aurelius

For a long time, "equal rights" for gay people was an unpopular opinion. Through action, gay rights have been forced upon others by the government. Why didn't gay people just restrain themselves to respectful disagreement?

You are advocating a double standard. Why is it ok for people to support "gay rights" being forced upon others by the government, but not ok for people to support traditional marriage values being forced upon others by the government? In either case, there are people who do not want the government to force those opinions upon them. So, if the majority is going one way, you're saying the minority should do nothing other than "respectfully disagree"?

The East Germany comparison is actually quite appropriate here.

I don't disagree. My point was that choosing to be married and have children is a unique undertaking that is extremely challenging, but a lot of goodness can be gained by submitting to the hard work of being a good spouse and a good parent.

Sure, you can shoot it down with counter-examples of bad parenting, bad spouses, bad children, etc.. Still, there's nothing like it, and it's worth speaking about the positive aspects of heterosexual marriage in a forum dominated by, quite frankly, people like you who have an irrational, negative, and hostile attitude towards non-gay marriage and families, to the extreme point where mutilation of your reproductive system is an acceptable choice.

Yes, there are a great number of "right choices", but some are objectively better than others. A lot better.

I saw that too, and LOL'd.

As a father of three, with #4 on the way, I can get on board with that last sentence. But there's nothing like being married, having kids, and living the constant struggle to be a good husband and a good dad. Having a family will make it painfully obvious what your faults are, and how they affect other people. You will have to face up to those faults, and deal with them. If you don't, it's a disaster.

Life certainly is complicated, but the good stuff never comes easy (or cheap). You can stay single, be happy, and hide from yourself. Marriage and kids drags you out of bed and forces you see the light of day.

Do you not benefit from newer technology delivered at lower costs? Do you not benefit from more paying jobs to work on open source software?

What RMS has a problem with is the fact that companies don't (and shouldn't) always tell you how their products work. Just because you bought something doesn't give you the right to know all of its secrets. If he (or you) is not ok with that, then fine, he lives in America, he has the freedom to disagree. His solution, however, is to try to restrict the freedom of people and companies when it comes to software and software reuse. That's what I have a problem with.

Thankfully, I think LLVM and clang represent the coming ultimate triumph of the Berkeley school of software freedom. The clouds of the Cambridge school have overshadowed the software world for far too long.

What makes you think you have the right to learn about a proprietary architecture? Just because you bought the product doesn't mean NVIDIA has to tell you how it works.

You seem to have forgotten that computers exist solely for the purposes of making man's life more convenient. Any ideas of software freedom that get in the way of this convenience are bad for mankind. Therefore Stallman's ideas about software freedom are bad for mankind. LLVM is more popular because it is more convenient. It is more convenient because it is truly free, and not enslaved by a license that exalts the "rights of software" above all else.

The idea of imbuing an inanimate thing with rights that are restrictive to animate beings is philosophically offensive to any right-thinking individual.

"The existence of LLVM is a terrible setback for our community precisely because it is not copylefted and can be used as the basis for nonfree compilers -- so that all contribution to LLVM directly helps proprietary software as much as it helps us."

See, this is why I hate Stallman's position on anything software. It's based on irrational thinking derived from a flawed ideology.

Since LLVM is not copylefted, EVERYONE is able to benefit from it, and that is good... FOR EVERYONE! For example, NVIDIA based their CUDA compiler on LLVM because it was not copylefted. Thanks to LLVM not being copylefted, NVIDIA was able to reduce their R&D time, provide customers with great technology, and consequently sell more products. The money that proprietary companies make from being able to incorporate non-copylefted software into their products has a ripple effect. Companies like NVIDIA can provide more jobs, LLVM developers become more highly sought-after, customers benefit from more rapid advances in the technology, and the entire LLVM-based community benefits from work that filters back down from companies like NVIDIA into the mainline LLVM repo.

Stallman's argument that projects like LLVM help proprietary companies take away users' rights is simply not true. There would be little benefit for a company like NVIDIA to take from the LLVM community, and be unwilling to give anything back. For one, it would be so much harder for them to hire good people out of that community, which they will desperately need in order to drive their products forward. But look at what has actually happened: NVIDIA are releasing the code to their LLVM-based compiler! Why? Because it doesn't really benefit NVIDIA to enforce a proprietary lock-in on their customers.

As for his argument against the Apple App Store, how is it really of benefit to anyone if binaries are "free" the way he thinks they should be? Does anyone really want or need the ability to install a "free" binary onto their iPhone/iPad? Why is wrong for companies to want to protect their proprietary platforms and technology (and also their users) from potentially malicious/illegal code, or code that might brick the device? Oh, that's right! Because Richard Stallman thinks that companies should not be allowed to guard any of their interests when it comes to software. This is an obnoxious opinion, and detrimental to real user freedom.

I do not think the world will suffer AT ALL if clang/LLVM has doomed GCC to irrelevance. I was actually glad to read Stallman's email because it signifies that clang/LLVM really are eroding GCC's relevance, to the point where even Stallman is feeling it. Soon, Stallman and his FSF cronies will be relegated to the footnotes of computing history where they belong.

C++.

But why should I support "free software", especially when people like the FSF want to convince me to sign away my rights as a developer of such software?

I don't support restrictive, people-hating ideologies. And neither should you.

What about them? Should we all go stand outside a Lexus dealership for the 90% of the population that can't afford a luxury car?

Since when did access to computer software become a basic human right? This kind of fanatical ideology around software disgusts me. How is it any more acceptable than religious fanaticism?

What's embarrassing is that you believe access to computers and software is some sort of basic human right. It is most certainly not. You and I have no more moral obligation to ensure free and fair access to software than we do to ensure free and fair access to electron microscopes.

So, go take your "free software" ideology and shove it up your backside. How dare you lecture me on morality, you insolent, self-righteous gas bag.

That's funny. One of the reasons I buy Apple products is because I want to get away from the FSF and GNU. Now that I have a job and earn good money, I'd rather pay for Apple Care and have Apple fix my broken computer while I do something more worthwhile with my time than sitting in the basement trying to debug "Free Software".

I have three kids of my own, and I can tell you that everyone is not "born a genius angel with unbounded potential". It's more like everyone is born with a unique set of character traits, mental abilities, and inclinations -- we're all different. But, in every case, training and discipline must be applied in order to cultivate those natural traits into something resembling civilization. Without that, I can assure you, children tend naturally toward savagery.

You sound like a Christian fundamentalist. Are you looking for a Biblical citation?

The grammatically correct generic pronoun in English is 'he':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Generic_he

Anything else is just politically correct nonsense.

And I, for one, am glad.

TL;DR - Rob finally realized Go is a flop, and nobody wants to use it for serious programming work. So, he whines about it, and blames C++.

What you said about guys with huge recall ability getting wrapped up in some kind of minutia really rang true with me.

When I first started at the place where I work now, I encountered a couple of guys who are excruciatingly smart, and seemed to know every little detail about a thousand random topics. They wrote excellent code, and I was really glad they were on the team since they were part of a very small group of guys who seemed to be the only ones who knew what was going on in terms of our code and the direction it was going in.

But they were extremely intimidating to be around. Don't get me wrong, they were very nice guys, but their seemingly immense intellect was scary and humiliating. I regularly felt like a dumbass -- and I was the only one there with a PhD (in astrophysics, no less).

Over time, I saw that these two guys regularly got caught up in the minutia of some abstract aspect of a problem, so much so that they became annoying to have around, and were somewhat of a hindrance in the decision-making process. I was surprised to discover that I wasn't the only one to have noticed this. I also noticed that neither of these guys never really seemed to produce anything huge out of their massive intellects, and most of the big jobs were tackled over a long period of time, with a lot of comparatively "dumb" guys doing most of the work.

Everybody does have their flaws.

I suppose what could be taken away from this observation is that you shouldn't waste time comparing yourself to the "genius" types. Don't put yourself down because you're not as quick or as all-knowing as someone else. What matters more is that you get stuff done, and that you always desire to improve yourself AND work towards that end. You may not become "all-knowing" or develop a huge recall ability, but the other skills that you do possess will get better and better, and you'll be worth more than the motor mouth "geniuses" whose ability to talk outshadows their ability to get stuff done.