Hacker News Reader

Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

Metacomment: a few years ago anything by RMS would have been jumped on within minutes of posting with lots of comments against him and his principles. Is he now being looked at in a different light by the wider software development community?

View on HN

Snowden's NSA revelations, Microsoft strongarming Windows 10 onto users, the increasing unavoidability of anything Google, Facebook continuing to be Facebook, copyright-laws being abused for all kinds of bullshit etc.

These all have validated what RMS has been saying for years, and you actually have to be quite ignorant at this point to just dismiss his viewpoint.

I work at a startup that uses a lot of open-source software. I would be willing to bet that fewer than 25% of my colleagues know who RMS is.

Not sure what timezone you're in but it's about 4AM US Eastern time.

Hmm, I asked since my mental model of the 'programming community' that I osmosify by reading comments on these kind of websites detects a slight shift on the RMS popularity front over the last year or so. I feel he's coming in from the cold a bit.

I am mostly browsing HN during my european daytime. Lots of people seem to comment on stories during my daytime. Do you mean his detractors are predominantly American? Do you think they have a particular political allegiance too?

I think people are just tired of criticising him. I personally am against him, but it bores me to discuss the same stuff all over again, especially when it's "meta" as you say and can be deemed off topic.

(Not from the US)

I'm not sure the sort of low-brow comments that have been common deserve to be called "criticising".

I was merely referring to the assumption that the majority of HN users are located in the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298905

Even if things have changed such that only a third of HN users are in the US, that's still a lot of people sleeping. Though I suppose I am implying that more of RMS's detractors are from the US. On one level, it wouldn't surprise me. Even though RMS's reputation is global, most of his writings are in English, and his homepage is currently focused on North-America-centric topics: https://stallman.org/

But I'm going to make a guess that HN is still busiest when America is busiest, judging by the time frequency of submissions currently in the /new section, as compared to what it will look like at 9am east coast time.

Years ago HN had a higher percentage of Slashdot refugees or whatever you want to call them, where what I'd call hard-nosed OSS was part of the dialog and the arguments were fresh. These days, there's many who see him less as a controversial figure within "their" community, and more of a crazy old guy with extremist views.

The more time goes by the less crazy he seems. His goals may not be realistic but his predictions about the dangers of dependence on commercial software have been vindicated in many instances. And things might get much worse still if the trend towards authoritarian leadership in Western countries continues.

A bit nit-picky, but RMS is perfectly fine with commercial software (software that is sold for money), he objects to proprietary software (software that you cannot read and modify the source code of). Freeware is not commercial, but proprietary. When you buy a Linux distro CD, that's commercial, but might be non-proprietary (depending on the distro).

Yet selling software--not services--seems incompatible with RMS's insistence on the freedom of end users to distribute without cost.

It's not incompatible in the slightest. If I write software and give it to you only in exchange for money, licenced under the GPL, then I am selling software completely in agreement with RMS's principles.

Also, RMS doesn't insist on any freedom of end users to distribute without cost. Only on you not limiting their redistribution.

Now, that makes some licencing models impossible, sure, but those are hardly the only way to sell software.

It sure is harder, but not impossible.

The crazy old guy who turned out to be right when people do get screwed over.

What he's good at doing is pointing out that certain things are not in our interest.

Everybody knows he's right. The question is not whether he's right, but whether it matters.

Yep, damn right. That's why it's so important that RMS says free software is political. As an ideology, it always matters as long as you like it.

People care about free software as much as they care about politics : only a few know enough to make a difference...

I don’t have any stats to back this up, but my impression is that most software developers doesn’t care that much about the FSF and RMS. Lots of people use free/libre software, of course. It’s kinda hard to avoid these days :)

There's only so many times you can say "wow, that guy is such a nutjob" before it gets old and you stop bothering.

I think free software as a concept is great, but everything I've ever read from RMS sounds psychotic.

That's weird, I have the exact opposite impression. Are you sure we're talking about the same guy?

Everything I've ever read or heard from RMS sounded extremely consistent, logical, common sense and down to the earth to me.

I always thought that people don't like him because he's stating some inconvenient truths about proprietary software and because they are pissed that they cannot use GPL'ed software for their closed-source, proprietary products.

To me, RMS is basically a modern reincarnation of Socrates.

The fact you don't understand the other guy shows that RMS is about politics muuuuuuch more than about software

Reply on news.ycombinator.com