This is the we hate Richard Stallman thread

[Sysman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

He hates anyone who makes money from software

Please feel free to discuss.

[VectraMan]

Stallman suffered a knee injury that ended the main joy in his life[7] - his participation in international folk dancing, and with it the opportunity it provided for socializing with the opposite sex.[8] Stallman's ensuing despair culminated in social withdrawal; but he found solace in a heightened focus on the area in which his achievements made him most proud - programming

There I was thinking programming was the way to meet girls. So is international folk dancing difficult?

[Cowboy Bob]

I agree with the open source philosophy in the same way that Linus Torvalds sees it. That is that sharing code and experience is good, but that people are also entitled to make a living from it - hence him, for example, making an exception in the GPL v2 license to allow proprietary software to link to the Linux kernel (e.g. this allows the NVidia drivers to work). I also have no problem with proprietary software, and specifically have no problem with Microsoft (which many Stallman followers seem to think is a manifestation of the Anti-Christ) - I don't run Windows because I don't like it from a usability or productivity point of view but at the same time I'm quite happy to own an XBox-360.

I have some open source software in the wild, and recently I changed my licenses to remove the "or later" clause ensuring that it can never be re-licensed from GPL v2 to GPL v3. Version 3 of the license is really an extension of Stallman and goes so far as to try and stop GPL software working within a proprietary environment. This has moved from a position of "we want to share" to "we want to tell you what you can and can't do with the software" which is wrong IMO.

[NickFitz]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

He hates anyone who makes money from software

No he doesn't.

From the page you link to: "He clarified, years later, that it is blocking the user's freedom that he believes is a 'crime', not the issue of charging for the software." (emphasis added)

And, also on that page, a quotation from one of his posts to a mailing list:

""I think it is ok for authors... to ask for money for copies of their works... in order to gain income".

His phrase "free software" refers to the idea that people should have the freedom to use software as they see fit, and be able to modify it to suit their needs, rather than being prevented from doing so via EULAs and restrictive licensing.

If his philosophy opposed making money from software then he would have taken action years ago to shut down companies such as Red Hat, who make their money from selling software licensed under the GNU General Public License that he authored. As it is, Red Hat currently has a market capitalisation on the NYSE of US$4.12 billion.

[VectraMan]

His phrase "free software" refers to the idea that people should have the freedom to use software as they see fit, and be able to modify it to suit their needs, rather than being prevented from doing so via EULAs and restrictive licensing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the GPL prevents you from making a commercial application out of an existing open source one. Most would say that's reasonable (i.e. making money out of somebody else's work), but it's still a fundamental hypocracy of the open source movement who claim their software isn't restricted, when clearly it is, and they don't care about money which clearly they do.

Personally I feel open source can only lead to lower standards, and less software overall. It's ironic that Microsoft have generally been demonised over their anti-competitive behaviour, despite the open source approach being far worse for competition. If you can get software for free, why would anyone pay? Why would anyone try to develop alternatives? Taken to it's extreme, there wouldn't be a software industry. There'd be no choice of software, and what there was would be of low quality churned out by a few geeks because all us professionals will have moved on to other paying careers.

And the other question is: who pays? Whether it's employers, universities, or the DSS, somebody somewhere is paying for people to give their time for free to open source projects.

[Sir_Edward_Matheson]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the GPL prevents you from making a commercial application out of an existing open source one. Most would say that's reasonable (i.e. making money out of somebody else's work), but it's still a fundamental hypocracy of the open source movement who claim their software isn't restricted, when clearly it is, and they don't care about money which clearly they do.

IANAA...GPL says you must release the source code. This is somewhat different to saying you cannot make a commercial application. The proponents of the GPL would disagree with your use of the term open source as a catch-all. As was mentioned previously in this thread GPL does not say you cannot make money from software. For example, Red Hat is a company whose major source of income is by selling support for Linux which has been released under the GPL. Last time I checked they were still in business.

Personally I feel open source can only lead to lower standards, and less software overall. It's ironic that Microsoft have generally been demonised over their anti-competitive behaviour, despite the open source approach being far worse for competition. If you can get software for free, why would anyone pay? Why would anyone try to develop alternatives? Taken to it's extreme, there wouldn't be a software industry. There'd be no choice of software, and what there was would be of low quality churned out by a few geeks because all us professionals will have moved on to other paying careers.

Let us consider an example of lower standards from "open source" software. Microsoft modified the BSD implementation of TCP/IP for all versions of Windows prior to Vista and this worked reasonably well. When MS released Vista they had rewritten the implementation themselves and it is now borked. Firefox is another example of high quality software which is much better than its commercial rival. Therefore, commercial software is not always better than "open source" nor is the opposite always true.

Your assertion that "open source" is worse for competition is very baffling. When MS take Windows in a certain direction by embedding the web browser or GUI deeply in to the kernel for instance, then are you free to release your own version of Windows to compete with MS Windows? On the other hand when you do not like something about say OpenSolaris or OpenBSD or Linux, you rebuild it and release it yourself. Whether people pay you money for this or not is not related to competition whatsoever. Another example is the recent debacle of Creative and drivers for their soundcards on Vista. Were you or anyone else free to release drivers or modify them without threat of legal action? Did commercial software in this instance increase competition?

And the other question is: who pays? Whether it's employers, universities, or the DSS, somebody somewhere is paying for people to give their time for free to open source projects.

Usually large corporations who have a vested interest in certain projects, such as IBM, Sun, HP and so on. Moreover, there are those souls who are happy to work on projects in their own time.

FWIW, I work with commercial software for the day job and run Ubuntu exclusively at home. There are good and bad things about both. However, there are less bad things about Ubuntu. I say this bearing in mind that there is no such thing as good software; just software that is not as tulip as its competition. BTW, I am not a proponent of commercial software, GPLed software or "open source" software.

[VectraMan]

IANAA...GPL says you must release the source code.

I don't want to release my source code. My source code is mine, and I don't want other people making money out of it. I'm happy to admit that, but I wish the open source brigade would admit the same.

Let us consider an example of lower standards from "open source" software. Microsoft modified the BSD implementation of TCP/IP for all versions of Windows prior to Vista and this worked reasonably well. When MS released Vista they had rewritten the implementation themselves and it is now borked. Firefox is another example of high quality software which is much better than its commercial rival. Therefore, commercial software is not always better than "open source" nor is the opposite always true.

There I was thinking the BSD based TCP/IP stack was one of the fundamental problems with Windows networking. But I may be wrong.

I actually don't agree that Firefox is better (yes I'm the boy that dared to ask why the emporer was naked), but that's beside the point. You used an important word: "rival". Firefox has been driven by the desire to oust Microsoft from dominating the browser market more than anything else. If MS had never bothered with IE, would we still have Firefox, or would everybody be using a crappy old version of Netscape? Competition is good; it's what drives one group to produce something better, even if it's not for money.

There was a market for an alternative to IE, if for no other reason than to be anti-Microsoft. However if I wanted to do that, I'd need say 50 software engineers for a couple of years, and that'd cost several million pounds. But because of Firefox doing it for free that would be financial suicide. MS and the Firefox backers between them have bought the market, and effectively fixed the price at zero. Yet it's only one of those parties that are ever in trouble for it.

Your assertion that "open source" is worse for competition is very baffling. When MS take Windows in a certain direction by embedding the web browser or GUI deeply in to the kernel for instance, then are you free to release your own version of Windows to compete with MS Windows? On the other hand when you do not like something about say OpenSolaris or OpenBSD or Linux, you rebuild it and release it yourself.

Why on earth would I want to release my own version of Windows, or Solaris or whatever? Lots of near identical products with different splash screens isn't competition.

I don't know what world the open source people live in, but this idea that users want to modify software for their own aims is well, a bit of a joke. There aren't six billion software engineers in the world all looking to make their own versions of Linux. There are people that want quality products, and that means there has to be competition, they have to be developed by professionals, and they have to cost money. Open source is selling a lie: that quality can be free.

[bogeyman]

I don't know what world the open source people live in, but this idea that users want to modify software for their own aims is well, a bit of a joke. There aren't six billion software engineers in the world all looking to make their own versions of Linux. There are people that want quality products, and that means there has to be competition, they have to be developed by professionals, and they have to cost money. Open source is selling a lie: that quality can be free.

Pretty good summary there VM.

Some excellent and useful tools have come out of the OSS movement (Linux, Apache, FireFox, PHP, MySQL and others) but most of the stuff floating around on SourceForge is utter crap.

It tends to be very personally-focused rather than addressing a real need, and also incomplete and undocumented. The devs are often primadonas who accept no constructive criticism or suggestions.

As always, the answer is "you have the code, do it yourself and submit the code back to the team".

Life's too short for that I'm afriad. I'd rather just look for a tool or product that does what I want out of the box. I suspect I'm not unusual in that regard so you're right. A big part of OSS is a myth.

I use OSS software, I'm a fairly accomplished developer, but I have never submitted any of my mods back to the core devs. I'm probably not alone in this.

OSS fanatics would probably call me a freeloader. Well, so be it.

Anyway, Stallman looks like a child-molester.

[TimberWolf]

On the other hand some products should be open to scrutiny and correction. Cryptographic algorithms for example, which are rarely if ever done well closed source.

[bogeyman]

On the other hand some products should be open to scrutiny and correction. Cryptographic algorithms for example, which are rarely if ever done well closed source.

Good point.

I can see the benefit for stuff like that, but at the more everyday, mundane level, amateur software really sucks and makes everyone's life a misery.

For instance, there is an eCommerce tool called osCommerce.

We've all used it without realising it when making online purchases from small outfits.

The thing is, the osCommerce code is the most dismal, overcomplicated, inefficient pile of shyte you've ever seen. Yet it's phenomenally popular.

I won't go into the specific horrors of this particular application, but suffice to say, it's what happens when you let amateur coders loose on a large and complex application.

There are 'consultants' who make a living modifying this pile of shyte - and that my friends is the nearest thing OSS has to a Business Model