I think reading about the early history of the MIT AI labs and the history of LISP machines really helps to put RMS in context. Before reading about how that all played out, I was one of the ones who respected RMS's broad goals, but decried his almost radical attitude.
I don't think like that any longer. Instead, I now see RMS as a sort of holocaust survivor warning against complacency when dealing with dictators. If RMS seems overly concerned with corporations co-opting free software, it's only because he's been there!
(P.S. Sorry for not providing links to the LISP machine history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine and http://funcall.blogspot.com are probably a good jumping-off points. The tl;dr of it is: MIT AI labs developed LISP, Symbolics took MIT's work and commercialized it without giving back, the MIT AI lab guys responded by going off and forming their own LISP machine company, and that left RMS all alone at MIT and hating commercial software)
One big problem I have with Mono is that it seems terminally buggy. A Mono application I was thinking of getting involved with had untraceable memory leaks to it that seemed to doom an otherwise excellent app to second-rate-ness.
Further, the whole '.NET' architecture seems to be structurally so elaborate that any open source implementation would have to be buggy and incomplete since no one person would have the time to really finish or even understand all of it.
So I think that even without the thread of patents, .NET is a bad thing for open source because it gives folks a continual impetus to go to the working, closed-source MS implementation.
So, then here is a question: If .NET is so big, the spec is unmanageable and so on, why even attempt this ?
There was a time when DEC shops were turning out projects between two and five times the speed of a comparable IBM shop. The advantage was that the defaults were sane and you could actually know the system. It was stable and a breeze to develop for.
By bringing 'mono' or something like it into the open source community we are attempting to match microsoft at its own game, which is imho completely stupid.
If open source is to succeed it should not attempt to copy the kind of architecture that you can only build and maintain with an army of programmers that will slog away at it simply because they get paid to do so.
Stallman isn't a bad guy but he's a zealot and like in every other aspect of life following a zealot generally isn't a good idea.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against him speaking his mind or his supporters speaking theirs. The difference here is between "Mono and de Icaza are evil" and "I think Mono is the wrong approach and here's why"
Stallman always jumps to "people who disagree with me are evil" and that's why even his supporters are starting to wonder if he's doing more damage than good.
"This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. Free C# implementations permit users to run their C# programs on free platforms, which is good."
"The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.
We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C# implementations as little as possible."
If you understand (not necessarily agree with) the reasons Stallman gives for being cautious about Mono/C# then you'd understand why someone who'd done so much for Free Software in the past, who is now driving Mono, could be described as "basically a traitor to the Free Software community" i.e. someone who used to promote their ideals, but now threatens them.
It seems strange that Stallman, widely regarded as some kind of maniac, regularly gets grief for single word choices or off-hand comments. Would this be a discussion if he'd said "his actions no longer align with the best interests of our community"? If he's really that crazy why didn't he go on some venomous tirade and character assassination like some political shock-jock?
Stallman is a 'polarizing figure', it's the if you're not with us you're against us mentality that gets a lot of people up in arms all over the world.
I'm a great fan of free software. I think all software should be free, and in the long run I hope that that will be the case, but I doubt that that will actually happen.
There will always be niches so obscure or unpleasant that the only way to get someone to code that stuff is to pay them for their work.
And that's good, it certainly does not brand them as 'traitors', unless you want to consider open source software versus closed software as a war. I think that is not the right way to approach the problem.
I think it is more along the lines of two competing business models that duke it out in the market, with market share being the yard stick by which you can measure the success of both methods for software development.
So far, open source software has done pretty good, but calling ex open source contributors 'traitors' is actually helping closed source, and hurting open source.
There's a few misconceptions here, first, though kind of off-topic but you can pay people to produce Free Software, lots of people do.
Two other misconceptions: He didn't call anyone a "traitor" for producing proprietary software, nor did he call anyone a "traitor" for stopping producing free software. That's kind of the point of using that specific word as it wouldn't apply in those circumstances though some people seem to be taking it as just a general insult.
He did use the word to describe someone who used to be a leading light of the Free Software movement. Remember de Icaza is the guy who started Gnome because the QT licence meant that KDE wasn't "free" enough, even though it was open source i.e. what most folks round here would call a Free Software zealot.
He's now, amongst other things that the FSF find dubious, advising a project specifically set up to create open source software which isn't copyleft with the clearly stated aim that it can be used in proprietary software. This is promoting Open Source (though only as a subordinate of proprietary software) but not Free Software which, for some people, is a very important difference.
If you don't understand that you could dedicate your life to the business success of open source and not impress Richard Stallman then you might want to read this:
> but you can pay people to produce Free Software, lots of people do.
Yes, of course. But the subject here is not whether or not it is possible to pay people to develop free software, the subject is whether or not paying people to develop closed software or software under a different license than the GPL is somehow morally repugnant. I think it isn't and it shouldn't be, and any person that pretends to say this with high standing in the open source community is not helping open source but hurting it.
It is insulting to large numbers of programmers that do both.
If de Icaza has decided that you can't change microsoft from the outside but that he stands a better chance of effecting change from within - and he seems to be successful in that - then that's fine with me and it should be completely his freedom to do so without being spoken of in derogatory terms by RMS.
> This is promoting Open Source (though only as a subordinate of proprietary software) but not Free Software which, for some people, is a very important difference.
So what ? Let the marketplace decide which is better. If 'real' (as in gpl'd) open source is better then that should stand by itself. Personally I will not touch any of microsofts code with a 10 foot pole because I suspect a catch, but I'm not going around calling people names.
It's the worst way to handle this sort of thing. The best would be to judge the offering on its merits and if there ever is fall-out from the licensing issues to use that as the reason to brand the code 'unusable', not to resort to personal attacks.
It's petty, mean, childish and a whole bunch of other things beside, and it hurts the open source movement as a whole.
This is not a war, and to resort to words like 'traitor' attempts to divide and hurts all of us.
Also, while Stallman can come across as kind of paranoid sometimes, where Microsoft is concerned they really have earned a lot of suspicion, distrust, and ill will with past behavior. I can't really blame someone for not wanting to forgive and forget quickly just because Microsoft has been a bit nicer lately.
I'm sure he's not a bad person but he is clearly intolerant of other peoples opinions when they are in conflict with his own. He also has a bad habit of going overboard in the way he vilifies people and technologies sometimes.
Regardless of RMS's position and community's reaction, that was just a poorly written, rambling paean to RMS.
I'll concede that there are some valid points to be fished out of that article and ruminated upon but the rampant amount of RMS adulation practically drowned it out.
(Full disclosure: I do indeed think that this is paranoid "they're all making fun of me" tripe. But that has no bearing on the above.)
I liked this article, especially for the last known picture of RMS when he was shaved, and (more seriously) Stallman's quote at the end. This sums it all up quite well in my opinion.
In this case we basically only have one source for the statement. I don't remember seeing anyone else aside from the OSNews guy mentioning that statement.
Some other blogger tried to get a transcript of the Q&A that Stallman was giving but the FSF apparently doesn't keep transcripts of Q&As (they probably didn't record video :/)
If it's so dubious, why do the fanboys not question that remark, but immediately leap to defend it and either try to redefine "traitor" as meaning something else or declare that they agree about the supposed "treason"?
Now, to be terribly fair, it's probably true that even if he didn't say it, everybody would be acting the same way. Nobody, even his fans, really doubts that he would say it. It's his style, and it's the exact sort of obnoxious remark his fanboys are used to defending and supporting.
EDIT: Ultimately, my complaint is about the fanboys. Someone made a dickmove. That someone is an icon to the fanboys, but he hasn't actually done anything in years besides be an icon to them, so it's barely even a story before the fans get involved.
I looked at the link and couldn't understand a thing what exactly is RMS or author's problem again. The "article" is more of a collection of links and quotes joined together by some rant. Domain name is quite telling as well.
I have seen RMS in person, I have heard his inspirational speech (that was in the days we battled EU software patents directive), I respect him as an activist and as a Hacker. I also donate to FSF.
But I'm way too tired of all those internal OSS scuffles that RMS seems always to take part of.
Which makes me think he rethought his headline after originally writing it.
Again, reiterating my earlier statement... If you want to boycott Novell, start with digging out every piece of code they have touched directly or indirectly to Linux, starting with Gnome, Mono, and a whole ton of other stuff that will reduce Linux back to 1996-level functionality.
Sure he's not... He just has a tendency of taking things a wee tiny bit overboard, such as accusing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of not giving a damn about helping the millions in Africa: http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/richard-stallman-expert-in-the...
The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles
immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At
the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health,
The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell,
Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France — the companies
responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution,
beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.
Indeed, local leaders blame oil development for fostering some of the
very afflictions that the foundation combats."
Stallman's article doesn't even emphasize it as much. Its abstract reads:
To pay so much attention to Bill Gates' retirement is missing the point.
What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system
of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies,
imposes on its customers.
The icing on the cake: You are actually the same guy! Check out ComputerGuru's profile:
about: Founder and director of NeoSmart Technologies (http://neosmart.net/)
a non-profit software development and research organization.
Specialization in high-performance webapps and OS kernel design.
I don't think like that any longer. Instead, I now see RMS as a sort of holocaust survivor warning against complacency when dealing with dictators. If RMS seems overly concerned with corporations co-opting free software, it's only because he's been there!
(P.S. Sorry for not providing links to the LISP machine history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine and http://funcall.blogspot.com are probably a good jumping-off points. The tl;dr of it is: MIT AI labs developed LISP, Symbolics took MIT's work and commercialized it without giving back, the MIT AI lab guys responded by going off and forming their own LISP machine company, and that left RMS all alone at MIT and hating commercial software)