I strongly disagree with RMS on some issues (like Snowden) and I don't share his hard line on proprietary software either. But RMS is just a particular kind of animal. I respect the need for that animal in a diverse ecosystem and I respect the reasoning behind free software.
In particular, I think gcc has played an essential role in providing free software to users because it is licensed under the GPL. The BSD license is great for less important things, but the moment giant corporations have engineered the whole "open source" ecosystem so that they can distribute forks of all the basic build tools without contributing changes to the public where we can see and influence them - that's the moment we've handed over the keys to the kingdom. You have to be pretty out of touch with history not to see that point.
To hear the way HN talks about RMS, he is a nerdy, smelly, arrogant, technically ignorant Emmanuel Goldstein, representing everything we hate most about the nerdy computing world that pre-existed the current startup gold rush (but which, coincidentally, entirely enabled it and us). Now a large proportion of us here secretly harbor the belief that we are the next Steve Jobs, so we pine for the good old days when people like that made bank on companies whose business models were entirely based on platform lock-in. Because so few of us actually remember how fucked up it really was for all the users and programmers. Because we don't consider ourselves users and programmers, just temporarily embarrassed millionaires and Chief Engineering Architect Engineers. So it's no wonder that HN still doesn't understand the point of GPL. Just like most of Marin county now thinks measles is something to cultivate, like acidophilus.
> The BSD license is great for less important things, but the moment giant corporations have engineered the whole "open source" ecosystem so that they can distribute forks of all the basic build tools without contributing changes to the public where we can see and influence them - that's the moment we've handed over the keys to the kingdom. You have to be pretty out of touch with history not to see that point.
In particular, I think gcc has played an essential role in providing free software to users because it is licensed under the GPL. The BSD license is great for less important things, but the moment giant corporations have engineered the whole "open source" ecosystem so that they can distribute forks of all the basic build tools without contributing changes to the public where we can see and influence them - that's the moment we've handed over the keys to the kingdom. You have to be pretty out of touch with history not to see that point.
To hear the way HN talks about RMS, he is a nerdy, smelly, arrogant, technically ignorant Emmanuel Goldstein, representing everything we hate most about the nerdy computing world that pre-existed the current startup gold rush (but which, coincidentally, entirely enabled it and us). Now a large proportion of us here secretly harbor the belief that we are the next Steve Jobs, so we pine for the good old days when people like that made bank on companies whose business models were entirely based on platform lock-in. Because so few of us actually remember how fucked up it really was for all the users and programmers. Because we don't consider ourselves users and programmers, just temporarily embarrassed millionaires and Chief Engineering Architect Engineers. So it's no wonder that HN still doesn't understand the point of GPL. Just like most of Marin county now thinks measles is something to cultivate, like acidophilus.