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Comment by ZeroMinx | Hacker News Reader

I give my deepest respect for anyone who fights for open software. I wish I would do more..

I've never met RMS, and as far as I call tell he might be a bit weird, but I still owe him the greatest degree of respect. Thanks to him, and to people like him, I was able to grow up with software I could hack on my own. I started learning proper programming in the early 90's, and I could do that using free (I'm not going to qualify what type of free we're talking about. If you don't know, you're not on HN) software and the reason is for people like him who lead the way

(ok, this post might be more about protocols rather than software, but the main gist of my point still remains)

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Not really. RMS has harshly rejected terms like "open source" for free software.

"Openness" is a relative and meaninglessly vague term in this context. Anything short of a open-sourced program and completely public data is less "open" than some alternative. The complaints that 99.99% of people make about APIs have less to do with "openness" than poor communication by the provider in the forms of bad documentation and unwarned changes.

TFA: "Facebook Connect is not open. It's controlled by one company."

Yes, because if it was another company, you wouldn't care about this API. The API only matters to anyone because it's Facebook.

I adore free software, but "openness" is a lousy justification for trying to work up umbrage about the difficulties of working in a parasitic developer ecosystem.

There are plenty of words in this particular universe that are thrown around a lot. You mention "openness". Another big one is "freedom". You can discuss to great length what these words mean, but I'm not going down that route tonight.

I don't know specifically what RMS has said and has not said. For the most of it I'm not interested. What I am interested in are the actions. Like him or not, but RMS has clearly done good things for anyone who believes computers should be devices that you and I are free to hack on on your own.

(I'm carefully avoiding your TFA quote because I have nothing useful to comment on that. Yes, I agree that the API only has value because it's coming from this one company. I don't really think this has much to do with openness).

I'm not really concerned about RMS. I just pointed out that he isn't about "open".

To the extent that you're fond of free software and RMS, that's nice, but the topic is TFA.

Alright, we're discussing "open" vs "free". Right now I don't care too much about semantics..

For anyone reading this that don't know what we're on about , read --> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...

(edit: I generally agree with RMS's points. I might confuse "open" and "free". For anyone not native to English these words might be interchangeable. I'm not a native English speaker. It becomes clearer when you define the words such as done in http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h... , but in a day to day conversation, it's easy to get the exact definitions wrong)

"Alright, we're discussing "open" vs "free"."

No, we're not discussing one thing vs. another, we're discussing different things. That is a whole other situation entirely.

(yea I realized my distance from the TFA half way through my first post.. but decided to post anyway. (possibly a bad decision). And it has lead to a bit of a discussion. Which is good -- which is what I like)

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