[cstross]

We need people like RMS. He marks one side of the Overton Window framing the debate on freedom and software.

(Overton window: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window )

This doesn't mean he's right but what he does is necessary. If he didn't exist we'd need to invent him (or someone like him).

(Oh, and he is indeed a fanatic, but of the pacifist variety -- not the kind who's interested in killing people to enforce his views -- and therefore worth debating with.)

[cwp]

No.

The difference between RMS and ESR is one of kind, not one of degree. Both the free software movement and the open source movement believe that open system are good, and the more open they are the better they are. The difference is in their answer to the question of "why?"

RMS and his adherents believe in inalienable human right to tinker, and consider limitations to that right, such as closed source technology, to morally offensive. ESR and his followers believe that open technology is better technology and that the benefits of technology are more fully realized when it's possible to tinker with it. RMS is concerned with morality, ESR with practicality.

The key thing here is that there's no spectrum with the RMS on one end, Steve Jobs on the other end and ESR somewhere in the middle. The open source movement is just as ardent, just as committed and just as "extreme" as the free software movement, but more successful.

Now perhaps you mean that the FSF serves an important function, in that their fanaticism makes the open source movement look more reasonable and thus more acceptable to the mainstream. But I think the very fact that actual positions held by free software and open source advocates are so similar make it hard for mainstream observers to appreciate the distinction.

So no, we don't need people like RMS.

[edited the last line for clearer rhetoric]

[raganwald]

The difference between RMS and ESR is one of kind, not one of degree

Yes.

RMS is concerned with morality, ESR with practicality.

Also yes, for some definition of “practicality.”

The open source movement is just as ardent, just as committed and just as "extreme" as the free software movement, but more successful.

I don’t know how to measure commitment, but I agree that the open source movement is more successful in the sense that it is more popular.

But what else should we expect? If you take two groups with similar ideas, but one thinks of moral arguments as a way to achieve practical goals, while the other thinks that practical arguments are a way to achieve moral goals, you should almost always expect to see the “practical” group be more successful than the moral group.

I see this in school, where students who study how to pass tests get higher marks than students who study the material to learn. I see this in business. I see this in politics. Why would we expect to see anything else in software?

no, we don't need RMS

I think that’s a fine statement to make if you qualify who “we” are. If you mean people concerned with practical objectives, you may be right. I caution against rhetoric that might be mistaken for suggesting that your point of view encompasses everyone reading your arguments.

[cwp]

I think that’s a fine statement to make if you qualify who “we” are. If you mean people concerned with practical objectives, you may be right. I caution against rhetoric that might be mistaken for suggesting that your point of view encompasses everyone reading your arguments.

Fair point. That line was actually meant as a direct response to cstross's "We need people like RMS," but I botched the parallel construction. The "we" there should be the same "we" that cstross was talking about.

one thinks of moral arguments as a way to achieve practical goals, while the other thinks that practical arguments are a way to achieve moral goals

That's an interesting way to think about it, but for me at least, neither of those characterizations is accurate. I think practical arguments are a way to achieve practical goals. I oppose the philosophy of the FSF, because AFAICT, they're making moral arguments to achieve moral goals. You seem to consider morality and practicality to be two sides of the same coin, where I see them as quite separate.

What I dislike about the RMS position is that it seems to consider tinkering, and perhaps geek culture in general, as inherently good and goals in their own right. I take a more utilitarian view: tinkering is good insofar we benefit from the results. (That "we" is very broad by they way. Users of technology and humanity in general.)

[turns out I can still edit the gp, so I fixed that line]

[icebraining]

What I dislike about the RMS position is that it seems to consider tinkering, and perhaps geek culture in general, as inherently good and goals in their own right. I take a more utilitarian view: tinkering is good insofar we benefit from the results.

I disagree; his position, as I perceive it, is that having the right to tinker is inherently good, not so much tinkering itself. Much like many of us consider Free Speech to be inherently good, even if we find some speech abominable.

And the advantages of Free Software aren't limited to tinkering, of course.

[cwp]

Sure. The right to tinker is required for actual tinkering, and a right that's never exercised is pointless. Regardless, I don't consider the right to tinker an end in its self. The pleasure of tinkering is utterly unimportant compared with the good that a tinkerers work can bring into the world.

As for freedom of speech, I think the analogy is flawed. The technology equivalent of speech is invention, and the freedom to invent doesn't require anything like the GPL. The freedom to tinker is more like the freedom to copyedit somebody else's work. And hey, I'm for it! Remix culture is great stuff. But it's not in the same league as freedom of speech.

When it comes right down to it, though, I don't consider freedom of speech an end in its self either. The value of free speech is the sort of society it produces, not the speech its self. I favour limits to speech when the effect of that speech is not a net good to society. Now, those situations are few and far between, but they do exist. Yelling "fire" and all that; our legal system has a long and nuanced tradition of weighing the issue in various situations.

The point is that dogma and fanaticism are counterproductive, whatever your goals are. The FSF is certainly not alone in this.

[icebraining]

Sure. The right to tinker is required for actual tinkering, and a right that's never exercised is pointless. Regardless, I don't consider the right to tinker an end in its self. The pleasure of tinkering is utterly unimportant compared with the good that a tinkerers work can bring into the world.

But who said anything about the pleasure of tinkering? I don't think that was ever RMS' position.

As for freedom of speech, I think the analogy is flawed. The technology equivalent of speech is invention, and the freedom to invent doesn't require anything like the GPL. The freedom to tinker is more like the freedom to copyedit somebody else's work. And hey, I'm for it! Remix culture is great stuff. But it's not in the same league as freedom of speech.

That was specifically about X vs having the right to do X; I didn't meant to make a broad comparison between them. Subjects in analogies aren't supposed to map 1:1 in everything.

When it comes right down to it, though, I don't consider freedom of speech an end in its self either. The value of free speech is the sort of society it produces, not the speech its self. I favour limits to speech when the effect of that speech is not a net good to society. Now, those situations are few and far between, but they do exist. Yelling "fire" and all that; our legal system has a long and nuanced tradition of weighing the issue in various situations.

But "fire" is an exception mostly because Free Speech is supposed to protect political speech and we can say in a mostly objectively way that "fire" doesn't fit.

But what about political speeches that are arguably not a net good to society, like e.g. calls to pointless (in your opinion) wars? Should they be banned? If not, why not, and aren't you contradicting yourself?

The point is that dogma and fanaticism are counterproductive, whatever your goals are. The FSF is certainly not alone in this.

Another word might be idealism.

[raganwald]

The value of free speech is the sort of society it produces, not the speech its self.

With great respect, I urge you to think this kind of thing through very, very carefully. Consider freedom in the general sense, such as freedom to vote. Many post-colonial countries have freer citizens but worse economies. If freedom is useful only inasmuch as it is a means to some other practical end, we could say that these countries would be better off with colonial masters running them.

America threw off colonialism and prospered, but it is the exception. Freedom often has costs, ask anyone who has chosen to start a company instead of taking a job with BigCo. Some people, myself included, consider freedom a worthwhile thing whether it makes us rich or healthy or happy or not.

[kamaal]

>>What I dislike about the RMS position is that it seems to consider tinkering, and perhaps geek culture in general, as inherently good and goals in their own right. I take a more utilitarian view: tinkering is good insofar we benefit from the results.

Would you say truth is beneficial only so as long as one benefits from it?

The fact is, somethings are inherently good in their own right. Eg: Non-violence.

[einhverfr]

I go back and forth on how helpful RMS is. On one hand, where would we be without the GCC? This is something he helped get going.

On the other, I see him as someone who misinterprets a bunch of things because it is convenient for him politically to do so. The two examples are what happens when you dynamically link GPL software to proprietary software (static linking is arguably a bigger deal with the GPL v3 than the GPL v2), and taking extreme positions as to what the GPL versions require of developers bridging proprietary and GPL software.

The second is his view of what the BSD license allows and he makes false claims here he bases his view that the BSD and GPL v3 licenses are compatible on. The BSD license probably does not allow sublicensing in the opinion of most lawyers I have talked to (Eben Moglen being the sole exception!) and so if relicensing/sublicensing is a requirement for compatibility with the GPL v3, the BSD license is incompatible but the MIT license is compatible. Last I discussed this with Moglen he seemed to think it was safe just because the BSD author would lack standing or on other technical grounds. Every other lawyer I have talked to says "don't assume it's safe to take BSD code and add license restrictions without first making significant changes" (this is also the Software Freedom Law Center's official recommendation also) something the GPL v3 explicitly requires. (The counter-argument is that everyone involved in drafting the GPL v3 believed it to be compatible with the BSD license and this was a goal so BSD compatibility should be read into the license. This was what Richard Fontana argued when I brought this up on the OSI email lists).

I actually still use the GPL v2 and BSD licenses almost exclusively, and RMS is a big part of the reason I won't consider upgrading to the GPL v3.

[cpunks]

The differences between ESR and RMS are:

* RMS is technically competent. ESR is technically clueless. * ESR is more charismatic. He manages to convince people he's important. RMS has on charisma. * ESR will do everything he can do undermine RMS. It's a way of building himself up. RMS will do whatever he believes will further free software. They're both often wrong. * RMS's writings from the late nineties are prophetic. ESR's writings from the same period are, in retrospect, idiotic. * RMS created the whole movement. ESR did little bits of damage to it.

[koeselitz]

This seems a bit extreme to me. I fall more on RMS's side of things, but I also thing RMS would not characterize ESR as "technically clueless" and only doing "little bits of damage" to the movement. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is not an unimportant essay, if only as a pedagogy to an important shift in how development can work. I disagree strongly with ESR's attempt to divorce, as he says here, "moral thought" from software - this seems like a mistake to me - but he is not a fool or a dilettante.

[nnethercote]

Have you ever seen RMS speak? I have, several times. He's fat, hairy, ugly, but he definitely has a great deal of a certain kind of charisma.

[kamaal]

Nerd Appeal!

I heard RMS speak at a college even here in Bangalore. It was like listening to a Saint. Somebody like Buddha of software. He has a unique appeal which big achievers build around themselves. That sort of a calm confidence comes only through relentless belief one's principles and proven success demonstrating his principles.

Outside of nerd circles, this doesn't have much appeal.

[zem]

one of the most striking examples of this is rms's objection to a modular gcc. modularity is a technically superior solution, and would have been supremely useful in supporting a larger ecosystem of development and analysis tools (e.g. ides, automated refactoring, source-to-source translators, etc), but would also have made it easy to build proprietary systems that could remain closed while using modules from gcc.

the current groundswell of clang adoption has revealed just how many people wanted a good, free, modular c++ compiler, but by rms's principles, making gcc serve their purposes would have come at too high a cost.

[pi18n]

RMS is pretty brilliant, he's predicted exactly the kind of closed platform iOS turned out to be, and has been fighting against it. I think it's important that people be allowed to code and mess with their devices, and know what their devices are doing. How is it that so many iOS apps grab your contacts without asking?

Before I stray too far from my point; I am glad he does what he does.

[dspeyer]

We do need RMS.

Compromise is a dangerous game. Especially when the proprietary world doesn't compromise back (and it usually doesn't). How long could the free software movement have continued to mean anything if each year it had crept a little closer to the mainstream technological community?

[cwp]

Open source isn't a compromise between free software and proprietary software. It's a different philosophical basis for advocating the same practices.

[dspeyer]

The open source movement isn't. The "proprietary software is ok so long as not much is at stake and you weren't likely to tinker with it anyway" idea is.

[bluekeybox]

Except: (1) Politics and public debate is multidimensional and not a single axis with a clear "left" and "right" as people sometimes mistakenly imagine; multiple and different extrema are possible. (2) On the axis where RMS appears to stand, I do not believe his position to be the most extreme one possible. (3) Just the way most people fail to understand that politics is multidimensional, without broad knowledge, they will often mistake one political axis for another. I believe people misunderstand RMS and project their own ideals about freedom and ascetic saints/prophets onto him. I do not believe RMS to be a champion of freedom that many people who had heard of him do. There exists an equally idealistic view, from where his positions are not wrong because they are fanatical, they are wrong period.

Take what RMS wrote about the early days of Symbolics. When you read him, you begin to realize that he believed the community of hackers that developed at MIT to be a goal unto itself, not as a means to achieve something specific. This is in spite of the fact that every individual who started hacking at MIT (this ironically includes RMS) surely saw himself as pursuing a specific goal. It is hard to reason with a man who believes that groups of people exist in and of themselves, independently of individuals and their goals. The only possible consequence that can stem from such a position is to define freedom as a property of groups, not of individuals, which is completely alien to the notion of freedom as most people (at least in the U.S.) understand it. The exact same position, when held by people in other countries, has lead to tyrannies being established, both of right- and left-wing kind.

The issue that ESR is raising is a very practical one -- RMS has become the de facto spokesperson for the free software movement, which hurts free software more than it helps it.

[kijin]

If you think of the Overton Window as a multidimensional space with multiple axes, RMS does occupy a location close to (although perhaps not exactly at) one or another edge of it. Regardless of whether he is wrong or right, he has done a great deal of work stretching the edges of, and drawing attention to, the part of the Overton Window that he occupies. In fact, it's the whole point of the Overton Window argument that even wrong views can often be useful in the grand scheme of things. So I don't think your exceptions to GP's argument are valid.

Also, lots of people have hopelessly romantic views about the group to which they belong (or used to belong). At least in that respect, RMS is not unique at all. But the fact that he falls prey to this common error is not very relevant when we ask whether it is indeed "evil" to make proprietary software, or any other current issue that RMS rants about. (We don't evaluate Peter Thiel's startup advice on the basis of his odd philosophical commitments, do we?)

[bluekeybox]

> But the fact that [RMS] falls prey to this common error is not very relevant when we ask whether it is indeed "evil" to make proprietary software, or any other current issue that RMS rants about.

I believe it is relevant when discussing RMS views. What you call "romanticism" of a group is only one of several possible romanticisms. There is also the romanticism of an individual, the romanticism of a family, the romanticism of a partnership etc. The point is that RMS was guided by a romanticism at the moment he was starting the GNU project as he himself described in the copy included with every Emacs install, and moreover his romanticism was of a very specific, (I believe) noninclusive and dysfunctional kind. This is rarely discussed for some reason, when even people who deep down disagree with RMS put on a guilty face and speak of the man as if he was just one of those rare idealists whom the world badly needs, and as if they do not dare to question his supposed integrity. This breeds orthodoxy besides other things because of which this thread is here.

[kijin]

If we're talking about the man, then you may be right. Few humans are worth constructing an orthodoxy around every aspect of their lives, and RMS ain't one of them.

But as far as ideas are concerned, I think RMS's romanticization of MIT hackers is severable from most of his well-known stances on software freedom. I think ESR's article has more to do with RMS's ideas than with the man himself. If (Microsoft|Apple|Facebook) are evil, they are evil no matter what RMS smoked in his MIT days. If it's counterproductive to treat them as evil, then it's counterproductive even if RMS turns out to be God's only nephew.

[specialist]

Agreeing with you: Absolutists (like RMS) expand the Overton Window. I'm more BSD than GPL, but without RMS, BSD would be seen as radical.

ESR wrote:

Unfortunately, RMS made an early decision to frame his advocacy as a moral crusade rather than a pragmatic argument about engineering practices and outcomes.

Having done a bit of policy work, value statements are what works. "Intellectuals" (progressives, geeks, libertarians) think The Right Answer wins. Nope. Cite George Lakoff, David Domke, Thomas Frank, Noam Chomsky...

Further, open source is a moral issue. Example:

Diebold hid their software. We lost transparency of our elections. Bad things happened. John Bonifaz and voteraction.org proved in court that John Kerry won New Mexico in 2004. The same things happened nationwide. Extrapolate.

Ditto medical devices, our personal data, etc.

So I'm with RMS. I'm sorry that RMS makes ESR feel weird. Tough.

[arthi]

No doubt you feel the same way about Rick Santorum.

[nickpinkston]

I'd say I feel the same way about Ron Paul - he brings a refreshing perspective to politics, but he's certainly not right on everything.

Santorum adds nothing to the debate but repetition of the narrative that's already going on. I should add to this that no one ever likes the same tactic they use to be used against them - in this case having Stallman define an extreme position to maintain a more pragmatic narrative.

All considered, I'm glad both Stallman and Paul are doing their thing - even if I don't agree with them much of the time.

[cynicalkane]

To elaborate on this, fanaticism often looks like a great idea to those allied with the fanatics, even if they disagree with their behavior. But people should not feel entitled to fanaticism because they think they are right, because that's how you get people like Santorum. Everyone thinks they are right, after all. It's hypocritical to say fanaticism is a luxury permissible to the "good guys" and not to the "bad guys".

[graeme]

That would only be true if he thought santorumms ideas were generally good, but too extreme.

[pjscott]

I would feel that way about Rick Santorum if (and only if) I wanted people's views to move closer to his. This is not a statement about his opinions, but about how his opinions influence the public discourse. Likewise for RMS.

[Spooky23]

Santorum is a true believer.

There's a difference between a leader who drinks the kool-aid, and a leader who mixes the kool-aid. Kool-aid drinkers by definition cannot set the agenda.

[einhverfr]

As John Medaille put it Santorum preaches to the choir but drives the congregation out of the church.