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by dragonwriter
4537 days ago
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> It's very rare these days to find people who are willing to stick to their principles; we should respect those who do, rather than criticize them for not compromising on their principles Why should I respect someone for sticking with principles that are misguided? The whole idea that "sticking to principles" is a virtue independent of the merits of the principles involved is perverse. Its even more perverse when the "principles" being stuck too are tactical judgments about how to best acheive strategic aims, and they are being stuck too even when they are operating against the strategic aims -- which is, precisely, the charge ESR is levelling against the anti-plugin policy vis-a-vis the stated goals of the FSF with regard to GCC. > asking the FSF to do something that they believe hinders free software is like asking MADD to open a drive-through liquor store ESR's argument is that FSF is wrong that this hinders free software, and in fact that FSF's status quo approach inhibits the FSF's stated goals for GCC. |
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I believe ESR is wrong.
In years past, there was BSD unix, a modified version of the unix shipped from Bell Labs. The BSD changes were theoretically "free", in that if you had a license from AT&T (which were easy to get, since at the time AT&T couldn't sell software), you could do anything you wanted with them.
What people did was to fork BSD, take their modifications proprietary, and create Solaris (well, SunOS), HP-UX, AIX, Irix, and a fair-sized stack of others that did even worse in the marketplace. The end result of that was fragmentation in the Unix ecosystem, which was bad on many levels. (One example: Don't like autoconf/automake/libtool? Guess where the necessity of those came from?)
Or, how about Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso's response to ESR:
"The FSF sure can prevent it, and proprietary compilers still thrive. Here is one that particularly bugs me as an Octave developer: we routinely see people being lured to use Nvidia's non-free nvcc for GPU computing, which they gleefully admit is based on clang and LLVM. And there is Xcode, of course, completely non-free and completely based on clang and LLVM.
"The fact that these non-free tools are not based on gcc are a testament to how proprietary software developers cannot plug into gcc, and how clang is fostering non-free software.
"The nvidia situation is particularly dire becuase today, free GPU computing is almost nonexistent. It's almost all based on CUDA and nvidia's massive pro-CUDA marketing campaign. Even most OpenCL implementations are non-free, and the scant few free implementations of OpenCL that exist are not fully functional."
So we have several examples of ESR's approaches failing. On the other hand, the GPL does a pretty successful job of preventing the kind of fragmentation that damages ESR's "hacker community". And part of the reason it does is the FSF's dogmatic stance.