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
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.
RMS's problem, which is the FSF's problem, is that he want's no commercial usage possible.
The BSD license is good enough for everyone. GPL2 is "good enough" for specific uses, but completely inappropriate for commercial software that isn't intended to be continuously developed (eg games.)
Some software actually needs to be "BSD-like" licensed because it commercial users don't use it, we get fragmentation. The entire reason we don't have 9000 versions of TCP/IP is because the original BSD TCP/IP stac
Nonsense.
RMS's problem, which is the FSF's problem, is that he want's no commercial usage possible.
No, THAT is nonsense. RMS has written many times that he does not oppose commercial usage. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/g... [gnu.org]
I'd like to license my code under the GPL, but I'd also like to make it clear that it can't be used for military and/or commercial uses. Can I do this? (#NoMilitary)
No, because those two goals contradict each other. The GNU GPL is designed specifically to prevent the addition of further restrictions. GPLv3 allows a very limited set of them, in section 7, but any other added restriction can be removed by the user.
More generally, a license that limits who can use a program, or for what, is not a free software license.
Since I am not against business in general, I would oppose a restriction against commercial use. A system that we could use only for recreation, hobbies and school is off limits to much of what we do with computers.
Yet again, your outright lying about this issue shows there's ulterior motives at work. Either that, or you bought someone else's hook, lie, and sinker who were malicious or also illiterate.
Yet again, your outright lying about this issue shows there's ulterior motives at work. Either that, or you bought someone else's hook, lie, and sinker who were malicious or also illiterate.
Or rms is bad at his job of being an effective messenger.
Just look at his appearance, the long hair, scraggly beard, frumpy clothing. It's the classic unprofessional appearance. That's great for students who want to look like rebels, but it's terrible for a board room.
So yeah, people will see him and think he's hostile to commercial interests because he dresses like someone who's trying to "stick it to the man".
Now you can get away with things like that if you're good with your messaging otherwise, but rms
So you're excusing people spreading a lie that he's against commercial use of software?
He either is or isn't against commercial use of software in principle. How he appears, how good he is at messaging, is NO EXCUSE for spreading lies about his position on commercial software. This is about facts.
So you're excusing people spreading a lie that he's against commercial use of software?
He either is or isn't against commercial use of software in principle. How he appears, how good he is at messaging, is NO EXCUSE for spreading lies about his position on commercial software. This is about facts.
Your points are kinda getting mixed up.
Your previous claim was that the corporate opposition was about freeloading, ie 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.
That is pretty damn false. Some of the biggest criticism came from RedHat, the exact opposite of a corporate freeloader. And yes it was bought by IBM, but IBM is also very much not a freeloader. Aside
Want to know what Stallman thought? Read "Free as in Freedom" Then you'll know from the primary source... Oh, yeh... information want's to be free, right? So no excuses... https://b-ok.cc/book/2837341/9... [b-ok.cc]... direct download link... https://b-ok.cc/dl/2837341/b7e... [b-ok.cc]... and for bittorrent... the Library Genesis libgen link has torrent links too... http://libgen.rs/book/index.ph... [libgen.rs]
The entire reason we don't have 9000 versions of TCP/IP is because the original BSD TCP/IP stack was good enough for everyone to use, and everyone used it, even Microsoft. Had that not happened, we might have seen Microsoft and Apple go off and make their own incompatible TCP/IP implementations, or even write entirely different protocols (see NetBIOS) that were not intended to be scaled to the entire internet, and if your PC doesn't have that OS and Protocol implementation, you can't talk to any other computer.
I don't know if you're just ignorant or trolling. Companies innovate and create stuff that fits their needs. Then when they find that the need to inter-operate with other companies' works, they kludge their working system to make it work with others. That's the way it has always worked. It may not in layer 3 (or even lower, layer 1. Think Token Ring, Ethernet, Arcnet, G-Net, StarNet, etc) and might even be in layers higher than 3 (SMB vs. NFS), but at some point companies realized that most others were
Some software actually needs to be "BSD-like" licensed because it commercial users don't use it, we get fragmentation. The entire reason we don't have 9000 versions of TCP/IP is because the original BSD TCP/IP stack was good enough for everyone to use, and everyone used it, even Microsoft. Had that not happened, we might have seen Microsoft and Apple go off and make their own incompatible TCP/IP implementations, or even write entirely different protocols (see NetBIOS) that were not intended to be scaled to the entire internet, and if your PC doesn't have that OS and Protocol implementation, you can't talk to any other computer.
That may have been true at one point, but the TCP standard has evolved since then and the protocol handling code hasn't been even close between different implementations for a very long time. Some did a full rewrite of the original TCP code and some just made so many changes the code is unrecognizable. Even 20 years ago I was seeing debugging on the Linux kernel list that amounted to "this code interoperates badly with this other OS or doesn't handle older/newer versions of the other OS well.
Kinda like what is happening with TLS 1.3 right now. Needlessly making the web have to run in full SSL mode all the time, wasting energy and time on smaller devices. We quite literately lost significant web server capacity on any machine more than 6 years old just to kowtow to google's idiocy. SSL does not give you privacy, contrary to the narrative. Google went and forked OpenSSL... that won't end well. There was no need to force SSL on sites that don't have any input. Thousands of video, comic and photo sites, along with streaming, never needed this. But now here we are stuck with a web that will expire every 60 days if someone so much as breathes on the SSL certificate.
RMS's problem, which is the FSF's problem, is that he want's no commercial usage possible.
This is a lie. I don't know if you're making it up, or if you've heard it from someone and are repeating it uncritically, but the FSF itself made money from its own code in the early years, selling tapes (yeah it's that old) of GNU to fund itself. Stallman has always been adamant that commercial is orthogonal to proprietary, and if you use the term "commercial" when you're talking to him, and you don't mean "profitable" but "proprietary", he will confirm that's what you mean, and correct you.
Stallman is a poor advocate, but for all his faults he is precise in what he promotes, often to the point of being offensive about it, and it's mostly the fault of his haters that lies like this propagate. Knock it off.
RMS's position, which is the FSF's position, is that he wants no proprietary software
When it comes down to it, this the big difference between the two camps. The Free Software/copyleft people are morally opposed to the existence of proprietary software. It's evil. They want it gone. The GPL is designed to disadvantage it. Commercial has nothing to do with; profit has nothing to do with it; just freedom. The open source/permissive license people just want people to use their code.
"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:"Nuttiness" (Score:5, Informative)
One can be nutty and right at the same time. That doesn't make them any less nutty.
Re:"Nuttiness" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (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
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
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Nonsense.
RMS's problem, which is the FSF's problem, is that he want's no commercial usage possible.
The BSD license is good enough for everyone. GPL2 is "good enough" for specific uses, but completely inappropriate for commercial software that isn't intended to be continuously developed (eg games.)
Some software actually needs to be "BSD-like" licensed because it commercial users don't use it, we get fragmentation. The entire reason we don't have 9000 versions of TCP/IP is because the original BSD TCP/IP stac
Re: (Score:1)
Nonsense.
RMS's problem, which is the FSF's problem, is that he want's no commercial usage possible.
That's not true, otherwise GCC would have been licensed such that anything it produced had to be distributed with accompanying source code.
Re:"Nuttiness" (Score:5, Informative)
Nonsense. RMS's problem, which is the FSF's problem, is that he want's no commercial usage possible.
No, THAT is nonsense. RMS has written many times that he does not oppose commercial usage. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/g... [gnu.org]
I'd like to license my code under the GPL, but I'd also like to make it clear that it can't be used for military and/or commercial uses. Can I do this? (#NoMilitary)
No, because those two goals contradict each other. The GNU GPL is designed specifically to prevent the addition of further restrictions. GPLv3 allows a very limited set of them, in section 7, but any other added restriction can be removed by the user. More generally, a license that limits who can use a program, or for what, is not a free software license.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy... [gnu.org]
Since I am not against business in general, I would oppose a restriction against commercial use. A system that we could use only for recreation, hobbies and school is off limits to much of what we do with computers.
Yet again, your outright lying about this issue shows there's ulterior motives at work. Either that, or you bought someone else's hook, lie, and sinker who were malicious or also illiterate.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yet again, your outright lying about this issue shows there's ulterior motives at work. Either that, or you bought someone else's hook, lie, and sinker who were malicious or also illiterate.
Or rms is bad at his job of being an effective messenger.
Just look at his appearance, the long hair, scraggly beard, frumpy clothing. It's the classic unprofessional appearance. That's great for students who want to look like rebels, but it's terrible for a board room.
So yeah, people will see him and think he's hostile to commercial interests because he dresses like someone who's trying to "stick it to the man".
Now you can get away with things like that if you're good with your messaging otherwise, but rms
Re: (Score:2)
He either is or isn't against commercial use of software in principle. How he appears, how good he is at messaging, is NO EXCUSE for spreading lies about his position on commercial software. This is about facts.
Re: (Score:2)
So you're excusing people spreading a lie that he's against commercial use of software?
He either is or isn't against commercial use of software in principle. How he appears, how good he is at messaging, is NO EXCUSE for spreading lies about his position on commercial software. This is about facts.
Your points are kinda getting mixed up.
Your previous claim was that the corporate opposition was about freeloading, ie 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.
That is pretty damn false. Some of the biggest criticism came from RedHat, the exact opposite of a corporate freeloader. And yes it was bought by IBM, but IBM is also very much not a freeloader. Aside
What Stallman thought? Read "Free as in Freedom" (Score:2)
Want to know what Stallman thought? Read "Free as in Freedom" Then you'll know from the primary source ... Oh, yeh ... information want's to be free, right? So no excuses ... https://b-ok.cc/book/2837341/9... [b-ok.cc] ... direct download link ... https://b-ok.cc/dl/2837341/b7e... [b-ok.cc] ... and for bittorrent ... the Library Genesis libgen link has torrent links too ... http://libgen.rs/book/index.ph... [libgen.rs]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The entire reason we don't have 9000 versions of TCP/IP is because the original BSD TCP/IP stack was good enough for everyone to use, and everyone used it, even Microsoft. Had that not happened, we might have seen Microsoft and Apple go off and make their own incompatible TCP/IP implementations, or even write entirely different protocols (see NetBIOS) that were not intended to be scaled to the entire internet, and if your PC doesn't have that OS and Protocol implementation, you can't talk to any other computer.
I don't know if you're just ignorant or trolling. Companies innovate and create stuff that fits their needs. Then when they find that the need to inter-operate with other companies' works, they kludge their working system to make it work with others. That's the way it has always worked. It may not in layer 3 (or even lower, layer 1. Think Token Ring, Ethernet, Arcnet, G-Net, StarNet, etc) and might even be in layers higher than 3 (SMB vs. NFS), but at some point companies realized that most others were
Re: (Score:3)
Some software actually needs to be "BSD-like" licensed because it commercial users don't use it, we get fragmentation. The entire reason we don't have 9000 versions of TCP/IP is because the original BSD TCP/IP stack was good enough for everyone to use, and everyone used it, even Microsoft. Had that not happened, we might have seen Microsoft and Apple go off and make their own incompatible TCP/IP implementations, or even write entirely different protocols (see NetBIOS) that were not intended to be scaled to the entire internet, and if your PC doesn't have that OS and Protocol implementation, you can't talk to any other computer.
That may have been true at one point, but the TCP standard has evolved since then and the protocol handling code hasn't been even close between different implementations for a very long time. Some did a full rewrite of the original TCP code and some just made so many changes the code is unrecognizable. Even 20 years ago I was seeing debugging on the Linux kernel list that amounted to "this code interoperates badly with this other OS or doesn't handle older/newer versions of the other OS well.
Kinda like what is happening with TLS 1.3 right now. Needlessly making the web have to run in full SSL mode all the time, wasting energy and time on smaller devices. We quite literately lost significant web server capacity on any machine more than 6 years old just to kowtow to google's idiocy. SSL does not give you privacy, contrary to the narrative. Google went and forked OpenSSL... that won't end well. There was no need to force SSL on sites that don't have any input. Thousands of video, comic and photo sites, along with streaming, never needed this. But now here we are stuck with a web that will expire every 60 days if someone so much as breathes on the SSL certificate.
I think it's
Re:"Nuttiness" (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a lie. I don't know if you're making it up, or if you've heard it from someone and are repeating it uncritically, but the FSF itself made money from its own code in the early years, selling tapes (yeah it's that old) of GNU to fund itself. Stallman has always been adamant that commercial is orthogonal to proprietary, and if you use the term "commercial" when you're talking to him, and you don't mean "profitable" but "proprietary", he will confirm that's what you mean, and correct you.
Stallman is a poor advocate, but for all his faults he is precise in what he promotes, often to the point of being offensive about it, and it's mostly the fault of his haters that lies like this propagate. Knock it off.
Re: (Score:2)
RMS's position, which is the FSF's position, is that he wants no proprietary software
When it comes down to it, this the big difference between the two camps.
The Free Software/copyleft people are morally opposed to the existence of proprietary software. It's evil. They want it gone. The GPL is designed to disadvantage it. Commercial has nothing to do with; profit has nothing to do with it; just freedom.
The open source/permissive license people just want people to use their code.