I first met Mr. Stallman at Budapest, Hungary in 1993 Fall, sorry I can't remember the exact date perhaps October? He was talking about Hurd. He was not giving a ... fiery ... talk on software freedom, just talking about Hurd. It was very exciting as it was by far not clear that Linux will win and the sci-fi like vision of Hurd will never happen. At this time Linux looked like a bit of a joke with version numbers like 0.99pl10... we are _almost_ 1.0 but not... not yet. Two months later? 0.99pl11. It was hard to take that seriously. Yeah X Windows existed but it was not a good experience compared to a Sun or DEC workstation. Who would've thought then that not only Linux 1.0 will indeed happen early 1994 and five years later freakin' IBM will embrace it and Hurd 1.0 won't ever be released?
I believe a fair amount of the Linux success story was available drivers. That is, as compared to any other unix like x86 OS. Even if they weren't the best drivers, you could get Linux up and running, and supporting your NIC, video card, etc.
Those seem important as well, but from my memory, weren't really differentiators after 1994 or so. I don't think the war was really over at that point.
I do remember having a much easier time getting Linux to work on various PCs than either Minix, FreeBSD, or NetBSD in the mid 90s. If I could pick all the components by hand, it wasn't an issue. But all that stuff was expensive, so Linux won out for me early because it mostly worked with whatever pile of motherboards, UARTS, used NICS, hdd driver boards, video cards, sound cards, etc, I had laying around.
And as it happens, I had some influence on corporate decisions sometime after all that. I knew that BSD was better in many ways. But I was also more comfortable/familiar with Linux.
Possibly, but one that the recent generation of userspace devs are unwilling to acknowledge. Just watch them throw out workable, if gnarly, code in some attempt at reaching programming nirvana.
I am not sure if they still teach it, but, when I did CS 15 years ago they told us about computing in the 70's (maybe 60's too ? not sure) when every computer manufacturer had proprietary languages/OSs/systems on there platform. Once a company had invested years and millions of dollars they basically had you in a trap. They raise the price, you had to pay up. Everyone saw that this was a terrible trap and they started standardizing the languages (hence ANSI/ISO C/C++ etc) that could run on multiple OSs. Woo Hoo, great job guys.
Now what RMS did with open source took this to the next level. Now there is so much control in the hands of the programmers and end users. You can keep stepping into functions until you hit the metal while debugging. Its fantastic and so much better than the previous opaque proprietary libraries of old. Any kid can modify whatever they want. I feel the young people today using npm, pip etc don't really appreciate how different a world we program in thanks to RMS. Had the dev world stayed on the 70's path we would be in a very different place that would have a fraction of the apps we see today.
Now, this lack of history is starting to come back around and bite us. I year and half ago I was on a project that brought on a new manager. He announced that the company was switching everything to Salesforce. He based his decision on the fact that Salesforce throws good parties and he had been invited to one. I looked into it and at the time you had to develop using a language called lightning that was a strange mix of java and sql that, surprise surprise, only ran on their proprietary platform. Because I am now the old guy on every team I spoke my mind and told them this was an obvious trap and once we go down this very expensive road it will be very difficult to get off. The manager guy looked disappointed and said he understood what I was saying. In an effort to get me on board, and missing my point entirely, he got me invited to one of their parties (which had half decent wine and great food and I did not say the phrase "this is an obvious trap" even once, I swear (but I did think it)). Long story short, I quit the job in disgust at their tech choices. (in fairness to SF, I heard near the end that they were switching to javascript, so they may know they need to be more open source)
RMS should be very proud of the fact that no sane programmer in this day and age would ever use anything other than open source. We need to teach tech history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
At the same time, people may have lost some of the freedoms they had back in the 60s and 70s to repair and modify their property. Used to be that TVs and such came with full schematics attached inside the case.
But as more and more microchips and firmware has gotten involved, those schematics have vanished, as there is little one can do with a multimeter and soldering iron alone.
Or look at vehicles. More and more of a car is controlled over the CAN bus. Good luck debugging that.
Or look at the struggle between farmers and John Deere.
Too bad the business and administration people know very little about this. In good companies at least they then refer to more technical people. Some kind of a "history of software politics" course should be mandatory for business management students. It's very fascinating too, how we ended up here, basically Linux and BSD running the world.
Stallman is one of those people I regarded as a rambling idiot when I was (very much) younger and as I grew older I've started considering him a genius that actually made our world a (slightly) better place.
When I was 19, I heard this line from a friend of mine at college:
"You know, when I was 18, I thought my father was pretty dumb. After a while, when I got to be 21, I was amazed to find out how much he’d learned in three years."
(Aside, the original author is hard to pin down - consider [1] - but the delight, of course, is that it's such a timeless observation that rewards the listener who can simply survive long enough to appreciate it.)
I first met rms on a rare visit of his to Sydney AU back in the early 1990's, I saw him again at a talk in London in 2011, and then at FOSDEM in 2013. His position really hasn't changed much in that time - some people suggest this is a weakness, but perhaps it's indicative of his prescience in understanding what the long term concerns (threats?) for IT were going to be. That people are increasingly siding, or at least empathising, with his message is actually pretty encouraging, even if you ignore the likely outcomes.
RMS is eccentric and a radical but he is a man of his principles and hasn't sold out. I have always respected his message and greatly appreciated his work. Like you my views have changed as I got older. I am now 33 and wish I had got involved with some of the projects I care very much for when I was younger.
More than slightly. Linux only had somewhere to grow because GNU was in place. RMS may be a kook to the wider world, but goddamn if he wasn't right, right from the start.
> We only need him as a radical to make the normal open source look like a normal reasonable thing.
This kind of comment perturbs me.
Primarily because it's not clear what 'normal open source' looks like -- could you point to a definition (that's agreed upon by more than a handful of people).
But also because 'normal reasonable thing' is just as nebulous, but embeds the little back-hander that implies freedom (the thing that the 'OSS movement' jumped on and arguably hijacked the message of) is either abnormal or unreasonable.
> Which adds to the desired goal of making normal open source look like a normal and reasonable thing.
What didn't you like about my original question?
I don't think anyone involved in this story has a desired goal of making open source look normal. rms is famous for railing against the phrase 'open source' as it disguises the actual desired goal of understanding the relevance and importance of freedom.
> In all honesty that already happened. All the big players now release and support some open source projects; even Microsoft
I always worry that when people preface a statement with 'in all honesty' they are conceding that everything else they've said has been dishonest. Is that the case here?
Anyway, most of the big players have long since fought / lost / taken advantage of / contributed to free software ... and much of that happened in the last century. I'm not sure what your point is.
I would argue the notion of "free software" is largely irrelevant and actually contributes nothing to actual freedom.
What really does contribute to user's freedom is the ability to take their data out of a program (whether local to their machine or hosted on the cloud) and import it to another program. AKA open data formats and protocols with no vendor lock in.
Do you require your furniture to be released along with its "source code" so you can fix it yourself? It's simply enough that you can throw it away and replace it with something else.
On the other hand, if the chair was glued to the house (or worse, made as a part of the wall) then that would reduce your freedom. Simply not knowing how the chair was made is normal and does not take anything away from you.
Very few people are too smart to write compilers. Very very few people make huge personal sacrifice to dedicate their entire lives to the ideology they believe in for the good of the world. RMS is both which is very rare.
Those of us with more "normal" lives can never understand how much RMS gave up for his dream. Is he a weird old man with some unsettling habits? Probably, but that makes him no less of a genius. He could have done anything and he chose to give us GNU.
Here's a talk Dan Lyons gave last month on how he was wrong about free software (and the associated politics) and Stallman was right. Highly recommended.
The opening discussion on Sir Tim Berners Lee gave me more perspective on the debate of the W3C and DRM.
People have pointed out before [0] how much of a disappointment it is that TBL allowed EME to be legitimised.
But it's really hard to see the founder of the web (one of my main initial inspirations) being legitimately shown as an enabler of large corporate greed.
Forgive the analogy, but the best way I could think of it was the free software and an open web as a kind of resistance movement. The French resistance for example did many things that did no good as the Nazis just powered through anyway.
But the point of each resistance fighter is to inspire the next.
If one of the founders of the movement suddenly steps aside and lets the Nazis do what they want on the basis that they would anyway then it's a massive blow.
Dodgy analogies aside, I wish TBL was as uncompromising as RMS.
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You need to be logged in for those links to work. I created an account just to test this. Maybe check your facts before rudely yelling "Nonsense!" at other posters here.
I don't agree with that one. I think though the state should takes measure to ensure people can pick stuff without any DRM. Sure, banning imports of DRM might help in that, but there are other easier ways like subsidizing products that don't implement DRM.
> However, if I am visiting somewhere and the machines available nearby happen to contain non-free software, through no doing of mine, I don't refuse to touch them. [0]
He only applies his method of computing to himself. You watching him talk on YouTube falls outside of his bubble of concern. I think he'd rather have his message heard than care it was shared via something non-free, so long as he doesn't have to put it there or see it there.
And that is perhaps the best part about RMS. While he may come across as a zealot, he leave the choice up to the individual. Never does he insist that everyone must follow his decrees.
He generally requires them to be distributed under Creative Commons, which permits distribution on YouTube as well as anywhere else. This video is CC-BY-SA, and this seems like an exception for this guy's channel, so I imagine that was part of the deal.
I assume people thought I was being snide, which I wasn't trying to be. Stallman is totally uncompromising on his principles regarding free software, so if YouTube used any non-free encodings in any of their distribution channels, that would violate his values that he's very explicit about.
I for once, reject the term interview, for a interview is a communication process, where one side dominates the communication, either by putting in some strategically evil intent loaded sentences, formerly known as questions. Or the other side, which will try to censor the whole communication process, by redacting the outcome. I reject this process, for there is only one, free communication process which is the irc-view. In it, the one party is free to ask all the questions, and the other party is free to not answer all the questions, and none of the two parties is able to control the resulting communication- unless it owns the room.
