Because frankly, some of the almost religious overtones of rms and the FSF were just nutty, and a certain portion of the community was actively driving commercial use away.
You know why the FSF and rms come across as "nutty" at times? Because without them, and without their voices being occasionally heard, PC hardware would have been as completely tied to Microsoft by now as Apple is to OSX, and we'd certainly have had another copyright extension act to boot. If they have to be loud and repetitive at times,
No, but it doesn't invalidate what they were deadset right about. For whatever Stallman's many faults, there is an obvious undercurrent of corporate interests behind the current opposition to the FSF. The GPL is simply a thorn in the side of anyone who wants to freeload off open source software.
It is not about freeloading. Google has enough smart engineers and enough money to buy them off from all over the world and have them write their own OS.
It is about eliminating competitors. Free Software removes "software" as a distinguishing factor. The only way to work in that market is branding. Steve Jobs did that at Apple but others suffer from being run by geeks. How do you become wealthy by only being good at writing ds/algo? RMS and FSF as his extension don't value being wealthy instead they value a more bohemian lifestyle. That's the source of conflict.
Linux Torvalds is a one-track person: his project is his baby and he wants the baby to survive, nothing else. It just so happens, that project is complicated enough that it is simply cheaper to have a person with "fsf is looney" manage it. The day he supports GPLv3, and I am sure his "toxic behavior" will suddenly find a lot of opposition.
Has Google made money out of anything other than search at this point? I'm not sure I buy the argument that they could write a useable, general operating system from scratch.
Making money is the opposite of writing usage general os from scratch.
I'm not sure I buy the argument that they could write
They have not only written their own os (ChromeOS, Android, Fuchsia), they have written Golang (a new language), Google FS (that became Apache HDFS), Protobuf, Chromium that turned into nodejs enabling javascript developers to be richer than C++ developers. That is all just system-level languages. If you do any NLP you are going to use google libraries in python.
"Nuttiness" (Score:5, Insightful)
You know why the FSF and rms come across as "nutty" at times? Because without them, and without their voices being occasionally heard, PC hardware would have been as completely tied to Microsoft by now as Apple is to OSX, and we'd certainly have had another copyright extension act to boot. If they have to be loud and repetitive at times,
Re: (Score:5, Informative)
One can be nutty and right at the same time. That doesn't make them any less nutty.
Re: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Nuttiness" (Score:1)
It is not about freeloading. Google has enough smart engineers and enough money to buy them off from all over the world and have them write their own OS.
It is about eliminating competitors. Free Software removes "software" as a distinguishing factor. The only way to work in that market is branding. Steve Jobs did that at Apple but others suffer from being run by geeks. How do you become wealthy by only being good at writing ds/algo? RMS and FSF as his extension don't value being wealthy instead they value a more bohemian lifestyle. That's the source of conflict.
Linux Torvalds is a one-track person: his project is his baby and he wants the baby to survive, nothing else. It just so happens, that project is complicated enough that it is simply cheaper to have a person with "fsf is looney" manage it. The day he supports GPLv3, and I am sure his "toxic behavior" will suddenly find a lot of opposition.
Re: (Score:2)
Has Google made money out of anything other than search at this point? I'm not sure I buy the argument that they could write a useable, general operating system from scratch.
Re: (Score:2)
Making money is the opposite of writing usage general os from scratch.
They have not only written their own os (ChromeOS, Android, Fuchsia), they have written Golang (a new language), Google FS (that became Apache HDFS), Protobuf, Chromium that turned into nodejs enabling javascript developers to be richer than C++ developers. That is all just system-level languages. If you do any NLP you are going to use google libraries in python.
What is stopping Google