Often it's the people that refuse to compromise that make the world a better place. Do you think Martin Luther King should have compromised on his vision of racial equality?
Whilst the civil rights movement is obviously far more important than the free software movement, the idea that ideals should not be compromised is at the core of both. Unlike, say, the BSD license, the GPL is a license that allows for no compromise. If you want to distribute modifications, you must also distribute the source. It's this ideology that made the more pragmatic open-source movement possible in the first place.
As far as I'm aware, Stallman isn't refusing to use a web browser for ideological reasons. It's because: "Most of the time I do not have an Internet connection."
Besides, I seem to recall he uses Emacs/W3 for viewing web pages (offline, downloaded via wget).
>> "To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me."
You have to admit that sounds slightly quirky? I assumed it was an attempt to maintain that his personal PC is free from any closed source software, since it's not even rendering websites, it's just receiving email.
Sorry, but to me it sounds like either someone who is so into ideals that they're cutting off their nose to spite their face, or someone who has simply failed to keep up with changes in technology.
Because there are (a lot of) people on the close-everything side of the debate it's essential to have at least a few people arguing that everything is opened so that the eventual compromise is somewhere in the middle.
Why X.org? Even if you ignore the fact that it is an XFree86 fork, there are plenty of Linux systems with no X at all. In fact, that would be most of them, since there are certainly more Linux servers than desktops out there. Now add the embedded systems, and desktop installs are a drop in the bucket. Also, a number of GNU tools predate the Linux kernel.
Apparently HN is refusing to let me reply to you. So I'm doing it here.
The point of saying X.org/Linux is that I could form some ridiculous argument that would require a completely different naming convention. Why don't we call all cars Benz/Cars since Karl Benz holds much of the work that makes cars go? Or all helicopters Da Vinci/Helicopters? Because it's silliness.
Calling something GNU/Linux is silly nonsense RMS designed so he could get his beard stroked. If you notice he's never suggested the following:
-Linux (powered by GNU)
-Linux-GNU
-Linux/GNU
-Linux - With GNU utilities
-Linux - powered by GNU and Xfree86/X.org and the Mozilla foundation.
-Linux/GNU/Xfree86|X.org/Mozilla
- etc.
He's suggested only GNU/Linux. Notice GNU is in front (to remind us all how wonderful GNU is) and the '/' indicates it's interchangeable. Like "do you want ham and/or cheese on your sandwich?". Only GNU != Linux, the two are not interchangeable. The GNU Hurd is a failure. But I bet I could cobble together a GNU free Linux distro for the most part today, even rewriting most of the utilities in a couple weeks, and probably completely in a couple of years once LLVM gets up and going.
He wanted to co-opt the relative success that Linux became by formulating an argument such that the only resolution in his mind was to call it GNU/Linux. And instead of building his own system, he built a bunch of the crap for a completed system, then spent the rest of his years dwelling in Emacs and emailing himself wget harvests of websites because for "personal reasons".
Really, outside of maybe the compiler toolchain (which is looking to have a short lifespan in the face of LLVM and associated front ends like Clang, are any of the utilities that hard to replicate? (quick answer no, I had to build most of the GNU toolkit from scratch for a single OS course assignment in my undergrad, including a shell, everybody had to do that, it's pretty easy). I'm sorry, but a few dozen utilities like 'ls' and 'cat' don't allow somebody to co-opt somebody else's hard work.
Actually it makes perfect sense. Most Linux systems are a collection of GNU tools on top of the Linux kernel. This "bunch of crap" forms the basis of a lot of internet infrastructure you take for granted. Also, saying the GNU compilers have a short lifespan is, well... Perhaps they do, in geological terms. Seriously, GCC existed since like ever.
My personal setup could be called Gnome/Xorg/GNU/Linux, but if people complain about GNU/Linux I guess my letter soup won't fly. Debian is packaging something that is called GNU/kFreeBSD, a GNU userland on top of a FreeBSD kernel. Nexenta could be called GNU/OpenSolaris (in fact, there are lots of GNU tools in OpenSolaris right now).
Operating systems, from kernel to shell, are usually conceptually very simple, with tons of hard work on top of simple concepts. This simplicity, specially in the case of Unix, allowed it to be continuously reinvented for 40 years in a way it's still a modern OS. I really wish we had HAL/OS (maybe Microsoft can expand the Milo and Kate demo into one) and full-blown human-level AI agents, but the world didn't take any turn into that direction. Unix, in its many incarnations, is still the OS to imitate. And the GNU tools, be it on top of a BSD/Mach kernel (as in OSX) or the Linux kernel is more or less what comes to mind when someone says "Unix".
From Wikipedia: "Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization: it is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted or diverged from."
Some examples:
* 4 rights constitute Free Software, not 3 or 2 or 1 but 4.
* Free Software is equivalent to Civil Freedom and Human Rights.
* Distributing software without any of these 4 rights makes the act unethical, immoral and evil.
* All software should be Free Software.
Doubt any of these and you are no true believer of the Free Software Movement.
The Free Software Foundation defines the traits of Free Software as having 4 freedoms (not rights) and explains them in simple language at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.
The freedoms are enforced by the GPL, just like any other EULA. So, trying to question why there are only "4" principles, is missing the point. The GPL itself has several terms and conditions.
So, equating the 4 freedoms to the notion similar to the "religious 10 commandments" and then invoking the argument of "dogma" seems disingenuous.