One has to admire rms for sticking to his guns and living up to his ideals. He is a bit brash, true, but a) he has been proven right many times before when it comes to software and b) he is consistently being himself and doing his thing. See him eat a piece of his foot on camera while giving a lecture (it's on youtube) and you'll perhaps have a Zen moment. He is a walking, talking media antidote.
To extend your a) a little, Stallman has every right to be suspicious of a company which has; deliberately targeted GNU/Linux in the past and said it's coming after it, said GNU/Linux infringes patents, is a convicted monopolist in the USA and the EU, deliberately uses its power over system-builders to shove GNU/Linux out (desktops options and netbooks), used its market power to make ACPI/power management difficult for other operating systems and much more. People seem to forget these things all the time when discussions come up. IBM used to be the big bad guy at one point too, but they now have a track record of community contributions to point to and say "we are different". There is no such thing with MS, and the top management went from Gates to Ballmer who sees rivals commercial or otherwise in a very combative way (going to "kill Google", GNU/Linux a "cancer"). When someone who was/is considered to be part of your community works with, helps and defends an entity which has tried to attack you and desires to do so in the future then "traitor" isn't a bad name for them. There's plenty of money to be made with GNU/Linux without doing any of the MS stuff he does.
Miguel de Icaza never got over his incapacity to land a job at MS (it was no visa because he didn't have a degree it wasn't because he was stupid) and has always sought to emulate them and defend them from that point onwards in some weird psychological relationship. Novell is suspicious in its intentions and it seems they'd gladly see others get sued if they had a waiver. They are not a community player at all.
Miguel putting "God" and "Love" in his post he doesn't clear up any of the issues while he sits there trying to evoke an open source hero mystique while working on a Microsoft platform clone... for the iPhone.
While i find some truth in your post , about Microsoft, it would be good to put things in perspective, and imagine for a second what the GNU/Linux landscape would be without miguel's contribution.
The guy has been proven to behave like an asshole, but i find it good to judge people on what they do. The contribution of miguel , in usefulness for a regular Linux user experience today ,is certainly comparable to RMS's.
And while i, like many others ,am very suspicious about the mono story, i would really like like to see this project succeed, if only because there is IMHO a desperate need for a decent multi-language VM on linux (other than java, wich is pretty unusable for desktop applications on linux).
Also, the patents infrigement threat has been hanging on diverse parts of GNU/linux for a very long time, and i've yet to be convinced of the solidity of the case microsoft could have against mono, since after everything i've read i couldn't reach a clear conclusion.
So yeah, RMS is true to himself. But i don't find that admirable at all. There is no balance in what he says, ever, and i don't view that as genius ...
I don't want to live in his free software world, because he looks like a totalitarian. Even if his views and his works are to be valuated, i respectfully disagree with him on almost anything ideological. And i don't like people insulting others in public, for any reasons ..
Like if i was watching a movie, i have real huge problems picturing miguel in the position of the ugly traitor, sorry ...
Expanding on allenbrunson's point, that's why it's correct to refer to them as a convicted monopolist. The word is indeed there precisely because "monopolist" does not carry the meaning of "convicted".... to be honest I'm not actually sure what your problem with the phrase is.
My problem with the phrase is unless I'm missing something, Microsoft was not found guilty of a crime (as sid_0 pointed out, U.S. vs Microsoft was a civil matter) and therefore the word "convicted" is meaningless. Actually, it could be considered slanderous.
This so far has been a community that prides itself on accuracy. If you're going to accuse someone of criminal acts, they should at least have been tried and found guilty in criminal court.
In his Conclusions of Law, Judge Jackson showed them to be in violation of sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act by being a monopoly and engaging in tying. A 'crime' is an act in violation of law, the Sherman Act is a law, and they were in violation of it.
How are these facts changed by the case being brought before the court as a civil action?
No. A crime is an act in violation of criminal law. From wiki (apologies in advance) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime -- "While every crime violates the law, not every violation of the law counts as a crime."
It is true that while every violation of civil law comes before the court as a civil action, but is it true that the existence of a civil action implies that no crime was committed?
Your mention of murder down-thread is an excellent example, as someone can commit an act of murder and face a criminal murder trial and/or a civil "wrongful death" case. O.J. Simpson is a famous, high-profile example of this.
You are basically taking the same position that his P.R. people might: that since he was acquitted in the criminal case, he is not a criminal - even though he lost the civil case. Yes, in the "innocent until proven guilty" sense of the word "criminal", you and they have an excellent technical point.
But you and they would have us to believe that O.J. actually committed no crime, and that might work on anyone who does not reserve the right to draw a distinction between having committed a crime and having been convicted of it.
Back to Microsoft, ask yourself what the Sherman Act is: is it civil law or criminal law? As it happens, the Sherman Act includes both criminal and civil remedies for violations. That is why, for example, books like this exist...
The DoJ pressed the matter as a civil action. This doesn't mean that Microsoft's violations were merely civil violations. Rather, it means that the civil violations were the ones that were successfully prosecuted. Whether or not their violations were also criminal in nature is a question that was never pursued.
So, yeah, Microsoft's actions were non-criminal an an O.J. kind of way. I'll give you that.
> but is it true that the existence of a civil action implies that no crime was committed?
Clearly not. However, if a court hasn't decided on the matter, whether the act is criminal or not is at least partly a value judgment. My value judgment is that while Microsoft did a lot of horrible stuff in the '90s, none of it warrants the tag "criminal".
I don't want to "win" anything. I just want people to use the right word for the right thing.
The word crime has very different connotations for me than the words civil suit do, and it really disturbs me when people substitute one for the other. Let's reserve the word crime for acts like rape and murder, please.
Which is a bad law, that doesn't make sense and was created to cleanup the governments interference in train system.
It's like saying someone who broke laws during the civil rights era, to integrate their establishments etc... being convicted of a bad law is meaningless.
were you in the software business circa 1992? quite a few companies who thought they were creating good businesses for themselves were in fact doing market research for microsoft, to mangle something pg said in one of his essays. microsoft's antics managed to retard software innovation for a good long while. i, for one, am glad they are no longer the unstoppable juggernaut they once were.
I'm not defending their actions; I'm saying what they were doing should be legal. Lots of things are legal that I don't agree with, for instance I don't agree lots of ideas that are expressed in music but I by no means think they should be illegal.
I am more worried about the grammatical mistakes I see in my post than your objection. Why? Well I would hope that if we were talking about something else and I said "convicted killer" you wouldn't fly into a exclamation marked rage over the fact I should have said "convicted murderer" because there are circumstances under which it is legal to kill people. I think it's pretty clear what I was saying in that post. But you are technically correct in that it's theoretically possible to have a company that is a monopoly and does not abuse that power, although I cannot think of any examples in the real world where corporations in such a situation behave. Allenbrunson has the rest in his reply to you. And before anyone else objects regarding the details of the EU case[1] it sometimes use different terms as the EU is not quite a state yet but I'd argue "convicted" captures the meaning there too.
Look you aren't "genuinely curious" you are being a total wanker.
Wiktionary definition: "A specific act committed in violation of the law."
Wikipedia (the sentence before you earlier nitpick quote): "Crime is the breach of one or more rules or laws for which some governing authority, via mechanisms such as police power, may ultimately prescribe a conviction."
Wordnet: " an act punishable by law; usually considered an evil act" and "an evil act not necessarily punishable by law"
N.B. The definitions from Wordnet, my uses passes BOTH. So it seems that if a governing body passes a law or regulation against a certain activity and then the government (through whatever process) finds someone in violation and sanctions them, you don't want to call it a crime (despite this being well within the broadest definitions), you want to have a big cry. Well sorry buddy, this isn't a court of law, this is the English language. You are the reason people hate lawyers.
I agree completely. Love or hate RMS, you have to respect that he says what he means and means what he says. He has absolutely no filter and is pathologically incapable of telling a lie. I don't always agree with him but I do admire him.
I'm not sure it's good to admire ideological extremists. In fact, I think the opposite, what is admirable is empathy, the ability to see something from someone else's perspective. RMS seems incapable of this.
Well, if you have some empathy then you can admire somebody for their good qualities while at the same time being aware of their faults.
The existence of free/open source software owes a big debt to RMS's idealogical extremism, and Emacs, GCC and GNU are pretty major (and admirable) achievements in programming. That's why I say I admire RMS, even if I wouldn't want him to date my sister.
No, we don't owe a debt to his extremism. There are thousands of people out there who have created open source software without the extremism. We do owe a debt to his work on those projects, but not to his extremism. The work could have, and often is, done without the extremism.
I would like to outline the basic "traitor" scenario, tell me if i got things right :
1. Miguel de Icaza, after a secret deal with microsoft and novell, starts an OSS implementation of the dot net platform. It has been his goal from the beginning. In fact he always wanted to work at Microsoft, and he decided to become their infiltrated spy, to stop the worst threat Microsoft has ever seen : Linux (ahem, sorry ,i mean GNU/Linux). Some say that's even why he started GNOME in the first place.
2. He gets a lot of contributors, but that's mainly because they're too dumb to see the secret plan he has from the beginning.
3. The mono platform enters a stage in wich it becomes usable, and applications begin to appear and after some time, begin to become integrated into common linux distributions. The fact that Novell is actually developping a major linux distro is a big factor in this.
4. Some very clever OSS users / programmers / developpers, led by their enlightened guru Richard Stallman, finally discover that this is a secret plan to make the whole GNU/Linux stumble. They decide to put aside the quarell about the Linux name, because duty is calling them. They consequently put tremendous effort into alerting people about the menace
5. The evil duo (Microsoft / Novell) and Miguel the menial, are in a very bad position. They never expected anybody to actually SEE through their evil plan. Microsoft then decides to publish a 'promise' not to sue anybody about an implementation of the CLR. The plan is very clever, because mono implements not only the CLR, but other parts of the Microsoft stack. When things will be calmer again, then will be the moment to sue !
... are you guys serious ?
Now i know there are some real risks, some real stakes, maybe even some part of that is true. But common, when i read some contributions, i just wonder how much hollywood movies has affected our brains.
You could have saved yourself a load of typing just by looking up the definition of "traitor" in the dictionary. By the way, while you are at it, look up "strawman" also.
To Stallman he is a traitor to the ideals and helping the enemy (see my other post on this page). This does not mean it's a conspiracy.
"i just wonder how much hollywood movies has affected our brains". Indeed.
This is why we don't see more Microsoft developers coming to open source. There are quite a few out there who are interested in it, but their skillset leads them to Mono. Why would anyone want to help out in a way that would get them treated as a pariah?
I appreciate all the things that rms has done, but he's gone off his rocker; why people still pay any attention to him is baffling to me (other than the tabloid qualities of paying attention to him, I suppose).
This is why we don't see more open source developers developers migrating to develop on Windows. They are curious but then they hear how open source is a terrible abomination according to Microsoft. (Admittedly, not the exactly the same, in one case rms is attacking your new choice, and in the other Microsoft is attacking your old choice, but it doesn't make either side attractive to the other).
I don't think we've really heard much about Microsoft needing more developers though. Certainly not in the sense that open source needs more developers.
I don't blame de Icaza for being hired by MS; I blame him for all the bloat to be found in each of his projects. He could be pure as whitest snow and MS would still be happy with how what he puts out slows down the Linux desktop experience.
Miguel gave his life to free software. He gave GNU its first desktop environment. If it wasn't for Miguel and his work there wouldn't be Redhat, Suse, Caldera, Mandarake, or any of the major corporate linux distros. Sun would never have bowed to Open Source, in fact, Sun would still be an independent entity in business. Novel would be in a different line of business.
GNOME breathed fresh air into the Unix workstation and made it truly a commodity.
Even Motif would have still been closed if it wasn't for the high quality code that Miguel et al where churning out both in GNOME and also in Gtk and its associated technologies.
In 2001, Ximian was the hottest thing to run on a PC. If they put a price tag on it they could have sold it in custom boxes at $5k and would have had buyers, but it was free, and it was a Unix desktop you could install and upgrade by double clicking on an icon. Fucking gorgeous too.
> If it wasn't for Miguel and his work there wouldn't be Redhat, Suse, Caldera, Mandarake, or any of the major corporate linux distros.
Bullshit. As if no one else could have created a linux desktop? There were already plenty of window managers at the time. The distance between a window manager and a "linux desktop" is pretty slim.
> In 2001, Ximian was the hottest thing to run on a PC. If they put a price tag on it they could have sold it in custom boxes at $5k and would have had buyers, but it was free...
And then Ximian died. Perhaps they should have sold it for $5k a box instead, hm?
Bullshit. As if no one else could have created a linux desktop? There were already plenty of window managers at the time. The distance between a window manager and a "linux desktop" is pretty slim.
There were plenty of Linux WMs but they didn't aspire to do anything more than what (fv)wm was doing and it was considered fancy to support ICCCM. X was big and bulky and it had to be accepted for what it was. Actually, most Linux users were happy with FWVM2 and other stuff, OpenLook and CDE were frowned upon as a corporate kludge, perhaps in sour grapes.
The genius of GNOME was not just the delivery of a full Free desktop, first, but also the ballsy withdrawal from everything X. GNOME said we're gonna bring our own libraries and we're gonna supplant and supersede X. They brought in a display manager, session manager, input translator, etc. They didn't stop there but they also brought unorthodox, at least to unix, computing models: they brought a component object model with CORBA/Orbit. GNOME kept pushing the boundaries and for once defining what Linux should look like, not a poor man's SysV-clone, but a new desktop OS to be judged on its own. So much so that an early port to Solaris was the hottest thing on Sunfreeware.
RMS basically invented Open Source, and I believe he is allowed to say whatever he wants!
So what is he think that Miguel De Icaza is a traitor to HIS ideals! It's his opinion!
And, when you speak with friends, don't you ever accuse and attack anyone for something he did or said! Why isn't RMS allowed to speak his mind, and speak freely!
I believe people are too harsh on RMS and love to portrait him as psycho, weird and eccentric to the level that allow them to discredit him.
> Why isn't RMS allowed to speak his mind, and speak freely!
Nobody forbids him to speak his mind. They just think he's a jackass for making that remark. I agree. And that's my opinion and I do believe I have the same right to express that as he does.
We badly need someone like Stallman to stay true to free and open-source principles. Without someone radically keeping to his visions, everything blurs to mediocrity.
Agree completely. But there are ways and ways of going about that. He should stick to talking about software though, ("don't use Mono") rather than attacking people ("guy who wrote zillions of lines of free code is a 'traitor'").
What really invented "Open Source" was the arrival of the Internet. There have always been people wanting to share their work freely, the Internet making that possible and cheap. Heck, researches on ARPANET collaborated openly to build the Internet. And the first open-source Unix kernel to run on top of x86 wasn't Gnu or Linux, it was 386BSD.
RMS didn't invent the people's desire to share. People have been doing that long before RMS was born ;)
What RMS did invent is a clever license that allowed companies to contribute to open-source projects with no risk of their contributions being taken by their competitors.
> What RMS did invent is a clever license that allowed companies to contribute to open-source projects with no risk of their contributions being taken by their competitors.
Actually the first big donation to open-source by a corporation is Netscape's Mozilla. It was distributed under their own license (MPL) following the definition of "open-source" ... a definition set forth because the term "free software" had ideological connotations.
Of course the FSF did valuable legal work prior to that, and they had a model to follow when defining what "open-source" is, but it was innevitable anyway.
The "open source" movement is not RMS's. Linux may have never been so popular without the work of Miguel, or without the folks at the Apache Foundation, or without Netscape's contribution, or without the contribution of so many others.
People have different goals, motivators and ideals. We will never get rid of proprietary software unless a business model is born that is better than selling copies of software. And that won't happen soon.
So instead of spreading the "free software virus" by brute force and activism, why not invite the corporations to contribute, such that at least the development tools and platforms become more open? And that's exactly what people like Miguel are doing.
I mean, I've worked on a couple of smallish projects in dotNet, and the landscape outside Microsoft is a waistland ... the majority of third party tools and libraries are proprietary. But more and more open-source tools are starting to come out of the Mono community or from CodePlex. The dotNet community is really warming up to "open-source". And I think that's really something.
I think that the .NET users warming up to open-source is an important first step, but I don't believe Microsoft can act against its own interests by making a true commitment to open-source.
Free Software has, indeed, ideological connotations. I strongly advocate for the freedoms it defends and also for the "giving back" attitude it obliges. Free Software, by its very definition, stays free. There are no such warranties in he rest of the open-source space. OS is useful, but I don't think it's enough.
> I don't believe Microsoft can act against its own interests by making a true commitment to open-source.
I don't think Microsoft is acting against its interests by committing to open-source. Quite the contrary.
If they open-sourced Silverlight, would they lose money from their authoring tools? What they would lose is some level of control, but they could win a big enough user-base to take on Flash, which is still king. Would I care if their authoring tools are proprietary and expensive? Not at all if they're getting the job done, as long as the platform is open.
You see, open source is really about economics, being many times a cheaper and more effective way of developing and distributing software. If you want to talk about rights with normal people, you'll have to explain those rights in terms of benefits.
Having the ability to share software with your friends is not a good incentive for many software developers. But having your piece of software maintained by others (when you don't want to die doing that) is an incentive.
And I don't think that the "giving back" attitude should be forced. It should come naturally from the inherent gains. We are so blinded by the individualism promoted by capitalism that we forget sharing and cooperation have real advantages. But being blinded by an ideology with opposites points of view is evenly shortsighted.
You see, while many people in Silicon Valley or in Cambridge are working happily in startups or on cool projects that will save the world someday, the rest of the world is kind of stuck in consultancy with flat hourly bills, working on boring and-not-quite-fulfilling projects that in many countries pays less than your average gas-station supervisor. And working on Free Software when your hourly rate is $10 an hour you can trust me it's not that great.
Another thing about open-source software is that there are clear disadvantages of the development model. You can see that in the unpolished GUIs of the open-source applications or in the lack of documentation (there are times when I thank God if I find a blog-post with an example for a library I'm trying to use). The notable exceptions are only those where the software itself is a complementary to something else that sells (like hardware, or ads) ... which is ironic since Microsoft was worshiped back in the day by many programmers for being a successfully pure software company (finally, our profession was going to have recognition).
So yeah, fighting a war against proprietary software is futile. Proprietary software will never be replaced by ideology. A better business model will (like <gasp> software as a service ... in which the software doesn't even run on your machine).
Mono's situation regarding Microsoft's patents is murky at best. While nobody can tell exactly what patents Mono risks violating, nobody seems to be able to clear it entirely.
But didn't Novell enter into an agreement regarding Mono such that they are not sued for such (hypothetical) patents? Will that not (automatically) cover anyone using Mono?
FWIW, "Apologist" is perhaps not quite so strong a word as you think:
"a person who argues to defend or justify some policy or institution"
"Apologists are authors, writers, editors of scientific logs or academic journals, and leaders known for taking on the points in arguments, conflicts or positions that are either placed under popular scrutinies or viewed under persecutory examinations."
"One who makes an apology; One who speaks or writes in defense of a faith, a cause, or an institution."
It doesn't imply that there's anything to "apologise" for in the usual sense: it means "to defend" or "argue for".
That may be the definition of the word, but look how it is used in mainstream usage. It is typically used to describe someone who is defending something that is not usually defended. Such as Nazi Apologist, Hamas Apologist, Stalin Apologist, etc. You don't hear anyone using the phrase "Clean Air Apologist", do you?
