foss Am I the only one who reveres Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds

It's really awesome to hear him speak so calmly.

i saw him speak at a small college at the start of the year. i'm an open source advocate, and respect what he's done for the community, but srsly, the dude is legit nuts

yeah all three are a little..... *pulls neck of sweater open*

Stallman's produced, and continued to uphold, a great concept. Maybe taking his ideas a bit far sometimes but he's been a boon for the software industry; in a user's perspective especially. I could imagine him as a good addition to Lord of the Rings with a 8 foot walking stick and long pipe.

That was an excellent video. It was really refreshing to hear such ideas described in such a lucid and accurate manner. I wish more people spoke like him.

and the corollary: i wish stallman would speak like that more often. his appearance, his demeanour, and his fanaticism do a disservice to the free software movement more often than not.

interesting. i feel half-holy, half-dirty watching that from my ubuntu computer running chrome. linux is free and open-source, but the newest ubuntu has a really disturbing amazon search feature built-in to the desktop, and chrome is based on chromium, but with google's massive, all-knowing eyes written in.

is open-source software being appropriated by huge corporations?

  On 10/28/2012 at 4:52 AM, Al Hounos said:

is open-source software being appropriated by huge corporations?

Uh, yeah, absolutely. So much of Google's (and Apple's and Microsoft's) software is based, directly or indirectly, on open-source tools. If there weren't so much open-source software with licenses allowing for commercial use, none of it would have amounted to much.

Maybe you were looking for a different word besides "appropriated"?

Do I understand Stallman correct when he talks about free software, he actually talks from the perspective of the programmer and not necessarily the user? I don't understand how software can be free for the end-user if the end-user is not a programmer but instead someone who never used a computer before.

The irony is that iOS is not free from Stallmans perspective, but still user friendly. So I'm not totally sure from what perspective he's reasoning. Either I'm confused, or his notion of end-users is confused.

linus is a boss tho

  On 10/28/2012 at 3:04 PM, dr lopez said:

linus is a boss tho

He is, but like, I'd love to run something like gNewSense and completely abandon reliance on all proprietary software and have my entire music collection be in OGGs and FLACs. I'm already that weirdo on soulseek who has OGGs of UGK's self titled album.

  On 10/27/2012 at 10:22 PM, kaini said:

and the corollary: i wish stallman would speak like that more often. his appearance, his demeanour, and his fanaticism do a disservice to the free software movement more often than not.

Not to mention whenever he sings the Free Software Song, does his St. iGNUcius routine, or picks whatever the fuck off his foot before eating it. He is nuts but he has awesome values.

And thanks for the awesome answers guys. Really engaging.

*frees software from the shackled minds of programmers*

  On 10/28/2012 at 9:18 AM, goDel said:

Do I understand Stallman correct when he talks about free software, he actually talks from the perspective of the programmer and not necessarily the user? I don't understand how software can be free for the end-user if the end-user is not a programmer but instead someone who never used a computer before.

 

The irony is that iOS is not free from Stallmans perspective, but still user friendly. So I'm not totally sure from what perspective he's reasoning. Either I'm confused, or his notion of end-users is confused.

Stallman comes from the era where most users were also programmers.

He realised that by making software free (to use, to change, to redistribute) you could kick off a virtuous circle of people taking and adapting and improving software. Also, lots of civil liberties angles.

We are no longer in an era where most users are also programmers, but the idea of 'free software' is still very important because of the civil liberties angle, and the 'dont let corporations run absolutely everything' angle.

Cory Doctorow has a good quote on this:

  Quote

"As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die, and of course, it won't be a hearing aid, it will be a computer I put in my body," Doctorow explains, "So when I get into a car - a computer I put my body into - with my hearing aid - a computer I put inside my body - I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, and to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests."

...

"Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks," Doctorow warns, "And we haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won't be able to fight on without them."

edit: vproc, no you're not the only one

Thanks for the answer!

I still think it's a bit silly though. Are we supposed to be able to write our own code for malloc and calloc? I hope not! Being able to write an OS from scratch is like doing string theory, imo.

Not to take away anything from the Stallmeister. RMS is awesome. Point. Or semi-colon, depending on your language;