> There are organizations that proclaim support for free software or the GNU Project, and teach classes in use of nonfree software. It's possible that they do some other things that really support free software, but those classes certainly don't. On the contrary, they work directly against the free software movement by promoting the use of the nonfree software. That increases the magnitude of the practical problem it is our mission to correct.
Just to throw out an extreme example for discussion: the Mozilla Foundation would seem to be one of the free-software organizations that RMS critiques.
To be fair, the current MATLAB lesson plan includes asides for how GNU Octave can be used...but the fact that the curriculum is titled "Programming with MATLAB" certainly counts as promotion of non-free software.
Edit: by "extreme", I mean that Mozilla is in most people's minds a passionate advocate for free software, and the number of their affiliations with proprietary software lessons is extremely small as far as I can tell.
Edit 2: FWIW, RMS's definition of non-free software may be much more expansive than most people's:
I've tried to use Octave, I really did. Passed few classes with projects made in Octave. Then I nearly failed some classes because of simple, reproductible bugs no one gave a flying fuck about.
None of PCs I've installed the thing on could produce a fully working figure with subplots. For example in 5 subplots number 3 would not render at all. Or the plot would not export to png if you had too many data points. Octave bug reports were shrugged off as "not our problem - it's GhostScript" (or whatever does the png conversion, I don't remember now) GhostScript didn't bother to answer.
All I can tell you the whole modularity concept is broken in practice because it promotes playing pingpong with issues. "It's not module A! It's how module B uses module A!" Unless people get off their high horses and actually fix broken shit the whole cult of free software is just delusional.
And let's not forget that apart from riddiculous bugs Octave is really missing A LOT of functionality, even without going to Simulink
> Unless people get off their high horses and actually fix broken shit the whole cult of free software is just delusional.
I understand your frustration, but the cult of free software initially was about being able to fix the issue by oneself in any case involving software -- lots of us still value that aspect.
I don't get why people are still advocating Octave as a Matlab alternative.
The real alternative is Python + Scipy. It's A LOT better than Matlab. Depending on your application domain, you might also want to look at R or Julia.
> I don't get why people are still advocating Octave as a Matlab alternative.
Because it is the closest thing to a drop in replacement, which is what you need when taking a class or following a tutorial based on MATLAB. Trying to use a different language and follow along is a much more advanced challenge and can be borderline impossible for a MOOC with an autograder or a class with a dusty professor.
I wasn't very happy with octave and I wouldn't use it for an independent project.. but I can't say how much of that is the pesky little octave specific bugs and how much is that I wouldn't like MATLAB's syntax when it is perfectly implemented. I suppose I could make the same criticisms of R as much of its frustratingly odd behavior comes from its history in emulating an old proprietary language's syntax..
I did take a class which worked with MATLAB and was using Octave to develop for it.
Well, and I guess it already says enough that I actually had MATLAB installed, but still preferred using Octave.
Just the minor annoyances in MATLAB like it taking probably a minute to start up, being in general really sluggish and having an annoying (read: not particularly bash-like) command-line were already enough to make up for the just as minor compatibility-problems I occasionally had to correct before handing in.
So, at least up until the stuff that you can get to in one semester, the compatibility was pretty good and I only really once had a problem which couldn't be fixed by a simple find+replace.
And in that case, it was actually something where I didn't understand why it didn't work in MATLAB (if I remember correctly, you for some reason couldn't use `hold on/off` with multiple `ezplot`-instructions in it).
So, yeah, I don't think at all that it was Octave-specific bugs bugging you, especially also because the MATLAB-syntax is actually even more annoying than Octave's.
It's been a long time since I've used Matlab (it was for a diff eq class), but isn't R, with vectors as its primary datatype, much more similar to Matlab than Scipy? Not that Scipy or Pandas is bad, but they have to work quite hard around the fundamentals of Python's syntax to emulate the same behavior of R/MATLAB.
I don't think this is the case. Most of numpy, which powers the vectorized operations that the rest of the scientific stack uses, is written in C anyway. The python part is simple, just python bindings to the C functions.
The matlab-like syntax for getting slices of arrays is the only really non-pythonic thing I can think of.
I understand your frustration, but Octave's problems are not because we're incompetent developers or because we have a broken shit cult of free software. We're doing the best we can, but it's hard when the talent we attract is mathematical, not language devs.
Maybe our real problem is that we don't know how to turn Octave into a business while keeping it free. It is disheartening when everyone tells us we should just kill Octave and make everything Python.
When Prof Andrew Ng first ran his Machine Learning MOOC, very many of us relied on Octave. An Octave dev showed up to help students and a fundraiser was organised in return.
In the cases you mention, surely it would be trivial to prove if the problem was Ghostscript or not by demonstrating graph 3 or the missing data points were output or not by Octave before Ghostscripts png conversion.
Surely modularity makes it easier to isolate bugs to a module ?
Were these bugs fixed ? You should go back and see.
> An Octave dev showed up to help students and a fundraiser was organised in return.
Hi, that was me.
There wasn't a fundraiser, just a thank-you card for jwe, Octave lead dev. We get some money from FSF donations but not enough to support a single dev. We mostly use the donation money to pay for travel expenses for the yearly Octconf.
I used to have an Octave job, but my current job is unrelated to Octave. I've been trying to court Enthought and Continuum Analytics to try to hire me or any other Octave dev to work on Octave again. My pitch is that while moving people off Matlab is a laudable goal, there's a lot of Matlab code out there that could be used as-is while they write new code in Python or Julia or whatever. With stuff like Pytave that glues Octave and Python, Octave could help their customers transition off Matlab.
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?44050
I could easily reproduce the issue on a few different machines. I'm pretty sure it is ghostscript issue because it also hangs similarily when converting some images to pdfs.
I can't remember if I even bothered to report the issue on GhostScript tracker - there are exactly the same issues being reported as early as 2008 all the way to today.
Hi, as one of the devs who commented on your issue (and the one who closed it as "not our problem"), I empathize with your position and agree that it can be frustrating to deal with large complex projects with a lot of dependencies. If any of our comments contributed to your feeling less welcome or less empowered to use or help improve Octave, then I sincerely apologize.
I have personally been affected by more than a couple of ghostscript bugs that have drastically impacted my use of Octave over the years, either crashing, busy waiting, or memory grabbing. My first response has always been to start digging into ghostscript to find out why it's screwing me over and try to fix it myself or come up with a workaround.
Not making an excuse, just offering that for myself one of the immeasurable advantages of working with completely free software is that I feel empowered to at least try to identify and fix problems when they happen.
RMS isn't talking about how easy it is to access the source and modify it. What he's saying that even though the source is there, it's covered by copyright and using that source code for any purpose other than running it unchanged in your browser is a violation of that copyright. Whether or not you choose to obey that rule is besides the point.
I certainly don't agree with RMS on many points, but the fact that most Javascript code on websites are "non-free" according to FSF's definition is pretty clear.
> JavaScript is many things, but nonfree isn't one of them.
Javascript is often minified, and it's generally important to the Free Software movement that you get the original source. Otherwise, a company could comply with an open source license by providing you with a compiled binary, which does have all the functionality the source code describes.
The other issue might be that you get to view the Javascript source, but might not be able to redistribute it or modify it.
I really appreciate what RMS has done as far as start a movement that I think has contributed greatly to the human existence but when he says things like "The basic point of the free software movement is that nonfree software is unjust and should not exist." I can't but seriously question his judgment. It's one thing to personally want to use free software, it's another to claim that nonfree software "should not exist". If one person writes nonfree software and another person voluntarily uses it, I don't think anything "wrong" has transpired. People should be free to offer software under whatever terms they desire likewise people should be able to consume software under whatever terms they are willing to agree to.
That is the liberal perspective, but one radical perspective would be that unfree software causes significant harm to society as a whole despite individuals having the choice not to use it directly, and so should not exist.
Note that radicals don't necessarily support passing laws to get what they want - the goal of most political radicalism is to cause a change in society, not to force society at gunpoint to do something it doesn't want to.
One can also see harm that the free software movement causes.
RMS tried to prevent emacs from having code completion through clang, modularity in gcc and puts software following his definition of freedom before the software being able to fulfill its task in a good way.
One could argue that a society in which people cared about free software would not require the free software movement to attempt to protect itself in such a manner, though. You can find many similar examples in other movements where the movement needs to protect itself from integration into the status quo without completing its goals.
If one person writes nonfree software and another person voluntarily uses it, I don't think anything "wrong" has transpired.
Beware the fallacy of composition. What may be "right" in a transaction between individuals can be "wrong" over the entire population. One example of this is the mob effect: if one person takes the time to disagree with you it is not a problem. If thousands of people send you messages of disagreement it becomes an unbearable burden.
Likewise for software. One person using nonfree software made by another person is not much of a problem. When thousands of people use the same nonfree software it becomes a problem due to lock-in, network effects, etc.
That's been RMS & FSF's position for decades. They view it as wrong that you have software which you do not have the four freedom for.
Many legal and ethnical systems have limitations on what you can consent to. You're not allowed to consent to work for less than the minimum wage, for example
However, if they were really radical they would license the whole GNU stack under the AGPL, because one cannot use SAAS software without the server side portion.
This is a little bit different. The only reason proprietary software exists is the copyright clause in the Constitution, which grants the government a right to issue limited-time monopolies to creators of original works.
Revoking a government-granted monopoly is very libertarian. Revoking mutual consent is the opposite.
"allowing system software
to be distributed free of charge via these organizations has
limited our ability to convince Apple resellers to distribute and
promote Apple system software products to their customers."
This is one of the cases where the American perspective just gives us a convenient language for discussing something more universal. By an accident of history, the US constitution cements inside a legal document the result of debates and lobbying that was going on all over the western world at the time.
Others at the time were also discussing the propriety of IP, and eventually agreed in favour of a limited form of it. Over time, it got strengthened further.
Proprietary software can be that way via unavailable source code and/or DRM without any government monopoly. So, legal elimination of proprietary software would require abolishing copyright and patent laws and mandating source release for published works along with prohibition of DRM.
Proprietary software would also exist without any copyright, people would just guard their trade secrets, obfuscate code and put it server-side more than they already do now. The free software movement uses copyright to protect the freedoms, it is not a "libertarian" movement and never claimed to be. It wants to ensure that programmers and users of software have the four freedoms that RMS has laid out in many talks.
Perhaps a BSD style license is what you personally prefer. RMS has argued against such licenses for decades. Even if you disagree with him, please don't blame him for being inconsistent or defending a view that is not thought through.
Also, if you do not like the GPL, then you should perhaps be consistent and not use GPL software at all.
> Also, if you do not like the GPL, then you should perhaps be consistent and not use GPL software at all.
The reasons one sometimes has to use GPL software are quite similar for the reasons one sometimes has to use proprietary software. So the answer for GPL haters should rather be: avoid using GPL software (if possible), but more importantly: don't contribute to GPL software and contribute to software with "better" licensing so that one can (in future) create devices that are proprietary-software-free and copyleft-free at the same time.
Where you sit on this scale of secrecy is very much a matter of what you expect to get out of participating in the software 'business'.
RMS' movement allows for little wiggle room when it comes to 'free software', because it is a movement. Unless you're willing to join a movement, its perfectly okay to criticize it from the skirts - but the point is, RMS has set those skirts at a boundary of his choosing, according to an ideology.
That ideology has done a lot of good for the world. It is worth considering seriously, just what the world would be like today without a Free Software movement happening, as it did, over the last 40 years. 40 years of software development culture has existed with this ideology in its midst; what of the world, were it not so?
1. If a person is uninformed about the consequences of their decision and the alternatives that they could choose from, is that a voluntary decision? I think it would be very difficult to actually defend the position that the majority of software users decide voluntarily to use proprietary software.
Sure, if someone voluntarily buys cigarettes and smokes, I guess they should be free to do so as well. From that it does not follow that you shouldn't object to cigarettes existing (and in particular to them being offered by vendors to the unsuspecting public).
2. Economists know a concept they call externalities. Those are effects that one's economic transactions have on parties not involved in the transactions, like, for example, pollution of the environment that other people live in. Non-free software very often has negative externalities, in particular due to network effects that lead to de-facto monopolies and lock-in. Negative externalities are a good reason to object to what other people decide to do voluntarily.
Can you provide a single political movement that is fully optional in their goal.
Would a vegetarian say that if a person voluntarily buy animal factory meat, then there is nothing wrong with it.
Would a environmentalist say that if a person voluntarily buy a polluting car, then there is nothing wrong with the manufacturer selling it.
Would a anti-war activist say that if a person voluntarily join the military, then there is nothing wrong with war?
I am looking at a list of political movements, and I can't see a single one which would say that they are fine so long the thing they are working against is done voluntarily.
Do all vegetarians try to "replace and eliminate" meat-consumption for the whole population? How do you view those that do?
> if a person voluntarily buy a polluting car,
Everyone is affected by the pollution, so a bad comparison.
> person voluntarily join the military,
Again people are involuntarily affected by war.
> I am looking at a list of political movements, and I can't see a single one which would say that they are fine so long the thing they are working against is done voluntarily.
How about "No means no" campaigns? Sex is fine as long as it's done voluntarily by all parties.
"No means no" is about rape, so can people voluntarily be raped? If I look up the definition of rape, will I find the word "consent", as in, rape is an act when someone is involuntarily being involved in an sexual act. You can not voluntarily be raped. People can pretend, but then people can pretend that they are dragons and live on the moon.
That's a question I often ask. From what I know, RMS got some money in the bank that allows him to live the way he chooses. That is : spare some of its time advocating and building the free software movement. He's also very charismatic (well, in its very own way, I must admit).
He basically incarnates one thing : there's no compromise. He proves his position by shutting him off the proprietary world. And that's super tough to do. If he ever used non free software, his uncompromising position would be weakened.
So, FSF needs to be able to replace that sort of, non compromising, super talented and really smart person.
Has anybody ever seen someone close to that ? Then only one I see is Eben Moglen (although its technical talent is not in IT)
Eben has recently argued for combining code under GPL and GPL incompatible licenses, which could lead to the combination of code under GPL and proprietary licenses. I regard him as compromised by his corporate clients.
Oh, I dunno. It's possible that free software could solve a lot of problems and that non free software causes problems. I think it's great that RMS is an advocate. We need an ecosystem of ideas to evolve to something that makes sense and evangelists like RMS help that evolutionary process.
It's quite a shallow idea that right and wrong in life are exclusively related to consent. Just building on that concept (not to compare to software issues), one could say that it's fine to own slaves as long as they consent to selling themselves to you. Ethics is clearly far more complex than just the issue of consent. And that even ignores the issue that the real world is far removed from the abstract principle of consent given imperfect power balances and imperfect knowledge on each side.
That's not true. He for example thinks it's a good thing that Steam is available on Linux, as it makes it viable for people to come into the Linux world and from there, they usually end up using more free software. Of course, he doesn't like Steam either, and would like to get rid of it eventually, but it's the lesser of two evils for the time being.
Care to explain why you disagree ? Be warned, I'm on the opposite side of yours : proprietary software is a byproduct of competition on material grounds :-)
Well yes. I support free speech, and also support the ability of people to promise to keep secrets.
If you don't think that is a fair analogy, then maybe you can start by explaining how the heck the free-speech to free software analogy works in the first place.
The analogy is that non-free software is akin to censorship. Free speech for everybody is the ideal, in reality we have yet to achieve that (see for example China), and approving of censorship is a step backwards. Free software for everyone is the ideal, we have not reached that goal, and approving of non-free software hinders progress.
My first guess was RedHat. From skimming through https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/all-courses-exam..., it seems all of the courses use open source software, that might not be libre. For example I'm guessing some of Puppet's software are not libre.
It's articles like this that make it very hard to continue to take RMS seriously, and that is a huge shame. He's brilliant and has contributed so much. Things he created are the reason I get a paycheck.
That said, this tribal religious you're-either-100%-with-us-or-you're-against-us and I'm going to "condemn you" ("nor have anything to do with it, nor even talk about it except with condemnation.") attitude makes it almost impossible to be sympathetic to his cause and puts him on the level of other rigid religious fundamentalist radicals.
If he IS talking about Red Hat here, as others have theorized, then he is worse than a fanatic, he's a self destructive jerk.
Red Hat just recently came out and said despite other companies abandoning GCC for Clang (See Google, Apple, FreeBSD, Android, even the Linux Foundation) they were still investing in GCC. Without GCC there is no more "GNU slash Linux" it's just Linux at that point. There are other C libraries, other userlands, but Linux still needs GCC and Red Hat is backing GCC. Keep condemning allies like Red Hat and soon they'll wonder why they even try to be your friend.
As soon as llvm.linuxfoundation.org gets Linux written in C instead of GCC, there will be no more GNU slash Linux or GNU plus Linux or whatever RMS wants it called. FreeBSD, Android, and then Linux will be fully capable of ditching GNU, FSF, and RMS and GPL'd software (save for the kernel which is GPLv2 and only nominally so, they never actually sue for violations like binary blobs) altogether. And who would be sad? Linux didn't "win" because of the philosophical views of RMS. Linux won because it worked. What happens when Linux, and companies like Red Hat, don't need this kind of garbage anymore?
Metacomment: a few years ago anything by RMS would have been jumped on within minutes of posting with lots of comments against him and his principles. Is he now being looked at in a different light by the wider software development community?
Snowden's NSA revelations, Microsoft strongarming Windows 10 onto users, the increasing unavoidability of anything Google, Facebook continuing to be Facebook, copyright-laws being abused for all kinds of bullshit etc.
These all have validated what RMS has been saying for years, and you actually have to be quite ignorant at this point to just dismiss his viewpoint.
Hmm, I asked since my mental model of the 'programming community' that I osmosify by reading comments on these kind of websites detects a slight shift on the RMS popularity front over the last year or so. I feel he's coming in from the cold a bit.
I am mostly browsing HN during my european daytime. Lots of people seem to comment on stories during my daytime. Do you mean his detractors are predominantly American? Do you think they have a particular political allegiance too?
I think people are just tired of criticising him. I personally am against him, but it bores me to discuss the same stuff all over again, especially when it's "meta" as you say and can be deemed off topic.
Even if things have changed such that only a third of HN users are in the US, that's still a lot of people sleeping. Though I suppose I am implying that more of RMS's detractors are from the US. On one level, it wouldn't surprise me. Even though RMS's reputation is global, most of his writings are in English, and his homepage is currently focused on North-America-centric topics: https://stallman.org/
But I'm going to make a guess that HN is still busiest when America is busiest, judging by the time frequency of submissions currently in the /new section, as compared to what it will look like at 9am east coast time.
Years ago HN had a higher percentage of Slashdot refugees or whatever you want to call them, where what I'd call hard-nosed OSS was part of the dialog and the arguments were fresh. These days, there's many who see him less as a controversial figure within "their" community, and more of a crazy old guy with extremist views.
The more time goes by the less crazy he seems. His goals may not be realistic but his predictions about the dangers of dependence on commercial software have been vindicated in many instances. And things might get much worse still if the trend towards authoritarian leadership in Western countries continues.
A bit nit-picky, but RMS is perfectly fine with commercial software (software that is sold for money), he objects to proprietary software (software that you cannot read and modify the source code of). Freeware is not commercial, but proprietary. When you buy a Linux distro CD, that's commercial, but might be non-proprietary (depending on the distro).
It's not incompatible in the slightest. If I write software and give it to you only in exchange for money, licenced under the GPL, then I am selling software completely in agreement with RMS's principles.
Also, RMS doesn't insist on any freedom of end users to distribute without cost. Only on you not limiting their redistribution.
Now, that makes some licencing models impossible, sure, but those are hardly the only way to sell software.
I don’t have any stats to back this up, but my impression is that most software developers doesn’t care that much about the FSF and RMS. Lots of people use free/libre software, of course. It’s kinda hard to avoid these days :)
That's weird, I have the exact opposite impression. Are you sure we're talking about the same guy?
Everything I've ever read or heard from RMS sounded extremely consistent, logical, common sense and down to the earth to me.
I always thought that people don't like him because he's stating some inconvenient truths about proprietary software and because they are pissed that they cannot use GPL'ed software for their closed-source, proprietary products.
To me, RMS is basically a modern reincarnation of Socrates.
I converted this year to using Linux on all of my computers, and with some compatibility of FSF and Apache 2 licenses, this is 'easy' to do (e.g., the community version of IntelliJ is Apache 2, so a decent IDE slips into my mostly GNU based working and writing environment). I like to wear FSF tee shirts, and I feel like I am being true to the cause, even if I do have an iPad and Apple TV to watch Netflix. I am a member of the FSF and I personally feel like it is OK to have these non-free devices around as long as my working and writing environment is libre software.
Exactly, to claim that you support FSF, you should support the goal of FSF which is that the four freedoms of software are more important than having more/better/different software without some of those freedoms.
As RMS says, "I also think that open source is nice, but by far it's not the most important thing there is to software." is a valid viewpoint but it's against the goals of FSF (not mild support, but opposition), so RMS would kindly ask you to cease claiming any endorsement by FSF in this case.
"Even worse, that grants nonfree software legitimacy." ⇒ "nonfree" software has no legitimacy, no matter what.
This totally ignores that there might not be free software for that use case, the free software alternative might be worse (very often the case). This article totally ignores those concerns and thus depreciates them as less important.
What you're doing is calling me an idiot, you could have at least tried to come up with a counter-argument.
The article doesn't ignore those concerns, but it makes an explicit statement that yes, in their opinion "nonfree" software has no legitimacy, no matter what and even then using, creating and improving free software should be done instead of using the better non-free alternative.
What counter argument do you want? FSF explicitly states their position, which seems incompatible with your position, so they acknowledge that your position is what they want to fight against, you are their "political enemy" and ask you to not call yourself their ally/supporter or claim FSF endorsement, as some of the targeted companies do.
It's a statement of values and goals, which are obviously different for different people and organizations.
I expect no counter argument or faulty ones if I'm right in my view, and good ones that change my view if I'm wrong. I don't expect to be attacked just by insults without any explanation why I'm supposed to be wrong.
I just pointed out with my original comment that the FSF doesn't tolerate other definitions of liberties and doesn't care if it tramples on them on their way to "replace and eliminate"(from this article) everything that doesn't follow their definitions. It also puts its own cause above everything else.
This seems pretty extremist and totalitarian to me
Just to throw out an extreme example for discussion: the Mozilla Foundation would seem to be one of the free-software organizations that RMS critiques.
One initiative they've supported is Software Carpentry: http://software-carpentry.org/scf/partners/
One of Software Carpentry's packaged lessons is for MATLAB: http://software-carpentry.org/lessons/
To be fair, the current MATLAB lesson plan includes asides for how GNU Octave can be used...but the fact that the curriculum is titled "Programming with MATLAB" certainly counts as promotion of non-free software.
Edit: by "extreme", I mean that Mozilla is in most people's minds a passionate advocate for free software, and the number of their affiliations with proprietary software lessons is extremely small as far as I can tell.
Edit 2: FWIW, RMS's definition of non-free software may be much more expansive than most people's:
https://stallman.org/airbnb.html
> Airbnb requires you to run nonfree software (an app, or Javascript). It puts you in a data base easily available to Big Brother (just like a hotel).
JavaScript is many things, but nonfree isn't one of them.