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Comment by wwarner | Hacker News Reader

Concur. He completely disregards the enormous human freedom and prosperity that comes from open source. It's amazing to be able to launch flask in a container and have a web app running in 10 minutes, and it wouldn't be possible without the present mixture of free software, open source and a healthy dose of commercial self-interest all mixed together. I mean, look at github. Yes, of course, it wouldn't be possible without open source. But by the same token, git alone isn't sufficient to produce the social coding phenomenon of github. And social coding is good for the world.

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Most Open Source code is Free Software, and vice-versa. The definitions are pretty close. The difference is in the philosophy of the movements. He's not against MIT/BSD/Apache/etc licensed code.

Citation needed.

When did he change his mind on this?

Citation needed. When did he hold the views you are attributing to him?

https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html is a good example.

I can't find the exact thread right now, but RMS asked someone to use gcc instead of clang when proposed for code completion in emacs... and then refused to allow the necessary changes be made to gcc to allow code completion because evil corporations might use it to extract the AST from gcc and therefore bypass the GPL.

Yes, because he prefers the GPL over non-copyleft. That doesn't mean he opposes non-copyleft Free Software. For example, gNewSense - the distro sponsored by the FSF - doesn't really distinguish between them when deciding what to include.

> But by the same token, git alone isn't sufficient to produce the social coding phenomenon of github.

How do you know that? Especially so, given that tons of "social coding" happened long before github was a thing?

I guess we don't agree on what "tons" means. I don't remember searching through millions of projects on source forge.

So, the fact that people didn't stop producing new software when github was created is because github was created?

Or the fact that there are more software developers in the world today than there were when github was created wouldn't have happened without github?

Or is it that because sourceforge wasn't a quasi-monopoly, therefore everything that was not on sourceforge didn't exist?

Or what exactly is your point?

Sourceforge was definitely a "quasi-monopoly". If you weren't on Sourceforge you had a much harder time gaining credibility. There were also other projects that didn't use Sourceforge just like there are projects that don't use GitHub now.

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