On Mon, Oct 23, 2006 at 12:46:54AM -0400, tom smith wrote:
> Steve,
> Yes, any article that deals in ad hominem attacks should
> raise flags as to the possible existence of a hidden agenda.
> The author's influences and motivations are not entirely
> clear, thus should be suspect. Is this some sort of power
> push against the FSF?
Actually, after reading the thing and considering it in light of recent
events, I think there's a lot of on-target speculation in there. The
paragraph describing Stallman in less than flattering terms isn't
inaccurate as far as I can tell and, though it's somewhat unnecessary
(the guy could have just made some off-hand comment about "eccentric
personal habits" and so on to make his point without sound snarky), it
doesn't really detract from the rest of the article unless you allow it
to.
There are some very sloppy bits of phrasing in there that make me wonder
just how much contact the article's author might have had with the FLOSS
community ("GNU license" in particular seems a mite sketchy), but the
analysis of Stallman's risk of rendering himself irrelevant raises some
interesting points. Frankly, I'm of the opinion that would be the best
outcome of this: the FLOSS community moves on, the businesses
surrounding it prosper on an open source model of software development
and support, and Stallman retires into obscurity.
It's certainly better than seeing him threaten small, grass roots
community distro projects with lawsuits for failing to have the
resources of Red Hat at their disposal but having the temerity to offer
a Linux distro anyway.
Frankly, it looks to me just a little like Stallman is trying to destroy
EVERYTHING. He's specifically targeting corporations inclined toward
closed software development and support models, threatening the future
of Linux-centric companies like Red Hat, and threatening legal action
for small community distributions. A conspiracy theorist might suggest
that the FSF aims to wipe out competition so that a full-on GNU system
can fill in the gaps (though hopefully with something a bit more useful
than HURD). I doubt Stallman and the FSF are really thinking that far
ahead on this, though. I think they probably really believe they're
doing the Right Thing. Unfortunately, they're attempting to do this by
being a real fly in everyone's ointment at the same time.
I fully expect that Stallman and the FSF will release a GPLv3 that is
simply unacceptable to a lot of people, many will move their projects to
v3, and any of those projects that anyone cares about will fork.
Meanwhile, I'm seriously looking into replacing all my Linux systems
with FreeBSD.
-- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] "The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit." - W. Somerset Maugham
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 20:11:32 EDT