Please, no GitHub (2015)
lists.gnu.org
lists.gnu.org
It's crazy how much people are willing to attack others for holding supposed views without bothering to actually verify the view being held.
The vast, vast majority of criticism of Richard Stallman comes from people mischaracterizing his views. It's as though grappling with his actual arguments is just too much of a threat or something. More likely, it's just intellectual sloppiness — posting crap on some online forum without bothering to care about being reasonable.
I can't tell quickly skimming those threads (even their context) whether these are people with real understanding bringing up particular reasonable complaints in just absurdly hyperbolic fashion or whether they are ignorant people with invalid criticisms. Either way, the comments aren't of the simple style where they just say that RMS thinks X and are factually wrong.
It just so happens that I know Richard's perspectives very well. I've not only read most of his writings, heard/watched several recordings of his, and heard him speak half a dozen times… I've also had several conversations with him directly and also with several people who know him well. So, I have a pretty good understanding of his views. It's only in that light that I'm able to see how rash and poorly-thought-out many of the other people's comments are when they make bold and quite inaccurate assertions about what and how Richard thinks.
It's not that you should accept my authority in some sort of logical way that would prove anything I'm saying as true. It's just incidental that I have knowledge in this case that allows me to recognize gross intellectual sloppiness in others in this topic. Asking you to blindly accept my claims about Richard would be closer to appeal-to-authority. But my point is that I want to be wary not to be sloppy the way I see others being. It's a commentary about being overconfident in general.
What I'm saying in my meta comment is that there's a risk that I could or even have done the same sloppiness in describing other people who I don't really understand as well. I could imagine writing some dismissive caricature of someone I have negative impression of, such as say Jeff Sessions, for example. And I would be better not to claim to know anything there. All I really know about Sessions is a few bits of impressions from a small number of places I've seen reference to him in the news… If I had to bet, I'd go with my impressions, but it would be careless of me to weigh in with some assertion about what he thinks in the context of some comment-section on some news. I have no real knowledge there, and at most should describe my impressions and ask questions rather than make bold claims about what Sessions believes.
If you ask RMS, he'll say it definitely matters and that we all need to not only work to be our best but need to speak up whenever we see bad ideas being spread.
a) terrifying and distopic b) correct
It's like staring into the abyss, people reflexively want to look away.
If you read into the thread, it's quite non-sensical, RMS eg. says Github is evil because the license picker doesn't push his license strong enough, with just the wording he'd be happy with: "You've put your finger on the problem. The site leads people not to specify explicitly whether it is [GPLv3] "only" or "or-later"."
I read into thread about 10 deep but I had to stop, my blood was starting to boil from the nonsense.
So I'm in my mid-30s and I still really believe in the GNU GPL. I even license my own stuff as GPLv3 (except for some libraries I released under Apache).
I still really believe in the GPL and that model of OSS. I feel like I'm in the minority; that people my age and younger who give a shit about things like this, prefer BSD/MIT/Apache style licenses.
In the end, the entire development of computers has been underwritten by massive corporations, the military-industrial complex, and to a large extent, the surveilance/telecoms hybrid that spawned companies like AT&T. I don't really see where being extremely punctilious about software freedom wins you in this context. There's no such thing as a free computer - the concept is borderline absurd, and even if it was possible, you're still using a free computer in a world that's largely characterized by tyranny, which is also absurd.
The issue is, if you have a 'free' device in a society that is largely based upon the absence of freedom, it's ultimately a fetish - in the magical-thinking sense. And honestly, if we were in a society that was substantially free, the FSF would never have been needed in the first place.
From an idealistic standpoint, RMS's views are consistent and sensible, honorable even. But from a utilitarian view (which I support incidentally), we evaluate the actual real-world consequences of each decision. In that light, RMS's overall concerns still hold up completely but his emphasis on each person individually rejecting all non-free software uncompromisingly is non-utilitarian.
And, if you want to look at what happens when deonotological ethics are the norm, just look at medieval europe.
I am of older age but I too prefer MIT over GPL. The logic is like this: time is precious and if I devote it to developing an open-source library, I want it to be used by as many people as possible. I see no reason whatsoever why I would exclude closed-source software from adopting it.
You could even disagree with prioritizing this. But it's not like there's no reason to be seen.
There are cases where someone wants to build something with your work, period. And if you require that it stay free software, it will be free for the end-users where it wouldn't be otherwise.
Let me help you out: if I have a computer and there exists software that I could privately run for my own purposes and the computer is set up to not allow me to run that software I want to run, then I am lacking some freedom to use my own computer fully. Or say I want to copy some software from one computer to another but someone has legally or technically put barriers to my ability to do that. These are not an artificial constructs, they are as plain as any concept of freedom can be.
And he's been right about things. Almost every time. I post this basic quip every time one of these threads comes up. After the fifteenth "Oh, yeah, I guess he was right" you start to cut the guy a ton of slack.
This is an excellent comment because it explains Stallman's accuracy (vs his opponents) not in terms of the fundamentals of their reasoning but in terms of their heuristics for judging motivations.
By the way, it always seemed to me that by civilized discussion once can learn the opponent's point of view and maybe even reach a compromise, but it seems HN works in a different way, hiding downvoted posts. When I expand them, I'm often surprised to see they're not spam nor offensive content, but just statements many people don't agree with.
The argument for closed source software (and indeed intellectual property in general) is that it incentivizes creation by giving creators a means to profit from their ideas.
Now RMS of course has his own arguments on that point, which is great. But, my point is that predicting that people will sometimes do bad things with closed source software doesn't make you a prophet. It means you have an IQ above 15.
It would be like if I "predicted" that baseball bats would be used for violence and then every time a crime was committed with a baseball bat, everyone was all like, "oh, he was right again about the bats!" Everyone everywhere knows that bats are sometimes abused for violence. That's not foresight, it's common sense.
Git, the protocol is distributed. You can have a copy, I can have a copy; anyone can have a copy. And they're all equal.
Github is Git with a bunch of stuff that's not copyable. If you want to move your data elsewhere, you lose access to a host of stuff. Wiki, issues, PRs, branches, fixes.. All sorts of things.
There's people who've developed bandaids to triage that data lockin, but they only stem the bleeding. They don't solve the problem, and that problem is your data is in a roach motel.
What RMS keeps going on about much of the time is a high level engineer-y view of the problem. He forgets to bring it back down to earth, to explain that "Yes, these things I talk about affect us all!"
For me, I'm setting up a new server right now, and I'm putting Fossil SCM on it for my repo instead. It does handle all those data assets that makes github useful. And its license compatible with Free Software.
https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wi...
edit: I'm also a card carrying member of the FSF. I've lived through enough computer "revolutions" to identify bad stuff when I see it. I'd rather my knowledge be portable, with usage and configuration of free software, than lock it up in proprietary blobs that change underneath me.
> Recommends and encourages GPL 3-or-later licensing at least as much as any other kind of licensing. (C5) - https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.html
Do those two look like identical statements?
> RMS eg. says Github is evil because ...
vs: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnustep/2015-12/m...
> > talk directly to GitHub people.
> I already did, starting about a year ago. I even had dinner with one of their executives. It seems to be a promising conversation, but they dropped it inexplicably. So we developed our repo criteria instead.
> If they want to resume the conversation, I won't refuse.
Does that sound like hate, or the actions of someone who has said a company is evil?
RMS, who leads the FSF, which owns GNU, thinks that GNU projects should not be hosted on services which encourage users to run proprietary software on their PC, or which don't encourage users to use the FSF's preferred license.
To me, this stance does not seem at all nonsensical.
I really respect RMS, but my purchasing decisions kinda stop at not shopping at Wal-Mart since 2009 and Amazon a few years later. I also realize my choices are symbolic and those companies will keep doing what they do no matter what. I still shop at Whole-Foods..
I feel like you need to find the balance between Stallman idealism and the reality that we live in a post-Edward Bernayes world.
I remember our sun will burn out one day and take a shot of nihilism before bed, to help forget so I can bike to work the next day.
Unfortunately, credit cards are on the rise here.
But for all the wrong reasons
> Current state makes it very hard to mange/search/fork/open-issues etc
> especially for newcomers,
> please move the project to github so we can have nice disussions
> forks/prs etc goodness.
No. Never. Github is proprietary communications tool which requires
users to accept a terms of service and login. That gives power and
influence to a single entity (and a for-profit organization at that).
Contributing to unicorn is *socially* as easy as contributing to git or
the Linux kernel. There is no need to signup for anything, no need to
ever touch a bloated web browser.
The reason I contribute to Free Software is because I am against any
sort of lock-in or proprietary features. It absolutely sickens me to
encounter users who seem to be incapable of using git without a
proprietary communications tool.https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source...
I've worked for an "open source" shop that made no differentiation on licenses (GPL vs BSDL). They did a lot of consulting/contracting and although they did release OSS code, a lot of times it was for a project that died off or was deprecated. Meanwhile, Apple has actively been trying to remove GPL code from their OS.
I know Stallman does agree with support license based companies liked Redhat, but what are his opinions on Commercial vs Enterprise setups like Gitlab? (Even with Gitlab, the Enterprise version is open source; you just can't legally run it without a license ... which is an interesting model for sure).
Savannah is some kind of hosting platform for GNU projects.
Wrote about this 10 years ago. https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/savannah
Have a new version coming soon.
Because there's also gitlab.com/GNU/ but this has nothing to to do with GNU, they just captured the group name.
I believe GitLab.com/gnu is me.
"Your vision of freedom is rather absolutistic, since forcing freedom upon others goes against the very nature of freedom."
Would he eat at a restaurant that doesn’t provide detailed recipes of everything he orders? If he had his way, there would be no restaurants unless they all provided recipes, which means that “secret sauce” becomes not so secret and thus commoditizes the hard work of those who developed it.
I'd suggest you read more of his work -- The Right To Read springs to mind -- as that's a misrepresentation of his ideology.
His fight is for the right to open the hood of your car and decide yourself if you've got the right carburettor and maybe swap out a lug nut or two using standard dimensions, conventions, and tools.
To match your example: he wouldn't eat at a restaurant that somehow made it impossible to open up your burger and see if the onions are caramelised, and required you only use McRestaurant brand utensils to eat the food. Do you own the food? Is it yours? Are you free to take parts out and add parts if you want? Or do you not have "the right" to decide that the pickles look sketchy?
Recipes, in your analogy, would represent academic knowledge. I'm pretty sure he's for sharing that, too, but the GPL has no requirements that people understand how you're creating the tasty algorithms you're serving on those floppy disks... That doesn't get commoditised, as such, but instead gains new value propositions as the demand for it raises through developing an economic ecosystem surrounding it.
That is to say: RedHat is more valuable because I can "commoditise" their drivers and then pay them money to scratch my itch, not less. Most businesses are in the "make money" business elsewhere, not in the Linux business. Sharing is profit.
How is this in any way relevant to the discussion? It's really bad form to pick a random activity, stuff the word "proprietary" in there, and use it as an example of how you think rms would regard it, and then rail against that.
> If he had his way, there would be no restaurants unless they all provided recipes
What do you think "his way" entails exactly? And what makes you feel confident this projection is accurate, especially in the light of apparently being largely unfamiliar with his person or his ideas?
That's a misrepresentation for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's a misrepresentation of what Free Software is about: having freedom to use/alter/etc. "the things you own". When buying a coke from a machine, that has nothing to do with whether you own that machine.
Free Software is concerned about the power imbalance that copyright can enable. For example, purchasing a computer chess game is very different from purchasing a physical chess set: you legally own the chess set, whilst the copyright holder legally owns the computer version and only grants you a limited license. The GPL, copyleft, etc. provide a way for copyright holders (e.g. computer chess developers) to offer their wares in a way which is more like the physical chess set (e.g. if they feel like the default copyright is less ethical).
The second problem is that you're claiming things which Stallman has specifically stated he disagrees with, in public, well-documented places. For example, at https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html he specifically states (under "Non-free software issues"):
"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. I will use them briefly for tasks such as browsing."
"Likewise, I don't need to worry about what software is in a kiosk, pay phone, or ATM that I am using. I hope their owners migrate them to free software, for their sake, but there's no need for me to refuse to touch them until then."
Also, Stallman has made it very clear that he doesn't care about proprietary code running inside devices if those devices aren't meant to be used as computers, e.g. like vending machines. From the same URL above:
"As for microwave ovens and other appliances, if updating software is not a normal part of use of the device, then it is not a computer. In that case, I think the user need not take cognizance of whether the device contains a processor and software, or is built some other way. However, if it has an "update firmware" button, that means installing different software is a normal part of use, so it is a computer."
Again, this makes perfect sense from the "things you own" perspective. If nobody can replace the firmware of a device, then you're not being excluded/oppressed. On the other hand, if a manufacturer can replace it but doesn't permit you to do so, then it becomes a Free Software issue. This was the case with TiVo: their devices ran on Linux, which the manufacturer provided source for as required by the GPL; but the device refused to run code which wasn't signed by the company's private key, which they didn't provide to customers.
> nor permit others to do so either because he hates proprietary licenses
That's absolute BS. Stallman has never said that others shouldn't be permitted to make or use proprietary software; it's an absurd straw man, which goes completely against his principles. He certainly asks people not to make or use it, but preventing people from doing so would defeat the entire point of FOSS!
If Stallman "had his way" then nobody would bother to make proprietary software, because users would choose to avoid it. Similar to how most people would avoid using software which e.g. blasted tortured screaming from the speakers during use, and hence nobody bothers to make software which does that. Yet nobody's being prevented from doing so.
PS: I admit that the "tortured screaming" analogy isn't very good, since adding such a "feature" wouldn't bring in extra money, like making something proprietary might. I originally wrote that sentence with an analogy to software being filled with advertising; it was only when I read it back that I realised some software actually does contain advertising, and people still use it! What about spying on the user? Nope, that happens. Being overpriced? Nope. Crashing? Nope. It seems like software users are willing to put up with a lot of crap!
If Stallman were "forcing" people to use a product like Savannah it would be a valid point, but Stallman has been consistent for decades pushing for maintaining freedom(strategic ownership). "Forcing" people towards solutions that support their abilities to change and grow is not authoritarian, even if you disagree with his recommendations.
This is exactly the same flawed logic that leads people to cry "But free speech!" every time they get yelled at in public for a offering an unpopular opinion. They're substituting the idea of "freedom from criticism" for "freedom to express" and claiming victory by linguistic trickery instead of moral philosophy.
And it happened to be that RMS wanted to use liberty rather than freedom, but US politics already associate the word liberty with a specific political platform and RMS wanted people from all side of the political spectrum to join the movement. Thus he used the non-identical-but-similar word "freedom" over "liberty".
If he had just called it the libre software movement from the beginning then maybe we would see less discussion about the true definition of freedom.
If you accept that people who want to take away freedom are "free" to do so, eventually you won't have freedom.
RMS has strong principles. We need more of that.
Don't get me wrong, I think he is important to create the far extreme end of the open source movement so we can gauge ourselves. But his stuff is dogmatic in nature _NOT_ logical in nature. He would rather software be crippled than be useful but non-free. He wants everyone to magically develop on their spare time for free with copyleft licenses. This is craaaaaaazy. People gotta eat.
With his model you fall into the musician trap. If you are a world-renown musician you get people coming to your recitals and don't gotta worry about anything else. If you are not, nobody attends and thus you work as a teacher or waiter.
There are some open-source developers who make a full living on donations. But they are few and far between.
Actually, Richard emphasizes consistently every time that he is asked that copyleft (GPL) is not required to be free software, and that non-copyleft free software is absolutely fine in itself. It's just that it risks being used to develop proprietary software which shouldn't exist.
Richard's problems with GitHub are only about the non-free aspects of it. There's tons of cases of Richard supporting non-GPL free software. Even if he would prefer GPL, the idea that he opposes (let alone "hates") non-GPL free software can only come from pure ignorance of his actual views.
> He would rather software be crippled than be useful but non-free
Certainly. He feels that we are better off with no software than with non-free software. And incidentally, I find that view to be too dogmatic.
But it's not true that he wants people to "magically develop on their spare time for free". That's not only a distortion of his views but a complete fabrication from nothing. Richard wants free software development to be funded and actively advocates for it to be funded.
But since he feels non-free software is negative, of course he doesn't want people funded to do something he sees as bad!
It's true that he advocates for those privileged enough to volunteer in their spare time to do so, but that's part and parcel of pushing for everyone to take whatever resources they have and actively use them for pro-social good.
Regarding the musician analogy, it's pretty decent. We're talking about public goods in both cases, with a set of economic dilemmas inherent. Richard doesn't deny any of this or think it's fine. He's interested in (and has actively proposed) solutions both for music and software.
You're completely mistaking Richard's view that non-free software doesn't deserve to be funded (or made at all) with a view he doesn't hold in the slightest (that software doesn't deserve to be funded).
You are flat-out misrepresenting him. Read his definition of "non-free". His concern isn't with the commercial aspect of software. This is clearly stated by him, repeatedly. His concern is with closed source, walled gardens, restrictive licensing.
His position is self-consistent and logical. He actually is okay with exceptions (such as using closed-source pacemakers if no open source ones exist), but those exceptions need a STRONG justification because they are depriving people of their rights.
If you believe that proprietary software is a violation of the user's rights, it's perfectly consistent to be so strongly opposed to it.
> He wants everyone to magically develop on their spare time for free with copyleft licenses
This is not true. He has no issues with companies like Red Hat (who primarily make money off of GPLd software) nor with individual developers selling their GPL licensed software.
> With his model you fall into the musician trap
The fact that companies like Red Hat exist counters that point I think. I don't think your prediction adequately captures the market forces and profession.
Richard is okay with users of pacemakers making exception in their own avoidance of non-free software. But he's as critical as ever about the software developers making the thing non-free.
Today, the issues about whether you can control your own devices remains and freedom issues come up with using software running on someone else's servers over the internet. Both aspects are significant to whether users have freedom and overall whether we have a free society.
Both in the past and today, developers who are not pro-social (don't care about what impacts their work has on the world, just want to focus on getting paid or on a satisfying coding experience) don't see the software-freedom message resonating with them, at least not until they experience a particularly frustrating lack of freedom in some way that affects them personally.
The whole time, it's been those who have pro-social values who bother caring about the ethics here.
If you don't know him personally and he hasn't told you this specifically, then stating your opinions as fact harms the larger conversation.
Even if I don't agree with him on everything he says, he has been right enough times, that I'm forced to consider the possibility that he might be right and not dismiss his ideas outright as coming from someone `far extreme` as you categorize him.