RMS Objects To Support For LLVM's Debugger In GNU Emacs's Gud.el 551
An anonymous reader writes with the news that Richard Stallman is upset over the prospect of GNU Emacs's Grand Unified Debugger (Gud.el) supporting LLVM's LLDB debugger.
Stallman says it looks like there is a systematic effort to attack GNU packages and calls for the GNU Project to respond strategically. He wrote his concerns to the mailing list after a patch emerged that would optionally support LLDB alongside GDB as an alternative debugger for Emacs. Other Emacs developers discounted RMS' claims by saying Emacs supports Windows and OS X, so why not support a BSD-licensed compiler/debugger? The Emacs maintainer has called the statements irrelevant and won't affect their decision to merge the LLDB support.
Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score:5, Insightful)
... especially when someone acts freely and in a way you object to.
Re:Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score:5, Insightful)
He's presenting and supporting a position that he holds. He's not flaming anybody, he is participating in a rational public debate about something that he helped to start, which seems entirely fair. He chose not to keep maintaining emacs day to day, and so that is his role; to say what he thinks the people running it now should do.
What you're doing, though, is just to flame him... for speaking his mind... while trying to accuse him of being against the speaking of minds.
It should be very easy to form a rational basis for views contrary to his. Unfortunately you abandon the attempt right at the start, and resort instead of a basket of logical fallacies. His views are at an extreme end, it shouldn't be hard at all to be both contrary and reasonable.
Re:Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score:4, Insightful)
True freedom must necessarily include the freedom to do things that piss others off, or else it is not truly free. The difference between soi-disant "free software" and BSD-licensed code is that the latter includes the freedom to do things that piss RMS off.
Re:Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score:5, Insightful)
RMS isn't against commercial (for profit) software at all. He's against software that is not completely transparent to the user about what it's doing (and that you can't fix yourself if it breaks). The additional restrictions in the GPLv3 are present to help prevent a company from monopolizing an open source project that was developed by someone else via threat of patent litigation. It also prevents TiVoization - because free software is meaningless to the end user if you can't tweak it and load up your modifications. Both are pretty legitimate concerns. If Canonical started selling Ubuntu laptops which will only load signed kernels (which they could do if they wanted, as the kernel is just GPL2), there's nothing stopping them other than the community gathering it's torches and pitchforks.
I was curious one time a while back about trying to make my own compiled programming language, and was quite disappointed when I started fishing around in GCC and learned that it really is designed from the ground up not to be extensible. I'm pretty sure RMS quite the hacker, so it disappoints me to see his stubbornness get in the way of writing software with a technically superior design. He has the right intentions, but he's picking the wrong battles here. Free software ideally should be superior to proprietary software in every way. Nerfing GCC and Emacs is pretty reminiscent of Microsoft's (and co.) historic strategy of vendor lock-in via proprietary ill-defined file formats and refusal to implement open standards imho.
Re:Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score:5, Interesting)
RMS isn't against commercial (for profit) software at all. He's against software that is not completely transparent to the user about what it's doing (and that you can't fix yourself if it breaks).
The software that he is objecting to supporting is completely transparent.
You can also fix it if it breaks.
Here is the god damned svn: http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-proje... [llvm.org]
So why is he complaining here? What we can take from this is that your comments are worthless shit.
Your complaint is shit, because the point is both well known, and obvious to anybody who bothered to understand the background.
The point of the Free Software movement embodied in the Free Software Foundation is to create and support software that actively protects the users freedom by ensuring not only that the original software was transparent and user-modifiable, but also that it would protect you from being embraced, extended, and extinguished. Not everybody agrees with this position, but it is a well known and easy to understand position.
The counter argument isn't just, "hurr, whu? huh? you're shit." The counter argument is actually that if users have enough freedom available, that they can simply switch to something else and that "embrace, extend, extinguish" has been countered mostly by user demand for portable data formats, and SCOTUS decisions protecting the right to inter-operate.
The counter-counter argument is that users who really want Software Freedom can choose GPL software and not have to remain vigilant about each little example, each case where somebody is trying to include some proprietary bit and then get you to "need" it. They can instead simply remain vigilant about one thing; using Free Software. And then they're protected, and they can make business decisions with a higher level of predictability.
Most people can read these arguments and easily choose which one they prefer. The subjective choice, as with most subjective choices, are easy. But not everybody arrives at the same choices! And it is clearly in error to claim that one side didn't have a good point, or is "shit." They're just different points, based on different values and concerns.
I just wish there was a version of the debate where becoming a package maintainer and thrusting a new paradigm on the users was recognized as a removal of freedom, a form of "embrace, extend, extinguish."
Re:Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score:4, Interesting)
So why is he complaining here?
He's complaining because this is about GCC.
AFAICT, he's seen in the past that GCC can be used as a tool to make hardware vendors open up their platforms because writing a new compiler is just too damn difficult compared to getting support into GCC, and the latter required distributing the source under the GPL.
With LLVM, that kind of hardware vendors can keep their source code to themselves.
Thus he sees LLVM as a threat in the long term.
I think most people in the Emacs community understand his point, but disagree that adding support to Emacs will change anything. LLVM will thrive whether Emacs supports it or not.
Re:Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score:4, Interesting)
The current maintainer has said he will apply the patches anyway so it's really a non issue. None of that seems to be mentioned in the summary at least.
That part IS mentioned in the summary
The Emacs maintainer has called the statements irrelevant and won't affect their decision to merge the LLDB support.
You can be sure Stallman is miffed. Publicly calling his input irrelevant on code he wrote is one step away from calling him irrelevant.
Re:Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score:4, Interesting)
The current maintainer has said he will apply the patches anyway so it's really a non issue. None of that seems to be mentioned in the summary at least.
That part IS mentioned in the summary
The Emacs maintainer has called the statements irrelevant and won't affect their decision to merge the LLDB support.
You can be sure Stallman is miffed. Publicly calling his input irrelevant on code he wrote is one step away from calling him irrelevant.
Whenever you relieve yourself of a responsibility by giving it to someone else, you accept that that person is not you and may not make the same decisions that you would make. If Stallman is to be blamed for anything, it should be in the form of Stallman blaming himself for choosing a maintainer who does not more closely share his views.
Now that persuasion has failed, I suppose he could fork it.
Re: (Score:3)
The Emacs maintainer has called the statements irrelevant and won't affect their decision to merge the LLDB support.
Now that persuasion has failed, I suppose he could fork it.
Winner! This is BRILLIANT : )
This is the only time I have seen a *plausible* use of the "don't like it? fork it" on slashdot since my 1998 awakening to Slashdot*. The other 99.9% of the time the rest of you guys are just being jerks by asking us random non-coder slashdotters to fork stuff, like Firefox and Chrome. It's like being slapped in the face with a strawman and insult at the same time (fractaltiger *must be* lazy and dumb if he won't fork after pointing out some design flaw in that program, ignore i
Re:Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score:4, Interesting)
You may be right, but there is such a thing at making your grip on something so tight that it escapes you grasp (e.g.g if you grip dough too tightly).
LLVM is a good case in point. The GNU, via the GPLv3, has created a situation in which companies such as Apple who are not interested in the politics of Open Source or Free Software, and aren't seeking a competitive advantage in compilers became unwilling to work with the free software community because the free software community tried to do an embrace and extend on them.
As Linus pointed out, the GPLv2 license was a good license because it imposed fairly acceptable conditions on companies. The GNU thought they had the likes of Apple by the balls, so to speak, and they tried to squeeze. Apple and others (including the BSDs) simply went to LLVM, and it is looking like LLVM is going to surpass GCC in all metrics that matter.
In fact, Apple originally worked to relicense LLVM under GPLv2 with upstream GCC https://forums.freebsd.org/thr... [freebsd.org] , but was denied by GCC developers. So GCC lost what was potentially a very good contributor Apple is now the largest company in the world - can you imagine how much better GCC could have been with a company the size of Apple working to improve the quality and performance of the compiler?
Now BSD and Mac OSX can be argued to have access to better compiler technology than GNU and Linux (although LLVM can be used under Linux). With Apple's support, free software could have been even further ahead, but politics ruled. The FSF/GNU could find itself made irrelevant if they continue to put petty politics and ideology above ensuring that free software is among the best software by engaging companies like Apple where it makes sense to do so.
Can you imagine if Apple had acted like GNU with respect to Samsung. Even when Apple was fighting Samsung on one hand, they were still prepared to buy a lot of gear off Samsung in a mutually beneficial relationship, and Samsung was willing to supply its biggest competitor with chips and other electronic gear that was going into products that were competing directly against its biggest moneymaker. Both companies, however, acted in a grown up manner to reach a mutually beneficial arrangement while continuing to kick lumps out of each other in the courts, in advertisements and in the markets. GNU acted all childish over LLVM and Apple's (and BSD and Linus) contributions to issues such as GPLv3 and accepting code that would enable GCC to work better for everyone, not just Apple.
Re:Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score:5, Informative)
You clearly didn't read his comments, because you put words in his mouth.
What he actually said:
So no, he doesn't say that free software should be less functional. What he says is that there are different harms and benefits for different packages, and the GNU Project should make the decisions in a way that is best for the GNU Project overall, not just each package doing what is best for that package. Not "just because" they're from the same "stable." It isn't a "stable," where different things just happen to be under the same roof for historical reasons, it is a complete project, where the big picture of providing a toolchain that supports the principles of the Free Software Foundation is the over-arching purpose of the whole thing.
To me it seems obvious that gcc is losing market share and the damage to gdb will be done either way. Luckily, gdb is well established and stable and doesn't need a bunch of new features, so there is perhaps little harm to be done by having less contributions. Whereas the danger to Emacs from not supporting newer compilers is more obvious.
If by "similar to... Microsoft" you mean that both organizations want to do what will benefit the goals of the organization, then I'd have say, "well duh." There are strong arguments to be made against that sort of Cathedral approach, and I'm sure there is even extensive published analysis on the differences. None of the critiques would offer to build a better Cathedral, though, so they might just be irrelevant to the decisions that the GNU Project has to make.
The really key thing here to understand though, is that he says: " I can't tell whether it is good or bad to install that change." From that, you took away that he has "in his mind" a conclusion that clearly contradicts what he said is... in his mind. That reminds me a lot of a tactic that Microsoft is famous for: FUD!
Actually it is inverted FUD, because you took an uncertainty that is full of doubt, and tried to make it certain in order to spread fear.
Re:Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score:5, Interesting)
Excellent point, open and free but only in the way he sees freedom... We are talking about the man who is insisting to call Linux, GNU/Linux and likes to flame people for speaking up their minds, with different world visions...
So he tries to persuade people to agree with him, perhaps passionately, perhaps vehemently, maybe even not so nicely ... but (to my knowledge) he has never used force or fraud to coerce people into behaving the way he thinks they should. That sounds perfectly freedom-loving to me. I'm really not seeing the problem here.
If your opinion of the guy is correct, then his methods will cause fewer people to listen to him and he will thereby undermine his own efforts. This means such a situation would be self-correcting. I've never heard of RMS using force or threat of force to make you call it "GNU/Linux". The degree of power he has over you is determined entirely by how much you decide to listen to him*. The ability to recognize this is generally called perspective.
It's as though some people have an entitlement mentality, a manner in which they are self-centered. It leads to them feeling like they've been wronged or mistreated somehow when they discover that someone doesn't agree with them, won't support or otherwise validate them (probably the part that really bothers you), and speaks against them.
* I started to add "and use his software", but then I realized that's not true - you could use Emacs with the LLVM debugger ... or not, whether anyone else likes it or not, because the GPL and LLDB's NCSA license are compatible [gnu.org]. RMS deliberately chose a license allowing this to happen. Did you fail to recognize the significance of that? That freedom means people might do things with which he disagrees does not remove his right to disagree. Are you suggesting it should? If not, what exactly are you trying to say, if you are not in fact expressing another entitlement mentality?
Re: (Score:2)
You mean by saying words you didn't want to hear? Yes, it is such a "bitch" that you chose to learn what RMS has to say. Luckily, since we're all free here, you can bitch about him bitching, and I can bitch about you bitching about him bitching about whatever those bitches did.
The part I don't understand is why you "object" to others exercising the same freedom that you're using to... object.
Freedom and power are not the same thing. (Score:3)
sounds like a... (Score:2)
seriously, why would someone care if you can do X in something but not Y, unless you are apple anyway i dont get it
Re: (Score:2)
i dont get it
Gosh, he's been on the scene telling you why your whole life. If you still don't get it, just read 2 paragraphs and you'll be there. It seems like, regardless of if you agree with him or not, that it would be worthwhile to have a basic understanding of the concept of "software freedom" in the context of the GPL. Even if you don't care, it is still worthwhile to spend 5 minutes on it because it gets discussed a lot by others, and you'll end up spending a lot more than 5 minutes reading about what people say.
That's the problem with gnu (Score:2)
The rights of the user always triumphs the rights of the developer.
But in this case the user and developer are one. With even Microsoft supporting clang, Android, and Linux development in the latest visual studio alphas it is now emacs that is becoming the most proprietary with locking in. What a bizarre universe this is becoming
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually "users" don't touch source code, they might hire a programmer to do that, but then that's another developer.
GNU makes the right of "information" higher than that of people, ever.
Re: That's the problem with gnu (Score:2)
What if a abiword and virtual box do not meet my needs. Would I be harming myself for purchasing VMWARE Workstation and Office2010 in return?
I am a user who not only is buying but willing to pay for proprietary software. RMS would think I am crazy but I would argue my own self interests are better served investing in better tools for productivity more than the rights for me to get something for free and hack the complicated source code.
Re: (Score:2)
I use both.
I get impressed by how much better for my needs a lot of free software is than Microsoft's bloat though.
Bit of a hatchet job (Score:5, Informative)
There's a little more than is being reported. Here's some other RMS lines in the same thread:
First we have:
"More precisely, Apple intends LLVM and Clang to make GCC cease to be a
signal success and a reason for all sorts of companies to work on a
compiler that always gives users freedom. That would be a victory for
Apple and a defeat for freedom.
I don't know what LLDB is, or what it might do. I am going to find
out."
That's a little bit paranoid, but it is still a cautious statement.
Then:
"This question is a small part of a big issue which is more or less bad.
I want to find out what it is, and think about it. Please do not ask
me to rush to a conclusion without finding out what is happening."
Again, in all of his posts he mentions wanting to discuss it a bit more. RMS is pretty incendiary, eccentric, and often does or says crazy shit but... in this case it sounds like he said something alarmist to get attention and try to get some discussion, without stamping his foot down or flipping his shit. That he's being selectively quoted to make news is bad juju.
The people who say that GNU gives devs freedom (Score:2)
miss developers who've said that GCC has been made deliberately harder to understand than clang... Something about wanting to keep the wrong sort of developers out. Freedom to obfuscate your code isn't really freedom of information either.
Re: (Score:2)
Something about wanting to keep the wrong sort of developers out.
Naturally: citation or you're just spewing more GPL FUD.
Re: (Score:2)
Citation = "I read it some time"
I googled a little, if I'd found the link I would have included it.
Lets face it though, LLVM started as an educational project, for years people complained that it was too pedagogical (and too fancy) to ever run quickly.
GCC isn't so nicely documented.
Re: (Score:2)
That would be a victory for Apple and a defeat for freedom.
So... the forces of GPL freedom need to step up their game.
Re: (Score:2)
If LLVM were a Microsoft product instead of an Apple product, we would all agree he had reason to be wary. Frankly the way Apple has acted since Jobs came back, there would still be enough justification to be wary of them as Microsoft.
Still I don't see much harm in it.
Re:Bit of a hatchet job (Score:5, Informative)
If LLVM were a Microsoft product instead of an Apple product
LLVM is not an Apple product. It's an open source project which Apple, amongst others, incorporate into their products, and to which they contribute source improvements.
Re:Bit of a hatchet job (Score:5, Insightful)
If LLVM were a Microsoft product instead of an Apple product
LLVM is not an Apple product. It's an open source project which Apple, amongst others, incorporate into their products, and to which they contribute source improvements.
Right and Android LLVM is not an Google product. It's an open source project which Google, amongst others, incorporate into their products, and to which they contribute source improvements.
Re: (Score:3)
So he's basically afraid of competition from a better product, and instead of upping his game he's playing unfair with regard to access to "his" products?
Re:Bit of a hatchet job (Score:4, Insightful)
So he's basically afraid of competition from a better product, and instead of upping his game he's playing unfair with regard to access to "his" products?
Most people could see this coming. Open source is great for developers, freeware is great for end users and free software just happens to be compatible with both of those and thus provided a vehicle for them. Now it's being done in a way that is also compatible with proprietary software and therefore RMS doesn't like it. So, as you say, he needs to up his game and create a better product that just so happens to be free software because nobody cares about free software in and of itself.
Re: (Score:2)
News is always selectively-quoted horse shit. That is not news. So causing the discussion to happen is an unequivocal success. That most of what is said is crap, that is just life among talking apes.
This Stephan Monnier guy (Score:5, Funny)
Take your time. But whatever you find out is irrelevant to whether or not the Emacs maintainer will accept LLVM support into gud.el, at least as long as I'm the maintainer.
I think I like him.
Re: (Score:2)
That is the true value of what RMS gave us, both with the GPL generally, and Emacs specifically. His gifts keep on giving, not even he could stop them. That is the Freedom that RMS imbued into Emacs, and supported by handing maintenance over to somebody else when the time came.
People have the right to disagree with RMS about Emacs precisely because of RMS's views and past involvement.
Personally, I think Free Software being "Open Source" with a permissive-enough license is what caused us to become Free of
Re:This Stephan Monnier guy (Score:4, Informative)
"Stefan"
The erosion of source sharing obligation (Score:3)
The most important tenet of GNU General Public License is that anyone who distributes a derived program is obligated to reciprocate by sharing the modified source. This is the "freedom" when RMS talks about "free software." Many other open source licenses such as BSD, MIT, and Apache concern more about attribution and no reciprocation, which more and more people seem to embrace instead. Many companies have a policy to use GPL code only in very specific cases and strongly forbids Affero GPL. If you are the author of some open source project and you want more people to use your code and make you famous, you'd care more about attribution and less about reciprocation. That's where GPL is losing ground.
I think RMS underestimates that many people are more than willing to exchange someone else's freedom for one's own fame. And famous projects tend to attract more contributors. I think RMS also overestimates that the proprietary code written by some company are worth contributing back to open source while most of them are garbage. Once he realizes his misunderstanding of people's motivation, he'd become less coercive.
The issue isn't sharing vs fame (Score:4, Informative)
the issue is, can people make money selling software? You know, contributing to their own survival and success. Both for individuals and companies. RMS doesn't care about that.
Re: (Score:3)
Software itself isn't valuable. The value is what the software allows you to accomplish compared to those without this software could. If you look at it this way, the real value is in the person who knows how to develop software that works and fulfills a purpose. The software itself is just a byproduct.
Open source software projects can grow out of an arrangement where a developer worked as a consultant to solve a customer's problem. Some examples are Paul Vixie of ISC BIND and cron fame, Poul-Henning Kamp o
Fragmenting Open Source (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, Open Source infighting: "We're not the People's Judean Front! We're the Popular Front for Judea. The People's Front is over there".
It's time to update RMS's firmware. (Score:2)
Re: It's time to update RMS's firmware. (Score:2)
He hasn't even been on the world wide Web yet because Xorg and any browser is not free enough. Never used a cell phone either etc.
In 2001 here there was a common belief on slashdot proprietary software would always be inferior and desktops would all be gnu by now. He still believes this.
I gotta say (Score:2)
I like clang better, recently. Nicer warnings and errors.
He did this to GNUstep as well.... (Score:3, Insightful)
RMS did the very same thing to GNUstep. GNUstep currently supports both GCC and LLVM/Clang. The project does this for good reason: because Objective-C is better supported in clang than it is in gcc. GCC doesn't even consider ObjC as a release critical compiler and LLVM/Clang looks on it as central. Additionally clang supports many modern features of ObjC that gcc lacks and shows no signs of ever attaining.
RMS specifically indicated that supporting LLVM/Clang by mentioning it on our wiki page (http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/ObjC2_FAQ) was harming the GNU project in an important place. Our response was swift and unanimous against remove it since all we are doing is providing user choice and, given that GCC is inferior to LLVM/Clang for ObjC, we MUST support LLVM/Clang. To date we have gotten no response from RMS.
I think it's grossly unfair of RMS to request this. By supporting Clang and LLVM and LLDB we are not impacting user freedom. All we are doing is offering users a choice which, last time I checked was completely okay. What we have here is a problem where RMS sees his role in the FLOSS community diminishing because someone has come up with a faster, more useful and better support compiler.
If anyone has damaged the FSF it is not the folks at Clang/LLVM it is RMS and the FSF itself. They have systematically impacted developer freedom by doing the following to GCC:
https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2005-01/msg00008.html
"One of our main goals for GCC is to prevent any parts of it from being
used together with non-free software. Thus, we have deliberately
avoided many things that might possibly have the effect of
facilitating such usage, even if that consequence wasn't a certainty.
We're looking for new methods now to try to prevent this, and the outcome
of this search would be very important in our decision of what to do." -- RMS
This is terrible! Why would you do this?! RMS is trying to achieve through technical means what proprietary software companies try to do via copyright and IP law.
RMS is risking an all out rebellion of pretty much all of the FSF/GNU projects if he keeps this up. My advice to the FSF and to RMS is to allow developer freedom and stop viewing LLVM/Clang as a threat or a setback for it is neither.
GC
Re: (Score:3)
It also allows programmers to make money off their work. You know, "evil deceptive" poor people and middle class people.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It is more resentment as BSD is "actually" open as opposed to the handcuffed license he wants to impose on people. Will take BSD style licensing any day of the week over proprietary or GPL
Re:BSD is more threatening than proprietary (Score:5, Informative)
Well, it is, but it does sod all to protect that openness, so BSDed software often ends up less open by the time you actually get a copy of it.
The only stuff the GPL doesn't let you do is remove other people's freedom. That should never be a problem unless you were planning to do that in the first place.
Re: (Score:3)
Well, it is, but it does sod all to protect that openness, so BSDed software often ends up less open by the time you actually get a copy of it.
Are you guys still spewing this BS meme? Letting someone use open code in a closed project does "sod all" to close off the original code.
Re: (Score:2)
do as we say or else and as long as you are acting within the confines of its barbed wire fence you are fine and free to do as you will.
Every society is like that. The "only" difference is how tightly closed is the fence. Otherwise, it's anarchy, and adults know that's bad.
What a meaningless argument. (Score:2)
You didn't go far enough. Obviously BSD is terrorism and imperialist hegemony!
Re:BSD is more threatening than proprietary (Score:4, Interesting)
If you apply handcuffs to someone you can't then claim they are free. you say freedom is a matter of self control, this is true, UNLESS you are under the GPL where freedom is dictated to you under strict terms.
Re: (Score:3)
It is more resentment as BSD is "actually" open as opposed to the handcuffed license he wants to impose on people.
This is an argument that can go on forever.
You could say GPL is more free, because it leaves you free to dual-license the product. People who want it free can get it free, people who want to restrict other people's freedoms can get a proprietary license. As far as freedom goes, it is just as free as BSD (but not as free in money).
You can't have a dual license in any meaningful way with BSD.
Ultimately the difference between the two licenses is this:
If you want to have your software used as much as pos
Re:BSD is more threatening than proprietary (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of us prefer others to voluntarily give back rather than be forced to.
Re: BSD is more threatening than proprietary (Score:2)
How?
It is open source? You can do whatever you wish. If you want to include it then you can. You want to contribute? You can as well.
Many gnu folks mod me down or get mad when I point out that just linking gun code means I can't use it at work. It is viral as the gpl is very strict and anti freedom. Most say just don't steal my work? I am just saying even linking is forbidden so WTF?
Yes that is less free than BSD where people do as they wish.
Re: (Score:2)
That makes no sense, because most open source is written by... paid professionals... making market rates. That is true of GPL code, BSD code, Apache code, whatever.
You probably just don't understand the markets you're talking about. I doubt you would make that big a un-truth on purpose.
Maybe you can't use GPL code at work. Others are required to use GPL code at work, unless it was written in-house. Others aren't allowed to use any open source at all. Some can use proprietary compilers and workflows, some ca
Re: BSD is more threatening than proprietary (Score:4, Insightful)
That is what Copyleft is. That is what GPL is supposed to be: using the copyright laws that were designed to protect proprietary interests in away that instead protects Software Freedom, that enforces Software Freedom.
Just because you refuse to understand the terms and arguments doesn't mean you've uncovered some hidden truth or something. You don't like Software Freedom. You find enforced Freedom too restrictive. You want to choose to be free, or not to be free. That is fine.
People probably mod you down because you pretend that people with a different view must just be stupid, or something. These are different choices based on different values, there is no utility in complaining about other people's license choices.
You know best what license to use for software you write, I know best what license to use for software I write, and RMS knows best what license to use for software that the FSF writes. This is all as it should be.
If you can't link GPL code at work, that is because of choices your boss made, not because of choices that RMS made or some implied deficiency in the GPL. Remember, people who choose the GPL want to be protected from your boss. People who don't share the values of the GPL are excluded for real reasons. You don't have to agree with those reasons or share their values to recognize that they have reasons that are based on their values, and they have every right to license their software in the way that they do. And you should be aware most of them are getting paid to write their code, most GPL code is written by paid programmers. Paid by companies. For-profit companies. With bosses who choose GPL. For business reasons. That doesn't make them less Free.
Re:RMS' GNU license is a license that gives away (Score:4, Insightful)
Say what? I disagree, but at least your rant made sense, right up unti you said:
>So yes, people who need to work for a living will prefer a BSD license over a GNU one.
BSD is only a hairs-breadth removed from public domain - it gives away pretty much all the rights that can be given, unlike GPL which retains many rights in order to impose reciprical giving on downstream developers.
I can only assume that by "people who need to work for a living" you are refering not to the people that did the actual work to create the BSD code, but rather to the exploitative sorts who happily harvest their code to incorporate into proprietary software without giving anything back.
Re: (Score:2)
BSD allows you to incorporate the code into something that DOESN'T give the source away for free.
Re: (Score:2)
Right, but since no one else can relicense your software and make a real project using it, it's only non-GPL'd software that's useful to working people. It's the non-GPL stuff that's more free in real usage.
Re: (Score:2)
Now, if you make modifications to the GPL code you are using, yes, you have to release those changes. That does not, however, apply to code that you write that *interfaces with* any GPL code you use.
It's simple, really: Did the code start out as GPL? If yes, you must release it; if no, you can do whatever you want, even if it interfaces with GPL code.
You're confusing GPL (Score:2)
with Lesser GPL. But I was talking about relicensing.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
You're funny. You really are. Did you mean to be?
EMACS is the whole reason the GPL exists to begin with. Some jackass hijacked it into a commercial project and RMS's contributors were pissed. They went to HIM with the torches and the pitchforks demanding an explanation.
The copyright holder of EMACS will most certaily sue your sorry ass for such a stunt.
As much as some people (even RMS) might want to portrary the GPL as some sort of communist plot, it really isn't. It's just a way to keep contributors happy.
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There is nothing in the LGPL (Score:4, Interesting)
that says you must share *all* of your code simply because it uses some LGPL library somewhere.
If it's full GPL you do, if it's LGPL you don't.
That's why everything useful is LGPL instead of GPL.
You could argue that LGPL isn't compatible with GPL and shouldn't be included in Linux >.>
Re: (Score:3)
Right! Just put the code you want to run (Score:3)
in a separate process that you don't link to, in a separate computer, and send it into space so it's not on the same planet.
No wonder you've never heard of that, you're too stupid to understand abstraction.
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The point is that under GNU your labor will almost certainly be forced to be free as in "not paid"; that's the practical consequences of the license. Under BSD you don't have that problem at all.
And that was my point. Giving away your time for free isn't something that normal people can afford. And as programming becomes no longer so lucrative (hey, they do it in India, China and east Europe now) then getting work out of people from lower classes becomes more important.
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Under the GPL, companies can collaborate in ways that are possible but less likely with BSD. With BSD, there is a strong incentive for an individual company to put out closed-source binaries with some extra "secret sauce" over and above the open-source versions. Think of it as a tragedy of the commons or prisoner'
Ok, so if the class of developers you care about (Score:2)
are "large corporations working on whole operating systems" then you might prefer GNU.
If you care about regular programmers and projects of the size they might invent then you don't want GNU.
Re: (Score:3)
There is a move toward BSD for a number of reasons. It is difficult to comply with the
new GPL on some modern platforms where bits of this and that are closed. Many of
the new SOC devices have NDA or binary blob support for this and that.
The new compiler has already kicked the GCC folk in the logjam of bugs and features.
As long as the bits packaged with GCC are GPL there is no big issue.
The Apple example is interesting. They have used LLVM and kit on some projects
but recently have given their internal c
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Uhm you miss that people actually need money to survive. RMS never cared about regular people. He could have come up with a system that was capable of working for regular folks who need to work for a living if he did care.
To be more fair (Score:2)
we needed free software. GNU got it off the ground and protected it long enough. Now we can have more freedom that that. We can have LLVM instead of GCC etc etc.
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The head of the church never cares about its members so long as he's ok.
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How many people have made a living in some way off of GPL'd software? It's a much larger number than you think.
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Freedom and money are two sides of the same coin. Freedom is useless without the financial means to enjoy it. Likewise, money is useless without the freedom to use it as you see fit.
Re:Who cares what RMS wants? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets see what my grandmother wants while we're at. Her opinion is just as valid.
If your grandmother is a developer producing useful software available at no cost, used by millions all around the world, and both articulates a philosophy and draws up a license facilitating useful systems such as every Linux distribution, starts a foundation known around the world to advocate said philosophy and host said software, and encouages many people (even those who do not agree) to think about and discuss such matters ... then yes at that point I will begin to care about her opinion on this subject.
If you don't like RMS that's fine, if you think he's completely wrong that's fine too, but to dismiss his views the way you are doing is weak, cheap, and shows that you lack the emotional maturity to separate your personal feelings from the actual subject at hand. I hope that pointing this out will be useful to someone else, because as for you, I doubt I could reason with you in an adult manner. The really annoying part is: so many people are like this that they think it's normal.
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RMS hasn't been an active developer in years by his own admission [stallman.org]. His role is largely advocacy and philosophy, and that appears to be the sole issue here. However, he doesn't seem, based on a reading of the thread, to have any formal ability to block the patch.
Re: (Score:3)
Pay the licenses, or out-compete them with freely available code. There's considerable experience by now that says the latter will win every time.
You lose nothing in a corp fork (Score:3)
... larger corporations will build non-free proprietary improvements on BSD licensed code without contributing back, and to continue to be productive as a programmer you will be forced to pay for the licenses on their proprietary tools ...
Really? How did they degrade your performance? You have access to and may enhance and contribute to the exact same source code they did. You lost *nothing*, not one line of code, not one opportunity to add a new line of code.
And if your code was GPL based a corporation may do the exact same thing. They may fork and enhance a GPL based tool for internal use only and not share. They can continue to benefit and merge all your work and the rest of the communities work as well.
Re: Who cares what RMS wants? (Score:4, Insightful)
He has the freedom to throw a tantrum. You, and everyone else, also have the freedom to distribute a version of Emacs with LLVM support.
Re: Who cares what RMS wants? (Score:5, Insightful)
GPLv3 started because RMS saw that companies were using the GPL in a manner that was compliant to the letter but not to the spirit. Back then, the GNU haters laughed at him, as usual, because "who would want to run code on a set-top box". Nowadays, the vast majority of the end-user devices are tivoized (Android, Apple, Microsoft, ...), and users can't do anything with the code that runs on them, including fixing security bugs and auditing it to find out what it does with all their personal data, let alone (God forbid!) run their own programs on it. So the introduction of the GPLv3 wasn't a whim as you are implying, it was actually sensible and farsighted.
Re: Who cares what RMS wants? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Who cares what RMS wants? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
He has the freedom to throw a tantrum. You, and everyone else, also have the freedom to distribute a version of Emacs with LLVM support.
... coming soon GPL v4.
Clause IV "...any code GPLv4 may not include, link, or run on any non GPLv4."
But serisouly GPLv3 started because of his tantrum with Tivio. It would not surprise me if he did a version 4 if clang takes over.
Tivo, not Tivio. And Tivoization [wikipedia.org] is a real problem. It's frustrating enough that I'm locked out of modifying my own devices without risk of breaking them or the law. But it's even more frustrating when I have a device that purports to run free open source software that I can't modify. (I'm looking at you almost every Android device ever.) It's against the whole point of the GPL if I can't tweak the code to fix or improve my device because the manufacturer locks me out.
rms is often not the most mature orato
Re: Who cares what RMS wants? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not throwing tantrum. RMS has a philosophy that users of software should have certain freedoms / rights (use, study & modify, redistribute, distribute). That's the gist of GPL and why he founded GNU. BSD-style license does not guarantee these freedoms, and Stallman sees wider adoption of projects using those licenses as a threat to free software. I do work on BSD-licensed projects, but I certainly do share his fear that this poses serious threat to free software in the long run.
I don't think it's a conspiracy or somehow widely orchestrated effort - more likely it's simply easier not to guarantee those rights and thus more attractive for commercial companies (participating in those projects), but I believe the threat to the freedoms is real.
Forced benevolence is not freedom (Score:4, Insightful)
RMS has a philosophy that users of software should have certain freedoms / rights (use, study & modify, redistribute, distribute). That's the gist of GPL and why he founded GNU. BSD-style license does not guarantee these freedoms more likely it's simply easier not to guarantee those rights ...
What rights do BSD contributors lose? All the community code exists, the community can continue without the commercial changes, the community is not required to use some commercial fork. They lose nothing if some contributor chooses not to give back. Furthermore, users of GPL'd code decide not to give back at times too. They can use some a commercial fork internally and benefit from community work and not give back. Also, various commercial users of BSD code have a pretty good track record of contributing back.
What rights do BSD users lose? **IF** they care about "free software" or access to the source code they can just avoid commercial/closed forks and stick to the community based code.
The GPL does *not* offer greater freedom, it creates restrictions to force behaviors it believes benevolent. Forced benevolence may or may not be a good thing but it is not freedom.
Re:Forced benevolence is not freedom (Score:5, Informative)
BSD licensed software allows someone to take it, modify it in some meaningful way, and not share those changes back with the community at large. In that sense, it is possible for software licensed under a BSD license to lose the freedom it had. The developers did not lose any freedoms, the source did. GPL does not force you to be benevolent, it just requires that if you want to use GPL'ed software that your contributions remain benevolent (to use your term). If you don't want to, then chose some other solution, no one is forcing you to use GPL.
Both licenses have their strengths and weaknesses. Both cater to different needs and are appropriate for different (possibly overlapping) uses.Neither is a one size fits all, and neither is better than the other.
Re:Forced benevolence is not freedom (Score:4, Interesting)
BSD licensed software allows someone to take it, modify it in some meaningful way, and not share those changes back with the community at large
The thing that a lot of GPL advocates usually miss is that this is often an intermediate step. Several big FreeBSD contributors have taken this path. First they take our code and incorporate it into a proprietary product. Then they realise that some of their changes are making merges difficult but are not giving them any competitive advantage, so upstream them. At this point, we're already doing better than if they hadn't used our code in the first place. Over time, the amount of code that they decide isn't part of their core competitive advantage grows until it's almost all of their stuff. In a few cases, their proprietary fork ends up having changes that simply wouldn't make sense for anyone other than them.
The other issue is companies that don't distribute software. Google's modified Linux that runs their datacentres, for example, is never distributed and so they never had to share their changes. I've worked with companies that use GPL'd software in this way but won't admit to it publicly for fear of liability (even though they're completely compliant with the license, as far as I can tell), and so who won't send patches upstream. Meanwhile, the same teams will happily send bug fixes for BSDL'd libraries that they use, because there's no chance that they're infringing the license and so they're happy to admit to using it.
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The other issue is companies that don't distribute software. Google's modified Linux that runs their datacentres, for example, is never distributed and so they never had to share their changes. I've worked with companies that use GPL'd software in this way but won't admit to it publicly for fear of liability (even though they're completely compliant with the license, as far as I can tell), and so who won't send patches upstream. Meanwhile, the same teams will happily send bug fixes for BSDL'd libraries that they use, because there's no chance that they're infringing the license and so they're happy to admit to using it.
People are not used to the GPL, don't know how it works, and then don't use the GPL. This is at first a problem of the people not educate themselves about the GPL. The license itself is clear: Yes, you distribute the original code or your derivative work upstream, as long as the people you distribute to can enjoy the same freedoms you had when you got the original code. It's quite simple.
And this is the real difference between BSD and GPL: as long as the people you distribute to can enjoy the same freedom
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The license itself is clear:
No it isn't. Go and talk to a lawyer about the GPL sometime. It has a lot of corner cases that businesses are likely to hit, and if you've actually read the GPL in its entirety and think that it's simple then you're deluding yourself. The fact that almost no one gets full marks on the FSF's own GPL quiz first pass should give you some idea of how clear it isn't. Lots of companies don't want to have to get lawyers involved to use (and contribute to) a library and the ones that do definitely don't want to
Re:Forced benevolence is not freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
What rights do BSD contributors lose? All the community code exists, the community can continue without the commercial changes, the community is not required to use some commercial fork. They lose nothing if some contributor chooses not to give back.
They lose the rights to take advantage of the improvements that the commercial contributor has done to their code, while the commercial contributor does not lose the right to take advantage of the improvements that the free contributor has done. You may agree or disagree with this, but it is objectively a loss.
Furthermore, users of GPL'd code decide not to give back at times too. They can use some a commercial fork internally and benefit from community work and not give back.
The point is that with the GPL they cannot commercially fork code written by me. Of course they can do whatever they want with their own code.
Also, various commercial users of BSD code have a pretty good track record of contributing back.
This is irrelevant to the discussion. When people make laws against theft, they don't think about the fact that most people have a pretty good track record of not stealing. Laws (and contracts) must be written with the worst case in mind.
What rights do BSD users lose?
100% pragmatic example: GPLv3 bash has a serious bug (any reference to reality is purely intentional). GPLv3 users patch, recompile and they have lost no right. BSD-licensed phone firmware has a serious bug. Users lose the right to make use of the phone they bought and not be pwned by hackers while doing that.
The GPL does *not* offer greater freedom, it creates restrictions to force behaviors it believes benevolent. Forced benevolence may or may not be a good thing but it is not freedom.
I believe that my rights to own property and to live are freedom. They exists only because other people are "forced to benevolence", in particular not to steal my stuff or harm me. Try to convince me that this is not freedom.
Translated to the software world, can you argue that the ability to fix the code of a program that I use is not a freedom for me? I'm free from bugs. I'm free from hackers. I'm free to add new features. I'm free both in a practical and philosophical sense.
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>Its also a humorous example given the fact that Android phones with their GPL based Linux host are not getting critical patches.
Actually - right there is the PERFECT example of why the GPL does in fact benefit USERS.
My own phone stopped receiving patches from the vendor some time ago. I got sick and tired of the aging code full of known bugs and security holes.
I was NOT in fact screwed as I would be with, for example, the BSD-based iphone.
I simply rooted the phone and loaded cyanogenmod on it - and it's
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He does, which is why everything under the GPL is there voluntarily, placed there by the original author.
Prove it. Go on, substantiate your claim.
And we have that framework, where everyone is
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BSD-style license does not guarantee these freedoms, and Stallman sees wider adoption of projects using those licenses as a threat to free software.
But why is that the case? I know there is the contrived case of a codebase being improved and re-packaged under a proprietary license but that just doesn't happen, part of the reason is the original codebase is still there and other people can still use and improve upon it. The most popular web server in the world is licensed under this model and it hasn't happened there.
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BSD-style license does not guarantee these freedoms, and Stallman sees wider adoption of projects using those licenses as a threat to free software.
But why is that the case? I know there is the contrived case of a codebase being improved and re-packaged under a proprietary license but that just doesn't happen, part of the reason is the original codebase is still there and other people can still use and improve upon it. The most popular web server in the world is licensed under this model and it hasn't happened there.
The standard example is Unix. Each computer manufacturer ported it to his computers, then improved it to make his product (hardware plus software) more appealing in the marketplace. The improvements weren't shared, so there was fragmentation: applications would run on some Unix systems but not others. POSIX and Single Unix System were attempts to fix the problem by standardizing certain parts of the user-mode API, but they weren't enough.
The problem was finally solved by a clean-room reimplementation of
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It didn't solve it, it just created yet another entry to the UNIX wars, it didn't supplant the major players BSD, Darwin, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris. The problem was that developers had many systems to target, Linux hasn't solved that, it is solved by having multi-platform frameworks and language standards.
And yet today GNU/Linux is the premier Unix-like system which everyone targets, after Microsoft and Apple. IBM actively supports it, even on their mainframes, though they haven't forgotten AIX. Dell advertises GNU/Linux on some of their offerings. Oracle offers a distribution of its own, though it hasn't forgotten Solaris. HP offers GNU/Linux on their Integrity servers along with HP-UX. Because of the GPL, GNU/Linux does not fragment, as Unix did.
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For someone so convinced that his way is the best way, he's sure paranoid that some other way is going to take over.