I was researching
Wikis using (appropriately enough)
Wikipedia just now to see if I could harness the technology for
HVOC. While I was at it, I came across a reference to the hacker and free software advocate
Richard Stallman, also known as rms. My friend, Richard Ess, also has the same initials; and only a few people know this: the M. in Richard M. Ess either doesn't stand for anything (as in "
J Robert Oppenheimer") or it stands for "middle".
Anytime Stallman's name brought up it summons in me a feeling of low intensity rage. If all politics are local, and you live in the world made up of software known as the Internet, which is by its nature global, then you may come to appreciate that the world of software is in fact political. If this is the case than I think it could be fairly said that if
Bill Gates were the
Rush Limbaugh or
Pat Buchanan of software, then Richard Stallman would be Ralph Nader; although I think this is being unfair to Nader, as Stallman is petty and childish (If you believe this to be true of Nader, then maybe it is not unfair).
One of Stallman's pet peeves is that people insist on calling Linux
Linux. You will find that I am one of these people, because 1) that is what it is called and 2) even if it weren't I would probably not call it that other name simply to spite Stallman. I won't repeat what he calls it, but I will say that he wants credit for Linux because his software plays a
part in the success of Linux. Instead of being happy that free software is being used, he is being petty and demanding credit. This causes divisiveness in the free software community, which if you use my political analogy to software, you can see is prevalent in American politics too.
The other charge is that he is childish. I won't go into too much detail but I read an article about him where the interviewer described an episode where Stallman flipped off a building that was named after Bill Gates. In another episode, he was invited to talk at a conference for free software that was sponsored by a number of free software companies. Instead of being a positive voice, he took the opportunity to attack the sponsors, all of which make money from free software. It is, to an extent, a "free country" so he is free to express himself thus. If I were to analyze his behavior (which I am), I would say that he is resentful of the fact that these companies are making money off of, and getting credit for free software, including free software that he wrote.
If you view that companies are doing a bad thing by exploiting free software commercially, or that they are not being "true" to the free software spirit, or more to the point that they are not properly reverent to Stallman, then this is a limitation of the Copylefted license that not only did he use to release his software; but he even wrote the license and invented the term Copyleft. I actually don't think this is a limitation of the license, although I do think it is a limitation of individuals when they believe that all software should be distributed under the same copylefted license.
Stallman resents the fact that when the PC was born and gave rise to the commercial software industry as it exists today, it lead to what he saw as a decline in his hacker community. I think that everyone in the free software community should recognize and appreciate what commercialization of computers has done for society. I can't think of too many people who like Bill Gates, or his henchman the
Microsoft Word Paperclip, but even I have to give him credit for turning the PC into a commodity, and making it widely available. I would argue that a big part of the reason that PCs are so affordable today is that Micro$oft, along with others, such as Apple, have made computers accessible to regular people. The creation of this enormous market has consistently driven the price of PCs down, while at the same time the speed and quality of hardware goes up.
Just to give you an idea, I gave Tyler Tron 2.0 for his birthday, and picked up a used copy for myself on half.com. If you have seen the original 80s movie on which it is based you know that the graphics are limited and simplistic. Those scenes were rendered in a batch process; meaning each frame did not have to be rendered quickly enough to be displayed real-time. This game, by contrast has much more sophisticated graphics and thanks to 3D hardware acceleration, all the frames are rendered real-time.
This is something that free software, which existed long before PCs, and long before Stallman claimed to have invented it, could never do. Free software is good for many things, particularly for constructing server software and for niche application development, and I will quite often choose a free software product over a commercial one based on quality rather than price. On the other hand, there are certain commercial software applications that are hands down the best available, and far outperform their free software equivalent. From my own point of view I would say Micro$oft Word and Adobe Photoshop fit this description. The free software community has put together some good WYSIWYG editors, but with the exception that none of them include a talking paper clip, they just don't have as rich a feature set as Word. As for Photoshop, while
The GIMP is quite good, and was adequate for my needs for a long time, it is simply not good enough for professional photographers, and after having learned how to use Photoshop I realize that The GIMP just isn't good enough for my need either.
Fortunately, in this world of extremes, there are also moderates. People who exist somewhere between Bill Gates and Richard Stallman who see the benefit of both free software, the commercialization of free software, and fully commercial software. The best examples, I think, are
Linus Torvalds original author of the Linux kernel, which serves as the core of the Linux operating system, and
Larry Wall, the original author of
Perl. I think people like these have so much more to offer the free software community than the zealots do. I think that it is telling that these two characters still play a major contributing factor to the projects that they created, while Stallman has delegated his coding responsibility to others for a life of advocacy. Those who can, do; those who can't, tell other people what to do.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
