I like the Linus view: free software is more fun, and better, and so on, so I'll work on that. It concentrates on the positive, rather than saying I want to avoid nasty closed software and telling other people what they should and should not do. Linus also seems like a much happier guy.
But that's a very different point. Stallman sees proprietary software as a violation of fundamental freedoms, like slavery is a violation of fundamental freedoms.
Linus also seems like a much happier guy.
Judging an idea based on how happy those who believe it are seems like a dangerous heuristic.
You touched on the biggest weakness of RMS point of view. If you write software, you have to fundamental right to make it free or not. If you are on the receiving end, you only have to agree with the terms. RMS turns the roles around, and wants to make the user the owner of everything.
> Can somebody suppress my rights (to share, to sing, etc.), in the form of terms?
You're making some fundamental logical errors here.
Your first premise is that you have these rights. But where's your rationale for that?
The simple truth is that you only have these rights if the objects under consideration are yours. But you have no right to share my books. You have no right to share my house. You have no right to share my property. And you have no right to sing my song.
Unless I give you my permission to do so, of course.
So, your first premise is wrong.
Your second premise is that it's suppression if you were not given all possible permissions. But you agreed to the terms with a free will. No one forced you to do that. No one pointed a gun to your head telling you what to do. In fact, you are free to do the same work I have done to author the work, in the first place.
So, your second premise is also wrong.
I don't know what your conclusion is but it's probably wrong, too, because your premises are.
I see. Sorry I misunderstood your intentions, then.
There are basically two contexts the word "right" is used: an moral and a legal context.
If the right you're talking about is an moral one, you surely can trade it. This happens all the time since people differ in moral judgements. For example, some may say you have a right to health. Assuming the premise is true, you can still "trade" it for the (subjective) benefit of smoking.
If the right you are talking about is a legal one, it depends on the law. I don't think, for example, that you could sell your right to vote. However, there are other rights you can sell. For example, copyright gives you certain rights that you may sell or trade.
What does the movie theater do to you when you enter BUT suppress your rights to sing/talk/shout/etc, on the terms that they will let you watch the movie? What does the military do to you BUT suppress your right to freely determine your life, on the terms that they will provide food, shelter, and training to you?
If the movie theater also restricted your right to write a negative review afterwards, say, it would be a bit dicey.
Some contracts that suppress rights might be defensible BUT the point is that such contract are not apriori valid.
Indeed, your the military example shows the need for limits; there's a reason that only the state can operate with the contract you describe. If a private organization could do such a thing, there would serious trouble on many fronts (private armies = bad things).
If a movie theater would want to restrict your rights to write a negative review, why would you attend that movie theater? If a contract is bad, you don't enter into it
you have to fundamental right to make it free or not
False. You do NOT have the right to restrict what I do with "your" ideas, once you've shared them with me - be it software, sonnet, or poem. The government may limit my fundamental freedom by enforcing a limited-time monopoly, but only in order to encourage you to work on your ideas.
It is NOT your fundamental right to have such monopoly indefinitely.
The issue is not the sharing of ideas, but sharing of how the software was made. It is more like saying: "if I buy your food, you have to give me the recipe or I will sue you." There is a huge difference between using gcc and knowing how it was created, for example.
Nobody is restricting you from creating a similar food or software (unless there is a patent, which is an entirely different issue). You have the right to create your version, and I have my right to sell only the product, not the process that made it.
Yet the maker of a software product can aid or hinder your ability to modify it by choosing to distribute as source or binary. That particular "right" requires no law.
I often wonder what RMS would do if he had the power to enact a law mandating that all software be free software - as a form of "positive liberty". Judging by his writings, I get the feeling he'd do it.
My copyright of a work doesn't restrict your ability to copy the idea. In fact, this is what many Open Source projects do: they copy the idea or a proprietary software, but not the software (ie. the work) itself.
That freedom stops as soon as you share it with someone else. While you can do whatever you want with your creations, those you share it with can also do whatever they want with your creations.
These fundamental freedoms can impede progress, and so the US constitution allows congress to enforce limited-time monopolies for authors on their intellectual creations. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
Uh, I don't think Stalman or anyone else wants to keep people from writing programs on they own computer and then running them however they want to.
What you're talking about is 'copyright', the right to give your creation to someone and restrict their ability to use said creation once they have it in their possession. That's more a little more complicated than ' to do what you please with your own creation'.
>> "Stallman sees proprietary software as a violation of fundamental freedoms, like slavery is a violation of fundamental freedoms."
See this is the insane part. How can anyone believe that? No one forces you to use their proprietary software. If you don't like proprietary software, write your own equivalent software and use that. (Of course these days it's sometimes hard to get your own software onto devices, but rarely is it impossible).
Actually, thanks to market forces and monopolies of various sorts, you are eventually forced to use proprietary software. The example someone else gave was Microsoft Office file formats.
Here's a better example: almost all webdesign, graphic design, and other jobs of that type want you to have experience in Adobe products. So what ends up happening is that because people want the jobs, they learn Photoshop. Now it may be a great program, but it's still proprietary and you get locked into Adobe's upgrade cycle because the latest version is The Industry Standard...always, it's fucked up how that works really.
So if someone has had experience with the GIMP or some other free software, and can do the work just as well as a Photoshop user, their resume will be dumped because the Adobe name has a lot of weight. That someone will then figure out that to get a job, they'll also have to use proprietary software.
You don't live in a vacuum where you can do what you want.
True. But what makes you think you are entitled to do what you what?
Getting a job has obviously benefits for you, otherwise you would no try to get it. But there are also always costs.
These costs include wasting time on learning how to design in the first place and quite a lot of other activities. And it may also include to get a Photoshop license.
After all, you are not required to use it for your private stuff, too!
Also, these "market forces and monopolies of various sorts" hold true for "free" software: If I'd like to get a job as a sys admin, I may have to deal with Apache and Samba althought I really, really hate it!
Where's my right of not being required to deal with Apache and Samba?
For software in education, for the state, or being used to access computerized tools needed for governance it certainly is a problem. If I can't access a government website because it's build to conform to the standards of a proprietary browser then it's everyone's problem. Same with using proprietary office applications or patent-encumbered formats.
The fact that a lot of public records are stored only to be used in proprietary software is a disturbing trend.
The output of a system and the system itself are two different things. It doesn't matter if the code powering that government website is open or not, you can't access that code.
A closed system cannot be modified at the whim of the organization that uses it if it is closed. It implies vendor dependence. With FOSS you have vendor independence and greater competition, plus promoting the local industry by not having to depend on the IBMs and Microsofts of the world for your software support.
You just said, "No one forces you to use their proprietary software." and I gave an example. Of course, it is not forcing, you can stay not opening the attachment, suppress the curiosity.
Yes, file formats /can/ be seen as a different issue, but its often the reason I end up using proprietary programs.
One can have a closed program with a open file format, but not an open program with a proprietary file format, why? Doesn't it suggest an interesting link between proprietary programs and proprietary file formats? Do you still think they are really independent issues?
The comparison to slavery may not be very good, I agree.
However, he is making a valid point and you are neglecting to see it.
Not everyone is a super-man that can ignore the influences of their environment. We have to deal with other people and their sometimes strange ideas and you're assuming that we don't, or at least you're assuming that there are no negative consequences for ignoring the rest of the environment and doing what you want.
>> "or at least you're assuming that there are no negative consequences for ignoring the rest of the environment and doing what you want."
You're right. I don't think there are. But then I'm completely against the minimum wage for similar reasons. You're not forced to get a particular job.
You can have closed proprietary programs and have completely open standard file formats.
Sure, but can you have open free programs and closed, locked-down, proprietary formats? It's a separate issue, perhaps, but it's a very closely related one.
With difficulty. There is free software that can work with proprietary formats, but those formats have to be reverse-engineered, and if the formats change, they have to be reverse-engineered again.
If rms or someone like him had never been born and the free software movement had never been started, with what would you have written your "equivalent software"? Borland C++?
I don't think just anyone could have done the same, but supposing for the sake of argument that it's true, I think not many people would have done the same, which is what compels me to respect rms in the same way as I would respect William Wallace as portrayed in the movie Braveheart. Sacrificing your life for the freedom of others takes no great feat of intellect or even physical skill, but in some ways, I think being willing to do such a thing deserves more respect than, say, proving P=NP.
Actually, it's more or less a summary pragmatism, which is a philosophy that grew out of the American civil war in response to fact that ideas people held strongly tended to lead to them murdering each other on a large scale.
According to pragmatism, the truth of an idea is at least partially determined by the effects of that idea.
That's the open source view. Practical, fun, and no attention paid to ethics.
And yet what do we see? Microsoft, Apple, etc. trying to dominate things. They don't want anyone to even think about ethics and freedom for users and developers.
Because of their actions I think it's even more important to take ethics and freedom into consideration.
It's like politics...the reason to pay attention is because everyone else is an asshole and will eventually try and screw you over in some way.
No one said anything about ignoring it completely. What I said is that I like how Linus approaches it. He spends his time making the world a better place by creating good open source software and helping others do so, as opposed to telling everyone else what to do.
It's hilarious that Miguel thinks RMS is fear-mongering when there is rightly something to fear. RMS has it right when he says,
However good or bad the CodePlex Foundation's actions, we must not accept them as an excuse for Microsoft's acts of aggression against our community. From its recent attempt to sell patents to proxy trolls who could then do dirty work against GNU/Linux to its longstanding promotion of Digital Restrictions Management, Microsoft continues to act to harm us. We would be fools indeed to let anything distract us from that.
It isn't fear-mongering when there is something to fear. Miguel also has a short memory and doesn't remember all the times Microsoft has spread FUD about GNU/Linux and free software.
Microsoft is a large company. There are different divisions with different objectives. When one part of the company tries to extend the olive branch and you come back with the pitchforks, that's not exactly encouraging the division that may be on your side that you're worth fighting for.
Who do you think has a better chance of changing Microsoft's policies? RMS or a group of people working internally?
Microsoft may be large but last I looked it wasn't a democracy. The top management of any large company is paid to bring a single 'strategic vision' to the company. Microsoft's top management clearly considered attacking open source to be in their interests when they did it previous. Seems like an indication they'll do it again.
The top management of any large company receives input and advise from their underlings. Those underlings are more likely to propose controversial changes to corporate strategy if they aren't getting tarred and feathered by the outsiders they're trying to work with.
I don't like cults. I don't like the 'cult of closed software' any more than I like the 'cult of open software'.
This is not a war, and anybody that is trying to make it look like one is manipulating people.
There is plenty of room on this planet for both closed and open source solutions, let the market decide. Long term that should skew the table in the direction of open source, you really can't compete with free.
But there will always be closed source, just as there will always be open source.
No need for all this polarizing. Miguel definitely seems to have managed to get to the 'moral high ground' in this whole argument, he comes across as reasonable and nice, but that doesn't mean that that should decide the argument.
Everybody is entitled to his own opinion, nobody is entitled to their own facts, especially not in something as objectively qualifiable(sp?) as software.
This whole 'drama queen' episode has gone on long enough, let both deIcaza and Stallman go back to their respective IDEs (at a guess, Visual Studio and Emacs) and write some code to prove their point instead of all this prose.
I don't like cults. I don't like the 'cult of closed software' any more than I like the 'cult of open software'.
What you're saying is you don't want to make a concrete decision and you want options to be open to you.
This is not a war, and anybody that is trying to make it look like one is manipulating people.
It's a war between many businesses, non-profits, users, developers, etc. Do you want to be stuck with Microsoft Windows everywhere? Or Intel's x86 hardware everywhere? Intel, Microsoft, Apple, etc. will all do what they can to kill the competition.
That's not manipulation, that's the truth. You can try and ignore it, but computer history is full of conflict between various companies who tried to force their ideas and "standards" upon the rest of the industry and on their competitors.
Maybe you just hate the word "war". Call it competition then, or conflict, or a struggle, or whatever else you want.
No need for all this polarizing.
Yes there is. One idea is opposed to the other. How can there not be polarization?
This whole 'drama queen' episode has gone on long enough, let both deIcaza and Stallman go back to their respective IDEs (at a guess, Visual Studio and Emacs) and write some code to prove their point instead of all this prose.
This is actually Stallman's point, and it was also the open source movement's point. Code is not enough. There is also the discussion of freedom or the discussion of marketing.
You want to completely ignore the discussion. I don't mind, you can step out if you like, but what you're saying is exactly what a proprietary software company would like. They don't want discussion at all because discussion means legitimizing alternatives.
If you don't want to take part in the discussion, the confrontation and war of ideas, then don't take part in it.
> What you're saying is you don't want to make a concrete decision and you want options to be open to you.
No, what I'm saying is I want to be able to make my own decision regardless of people trying to make it seem as if the one or the other side is 'evil'.
I've long ago decided the world of closed source is no longer mine. But that doesn't stop me from having respect for those that try to change the closed source world from the inside, and it doesn't stop me from having respect for those that try to keep it alive.
I just don't agree with them.
> It's a war between many businesses, non-profits, users, developers, etc. Do you want to be stuck with Microsoft Windows everywhere? Or Intel's x86 hardware everywhere? Intel, Microsoft, Apple, etc. will all do what they can to kill the competition.
Possibly. But that does not mean I'm going to have to stoop to their tactics in order to make my points. The last time I wrote software for or explicitly supported closed source platforms is very long ago.
> Yes there is. One idea is opposed to the other. How can there not be polarization?
Because there is a lot of gray stuff in between. Closed source software that ends up being open sourced. People working for closed source companies writing open source in their spare time using company resources (with approval), closed source companies donating money, equipment, programmers and other resources to open source project and so on. Dual license software, etc. To polarize means that the issues are black and white. They're not.
> This is actually Stallman's point, and it was also the open source movement's point. Code is not enough. There is also the discussion of freedom or the discussion of marketing.
So, let's do it. Let's not attack people on the other side of the imaginary divide, if it even exists. The best way to make sure that Microsoft and company are irrelevant is to make their software irrelevant. To literally outcode them. Once that's done, there is really no fighting with free.
Sure, you get football players that comment on politics, movie stars that tell you how to run a business (or a state or a country for that matter).
No offense to Brian Eno, he's a pretty smart guy and has a lot of stuff to say that makes sense, also outside his domain. (and makes interesting music, 'the pearl' is my favorite music to code by).
It's just that it does not generalize from Brian Eno to 'leaders in other fields'.
There are people that it applies to and there are those that it definitely doesn't apply to, in other words, being a leader in one domain does not automatically qualify one for comments on other fields, that varies on a case-by-case basis.
Brian Eno is exactly the kind of person for who it does seem to work.
Two shoe salesmen were sent to Africa in the early
1900's to scout the territory.
One telegraphed back: "Situation hopeless. Stop. No one wears shoes."
The other telegraphed: "Business opportunity. Stop. They have no shoes."
Nothing makes a larger difference than knowing an opportunity when you see one.
A poignant example -- but I disagree as to its import.
A perennial business strategy is to create commercial means for satisfying needs that commerce creates -- of the creation of scarcity out of abundance, be it food, education, health, etc. So it goes with software as well. On one side there is "opportunity"; on the other, exploitation.
I don't know how this relates to Miguel & Richard, though; their issue seems to be the classic "radical vs liberal" split.
Huge respect for both Miguel and RMS. Everyone knows RMS says stupid ridiculous things (like his anti-procreation posts on usenet). Seems good enough to disregard him as a nut on some issues, and a genius on others.
That said, I don't think I'll ever understand the Mono project. As a former C# coder (back in 2004), the project was doomed to failure from the getgo. No .NET developer in their right mind would use it as it'll always be lacking in features compared to Microsoft's implementation.
It's such a sad project because Microsoft gives it no love, yet has no problem using it as an example of how "open" their platform is. Seems like a complete waste of talent to me.
The larger Mono projects on Linux are built on the language and CLR features implemented in Mono; and don't rely on Microsoft libraries like WinForms. And as far as language features are concerned, the downloadable Mono compiler even implements part of the C# 4 spec.
Also, the popular Linux/Mono apps hardly work on Windows.
Actually I need not have replied; "....as it'll always be lacking in features compared to Microsoft's implementation" -- i just realized this was pure trolling. Try /.
"Also, the popular Linux/Mono apps hardly work on Windows."
How can this possibly be a good thing? It either means mono is a poor .NET substitute, or the linux mono apps are less cross platform than apps written in other languages - also a bad thing.
I've seen large mono project with unresolvable memory leak problems.
The problem is that .net is such a vast 'hunk of stuff' that there isn't any way for a single person or a small team to implement is perfectly and the imperfect implementations are fundamentally flawed - ie, memory leaks and strange bugs making mono apps fundamentally unreliable.
I found it ironic that the latter half seemed to be describing Stallman's tactics as "FUD" without actually using that term. This tactic being famously employed by Microsoft.
Of course, another layer of irony is that before Microsoft became the safe choice, this was a favourite tactic of IBM, who are now considered an open source friendly company.
What if the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt is actually justified? I don't think it's necessarily wrong to doubt or be uncertain that corporations have our best interests at heart.
The whole point of the phrase FUD is that it's an emotional response. People use it to try to overwhelm someone's rational thought process with Fear.
I think you SHOULD use past performance of a corporation as part of a rational thought process in deciding whether to use software. But FUD is never justified because emotion has no place in rational decisions.
RMS isn't insane. It's just that he's willing to extrapolate his ideas into seemingly insane territory. He is right in that corporations are making scary inroads into our rights online and with regards to privacy. But we may not agree in terms of what to do about it.
I think FOSS can "embrace and extend" just as well as Microsoft!
I've always felt that RMS is basically an extremist (every movement has them). But I think that's actually a good thing. Yeah, he says some crazy things, but his ideas are always worth listening to. It's for the best that most of us don't take such a hard line, but I think it's a good thing to have someone like RMS constantly calling us out when we stray too far from the vision. The end goal should still be a world unencumbered by closed software. We don't want to get so busy implementing .NET that we forget about that.
And I have the opposite opinion. Ideology = a lack of flexibility and a very closed mind, neither of which is a constructive state and achieves little in the long run.
Most people don't have the courage of conviction. To stake out a position with a mental framework that supports it, and to live by what that position implies, is difficult.
I don't think one can say that RMS didn't achieve much. He supplied the seed, directly or indirectly, to many free and open software accomplishments. I don't think that would have happened if he'd been wishy-washy, flexible, easy-going guy. He'd certainly have been easier to like, but probably not as effective.
And to reiterate, I don't subscribe to rms's opinion, or think he's right on everything, or anything in particular without further investigation. But I do think lack of compromise is harder than it looks.
I respect the hell out of RMS and his accomplishments. On this and some other issues I do think there is a blurriness to his ideology. Technologies don't have an intrinsic goodness or evilness to them, even DRM, it's just technology the good and the evil come from how it is used.
So I look at something like Mono, it's a remarkable piece of technology. It's a fairly lightweight managed VM, just like Java but completely and 100% opensource, built on opensource for opensource. It works too and it works pretty well at what it does. There is no "good" or "evil" component to it. Now Microsoft potentially have patents that cover parts of it that they could threaten to use, that's a risk but that risk will also expire at some point. The Linux kernel also has patents that potentially cover parts of it, including patents the Microsoft owns but that's not being treated as a taboo... RMS waters his own statement down by blurring that line between technologies and how the technologies are used.
Instead of bullying Miguel, he should bully MS to further clarify their stance and continue to open their position on the technologies used by Mono. he should be fighting to free that stuff rather than bash one of the biggest contributors to his movement.
What's there to respect about purity of ideology? Being pure and ignorant of other opinions is the easy way out. Learning and understanding alternate points of view and working with those people is what's worth respect, imho.
Being pure and ignorant of other opinions is the easy way out.
There is nothing in ideological purity that demands ignorance of other opinions. And just because you're cognizant of someone's opinion, doesn't mean you have to agree. RMS can say what he wants, and I'm sure he's not ignorant of other's opinions. If you don't like what he says, don't do what he says. If you don't like his philosophy, maybe you shouldn't use GNU software? He doesn't force you to use any software. (Which is more than can be said for lots of corporations.)
That's exactly opposite of what I think is actually going on. I don't want to get into a GPL vs BSD argument, but he does say people should not use commercial software, thus limiting their options to often less useful free software equivalents. And corporations do give you choice in usage as you can always opt to not buy software from them. A well-regulated commercial market is all about choice.
and the more we forget how much RMS did. People lose respect to him, I even heard people saying: "and what did he write? Emacs? nobody use that sh*t", the fact is, a lot of todays innovation is built on top of Stallman's work.
Precisely, but my respect for him isn't even because of hacking ability or the software that he wrote. It's because of his ideology and his willingness to dedicate his life to it so that other people may have freedom.
Hackers nowadays take free software for granted, but without rms, it may well never have happened. If we (developers who rely on open source software) can afford to compromise and parlay with the enemy now (and make no mistake, before rms got pissed at the path software development was taking and took it upon himself to start a one-man war on behalf of all of us, proprietary software was an enemy), it is because the movement has gained sufficient momentum and become too strong to destroy.
I mean, imagine the reaction of a pragmatic person to the decline of the hacker culture at MIT's AI lab, where it all started. Shrug, move on to whichever job paid the highest/offered the most interesting work, continue living life. If every hacker were pragmatic, then open source would never have gotten started. It took someone who was willing to do it when it didn't make sense to do it to get the entire movement started. I think rms was not only important, he, or someone like him was necessary at the time. He was the snowflake that started the avalanche. Come the moment, come the man, as they say, and rms was that man.
Oh well, I doubt I will convince anyone who is unable or unwilling to imagine how difficult it is to give up personal advancement for the sake of others that rms deserves respect, if not gratitude, but there it is. I think it needed to be said.
On a tangential note, is anyone else going to FOSS.my 2009 at KL? If so, are you planning to attack rms as a ninja? :)
> Hackers nowadays take free software for granted, but without rms, it may well never have happened.
Maybe, but this does not mean that Open Source would not have happend.
Project Gutenberg, for example, was already started in 1971 to to archive and digitize cultural works. The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) started in 1977. The GNU project, however, started in 1983.
In other words, the idea of sharing copyrighted works such as literature and software was known before Stallman. Basically, Stallman was quite late in the game. Additionally, other attempts to freely distribute code started after the GNU project, but independently of Stallmans ideas. For example, the Apache project, IIRC.
Overall, it's save to say that we'd have some sort of Open Source movement, due to earlier examples of code sharing and independent attempts, even if Stallman would not have done what he did.
Maybe, we'd even have a "better" Open Source movement.
Also, the ability to have an ideology does not deserve respect, per se. There were quite a few people with ideologies who made millions of people suffer.
That's a logical fallacy. It doesn't matter how much he did, if he says or does stuff today that doesn't hold water he should be called on it.
If all the software that deIcaza and Stallman helped produce would be removed from your average Ubuntu box it would probably not get into booting, let alone do something useful. That doesn't give either of them the right to pretend to speak for everybody or to try to carve up the world of software in to camps.
I'm not convinced of that. I think that to some extent it was RMSs traumatic early career experiences that set him on the path of extreme inspiration that drove the development of some of the most impressive amounts of code by a single individual.
It takes real conviction to literally dedicate your life to projects like this, and RMS has that to spare.
He's not insane, he is just the opposite of politically correct, and while that can be charming in a person that is not the perceived spokesperson of a large community when you are you'd do well to moderate your language.
If you don't it costs because it gives your opponents plenty of opportunity to claim the moral high ground.
The funny thing here is that if RMS really wishes to see closed source vs open source as a battlefield then his way of going about waging the war aids the enemy by giving them a couple of really good opportunities to get him bad PR.
All the same, here's a quote about him (lifted from wikipedia) that I agree with.
There's something comforting about Stallman's intransigence. Win or lose, Stallman will never give up. He'll be the stubbornest mule on the farm until the day he dies. Call it fixity of purpose, or just plain cussedness, his single-minded commitment and brutal honesty are refreshing in a world of spin-meisters and multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns.
I'm sorry, but however much I disagree with a lot of RMS's opinions the man has been making spot-on predictions about the development of proprietary software for over 20 years and time has only been proving him right. While many of us appreciate de Icaza's efforts on GNOME, all Mono has done is provide more validation to a fundamentally proprietary platform, when that effort could have been spent creating a FOSS stack that could rival Java and .NET while trying to solve some of their problems.
Basically he's a guy that's responsible for some quite big open source software projects (GNOME,gnumeric,mono) used by quite a lot of people.
He has also received the Free Software Foundation award for the Advancement of Free Software, which is why it is kind of a big deal when RMS turns around and calls him a traitor.
This isn't just some schmoe replying to the GNU Manifesto. This is a person replying to comments made about him by Richard Stallman. So it's not "a response to...", it is "the response to..."
I think he makes some great points. I worked at Microsoft as an Intern for a spell, and contrary to popular belief, there really are plenty of smart, hard working people there.
I wonder if the major disconnect between RMS and deIcaza is that deIcaza deals with the people at Microsoft, whereas RMS only sees them as a corporation. Thus, deIcaza might see them as a diverse and malleable entity and RMS would not. Of course, I don't have the inside scoop here, so I'm just conjecturing and could be completely wrong.
I interned there as well, and not only did I find plenty of intelligent people there, (including you, what's new Mark? ;) but I also found a hotbed of innovation and unique ideas. I think it's annoying how so many of my peers treat the company like it's a collective of unimaginative, unintelligent sellouts.
I honestly think RMS is a religious nut in a closet. Sure he has his achievements, but that doesn't give him the right to say what is right and what is wrong. Times have changed and there are people who know better than him about the current problems. Mono is itself cool enough that the community around it will fight against any onslaught. We don't need dictators anymore, we need explorers.
