Stallman On the State of Free Software 25 Years On 367
TRNick writes "What's the state of free software, 25 years after GNU's birth? TechRadar has an interview with Richard Stallman to find out. Stallman thinks free software is making good progress: 'Nowadays hardware developers are also increasingly likely to publish the interface specs so that we can develop free software that works with the hardware. Perhaps we are turning the corner, but we still have a big fight on our hands before all computer users have freedom.' But how many of us actually run an operating system that Richard Stallman would consider free? Many of the more popular GNU/Linux distributions, including Mandriva and Ubuntu, bundle proprietary code with their free software packages. Perhaps free software has reached a large enough install base that companies are happy to use it for their own gain, but aren't quite so willing to make their own commitments to free software development. How important this is to the success of free software depends on how strong your stance is on freedom is."
Free NOT EQUAL TO freedom (Score:0, Interesting)
I'm not anti-open source, but this horrifically mangles the concept of freedom. Freedom is the right to be left alone, and the obligation to leave others alone, unless there is voluntary association between all relevant parties. Being able to have a thing or service for free is nice, but it has nothing to do with freedom.
Re:Compromise (Score:2, Interesting)
One person's freedom ends where another man's freedom begins.
So when a developer uses *his* freedom and develops in Flash, he ends up taking away everybody else's freedom because now they must use Flash as well if they want to see this site.
Installing and using Flash is *not* giving yourself more choice, it's taking back the choice that others took away from you. And that shouldn't happen.
Re:Free NOT EQUAL TO freedom (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux Torvalds? (Score:4, Interesting)
"While Linux Torvalds gets most of the plaudits nowadays for the Linux kernel, it was Stallman who originally posted plans for a new, and free, operating system."
Re:Free NOT EQUAL TO freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
In Germany, we have 3 different words for "free" when used as in beer, and a law defining what each word means, when used in business. There is "gratis", "kostenlos" (no cost), and some other term I forgot. Then of course there is the word "frei" (free) too. I noticed, that translating to German, and then translating all terms back to English, (both with dict.leo.org) gives me a pretty nice thesaurus. :)
Re:Compromise (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you realize how preposterous this is?
Flash is a tool. (Not one I like or even use, but that's because the abuses of Flash are generally worse than the benefits.) You don't have an inherent right to demand that everyone use shit you yourself have vetted as being oh-so-FREE-SOFTWAAAAAAAAAAAAAARE. If you want to view that developer's Flash, then you must descend from your holier-than-thou cloud and use Flash. It's not "losing freedoms," it's playing nice with others. Because you're free not to use their sites, as I do.
Re:Free NOT EQUAL TO freedom (Score:1, Interesting)
Microsoft for all the demonizing they get around here has been doing a lot less work to control my options in both senses of the word free.
(I know Windows costs money, but it's usually subsidized or pirated anyway, so in my personal domain the cost is 0. Professionally speaking is a whole other story on all fronts for a number of reasons.)
Re:Compromise (Score:3, Interesting)
Talk sense (for long enough) and people will listen.
You have too much faith in the masses, if you ask me.
The door-in-the-face method is a psychologically proven method of manipulation.
Talking sense? The verdict is still out.
Stallman's vision (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone that grew up with computers, I can understand Stallman's vision. I don't agree with it, but I can understand it. He would like to think there are 1.5 kinds of people in the world: those that write code and those that haven't gotten around to writing code. His sense of "freedom" is important to both parts of that, assuming that is all there is to humanity.
I think it is much closer to say there are three groups: those that write code, those that should not be writing code but are trying and those that will never, ever write code. Call the last group "users". What RMS misses completely is the last group is probably the most important. They are utterly at the mercy of the first two groups, and they are continually being disappointed by the second.
The ability to design computer software is an art and it is not one that is easily taught to people that just don't get it. Writing clear, functional, concise code that implements a design is much easier to teach but in the world of open source and free software these two roles are usually combined. And, from looking at a lot of code in the open source world, much of it is from the folks that aren't doing a good job of design and probably shouldn't be writing code either.
The future is not one where everyone is a programmer. The world is bigger than that. There are a lot of people that have no desire to ever be anything more than a user and for them being handed a piece of software that is intuitively easy to use, relatively bug-free and gets the job done for them is what they want. From both proprietary and open source software development users are continually handed non-intuitive, buggy software that accomplishes something less than 100% of the job. And, collectively speaking, our users deserve better than that.
Probably the biggest problem I see with open source is the lack of critical review. Without this someone that turns out garbage code will continue to do so forever. Unless they stumble upon their own code and have to maintain it for years. Even then, it takes a stern taskmaster to reinforce the idea that if it isn't maintainable, it wasn't worth writing in the first place. And that if all the users can't use it how they want to, it isn't doing the job either. Yes, I do mean all the users and all of what they want it to do.
Where is the professional society that builds up talented but rudderless newcomers? Where does someone that wants to be turning out a "professional" quality product go for help? Universities? No, I don't think so. Most commercial establishments are just as driven to produce something "good enough" that they just have a hope of maintainability and usability. Sometimes they get lucky, but most of the time they do not. And we wonder why software development gets a bad reputation?
RMS would like us to each be able to fix the bugs we find and extend usability to take something that does 50% of the job we need done and fix it so it does 100% for us. Nice idea, but it comes from a flawed premise - a sort of universality of programming ability. The reality is major talent will be always rare and it is up to these folks to help out and guide those with ability but undeveloped talent. And then there are the users. These will always be in the majority and they cannot help but rely on the people with ability and talent to do what they cannot do. I do not think the mantle of this responsibility can so easily be passed off on the users.
Re:Free NOT EQUAL TO freedom (Score:3, Interesting)
BSD makes the end user free. GPL makes the code free. You can't really have it both ways (because there will always be end users who want to make the code non-free).
You can't make BSD code "non-free". You can add your own code, and make the resultant product "non-free", but the original BSD-licensed code, will remain BSD licensed.
The big difference between the BSD and GPL, is with the BSD you're stating what you want to do with your code, but with the GPL you're stating what you want to do with other people's code.
Stallman's approach is desperately needed (Score:5, Interesting)
Cooperation, not freedom (Score:3, Interesting)
Free and open source software - hell, ANYTHING open source and free - is not about "freedom" per se. It's about cooperation rather than competition. It's about that dirty economic word socialism versus Mother Nature's status quo capitalism.
Companies that pay for OS Dev. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The problem with Stallman's approach (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd respond by notion you have only one issue here, he doesn't like unfree software. Note the question asked, "Do you believe notebooks like the Asus EeePC are championing the cause of the FSF?"
Answer: "Not entirely...."
If the question had been, "Do you believe notebooks like the Asus EeePC are better than notebooks running all commercial software" the answer would have been "yes". Or, "are you excited about how much free software is going on many of the netbooks being distributed..."
In other words he doesn't think Asus went far enough. As for Canonical again he is against the non free packages, which has little to do with creating a desktop version of Debian.
In other words I disagree with the notion that Stallman is against the major initiatives of the last 25 years rather he is cautious about the fact that 90% free, 10% unfree can be functionally little different than 100% unfree.