to be logical contradictions and inconsistencies in GPL, concerning the meaning of the concept of "linking", in opposition with LGPL, which I consider as a fine license.
While I have presented a series of arguments, which in my opinion could not be refuted logically, it was not possible to change RMS's mind about anything, so the discussion has ended with everybody keeping their original opinions, unchanged.
Nevertheless, I am immensely grateful to RMS for his past work. I am a very good programmer and i could have been able to write all the programs that I use daily, including an operating system, device drivers, compilers or a text editor.
Nevertheless that is a huge amount of work, which would have taken many years of my life. Due to the open-source movement, I was able to benefit of the work shared by countless others, thus saving an enormous amount of time.
I usually take advantage of the open-source nature of the programs to make customizations that would have been impossible when using proprietary programs. However, making various modifications to an open-source program is orders of magnitude less work than writing the program from scratch.
While the great quantity of open-source programs existing now is the work of a very large number of developers, RMS has played a critical role in catalyzing this evolution, which must not be forgotten.
I also agree with the author of the article that in general all the targets set by RMS about free software and hardware remain as valuable and important as ever, but the strategy and tactics advocated by him are no longer effective and by now it cannot be expected that he will ever change in the future.
I understand why people would like discussing GPL with RMS, but RMS is not a legal scholar nor has a legal background or education. If we look into the history of GPL we see that RMS himself did not arrive at the finer legal details by himself, but rather through the help by his friend Eben Moglen who is a professor of law and legal history. RMS tend to focus on the philosophy and the strategic use of GPL towards free software goals.
The concept of "linking" in GPL also came from Eben Moglen. The legal theory was fairly simple, ie, would a non-technical judge see a linked program as one large single copyrighted work or two independent separate works (originally in US legal context only)? RMS initially viewed it as two works, but Eben Moglen had a different view about it, which RMS then changed his opinion to.
Technically, dynamic linking looks like use, and not the creation of a combined or derived work.
Using an interactive dynamic language with FFI, I can connect to a shared library at the REPL and interact with its functions, just as if I were calling programs in /usr/bin.
It’s also a perplexing display of ignorance for a compiler writer, as clearly and obviously static analysis typically requires the whole AST, and there’s almost no limit to the static analyses that are useful to have in a code editor.
As others have explained in the mailing list, the technical ability to dump the AST in a way that circumvents the GPL already exists via GCC plugins. So, no, it doesn't make sense even from that perspective.
Stallman is probably a good example of how people practice based on principles end up like how you describe when the principles drive them away from the real practice of their users (or just reality in general).
"skin in the game" as taleb would say, only a little bit more subtle.
The thread in which he changes the topic from garbage collection to "you should be prioritizing making Emacs a better word processor" is just stunning.
Like, no, that's not how it works! This person is a volunteer with a detailed design proposal for a prototype. You can't just ignore the proposal and demand something entirely unrelated! I was blown away.
The part where he just shuts down discussion based on his authority was pretty shocking to me. I remember other instances where he did that and if I'm not mistaken it led to people forking GCC.
Remember that LLVM almost became a FSF or GNU project. The only thing that prevented it from happening was RMS missing an email in his inbox. Imagine where LLVM would be today if he hadn't missed that email.
Ironically exactly thanks to the licence, clang is now lagging behind GCC and Visual C++ in ISO C++, even though LLVM itself has a contribution level similar to Linux kernel, the C and C++ vendors leeching clang forks aren't that keen stepping into Apple and Google's shoes now that they are focused on their own C and C++ follow ups.
That was addressed in the long (and interminable) example thread linked in the article.
Because of RMS's opposition to making gcc usable in any context other than gcc, people just moved to llvm and clang.
The core issue is that these are people who care about FSF, GNU, gcc, etc running headlong into RMS who is forcing design decisions based on a threat that does not exist, leading to the gradual erosion of there relevance.
Take gcc as in the example thread: RMS intentionally hobbling gcc means that gcc is simply not involved in any significant amount of compiler and language research any more. Why bother? it's intentionally designed to make the kind of things that compiler researchers would want to do hard, to "stop it being used in non-free software", similar happens for new languages: why bother messing around gcc where by design your only real option is "compiling" your code to C, which comes with _many_ costs.
These are people who _want_ to use gcc, who _want_ to use gpl, gnu, fsf, etc software, but cannot because functionally RMS does not allow it.
Those people who you speak of that have a romantic attachment towards GCC, are creating their own issues by being inflexible. However, I fail to see how their attachment should be of any serious concern to anybody. Surely, the mature way of dealing with this is for them to learn to let go and vote with their feet sort of speak.
No surprise that the etherium developer (yes, I've looked at yr linked bio) throws in the 'governance' canard, i.e. control software projects through power games, rather than by free association (support a project or fork it).
Free Software is not about governance; it's pretty much a complete antithesis to such power structures. Communities voluntarily coalesce around software projects with a core developer group. Don't like the group, fork the code; don't attempt a takeover/coup and if you do, or agitate for one, then you've revealed your true colours and that community will now see you as a hostile threat to their project.
I work on camera algorithms full time and do Ethereum stuff in my free time, not sure that's relevant though.
Like it or not, FSF has governance and power structures. The GNU project power structure is very top heavy, effectively a dictatorship. I believe dictatorships are bad so I'll continue advocating for GNU to change.
Interestingly the approach to cooperation you're describing (if you don't like it, fork it) is actually the same as OG crypto Bitcoin people. IMO it's not conducive to good outcomes and most of the crypto world has embraced processes that lead to consensus building and more inclusivity (although clearly not perfect yet).
I think you should be more a bit subtle in your analysis and weight the pros and cons. Especially in the context of software projects where nobody gets killed or detained :)
Not saying that dictatorship is the only good way to lead software projects but there are enough highly successful dictator led software projects that it's worth not rejecting this type of governance as just "bad".
On your point about talking about Free Software projects as 'dictatorships', the analogy looks especially silly if you bring it back the other way, which would mean that anyone living in a real world dictatorship could simply 'fork' the country they are living in, recreating/replicating all its lands, forests, cities & towns and install themselves as the new ruling class and attract a new population to people their newly created land. Without any bloodshed; the old 'dictatorship' and its physical lands still exist in a parallel reality and they can carry on along their own original path. Also, people living in these two lands can 'teleport' to the other reality, if they decide they like it better. Doesn't sound very oppressive now, with the analogy properly extended.
It was RMS who "played the governance card" in the first place:
> Emacs is not an independent project, and it isn't governed by its contributors. I'm the head of the GNU Project, and that includes Emacs.
>
> You, as a contributor, can advocate a certain decision, which means you present arguments why I should approve it. I don't need to advocate a decision in that sense.
>
> I leave most technical decisions up to the contributors, including you, because for most of the questions I don't have any special preference of my own. For those questions, I'm happy with whatever works, and I know the contributors can figure out what works.
I have an open source project of my own. For some strange reason, some people who interact with it is some way believe it is acceptable for them to tell me how to run the project. However, they are not in the position to tell me how to run it, and how polite I should be when showing them to the door.
I'm yet to see RMS out of his depth in any technical discussion of computer science related matters and I think it's a very big call for anyone to make without backing the assertion up (as you very noticeably failed to do).
RMS has a towering reputation in the computer science field based on very significant accomplisments, that is undeniable. Any random person on a forum is welcome to challenge that reputation, but they'll need to do it properly, not just sling mud.
Read the linked email thread and decide for yourself.
He doesn't know operator overloading exists. Then when he's told and given an example he claims it doesn't interact with type deduction in a way that is not true in C++. Then when given a simple example with auto he claims that the method overload resolution is equivalent to finding the right return type, ignoring multiple overloads and the possibility of type conversion after the function returns.
All these mistakes are acceptable, but when they were pointed out to him, he reacted by claiming blanket bad faith on everyone who was trying to justify using the full AST. He then said he wouldn't listen to them and instead would talk to "people he trusts".
His approach to implementing this feature would have been “if code completion needs data X from the code, we provide an API for that”, and repeat this for all other possible use cases. This, to protect the AST.
This is of course technically feasible, but a huge amount of effort, and will constantly have to be updated / changed. When people are effectively arguing “it’s a much more forward-compatible and scalable approach to let tools use the AST directly”, he rejects that as changing the discussion, not a concrete example, and/or pressuring.
This is super ironic coming from someone who made an editor entirely based on LISP, which is successful precisely because it is completely transparent and anything can be changed / inspected / done.
Given the success of LSP in the recent years, it’s super evident that RMS was wrong on this matter. It has created an ecosystem for LSP around clang, and the integration with emacs is great.
To be more accurate, this to protect an AST parsed into source code that is _readily available_ for anyone who wants it, because... it's open source. Anyone with knowledge of GCC could write a patch in a week or so to dump the AST into JSON and publish it as a patch.
You're right, too, though: this exact argument is part of why LSP and clang won. When people showed up (in _2015_!) to try to start on support for this sort of thing in emacs and gcc, the dictator at the top could not be convinced this was worthwhile. And now the world uses Clang and LSP and the GNU counterparts get dustier and dustier.
Yes but I don’t think that could have happened if they were not decoupled from the compiler.
But yes it’s a good point that LSPs are actually an API for editors instead of exposing the AST to the editors directly, but from the discussion I’m fairly convinced that RMS lacked the imagination of all the possibilities LSPs could create.
And it’s also quite ironic that he resisted opening up the compiler to support these kind of tools, and it ended up being a for-profit corporation that spearheaded this whole open standard / ecosystem of LSPs.
The man is right about a lot of things but the GCC thing isn't one of them. First time I read those emails it permanently changed the way I looked at GNU software. Now I always wonder if they crippled something on purpose every time I run into any difficulty. For example, is this the reason why GCC is unable to output source file dependency data in anything but makefile format? That would make so much sense.
I'll begin by quoting an excerpt from "A man for all seasons"
Alice More: Arrest him!
More: Why, what has he done?
Margaret More: He's bad!
More: There is no law against that.
Will Roper: There is! God's law!
More: Then God can arrest him.
Alice: While you talk, he's gone!
More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man's laws, not God's– and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.
----
With every passing year, and the way modern web/cloud based SaaS is playing out, RMS seems increasingly prescient.
His uncompromising and principled stance on software freedoms is crucial to maintaining the Overton window on the matter, allowing space for others to make compromises and find practical solutions.
And his public behavior has been equally worrisome. According to dozens of witnesses, Stallman actively sexually harassed women students and faculty at MIT, for 30 or more years. To the point that women have passed down RMS-specific avoidance tactics like he hates plants so faculty should fill their offices with them or “If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.”
It had allegedly reached the point that he was asked so many times to stop asking out colleagues and students that he decided to create and hand out a business card to non-verbally harass.
Georgia Lyle, who worked at FSF from 2015 to 2018, wrote a long Twitter thread about the exhaustive — and ultimately moot — efforts she and other FSF staff made trying to change Stallman’s toxic behavior and silence his “racist and sexist ‘hacker humor’.”
> "I recall being told early in my freshman year 'If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.'”
— (Anonymous Bachelor’s in Computer Science, ’04)
I’m sure RMS could be like that, however having spent some time with him —- I didn’t see anything like that. He was frankly more interested in his laptop and food than people.
Until he is criminally charged, I view such rumour mongering as simply a smear campaign against an innocent man. You can take a more "worried" view, but I believe we should hold more tightly to innocent-until-proven-guilty than is the norm these days.
This doesn't rebut any of those allegations, and in fact adds new ones, like the time Stallman threatened to commit suicide if a woman refused to date him.
It is certainly inappropriate to say today. It may have been closer to being acceptable in 1985, when it (allegedly) took place. Customs and morals change with the times, sometimes more than we want to imagine or recall.
Remember, this was only one year after the movie Revenge of the Nerds was a lasting hit (it spawned one theatrical sequel and two more TV sequels). Viewed with today’s eyes, the movie is unequivocally terrible, with rape perpetrated by the movie’s protagonist being played for laughs, among many other things. But it was not viewed as terrible by audiences at the time. However, the people who liked the movie at the time, and even the people who made the movie at the time have presumably changed in the intervening years, and may not deserve to be judged by something they did forty years ago.
This is the second time on this thread you've suggested that in 1985 it was acceptable to threaten to commit suicide to coerce someone to date you. No, it was not.
I’ll take your word for it (and I upvoted your other comment which stated this).
> Holy non-sequitur Batman!
It was not a non-sequitur. It was an example meant to conclusively illustrate of how radically morals and attitudes (in the time period in question) differ from the current ones, even though we collectively might feel and remember otherwise.
No, it was not in fact OK to coerce someone into a date with a threat of suicide in 1985. I was there. It's telling, about this whole Stallman debate, that anyone would even try to make this claim.
Anyways, I didn't know anything about the suicide threat before seeing this link, and didn't know my contempt for Stallman could get any deeper. So thanks for that!
The sort of things that were OK then would make the average sjw have a meltdown, just like how eating meat will be viewed in 40 years and everyone will pretend they always ate soy burgers.
I grew up in a part of Chicago where it was not safe for my Black friends to be on the street with me after dark. And even then, you'd have been ostracized for using a suicide threat to coerce someone into dating you. It's a remarkably fucked up thing to do.
> > No, it was not in fact OK to coerce someone into a date with a threat of suicide in 1985.
> In 1985 you still had towns where blacks weren’t allowed after sundown in the US
Literal, de jure, sundown towns were no longer permitted by federal civil rights law and the interpretation of the 14th Amendment for…quite some time before 1985.
The term persisted (and persists) for systems of informal racial discrimination (which may or may not have any significant association with time of day), and in that sense, yes, “sundown towns” existed in 1985 – and also in 2022.
(Not that even if you were literally correct would this be anything but a total irrelevancy to the point you responded to with it.)
Were there some significant cultural differences in 1985? Yes, sure. Were threats of suicide to coerce someone into dating within the window of acceptable adult behavior? No, not at all. It was viewed as a sign of unusual and dangerous obsession and instability when the person doing it was a teenager.
I mean, at least, it was by everyone of all ages the one whole time it occurred anywhere in my social circle within a few years of 1985.
I'm struggling to understand how the author of this page thought Stallman's "voluntary pedophilia is fine" statement would seem better with them providing the context that he wrote that in reference to a movement to lower the age of consent in the Netherlands to from 16 to 12 and from there eliminate it entirely.
Firstly, it is slightly disingenuous of you to bring that up, since RMS has not held that opinion for more than seven years now¹.
Secondly, you are mischaracterizing what he actually wrote¹.
The context, that this was a debate specifically about the age of consent, is relevant. Otherwise you seem to imply that any discussion of the age of consent is reprehensible. The age of consent differs quite a lot over the world, and you could declare every citizen of those countries to be terrible people, which would at least be consistent, or you could concede that there was a debate to be had. You might not agree with what RMS wrote (neither does RMS, now), but would you declare every person in a debate to be a terrible person who does not argue the side of the prevailing one? Even if they have since changed their minds?
Well, what Stallman actually wrote in his post referenced by this portion of the page I was referring to was:
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."
There are no links in this original post besides the one to the news article about the Dutch party pushing to lower the age of consent to 12. The page defending Stallman quotes from the news article (omitting the detail about the party's goal to go on to remove the age limit entirely) and then adds this comment:
"When people talk about pedophilia, what usually comes to mind is prepubescent children. Not what Stallman was referring to."
I'd say my previous comment contained an accurate statement of the view Stallman expressed there (and later retracted): that pedophilia is fine, if it's voluntary. Stallman's own later distillation of his prior view in his own words was "I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it."
This page was written in the context of Stallman already having disavowed those earlier posts, but its tack for defending Stallman in relation to this quote is still to essentially say "12? misleading to call that pedophilia." On the one hand, this statement is itself misleading (Stallman offered no lower age limit for his views on voluntariness, in the context of discussing an article that included the idea of completely removing the age of consent, and further, the idea that he didn't really mean pedophilia here rests on the idea that famous language pedant Stallman repeatedly misused the word).
Beyond that though, my point in my previous comment was more that, as an implied statement of the author's idea of what the public generally believes and as a matter of rhetorical tactics for defending Stallman it was... a choice.
> "When people talk about pedophilia, what usually comes to mind is prepubescent children. Not what Stallman was referring to."
Yes, that was what they actually wrote.
> "12? misleading to call that pedophilia."
Mischaracterization of that same sentence.
However, what you are actually criticizing is apparently not actually Stallman, but the defense of Stallman? In that case, perhaps this page does a better job:
> “If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.”
A normal person probably doesn't see the double-indirection and ambiguity in this. The first indirection lies in using 'I'm a vi user' as a proxy for 'I don't like Emacs'. The second indirection lies in using 'I don't like Emacs' as a proxy for 'I reject you romantically'.
The ambiguity is even less visible. Some women use an indirect 'No' as a shit test. The man is supposed to ask again. This is phenomenon invisible to normal people because it occurs in a social context of body language and flirting. Normal people find this social context conspicuous. Consequently, normal people are oblivious to the phenomenon of men with poor social skills failing to navigate the treacherous waters around the "ask again no" and the very different "don't ask again no". These waters are a normie's paddling pool.
Remind yourself of the big picture here. We have a highly intelligent man with embarrassing blind-spots around certain social skills. We have intelligent women attempting to communicate with him. They choose a code with two properties. First, it aims at a social skills blind-spot; the message is likely to be misunderstood by the target. Second, it is a trivial code that normies will not even notice breaking. They get to have a sneer and a laugh at the expense of the loser who misunderstands the coded message. The joke lies in the weakness of the code. Everybody except the victim gets the message effortlessly.
So long as 'I'm a vi user' is a private joke, its heartless cruelty is mitigated by its pettiness. But RMS is the victim. To tell the tale as a strike against him lacks self-awareness.
i don't know if the allegations are true and if he sexually harassed people then sure, cancel him. but none of the "hacker humor" shit people reference seems that serious.
* stuff like "knight for hot ladies" is just corny not bad.
* the abort() joke was as follows: "Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function. We would be required to say that this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program." that's not that bad honestly. it's more pro-abortion than anti-abortion so i'm not sure why progressives got mad.
* the "emacs virgin" shit is cringe but not rly sexist? anyway i think he switched it to be either men or women later so it was still cringe but not gendered.
idk if there's other stuff i missed but that covers what your article and the twitter thread you mentioned point out. like, yeah, it's cringe asf. but is it rly "cancellable? nah.
btw i still think his presence in the open source community is a negative in part because of goofy ahh shit like emacs virgins or knight for hot ladies, mostly because the amount of cringe it produces attracts more asocial weirdos like rms and puts normal people off open source stuff. like, i'm a outgoing person and can sit and enjoy a coffee with almost anyone. but i feel like spending 5 minutes face to face with rms would make me lowkey want to unalive. i also really don't like a lot of his politics. so i'm in no way an apologist, just don't think a lot of what you referenced is problematic.
ofc, i think there's enough evidence of creepy behavior, especially now, to kick him out and don't really have a problem with it. just the goofy ahh jokes isn't the right reason to do it.
It seems to me that he created a toxic work environment - especially for women, and got away with it because of seniority and it seems having narcissistic personality traits.
It is illegal to sexually harass women in the workplace. Gather all the evidence you have and send it to the district attorney and he will be given a fair trial at a court of law.
Ok, he will have a fair trial in a civil court. You just have to convince the alleged victims to sue for damages. If the case has merits, it will be decided upon the available evidence.
yea i completely agree. "he's a asshole" is a perfectly good reason to not make somebody the public face of something. as i said i feel like he's one of a fairly small number of people i'd genuinely dislike spending time with
There is a lot misinformation about RMS out there, you've posted some of it. This addresses some of it https://stallmansupport.org/
"Georgia Lyle", there is no such person, the Georgia you are thinking of wrote ~3 tweets, the FSF staff who were her coworkers did not agree that they were accurate. She rarely interacted with RMS, it was not part of her job, she was spreading rumors she had heard (and posted years after she had left the FSF and had no further involvement with Free Software). It looks like she's deleted them since. I think a lot of RMS misinformation has been an attempt to support feminism at his expense, and because his personality/autism tends to make some people rather unsympathetic to him. Note, the current FSF Executive Director (who's job is to work with the board, thus RMS), is currently a woman who was on FSF staff for years before taking that job.
"In fact, Stack Overflow’s 2020 survey found that “developers who are men are more likely to want specific new features, while developers who are women are more likely to want to change norms for communication on our site,” a request that’s frequently paired with the terms “toxic” and “rude.”"
It is difficult for me to seriously treat an article that considers "rude comments" more important issue than "features". What a regular person wants is something that works. Whether it was done in a way that kept Susan happy is tertiary at best.
Is this all that RMS is accused of? If so, I am only glad I am nowhere near that scene.
edit: Come to think of it.. is the reason new software sucks so bad lately ( the focus on stupid stuff )?
> "In fact, Stack Overflow’s 2020 survey found that “developers who are men are more likely to want specific new features, while developers who are women are more likely to want to change norms for communication on our site,” a request that’s frequently paired with the terms “toxic” and “rude.”"
> It is difficult for me to seriously treat an article that considers "rude comments" more important issue than "features". What a regular person wants is something that works. Whether it was done in a way that kept Susan happy is tertiary at best.
I think it's worth considering the fact that calling an issue "stupid stuff" and saying a "regular person" wouldn't care about it is essentially a self-reinforcing confirmation bias. Most people won't try to talk to someone about something if they know they're going to get a dismissive response, but that wouldn't stop them from being more vocal about it in an anonymous survey. If your daily experience differs so drastically from the reported survey results, how would you tell if it was the survey's data that was inaccurate or your own anecdata? Alternately, if you think the results are accurate but that the people who responded to it are out of touch, how would you be able to tell if it wasn't them but actually you?
I know it goes against everything people are being taught today, but not all opinions are equally valid. I will hesitate for a little bit since I know for a fact I do not have all the answers, but eventually my internal firewall will start marking things as "drivel". To be perfectly honest, it is this weird insistence that I not only have to agree with someone's opinion, but act on someone else's belief that I almost automatically pull back and say no. This is not how a conversation works. So thanks to those vocal individuals I mark the use of word "toxic" and automatically dismiss it as a person with no arguments.
<< If your daily experience differs so drastically from the reported survey results, how would you tell if it was the survey's data that was inaccurate or your own anecdata? Alternately, if you think the results are accurate but that the people who responded to it are out of touch, how would you be able to tell if it wasn't them but actually you?
And here I do not have a good answer that would scale. The dismissive approach works well on an individual level. I think experience ( and knowing that surveys have all sorts of flaws ) helps. Now, anecdata has its own obvious issues, but at certain point anecdata becomes data.
<<I think it's worth considering the fact that calling an issue "stupid stuff" and saying a "regular person" wouldn't care about it is essentially a self-reinforcing confirmation bias.
You might be right on confirmation bias. Still, I challenge you to defend the proposition that focusing on making a given piece of software work or adding features is less important than "toxic" behavior. As a user, do I care that, say, notepad++ was created in an environment that was not "toxic" or that it does what I want it to do and that it does it well? To me, at least, the choice is simple and not controversial at all.
> I challenge you to defend the proposition that focusing on making a given piece of software work or adding features is less important than "toxic" behavior. As a user, do I care that, say, notepad++ was created in an environment that was not "toxic" or that it does what I want it to do and that it does it well? To me, at least, the choice is simple and not controversial at all.
For starters, the survey was given by StackOverflow, so my interpretation is that these responses were given by people about what they would prefer as developers working with other developers. It seemed to me that the idea was that some people did not feel like they were being treated fairly when as members of the tech community, but I guess I could be inferring incorrectly.
As for the actual question, this seems similar to me to the question of whether we have obligations to others in society or if things are "everyone for themselves". This obviously is predicated on the fact that the complaints of the survey responders are valid (which my previous comment is my attempt at explaining my view on), but assuming they are valid complaints, the question is whether I should care about the treatment of people who made a product that I use. There's a spectrum of potential issues that they could have to deal with; I don't pretend that everyone will react the same way to if notepad++ were being developed by workers who were forced without pay to develop 12 hours a day to if they no longer got free coffee in the break room, but there's undoubtedly a line we have to draw somewhere about what we're willing to tolerate and even a spectrum on what "toleration" looks like. Personally, I don't have any issue with the idea that the people who make the software I use would insist on an environment free from harassment, and I wouldn't want new features at the expensive of the treatment of the people who make it. This feels pretty simple and non-controversial to me, but I guess this could be my own confirmation bias that makes it surprising that anyone would feel differently.
A lot of people who have 'worked for' him consider him to be a terrible boss. There has been many posts like this over the years, when a true believer figures out the leader is terrible at leading. You could even look at the history of FOSS organizing as setting up alternative organizations where RMS has no pull. Even Debian was about "laws, not men".
I also do not believe Stallman 'got' SaaS or ever even really understood the basic economics of the software industry. Emacs was originally SaaS software if you weren't aware.
I think it's clear RMS has some good principles, and an absolutely awful personality that doesn't make for a good leader.
There's a solution to that: shove him off somewhere to the side, enshrined as a "spiritual leader" people consult with for nuggets of wisdom, and then 99% of the actual functioning of the organization is done by other people.
If anything, I think Stallman represents an increasingly-obsolete view of computer freedom. It is perhaps worth meditating on what happens to the protagonist of A Man For All Seasons.
This article gives good reasons why modern financial incentives make it increasingly irrelevant if software is copylefted (the Corps interpret copyleft as damage and route around it; the free software community has not demonstrated enough organizational energy or proactive vision to outpace moneyed development with their copyleft solutions). Meanwhile, some of the Fundamental Freedoms are philosophically undercut in the Cloud era; why should you have the right to view the source code or modify what runs on someone else's computer? The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud," which is head-in-sand ignorant of how modern developers value things.
New approaches are needed, and the approach represented by GNU has run its course. The Overton Window moves regardless of RMS's opinion these days
> Meanwhile, some of the Fundamental Freedoms are philosophically undercut in the Cloud era; why should you have the right to view the source code or modify what runs on someone else's computer?
Because the user should have that right regardless of where the program happens to execute.
> The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud,"
You're welcome to that opinion, but you're just arguing against Free Software in general; that's exactly the same argument as saying that the user has no right to inspect or control the software running on their own machine.
No idea why you're being downvoted. You're completely right. Computing is increasingly centralized in corporation servers. Our computers are becoming appliances. We're no longer in control. We can't run software on them without some corporation's blessing.
Free software presupposes free general purpose computers. It assumes we can write software and run it on our devices. What is the point of free software if we can't run it because the corporation that actually owns the keys to the machine won't sign off on it?
> The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud," which is head-in-sand ignorant of how modern developers value things.
Lol wut? I feel like this comment is willfully ignoring hugely popular projects such as Nextcloud! There are lots of GPL web services that are available which provide 'Cloud' functionality without being crazy invasive proprietary data-mining platforms....
It seems to me that these services certainly reflect a good portion of 'GNU Philosophy'...
RMS has been right about so much and continues to be proven right again and again. And he has written and maintained so much software that is the bedrock of the modern internet. I’m bewildered by the prevalent anti-RMS sentiment I see so frequently on “hacker” news. Is he opinionated? Definitely. Vocal and perhaps even forceful about asserting his opinions? Yep! But guess what, this is _his_ software and FSF vision we collectively decided to build so much on top of over the last several decades. He gets to call the shots until he really does step down and until then, we’ll, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Lets stop talking about him like he’s an infirm wingnut who’s past his expiration date now. His message and position has stayed the same since day one and frankly I think more of the people that depend on his work should revere and respect that a bit more instead of the relentless attitude of entitlement he seems to meet so often. There’s a crowd that has complained and continues to do so wrt Linus and it’s just as bad of a look imo.
> I’m bewildered by the prevalent anti-RMS sentiment I see so frequently on “hacker” news.
Why would it bewildering? The guy created a great thing, but is now one of the main impediments in the way of its success. I'd rather have his principles outlive him. His creation is more important than he is.
I appreciate the debate and tension around this issue on HN. I think it is dangerous to consider a situation as complex and multifaceted as RMS to be settled and not worth discussion.
That being said, I 100% agree with you! I don't care if everyone considered RMS to be a saint. Free software is about freedom and software, not a cult of personality.
I’m bewildered by the prevalent anti-RMS sentiment I see so frequently on “hacker” news.
Look at who many people here work for. Look at the power that Big Tech holds. Look at my dead comments and realise that there's a crucial battle boiling beneath the surface, one that they definitely don't want you to know about. The war on general-purpose computing is continuing and they are going after those taking the side of freedom.
This comment is a few decades late. Big Tech doesn't think of RMS, because he's really irrelevant and doesn't stand in their way.
Why? Because he does a bad job in his role of movement leader and made himself irrelevant.
He's irrelevant even in niche circles -- how often do places like HN speak of anything related to RMS other than the drama of him being removed and later re-added to the FSF? Compare with the coverage of other prominent figures. For them we typically have regular non-drama news of what they're actually doing. For RMS we mostly have discussions of "is he a dinosaur?" and once in a while, "Stallman was right about something he said 10 years ago".
I think you'd find most people who work in those companies agree with Stallman at a fundamental level, and broadly support Free Software and the ideas around it. Very few of them support Stallman or think his behavior is helping anything, however.
I think you'll find that they actually don't, and are often openly hostile to his ideas and Free Software. Companies generally prefer more permissive licensing. OSI Open Source was designed for them.
They use morality to strike against powerful men and in turn feel a snippet of power themselves.
No need to contribute to free software to the same degree as him to prove him wrong, that's too much trouble. Their contribution shall be retribution. A destructive action, instead of a more commited creative one.
"but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
Here is where RMS went astray with this GCC AST thing.
He's insisting that technical barriers be erected to protect something, when that is the job of licensing.
We would never take some GPL-ed shared library, say, and cripple the API with inconveniences so that proprietary applications can't take advantage of it. That will cripple the free applications too. Of course you make the API technically excellent and complete, and then protect that with the license; it's a GPL violation to link it and call it from a GPL-incompatibly-licensed program.
Same with GCC: expose the full AST so that people are unblocked in doing whatever analysis they want, and protect that with licensing, if you must.
By favoring technical barriers, Stallman is being exactly like the jealous company that didn't give him the information to fix the printer, without signing an NDA.
"You can view a printed version of a partial AST, in a pitch dark room, using a tiny spotlight, and take only handwritten notes, provided you sign this agreement ..."
I think that there are benefits to not exposing the AST in a compiler, for example the freedom to radically change its internal structure from one release to another without having to maintain backward compatibility with software that use the now public API. He could have used this argument instead, having a public API will put more work on the developers that now have to maintain it.
But the argument that this will make it easier for proprietary software to use GCC to parse code doesn't make any sense.
The whole GPL/LGPL dichotomy requires that GPL programs not be usable as part of commercial software. They can discourage linking through copyleft, but they also need to not let their code have any other API, such as an LSP for editors to get type info. Gcc has been hampered by not having import/export between passes for decades. The LLVM ecosystem shows how useful that is.
But then it sounded like he wanted multiple functions in such a library so that the AST is never revealed in its entirety. (As if someone clever couldn't find a way to use them all and piece the AST together?)
The underlying problem is this elephant in the room: no matter how you set up the access to the AST, it will be legal for someone to make a GPL-ed utility program which uses that API, and dumps the data to standard output. That utility can then be used in a proprietary development ecosystem, the same way that GNU Bash, Make, CoreUtils, Awk and everything else can be used in a proprietary ecosystem.
The subtext behind RMS's arguments is to make it difficult to write such a utility such that it pieces together the entire AST. That's probably why he was vehement on the techincal solution.
I'm amazed Stallman just doesn't come to the conclusion "so what?" like everyone else.
If someone user finds value in GCC just as a parser, maybe that's better than them not finding any value in it at all.
Say someone uses an IDE, whereby GCC is used to help with completion, refactoring and all that. But the actual product that is built for the target uses some proprietary toolchain (e.g. licensed ARM stuff, run on Windows). The back-end parts of GCC aren't used at all. Well, "so what?"
That's like saying it's a crime someone proprietary app only used malloc and strcmp from glibc, but rolled its own printf.
What if GCC was used to compile the code, but only to obtain diagnostics and maybe run some unit tests? That happens, and I suspect it really bugs Stallman.
Stallman is an ideologue, in every sense of the word; a crusader for free software. His worldview can sometimes be so small you can't fit your head inside it. That sometimes means he makes management decisions about Emacs optimizing for being a word processor, when nobody else in open source cares about word processors. That also sometimes means he makes management decisions about GTK optimizing for more accessibility, when nobody else in open source cares about accessibility. You can't have the good without the bad. If RMS were to be replaced, there would be no more high profile sillinesses, but at the same time, a huge number of things would slowly get worse because he's the only one who cares enough about them.
By high profile silliness do you mean arguably piloting free software into the ground?
GCC is almost literally nonexistent as a place for new compiler research in large part thanks to previous stallmanist approaches to managing, this isn't just some cutesy hypothetical about principles and so on.
The above also ignores stallman's manner around people.
I believe that you are referring to the old LLVM modularity? That is old news. GCC is now (reportedly¹) better in C++20 standard compliance, and this will probably not change, since, (reportedly²) both Google and Apple have moved away from LLVM involvement.
> [...] this will probably not change, since, (reportedly) both Google and Apple have moved away from LLVM involvement.
Correction: according to what you've linked, it is not LLVM but clang. This correction would be extremely important for my reply.
I can't see how is that a good news for GCC. This (and other incidents) suggests that both companies have lost interest in investing the future of C++, and they were already building their own languages for a long time. You can argue that they wanted to bend the standard and implementations as they see fit---and it's partly true, otherwise why would you want to join at all---but it's probably more likely that C++ is becoming irrelevant at least in some applications. And if the language is made irrelevant, a better standard compliance means nothing.
Exactly, all the later languages that were made to replace C++ (Swift, Rust, Zig) all rely on LLVM, so it has become a much more important project than in the past. (And I'll bet Google's new Carbon language will also rely on LLVM.) It's just that it's so hard and time-consuming to write a compiler backend with all the latest optimization techniques, and GCC's backend isn't as much as flexible than what LLVM brings to the table.
One of my disappointments is that Richard Stallman fails to see the big picture of people should care about free software. He’s a hacker so he feels like the best way to sell his position is “ok you can have the source and edit it”. But to the vast majority of humanity this is basically irrelevant! They can’t code, the don’t want to code, having access to the code is “basically useless”. The things people actually want: accessibility, data portability, privacy, agency-they’re all as relevant and universal as ever. But the GNU and RMS remain dead set on “oh we’ve got to push everyone to adopt the GPL”, which I respect but fundamentally ends up being an ineffective use of resources. When you train a pubic to care about free software and understands why they need it, that’s how you get true freedom. Leaning into the fringe appearance, and definitely continuing to remain socially inept if not entirely inappropriate, is just shooting yourself in the foot.
With Chromium and VSCode, there are 'pro-privacy' forks which which remove the telemetry from the codebase. With Windows, there isn't an equivalent ad-free option.
I think "freedom to manipulate the source code" may not be a popular point, but it seems foundational in that it restricts what the software can otherwise get away with.
e.g. I don't like the idea of buying 'smart' TVs which come bundled with adware.
> But to the vast majority of humanity this is basically irrelevant!
Oh, it's very, very relevant. For example, I can't think of a person who wouldn't ask a programmer friend, or hire a freelancer, to remove ads from their devices, if they had the option to do so.
People want to control their software, even if they're not programmers, because people like being in control of their lives - it's natural. I don't see how could anyone argue against human desire to control their own machines.
Emacs is his baby in a way.
It is his privilege to develop it in a way that he believes is best.
Much like how Linus has a decent say in what happens to Linux.
Why should RMS change how he does something because some big corporation can write a propriety editor, and a proprietary compiler?
This is nothing new. There were plenty of proprietary compilers at the time the project started and that was one of the primary reasons to write it.
Instead of bitching about leadership on a free software project and feeling entitled to have it changed to yours and others liking
If you feel strongly that Emcas or GCC is heading down the wrong path,
you are 100% free to fork it and within the limits of the license write
whatever features you want,
Perhaps if it is hugely successful or the features do turn out to be
killer additions GNU may decide to add some to Emacs.
In so far as fighting the good fight for Libre software it is the same fight he has fought for decades and the way the world has developed lately I would say most of these predictions have come true.
RMS is extremely smart and extremely dedicated, and he has made a lot of sacrifices due to his principles.
Yes, he is stubborn (So is Linus) and eccentric.
So what?
How the F can people claim to be fighting for an "inclusive society"
if you can't let a guy, be a bit eccentric.
If anything, we need more eccentric people in a society that is turning ever more and more homogenic.
And please consider that Linux would not exist today if it was not
for the GNU compiler, and a lot of the GNU free tools.
Today they can be replaced but back then it was available for free.
Compilers used to cost a lot of money way back when and a lot still do.
> Emacs is not an independent project, and it isn't governed by its contributors. I'm the head of the GNU Project, and that includes Emacs.
Honestly adore this attitude and wish more devs had the self-assuredness to run their projects this way. Assured not only in the their vision but in their ability to have a vision.
When that’s missing it becomes really easy to write software that creates tedium instead of freeing us from it. There’s even a word for when a project’s vision is to avoid vision. The one word in a readme that fills me with more dread than any other — “unopinionated”.
Translation: “Here, you make all the decisions, because the only way I know to avoid having any Wrong Opinions at this scale is to have none”. If the concept of “unopinionated software” had a favorite color it would be “What’s yours?”
"Unopinionated" is not about leadership at all, it's generally about providing a library versus a framework, and the "less opinionated" it is the more "library-like" the code is.
The vast majority of open source software is effectively maintained by people who don't give a shit about users/contributors, obviously, as they're unmaintained github projects.
It's fine for the majority of projects because no one uses them. What's weird is that anyone uses emacs when it's led by a fairly incompetent developer and a radically incompetent leader.
I honestly think the word itself is great example of a meme in the Dawkins sense, an actual non-biological living thing that keeps living by influencing humans to become its hosts by tickling all of our senses at once:
It’s visually pleasing to see written out and to scan over, at least in my sans-serif browser font — unopinionated.
- Check our how it has a completely uninterrupted horizontal sight line!
- The unbroken visual falls along the midline for a nice balance between the above and the below. The eye can’t stray into words on adjacent lines like it could if we were focusing along the word’s baseline or at cap height.
- The properties of the leading ‘u’ glyph welcomes the eye to start reading the word left-to-right. The ‘u’ has nothing below baseline or above midline to be a visual obstacle blocking any angle of entry to the word. If our focus enters the ‘u’ anywhere below x-height the first thing we see is its happy smiling bowl with nothing sharp telling us to look away. If our focus enters it at or above x-height, the two sharp stems would look unwelcoming, but the adjacent ‘n’ is ‘u’s perfect opposite and makes that entry angle into something unique, a yin/yang sort of thing, pulling our eye’s motion into at the very least a diagonal. Without the ‘n’ our gaze could enter the word straight down and just sit in the bowl of the ‘u’ instead of continuing to scan right.
- The tittles on the ‘i’s prevent the above-sight-line negative space from overwhelming, breaking it into two wide and one thin segment.
- The ‘n’ shoulder connects the two tittles into something like a paperclip that feels as though it pins our line of sight tightly to the tops of the lowercase glyphs.
- The ‘ini’ group has its own line of vertical symmetry, like a cute li’l’ sans-serif Solomon’s Temple, and the location of that group provides a nice thick natural visual center point in the word as a whole. It sits a little bit left of actual center, but that gets balanced by the two ascenders on the right side.
- The ‘t’ ascender would break our sight line, but its cross-stroke falls right along the line of sight, ensuring it will always be the first part of the ‘t’ we see, so it will never fail to grab and hold our gaze until our focus is safely on the other side having dodged the ascender completely.
- The ‘p’ descender balances the ‘t’ ascender both in horizontal distance from the word’s visual center and with its opposite orientation. Those qualities combine with the ‘n’s shoulder to imply possible rotational motion of the entire word around that origin.
- The ‘d’ ascender would break the sight line of it weren’t the last glyph, but instead it provides a nice satisfying perpendicular terminus, stopping our left-to-right scan at the best possible place where we’ve seen the entire word but get made to linger and take it in for just a moment longer.
Its syllables form a naturally musical staccato rhythm, and the necessary mouth movements feel physically pleasant to say — unopinionated
It’s a perfectly-sized dose: six syllables is long enough to be satisfying, and any longer than a single word would be too much. It’s the same feeling as picking the ideal number of Skittles® in a single handful:
- Three is too few and just feels like the remains of a previous mouthful as soon as you start chewing.
- Four is like the minimum that won’t make you think “I should have taken one more”.
- More than seven and the whole wad turns into a brick around the back of your teeth so you can’t even chew properly to break it down.
- But six? Perfect sweet spot.
The word as a whole has a smooth rising and falling sound when spoken. Say it over and over and you can feel it like a sine wave — unoPINIONatedunoPINIONatedunoPINIONated
Emotionally, saying the word has that ‘90s-cool-guy vibe, like I’m smart enough to be able to care about things if I, like, wanted to, man. Stop, like, harshing my buzz.
This comment is not a joke in any way. I still hate the word’s meaning but admit it has an impressive form :)
Ok, one joke: I just spent like 15 minutes trying to think of things I like about this word because I thought it would be funny to be opinionated about ‘unopinionated’.
I met him once. He used the urinal beside mine, despite there being three available and myself not being in the centre. He was wearing socks, no shoes or sandals, in the public bathroom.
Later we argued over whether digital artistic content should be made freely available, and he took the side of unequivocal defense of a user's right to resell, regardless of there being any derivative effort, and with no obligation to compensate the creator. He had no clear concept of how to compensate the original artist aside from an initial work for hire model.
In his desired reality, wealthy persons would provide patronage to artists and artists would have no other source of income, because redistribution would be free. It's positively medieval.
> In his to desired reality, wealthy persons would provide patronage to artists and artists would have no other source of income. It's positively medieval.
Do you prefer copyright where someone can make one thing in their 20s and live until the end of their lives doing nothing else but reaping the money from what they did once?
Or dead authors still being paid for their creations?
Dead authors don't get money for new books. If people are buying the books, who gets the money? Assets have value dictated by their money generation over time. Assets can also be owned by companies. Should the a book owned by a company suddenly be out of copywrite because the author dies? Should a movie made by hundreds of people be free at some point when the writer or director dies?
Should a house be open to the public after the owner dies? Should it go to some government?
There isn't any sort of consistent logic here. Once you think about assets, companies, multiple people working on something etc, it will never make sense to think someone dying means all their work should be free unless they own it and make it free in their will.
Houses are rivalrous goods. The whole reason IP is treated differently is that it's non-rivalrous. One theatrical company doing a production of Macbeth does not stop another. One orchestra performing a Mozart concert does not stop another. There isn't a consistent logic between rivalrous real and personal property and non-rivalrous intellectual property precisely because they're different things.
The right to legally enforcable exclusivity in intellectual property regimes like copyright or patents stems from a balancing exercise between incentivising the work being done (i.e. authors writing books, filmmakers producing films, drug companies researching cool life-saving medical innovations etc.) and ensuring that at some point it reaches the public domain (plus a bit of practicality).
You can say 'rivalrous' as many times as you want, but none of this explains why an IP asset should suddenly be public domain when someone dies. You didn't answer any of the questions about various scenarios like company ownership or lots of people being involved in something's creation.
Also there are already time limits for things to be in the public domain and medicine patents expire and become public domain, so I'm not sure what your point is.
I think that you are very fairly communicating his position, which leaves me grossed out that you're probably fairly communicating the preamble. I agree with him. It doesn't bother me if that wipes out entire categories of art. I guarantee that the world will remain filled with art, even if I have to make it all myself.
There will always be art, but we have a way of compensating artists that allows them to create art for a living. He proposed no alternative that would allow this.
I've seen a few articles lately that suggest that the FSF needs to get with the times and stop being so militant about free software. But if you're looking for an organization whose philosophy is "free software is a good idea, but social issues in the tech community are more important, and who cares about 'microcode' or 'blobs'", there are already a lot of organizations that can offer that for you. That's Mozilla, that's the GNOME Foundation, to a first approximation that's every other open-source-related organization. Why does the FSF need to change to become the same as everyone else?
(If you're looking for a text editor developed under that philosophy, I can recommend Visual Studio Code.)
RMS' stance on the technical topics concerning Emacs here (which the larger portion of the article is about) really doesn't make any sense even in the context of strict free software advocacy. This is just hurting both the Emacs project and the reputation of the FSF.
It is a technical solution to the problem of GCC being used by proprietary software without them giving back anything to the community.
I think he made the wrong call and should have opened it up and gone for a re-licensed GCC under the AGPL or something similar if crippling proprietary software was so important.
Are you arguing that FSF should deliberately disregard social issues to be different? Do social issues waste valuable care that could be spent caring free software? Or is there another reason to be frustrated by people caring about the social impact of their organization?
Free Software Foundation deals with the issue of software freedom.
Not diabetes, not the poor children in Africa, not child slavery in China, not social justice - just software freedom.
If they start caring about other issues unrelated to software freedom, they would have to divert their resources from the issues of software freedom to something else. Demanding they care about other issues is demanding they care less about software freedom, as their resources are limited, naturally.
There's an argument to be made that they shouldn't actively make other things worse in the process of pursuing their own cause.
It's the difference between "we're not actively campaigning for improvements around climate change because that's not our thing" (morally neutral, probably) and "unlimited free intercontinental supersonic jet flights around the world for people who license their work under the GPL" (may encourage GPL usage but at a high cost in pollution).
(Controversial thread disclaimer: this is a counterargument solely to your comment, and not an expression of any particular opinion outside of what I explicitly wrote here.)
You don't have to be an activist just because you give a damn. Being a good citizen in the world means caring enough about other people to not trample them. Not caring simply means not bothering to check if you're stepping on people and not changing course once you found out that you have.
For example, having a spokesperson who some people actually listen to publicly question whether a very young woman coerced by Jeffrey Epstein into having sex with his friend can justifiably say she was "assaulted." If he actually cared as much about his social impact as his friend's justifiably ruined reputation, he'd have just shut his mouth at the very least. If you think that's an unreasonable expectation then that's just sad.
How exactly does RMS voicing his thoughts and opinions make anything worse?
You mention the phrase "stepping on people". What exactly do you mean by that - both in general, and in the specific case you've mentioned?
Do you mean that people don't like his words, and he's figuratively "stepping on them" by expressing his thoughts? Because it seems to me that the only argument against him is that "some people don't like his words". If there is anything more to it, I'd really like to know.
Do you think the court of public opinion is consequential? If not, why did he make those public statements in support of his friend? The accusation is almost certainly true, and a public figure publicly casting doubt upon and minimizing the woman's claims is consequential. If he was talking privately among friends or some random person whose words had no more influence than the next person, then who gives a shit. That's not the case.
> Do you think the court of public opinion is consequential?
No. The purpose of FSF is not to be demagogues and bend at every whim of the mob. Public opinion is driven by gossip and yellow press, not by facts and original sources - which was clearly demonstrated when the yellow press accused RMS of saying the girl who approached Minsky was "entirely willing", when all he said is that many scenarios are possible, but he believed that it was plausible that she was directed by Epstein to "present herself as entirely willing" - which was not nearly the same, but was taken out of context by the yellow press in order to destroy his reputation.
Now please apply the same principle to yourself and stop avoiding the questions that I have asked:
> How exactly does RMS voicing his thoughts and opinions make anything worse?
> You mention the phrase "stepping on people". What exactly do you mean by that - both in general, and in the specific case you've mentioned? Do you mean that people don't like his words, and he's figuratively "stepping on them" by expressing his thoughts?
> No. The purpose of FSF is not to be demagogues and bend at every whim of the mob.
By him discussing it publicly he did exactly that. Everybody likes to think their opinion stems from pure reason and logic while everybody else is just an angry mob driven by pure hysteria, but he was just as full of shit as any other random person talking about it. However, he was a public figure speaking about it publicly. If he had just shut his mouth, he would have been doing what you insisted he actually did. Giving a shit doesn't mean you have to be an activist. Sometimes you just need to recognize that you don't know any better than anyone else, and especially if you're a public figure, keep your mouth shut.
> Public opinion is driven by gossip and yellow press
Public opinion being based on yellow journalism and gossip means it's bullshit, but it absolutely doesn't mean it's inconsequential.
> How exactly does RMS voicing his thoughts and opinions make anything worse?
> You mention the phrase "stepping on people". What exactly do you mean by that - both in general, and in the specific case you've mentioned? Do you mean that people don't like his words, and he's figuratively "stepping on them" by expressing his thoughts?
I explicitly answered these questions. As a public figure-- someone whose words are read and commented on by many people-- I think it's pretty obvious that his public statements affect public opinion. You still didn't provide any real answer to whether you think that a) public opinion isn't consequential (as opposed to truthful or trustworthy,) or b) whether public figures don't influence public opinion with public statements. So? If you do think public opinion is consequential but don't understand how a public figure publicly questioning the account of an alleged a rape victim constitutes stepping on someone, I'm not sure what to say.
I don't - I thought I made myself clear. The "public" is not a hivemind - what you're talking about is the mob of cancel culture that wants to remove everything they deem to be thoughtcrime from the face of the earth. The mob doesn't donate to FSF. I don't give a shit about the mob, RMS doesn't give a shit about the mob, and neither should you.
> public figure publicly questioning the account of an alleged a rape victim constitutes stepping on someone
People, whether public figures or not, should have the right to discuss any topics as long as they do it in a rational and civilized manner. The fact that you don't like the topic does not give you the right to silence others. Hiding behind the "public opinion" is just an attempt to project your own values onto that intangible boogeyman who you deem, for some reason, an authority.
You keep saying that public perception comes down to speech someone doesn't like. In this context-- publicly questioning the word of someone victimized by the highest profile and influential serial sexual predators in recent times-- the idea that such speech is merely "disliked" is beyond obtuse.
Why would Peyton Manning implement a broad sweeping smear campaign against a faculty member that (not publicly) accused him of sexual assault? Why would that be a problem for the victim? Just personal preference, right? Delicate sensibility? Why would other victims ask to be shielded by anonymity in public disclosure?
Why do people make statements that convey anything besides entertainment or data? Why do companies pay influential people millions upon millions to deliver those messages? Why does Stallman advocate instead of just writing software?
Federal Rule 412 says that a sexual assault victim's reputation can sometimes be used as evidence in civil cases. Could questioning statements influence people's opinions on someone's trustworthiness, even subconsciously?
Recruiters almost always search for someone's online presence, and many are eager to avoid potential controversy, especially in higher-level jobs.
Public opinion destroyed Monica Lewinsky's life. Or maybe she merely disliked the public flaying of her credibility from a million different angles?
A Ukrainian truck driver in New England was quietly acquitted of DUI after a head-on collision killed seven motorcyclists from a local USMC motorcycle club. It turns out his drug use was 10 hours earlier, and the motorcyclists were all shitfaced, but public discourse on the matter shows he was convicted on the first day. The little commentary on the acquittal indicates most people haven't changed their opinions.
What are the chances of one of these people's potential future boss having such an opinion? What's the likelihood of that affecting a hiring manager's opinion, even subconsciously?
--
I initially posited that people in positions of influence shouldn't value their desire to publicly voice their opinions over the consideration of the adverse effects on others, especially those with vastly less influence who couldn't hope to defend themselves.
We've arrived at a point where you say he shouldn't care if his words affected public opinion and, consequentially, negatively affected someone with vastly less influence. You justify this and nibble at the general premise by saying nobody should care about public opinion and that people who influence it shouldn't consider the consequences of their speech (unless... giving them money) because it shouldn't matter.
In summary, you have a different ethical take on it and, despite lots of typing, haven't countered any of my assertions except that he should give a shit. Your opinion is not uncommon. Many argue that freedom of speech essentially means speech occurs in a vacuum, so we can all ignore the consequences of that speech, and anyone who disagrees is thin-skinned. And the funny thing about mob members is that they all like to think they're individual thinkers whose values are derived from pure reason, logic, and proven philosophical constructs, while those that disagree are irrational maniacs controlled by groupthink.
Anyway, you'll keep responding by restating the same subjective values you started with couched in arguments that nibble at the general premise instead of addressing my actual statements, so I'm done engaging with you on this.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Please bring forward the link to a page containing the joke, so we can be on the same page before continuing this discussion.
I don't think the FSF should do anything just to be different. But I think it's a good idea for different organizations to work to improve the world in different ways. The FSF should focus on its core mission, and they should leave space for other organizations to focus on other issues.
Agreed. It seems to me that ensuring the freedom of free software addresses a fundamental social issue that without RMS never would have been met and could have been lost several times along the way.
I see a lot of references to getting with the times and modernity in the complaints against RMS. I don't see much in the way of complaint that GNU is insufficiently free-as-in-freedom, which is the only thing I really want out of GNU.
> Why does the FSF need to change to become the same as everyone else?
I think we know why. The point is to cancel Stallman and thus his ideas and free software. People that actually care about the issues aren't wasting their time prioritizing this. People who want freedom dead so that they can profit are though.
So it goes. RMS represents his time: a great observation of the vital importance of software in the interplay of freedom and authority. I’m of the mind that nothing should be respected beyond its meaning, and so if RMS is no longer a great conveyor of the mission then it’s best to respect him for what he provided in his time and move on. But if he still has a role — which is the debate here — let him play it. It’s not so hard. We can operate without him without disrespecting him.
The FSF and GNU project have always been a weird mix of things:
- (Especially FSF) A political organization to advance the ideals of free software, or more generally present a more equitable vision of how software can fit into society. Here RMS is effective, but for years now as a writer and thinker and not as an organizer or administrator. Here lots of others are qualified for those roles, but RMS has spent decades driving many of them off.
- (Especially GNU) A particular technical vision - probably best summarized as "a free user-programmable Unix". Here, RMS is fairly effective, but it's not clear this technical vision is good anymore. Qualitative advancement often happened via long-term, sometimes acrimonious forks (GCC, Emacs) or in parallel (Linux). A small steering committee would likely be a better approach to avoid RMS's personal technical biases and blindspots. And here again, RMS's approach has made a lot of people who could significantly contribute here uninterested in returning to try to fix this.
- A particular style of project/team management. This should have been dead, or at least not so dominant, as soon as Linux took off. But RMS has a style of working which is wildly out of sync with even his own contemporaries, let alone the current generation of programmers. And the development and administration end up bound to that, discouraging and occasionally completely forbidding anyone else.
- RMS's attempt to rebuild a social environment he had and lost at MIT. Especially for "core projects" - Emacs, GCC, Hurd - you had to be RMS's friend, or at least RMS would come to think you were his friend. This means technical disagreements would tend to get interpreted as personal betrayals, which is unproductive at best.
As long as RMS demands the organizations fulfill all of these (and especially the last) role, the good parts will never succeed dragging the bad parts along.
My job over the past several years has been to work on IDE integrations for a language (Hack, Flow). Prior to that I worked on C#/VB "Roslyn" system at Microsoft, which is entirely about exposing the internals of the compiler to plugins.
Autocomplete isn't really helped by the AST. Here instead is how it works:
(1) Query the backend "at the specified line+col in the file, what context are we in?"
(2) The context might be a qualified identifier, e.g. "foo.|" or "foo.ba|" or "MyFoo::|", in which case the context will have to tell you the type of the thing to the left of the qualifier. You then make a second request to the backend to ask for a list of members of that type. (This requires you have some common language with the backend for referring to types).
(3) Or, the context might be an unqualified identifier, e.g. "|" or "fo|". In this case you have to assemble a list of all possible identifiers in this position. (You might also want to assemble keywords here, but it's hardly necessary). This list will include all local variables; for this, you can use the AST so long as the semantics of your language aren't too tricky about what variables are in scope, or you might query the backend for them. The list will also include every single top-level symbol in your entire project. (Even in languages which require import or #include statements, you still want to list top-level identifiers that haven't yet been imported, because that's what a nice IDE experience is -- you help the user type this and then help them auto-insert the import).
This fact means that autocomplete has to be powered by the build system, has to know about all files in the project. Also, for large projects, there might be countless top-level identifiers across the project, maybe in the tens of thousands, so autocomplete needs some serious pre-compute assistance.
So how would one achieve any part of the above with an AST? The AST solely helps with part of the first step, allowing you to identify which AST node you're in. Then you still have to query the backend using the exact same API as above to learn the type of the qualifier to the left of the current AST node. Then you still have to query the backend to find all members of that type. And you still have to query the backend for its build-system knowledge of every type in the file.
In other words, the AST has barely helped you at all in your quest to implement autocomplete.
> RMS is nothing if not a man of principle. He really, truly believes in his ideas of software freedom in a way that I really do think very few people believe in anything these days
The thing is, RMS is also a free software extremist in ways. He uses free software exclusively. Hard to imagine living that way. At some point you will have to interact with Windows in our modern world, or interact with other proprietary software.
That said, I use Trisquel[0] as my daily driver and have no issues, but I also own a workstation with Windows 11 installed for programming and general computing. The software available for Windows is fantastic and many vendors target Windows and treat Linux as a second class citizen, so I'm forced to use Windows just to interact with our modern world.
So in a sense I'm enjoying the best of both worlds and not letting the free software ideology rule me.
To all people complaining about what this that or the other organization is or isn't doing: lead, follow, or get out of the way. Stop clickety-clacking on HN and go make the world you want.
You don't have to be the sole capo di capo to lead; nor does following mean you don't get to speak or think for yourself. Everyone involved in a group has a leadership role to take by acting in, and advocating for, ways to make the group achieve its goals.
> You, as a contributor, can advocate a certain decision, which means you present arguments why I should approve it. I don't need to advocate a decision in that sense.
A long long time ago I was a moderator at a (mostly) teenagers' forum. And back then my personality morphed into a state that may talk like that. I'm not proud of it. It lasted for a half a year or so, before I recognized that I became a jerk. I still feel the shame. I hope though that it was a good for me to see how power corrupts. I hope I'm immune to it now. But it is sad to see it in RMS.
Everyone who thinks they know how to improve what RMS does has failed to improve what RMS does themselves. If you are a more compelling free software movement leader than RMS, people will follow you. That just hasn't been done. No long winded articles will ever change that.
Ton Roosendaal is a vastly better free software movement leader than RMS, many people follow him, many corporations contribute to and support his foundation, and Blender is one of the most successful open source projects on the planet.
> many corporations contribute to and support his foundation
But corporations would never ever fund the FSF.
Google is rewriting a whole OS to avoid having to give device drivers for android.
Companies prefer to spend millions of $ to avoid the GPL. They only like MIT-like licensed open source. They hate anything that can be used to give freedom to users.
Google has forbidden the use of AGPL software completely.
This means that having support from companies is incompatible with making libre software.
Blender is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL, or “free software”).
This license grants people a number of freedoms:
You are free to use Blender, for any purpose
You are free to distribute Blender
You can study how Blender works and change it
You can distribute changed versions of Blender
The GPL strictly aims at protecting these freedoms, requiring everyone to share their modifications when they also share the software in public. That aspect is commonly referred to as Copyleft.
The Blender Foundation and its projects on blender.org are committed to preserving Blender as free software.
>This means that having support from companies is incompatible with making libre software.
Bullshit. Cygnus Support's motto was "We Make Free Software Affordable". Big companies support free software, and free software supports big companies.
>Marketing Cygnus Support -- Free Software history [...]
>We had the grandiose idea that major computer companies like Sun, SGI, and DEC would fire their compiler departments and use our free compilers and debuggers instead, paying us a million dollars a year for support and development. That wasn't quite right, but before we starved, we stumbled into the embedded systems market, doing jobs for Intel (the i960, a now-forgotten RISC chip), AMD (their now-forgotten but nice 29000 RISC), and various companies like 3Com and Adobe who had to port major pieces of code to these chips. In that market, once we fixed the tools to support cross-compiling, we had major advantages over the existing competitors, and we swarmed right through the market for 32-bit embedded system programming tools. And ultimately, we did get million-dollar contracts, such as one from Sony for building Playstation compilers and emulators. This allowed game developers to start working a year before the Playstation hardware was available. This enabled the Playstation to come to market sooner, with more and better games. [...]
>Later, after hiring more experienced executives, we discovered that our pricing was "leaving money on the table". We still needed to estimate our own costs and overheads and profits -- but we also needed to estimate how much money our work would SAVE our customer, or MAKE FOR our customer. When there was a big discrepancy in those two numbers, we could raise our price significantly, and the customer would still be happy. For example, the Sony PlayStation contract enabled Sony to ship the PlayStation months earlier (with working third party game software). Even a single month earlier of shipments would result in hundreds of millions of dollars of income for Sony. Similarly, big networking vendors like Cisco had tens or hundreds of millions of dollars riding on the introduction dates of their new products. We were selling them "insurance": if any big problems came up in the development software as they worked on the product, we'd fix them rapidly so their engineers would be able to deliver the product on time. Chip vendors, for whom we built many compilers, were betting big money on getting at least one large customer for their latest chip. Early availability of our tools allowed their customers to reliably prototype large, complex products with the chip. Our pricing gradually grew to include a percentage of the value that our work was creating out in the world, for our customers. [...]
Gumby, one of the founders of Cygnus, was just discussing gdb development on Hacker News a couple days ago:
You seem to suggest that FSF is like an orc horde where orcs will naturally follow the strongest or the most capable. The reality is that the torch of leadership has to be passed on though.
You seem to suggest that it's an insult to say that people who are interested in free software will follow the person that they think is the best leader, i.e. they're orcs following the strongest. Then you follow it up with a demand for the passing of a magic torch.
Orcs are pretty cool characters. Lotr orcs are more brainwashed, but Warcraft orcs are cooler and explicitly say that they only follow the strongest. So comparison of the FSF sympathising developer horde to orcs is not an insult.
I’m just observing that the FSF needs the magic torch to be passed on to the next generation and doesn’t believe in organic leadership changes at least at the top level.
I think we should look at the statements like that through the prism of skepticism. Whenever something like that gets said about a person alive. In the same manner, people talked about Hitler, Putin and Trump.
No living person is irreplaceable in the context of societal progress. Sometimes, after they die, we may acknowledge their role, their remarkable achievements, and their legacy.
Can we please stop idolizing RMS? I think, doing that today brings nothing but harm to the people who promote ideas of free software, Emacs aficionados, et al. I'm not claiming your statement is wrong, you may be 100% right, and who knows, long after he leaves us, we may come to believe that he was indeed worthy of adulation. But while he's still alive, let's not make it weirder than it already is. I don't want to be called a cultist because I use Emacs.
I was particularly surprised when it complains about the GC discussion without noting the words of wisdom RMS was offering: Put the maximum effort into user visible changes.
It was not that he (RMS) wanted a word processor and GC was not getting there. It was because GC improvements do not improve (in this case) user experience. It (ash) seems to think this is a sign of malevolent, not benevolent, dictatorship.
> I'm fine with using React for my personal projects, and I'd be fine with contributing to it, despite the fact that I think Facebook (the product, and the company formerly known as) has done orders of magnitude more harm to the world than even the worst possible accounting of the FSF.
I guess that's the thing with humans, we like to go along with everything.
I wonder what would happen if all the engineers were cats.
What free or open source projects have had good governance?
The motivation for neovim being forked was a frustration with having a vim PR rejected over fear that something would break. The last few years neovim and vim have competed.
'BDFL' I'd most associate with Python, where Guido van Rossum recently stepped down from the role IIRC.
There are quite a few healthy and longing projects; decades in some cases. You can't do that without good governance.
Of course sometimes that governance comes in the form of a benevolent dictator workaholic running the whole show. Nothing wrong with that as long as it works.
E.g. Linus Torvalds might not be the nicest person to deal with, but he sure gets a lot of people to contribute very meaningful changes to Linux continuously. I'd say he's an extremely effective manager of what is arguably one of the fastest evolving bits of software on this planet with a sustained modification rate of many tens of thousands of lines of code every month for decades. So, I would call that good governance.
Other projects do less well because of governance issues and inter personal issues. Not going to name names here; we all know examples of such projects.
My observation is that ideology, dogmatism can get in the way of good governance. There's a lot of OSS software that gets written and sponsored by corporations. You tend to see a lot more pragmatic attitude in projects like that. People working on those projects are getting paid to do so and are expected to do so competently, solve technical problems, and generally do things that have business value. Conflicts can happen in any project but when the conflicts are of an ideological nature, there isn't a pragmatic way of resolving those issues. Pragmatism and ideology simply don't mix. At best you can agree to disagree, which is the pragmatic thing to do.
I wish the response to RMS returning to the FSF board in March 2021 would've been more like this article instead of the self-righteous outrage we actually got.
Secondly, it seems Vim was forked for less disagreeableness from Bram than what RMS has displayed. Is there a popular fork of GNU Emacs?
More people channeling their unhappiness with RMS into something constructive by exercising the freedoms FOSS gives them and less time spent demanding the organization RMS founded become more like the OSI, EFF, GNOME Foundation, or Linux Foundation seems like it would be more productive.
I read through the thread (which was a grind, I don't recommend it - there were many good arguments made, and many cases of RMS telling people that they were pressuring him, insulting him, or did not understand the point of free software) and I was sorely disappointed that no one just bought up constexpr.
constexpr is to a first approximation a C++ equivalent to rust's macros. Being C++ it is exciting, and basically requires a correct C++ compiler to include a correct C++ interpreter.
So many words about how ineffective rms leadership is. Well, free software movement is not something exclusively belonging to FSF and Stallman. One can always start his own organization and lead the fight for free software with it, instead of complaining about the FSF fighting the previous war of the 1980s or so. Just lead the way, be the change, etc.
this seems mostly like a well written argument for the politics and procedure as well as implementation of emacs, and its absolutely worth a read.
I don't hope to see this comment beyond down vote oblivion. the author dances around a fire I want to throw myself into though. for the uninitiated, RMS as a potential sexist, and his unorthodox commentary on the age of consent in particular made him an unwanted figure. never meet your heroes, or so they say I suppose...
my burning question is what is RMS now? repentant? reflective? changed? alloyed or convicted beyond his gnu?
Even if we ignore the horrible pile of allegations against him (and we shouldn’t), I always come back to the same fundamental question.
He did some very important work at launching the idea of free software and starting important projects/groups. That’s very commendable.
What has he done in the last 20 years to seriously benefit things? He had refused to budge on software being free, and that’s laudable. But what has he done tangibly? Because all I ever see reported is software-wise is him standing in the way of things or rejecting the idea of improvements. What has he done to improve things?
If nothing else, there needs to be a clear concession plan ASAP. One refrain I kept reading when he came back to the FSF was that we needed him back because no one else could lead this movement. Really? No one? In 36 years since the FSF was founded it hasn't managed to attract a single individual with the sufficient combination of motivation, morals, and skill to replace Stallman? If that's not the definition of failure I don't know what is.
The man is 70 years old. Decent odds they'll be doing without him sooner than later.
MIT used to be place that coddled mavericks and misfits. Now they drive the Aaron Swartzes of the world to suicide if they stick to their principles too much. RMS’s time has passed. Problem is there is not a replacement.
They didn't say they were an old timer. They just used it to establish that they weren't some junior dev whose been using it for all of 4 months but now has opinions we should definitely all listen to.
10 years may not be an old-timer in Emacs terms, but it's well past the clueless newbie phase.
The number of people who have been using and contributing to Emacs continuously since the 80s probably numbers in the dozens if not less. The maintainer of Doom Emacs has been an Emacs user for about 10 years; the lead maintainer of Magic has been an Emacs user for, well I’m not entirely sure, but I’m not aware of his contributions prior to Magit which started just shy of 10 years ago; the maintainer of Projectile has been an Emacs user for about 20 years, and their major contributions started around 10 years ago. If you’ve been using Emacs for 10 years, you’ve probably seen a lot, especially if you contribute to the project. 10 years is a long time in software, whether the project has been around for 15 years or 40 years.
It’s been obvious for decades that RMS has his flaws as a software architect and product manager. Make him more perfect, address all the issues raised by the TFA about C++ AST access in emacs, and it wouldn’t change anything about whether he should be shunned: the man is a sexist, harassing creep. There’s a lot of talk here about him being a man of principle — let’s stipulate that’s true — the conclusion is, he has no sense that the most important principle is to treat others well.
While I agree in part, I think you can’t have a “flawed” but effective advocate for free software.
We kind of already have that in “open source”. What Stallman was advocating for was the far-left pulling everyone further with him.
That said, I think what actually failed him was his poor management and discipline. He couldn’t build an organization. He could inspire and advocate.
What’s troubling to me, is that no other organization or project really pushed free software in the same way. Out of the tens of thousands of people working in tech. How many were principled enough to do what Stallman advocates. Very very few, if any. And none are as effective.
- There isn't a big pool of people willing to devote time to Free Software. If we had a big pool of people who are better than Stallman and more willing to work on the cause then we'd talk about them. Stallman may not be unique, but he is rare in being simultaneously 1) principled, 2) motivated, 3) willing to work very hard for not a lot of money or prestige in the circles of power and 4) willing to put himself out there pushing a message.
I can find any number of people who are 2/4 on that list. 3/4 is rare. A lot of people who want Stallman gone are going to trade off their principles when they realise that they can get invited to very expensive parties put on by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Or plan on just fading in to the background. I think there is an interesting wound to be reopened in the Eich v. Mozilla topic on this point as well.
- No related to this article, but people have completely unrealistic standards for volunteer leadership. The man is human and has flaws. Everyone has flaws. We can tolerate some flaws in people who are doing good work.