A search for Richard Stallman turns up stories about him resigning on CNN, Arstechnica, Wired, ycombinator, ZDNet and a bunch of others.
Arstechnica seems to have a note about him coming back. Looks like your "multiple sites" makes it a mostly niche or internal discussion. I.e. nobody cares anymore.
A day later and your comment is already dated. Two days and it's badly out of sync, especially with FSF Europe issuing a statement condemning his return, supporting his removal, and refusing to work with FSF or any of its constituent bodies until he is removed or resigns from any and all leadership positions.
I'm looking back on pre GPL/FSF days when there were only ideas on how the future should look. The idea was "freedom to innovate" please bare with me... Now, the idea can I say was to allow for pure "imagination" and "benevolence" to drive software development? And that creation if an act of nature. I don't know Stallman but that is what I got form his discussions. Then the "politics" started. what is "free" and "innovation" and the like...."Well,...It's not closed source" I guess is what the leaders of "in
Meh, to my eyes Stallman has always been a political figure. His essays are inflammatory, not just arguing that free software is a good policy but that anything else is immoral. He has followers, many of whom are zealots.
To be fair, he's a politician who puts his effort where his mouth is and actually writes stuff and releases it for free, but his message has always been political and moralistic. Comparing him to Marx is not really such a bad analogy. He got burned by another political, moralistic, crusade. I don't think it was fair, and I think that sort of hysterical witch hunting is terribly damaging to any organization, but I also don't think people who release software without the source code are the spawn of satan.
Pissed off? Most people would be. That's why it's inflammatory. You may recognize that argument from any of a number of other political positions you dislike. It's always been very popular, and it's always been inflammatory.
I tend to agree with Stallman that open source has many very compelling advantages. I don't think you're a bad person if you disagree with me.
It's not like FSF matters -- free software was fine way before the FSF came to be in 1985. The Berkeley Distribution pre-dated FSF by many years, and before that real men used the public domain for free software distribution.
Berkeley Distribution was not free in some sense. You needed a Unix license first before you could use BSD, primarily because so much of BSD was modifications to the AT&T code. 1991 had the first version with most AT&T code removed (Net/2). The first BSD license from of the modern form was 1988.
Sharing of code, especially the non-AT&T part (such as vi) was more open certainly and most people didn't worry about licensing much or cared to read them or whatnot. "Feel free", meaning if you can m
It's hard to say if Linux would have done as well as it did if it were BSD or MIT licensed instead. Honestly I think if GPL didn't exist, that Linus would have leaned towards some kind of low-cost Shareware model. It's not like he was initially all that attached to the idea of free software and GPL, but pragmatism won out.
Free software was dying back in 1985. That's the whole reason the FSF was started in the first place. Sure, the BSD toolchain was semi-free, but it wasn't comprehensive, and nobody really knew the legal status of it given that it needed to run on proprietary Unix and was, in some senses, derived from it. The resources needed to run it, in any case, were well beyond the typical computer user in the mid-1980s. Most computers weren't even powerful enough to run Xenix. And Xenix cost a thousand dollars or more just for the operating system and C compiler. The hardware cost was another $4000-$10,000 on top of that.
It's actually very hard for me to think of many major projects from back at around that time frame that were even source available, let alone free software. The occasional source available stuff was typified by SEA ARC, which came out in 1986, which was source available but not even remotely free software, causing a famous dispute that lead to the creation of PKZip. MINIX came out a year after that, and again, was source available, not free software, despite the author writing it while employed by a University as a teaching OS. And those both postdated the foundation of the FSF. Meanwhile most of the time even freeware wasn't source available.
Why? After all, during the 1970s there was a massive hobbiest interest in microcomputing with a lot of Hippyish individuals giving away everything they created. So what happened? The answer is microcomputing became commercialized. As we moved from expensive open architectures, which even by the second half of the 1970s weren't even 90% open, to cheaper, far more powerful, SBCs, the number of people using them increased dramatically and the proportion that were interested in the tinkering side, compiling their own software etc, reduced dramatically. The only language most computers came with for free was BASIC, which wasn't fast or powerful enough to run significant applications, C compilers, even BDS C, cost money, the free alternatives were too stripped down to be useful (SMALL C etc), and so the demand for FOSS basically died out. Meanwhile there was a high demand for commercial software, and a huge amount of support from the industry for commercial software developers, so people were encouraged to think of the project they were spending time working upon as a product, not a contribution.
There's a good question of whether this might have been reversed naturally as ubiquitous networking started to become a thing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the Internet seriously took off in the mid-nineties, permitting a degree of world wide collaboration that didn't exist before. But at the precise moment the FSF was founded, free software was in retreat. The FSF, and Stallman - whatever his faults - deserves credit for pushing back.
Stallman being unsuitable as a leader for the free software movement is something that saddens me immensely. I hope that he'll always be seen as the major contributor he was to our movement. But like many others have proven over the decades, he absolutely should not be leading it.
I think Coherent was around $200 in the 1980's, and I believe came with a C compiler at that time. It was in some ways better than Xenix and in some ways worse. But it was capable for running control systems, network services, or single user workstations. It obviously wasn't very nice for multiuser on an 8086, but got nicer with 286 and 386 support. That nobody remembers it seems surprising because just about every issue of C User's Journal had an ad in the back for it.
"Who alone has reason to *lie himself out* of actuality? He who *suffers*
from it."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Gotta admire the man's determination (Score:5, Insightful)
I think he's an absolute Communist, but you gotta give it to the guy: you can't cancel someone who doesn't give a fuck.
Re:Gotta admire the man's determination (Score:4, Insightful)
Another way to view this is that the FSF has decided that the ship should go down with its captain.
Re:Gotta admire the man's determination (Score:5, Insightful)
Or that the Internet's attention span has been exceeded and nobody cares anymore.
Re: (Score:2)
The response across multiple sites suggests that this is not the case.
Re: (Score:3)
A search for Richard Stallman turns up stories about him resigning on CNN, Arstechnica, Wired, ycombinator, ZDNet and a bunch of others.
Arstechnica seems to have a note about him coming back. Looks like your "multiple sites" makes it a mostly niche or internal discussion. I.e. nobody cares anymore.
Re: (Score:2)
A day later and your comment is already dated. Two days and it's badly out of sync, especially with FSF Europe issuing a statement condemning his return, supporting his removal, and refusing to work with FSF or any of its constituent bodies until he is removed or resigns from any and all leadership positions.
https://fsfe.org/news/2021/new... [fsfe.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah. It definitely blew up. Guess it wasn't the right time to come back.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Gotta admire the man's determination (Score:5, Informative)
Meh, to my eyes Stallman has always been a political figure. His essays are inflammatory, not just arguing that free software is a good policy but that anything else is immoral. He has followers, many of whom are zealots.
To be fair, he's a politician who puts his effort where his mouth is and actually writes stuff and releases it for free, but his message has always been political and moralistic. Comparing him to Marx is not really such a bad analogy. He got burned by another political, moralistic, crusade. I don't think it was fair, and I think that sort of hysterical witch hunting is terribly damaging to any organization, but I also don't think people who release software without the source code are the spawn of satan.
Re: (Score:2)
Sad state of affairs when arguing, with reasoning and logic, that something is immoral is considered "inflammatory".
Re: (Score:3)
"My way is the right and true way and believing anything else makes you a bad person" is an inflammatory argument.
Re: Gotta admire the man's determination (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You're a bad person because you disagree with me.
Pissed off? Most people would be. That's why it's inflammatory. You may recognize that argument from any of a number of other political positions you dislike. It's always been very popular, and it's always been inflammatory.
I tend to agree with Stallman that open source has many very compelling advantages. I don't think you're a bad person if you disagree with me.
Re: (Score:1)
> please bare with me
No baby, I won't. Ever.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not like FSF matters -- free software was fine way before the FSF came to be
in 1985. The Berkeley Distribution pre-dated FSF by many years, and before
that real men used the public domain for free software distribution.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not like FSF matters -- free software was fine way before the FSF came to be
in 1985
No it wasn't. Back when I got in, Linux and the FSF toolchain was the only practical way to go.
Re: (Score:3)
Berkeley Distribution was not free in some sense. You needed a Unix license first before you could use BSD, primarily because so much of BSD was modifications to the AT&T code. 1991 had the first version with most AT&T code removed (Net/2). The first BSD license from of the modern form was 1988.
Sharing of code, especially the non-AT&T part (such as vi) was more open certainly and most people didn't worry about licensing much or cared to read them or whatnot. "Feel free", meaning if you can m
Re: Gotta admire the man's determination (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's hard to say if Linux would have done as well as it did if it were BSD or MIT licensed instead. Honestly I think if GPL didn't exist, that Linus would have leaned towards some kind of low-cost Shareware model. It's not like he was initially all that attached to the idea of free software and GPL, but pragmatism won out.
Re:Gotta admire the man's determination (Score:5, Interesting)
Free software was dying back in 1985. That's the whole reason the FSF was started in the first place. Sure, the BSD toolchain was semi-free, but it wasn't comprehensive, and nobody really knew the legal status of it given that it needed to run on proprietary Unix and was, in some senses, derived from it. The resources needed to run it, in any case, were well beyond the typical computer user in the mid-1980s. Most computers weren't even powerful enough to run Xenix. And Xenix cost a thousand dollars or more just for the operating system and C compiler. The hardware cost was another $4000-$10,000 on top of that.
It's actually very hard for me to think of many major projects from back at around that time frame that were even source available, let alone free software. The occasional source available stuff was typified by SEA ARC, which came out in 1986, which was source available but not even remotely free software, causing a famous dispute that lead to the creation of PKZip. MINIX came out a year after that, and again, was source available, not free software, despite the author writing it while employed by a University as a teaching OS. And those both postdated the foundation of the FSF. Meanwhile most of the time even freeware wasn't source available.
Why? After all, during the 1970s there was a massive hobbiest interest in microcomputing with a lot of Hippyish individuals giving away everything they created. So what happened? The answer is microcomputing became commercialized. As we moved from expensive open architectures, which even by the second half of the 1970s weren't even 90% open, to cheaper, far more powerful, SBCs, the number of people using them increased dramatically and the proportion that were interested in the tinkering side, compiling their own software etc, reduced dramatically. The only language most computers came with for free was BASIC, which wasn't fast or powerful enough to run significant applications, C compilers, even BDS C, cost money, the free alternatives were too stripped down to be useful (SMALL C etc), and so the demand for FOSS basically died out. Meanwhile there was a high demand for commercial software, and a huge amount of support from the industry for commercial software developers, so people were encouraged to think of the project they were spending time working upon as a product, not a contribution.
There's a good question of whether this might have been reversed naturally as ubiquitous networking started to become a thing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the Internet seriously took off in the mid-nineties, permitting a degree of world wide collaboration that didn't exist before. But at the precise moment the FSF was founded, free software was in retreat. The FSF, and Stallman - whatever his faults - deserves credit for pushing back.
Stallman being unsuitable as a leader for the free software movement is something that saddens me immensely. I hope that he'll always be seen as the major contributor he was to our movement. But like many others have proven over the decades, he absolutely should not be leading it.
Re: (Score:2)
I think Coherent was around $200 in the 1980's, and I believe came with a C compiler at that time. It was in some ways better than Xenix and in some ways worse. But it was capable for running control systems, network services, or single user workstations. It obviously wasn't very nice for multiuser on an 8086, but got nicer with 286 and 386 support. That nobody remembers it seems surprising because just about every issue of C User's Journal had an ad in the back for it.