How did you start hating opensource?
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@mott555 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
No, Stallman used a perfectly well-understood sense of the word "free" (free as in speech) as the basis of an easily defensible ideology, then sought to employ a legal hack to make that ideology survive and spread.
Free speech means that the government can't suppress/persecute/prosecute individuals because of their ideas. So free software means that the government can't suppress/persecute/prosecute based on software usage?
Pretty much. Check the EULA for the next piece of commercial software you need to use. Chances are, there will be language in there that prohibits reverse engineering, decompiling or modifying it; do any of those things and you're in breach of the licence and therefore vulnerable to prosecution.
Free software, by way of contrast, makes understanding and modifying it explicitly legal. The point of doing that is partly educational (you get to see coding examples that solve specific real-world problems) and partly a matter of being able to trust what the software is doing: in theory, if you use tools you already trust to rebuild software whose source code you can inspect, you end up with a trustworthy executable.
The last point is much weaker now than it was when the GPL was first designed, as there's been an exponential explosion in software complexity: it would be a very rare human who is actually capable of achieving full comprehension of the source code for any project of even moderate complexity by 2016 standards.
I think that's why so many people from generations later than rms's tend to pooh-pooh his points about software you control vs. software that controls you. It's a lack-of-perspective thing, like "what was your favorite Internet game when you were a kid, Dad?". We've pretty much given up on any attempt to remain in control of our technologies in any meaningful way, so the natural assumption is that doing so could never even have seemed possible.
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@lucas1 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
The same person thinks that people that can't code are fucking "robots"
To be fair, more and more of them are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHi8hTvT3II
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In this thread:
@another_sam doesn't understand that the word "can" has more meanings than "is legally allowed"
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@Grunnen Listen man, if you set up a business selling something that's not scarce and you can't make it work, that's not my problem. Some might tell you your business idea is flawed and I wouldn't argue. Yet lots of people pay more for bottled water than bottled wine, and water comes out of a tap nearly for free and wine only does that in my dreams. So clearly it's not just possible to succeed selling something that's already nearly free, it's possible to make an absolute killing. Copying software is way harder for numpties than filling a bottle of water, so why can't you make a business work doing that?
INB4: RedHat
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@LB_ said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@Gurth I would like to speak to these video makers who are distributing their videos in specialized formats that can't be readily played by their target audience. Or maybe the average viewer is not the target audience.
You’re talking about the situation today, whereas I was talking about the situation a decade ago or so when all these video formats popped up and each of them required its own player that seemed to do nothing more than reinvent the wheel.
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@Gurth Well we had to stop using VHS and switch to DVD some day.
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@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@LB_ said in How did you start hating opensource?:
"seeing that something has already been done makes others less likely to redo it"
If that were true, there would be no rationale for the existence of the patent system.
No, it seems to be it's entire reason. People want to use what the original inventor did instead of coming up with their own way. The patent system is just supposed to make sure the original gets compensated for it.
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@lucas1 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Thus why I say "Freedom as we tell you".
@Jaloopa said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@flabdablet FREEDOM! to work exactly as RMS desires
You'd think English people would be more comfortable with the English language and the way it uses words in multiple ways.
Do we need to start saying freedoum or something before you'll get it?
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@LB_ said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Free means "no license terms to obey". As soon as you impose any restriction on how I may use the software, I do not consider it free.
Thanks for that, Humpty Dumpty.
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@lucas1 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@flabdablet How about you say what you mean?
He did! Youu just can't get ouver a wourd that can be used in different ways and whouse basic councept can be applied in different countexts.
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@lucas1 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@flabdablet In anycase the problem is that Stallman redefined terms to means what he wants them to mean so he can bend the argument to his will.
Dude...he used the wourds we have to describe soumething that hadn't really been described befoure (that I'm aware ouf). That youu have a hard time putting them tougether isn't his fault.
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@boomzilla nice trolling, but how is "free software" any more free than any other license I might want to make that grants some freedoms and restricts others?
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@Jaloopa said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@boomzilla nice trolling, but how is "free software" any more free than any other license I might want to make that grants some freedoms and restricts others?
Whoa, there. I'm not the troll here. I get it, you're jealous that someone else didn't coin the phrase before he did. I think that properly, one would call it Free Software to be clear that you're not talking about free software that you can download off the internet in order to facilitate extra email traffic.
Your argument is purely semantics, and it doesn't even have the benefit of being correct, like tilting against nonsense like "begging the question" misuse or "I could care less."
I suspect blakey levels of intentional illiteracy in this thread. It's perfectly legit to value RMS' kind of software freedom less than some other kind. Just don't act like you can't speak English.
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@Jaloopa You may call it "libre software" too
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@wharrgarbl I may call it arsehole software. There are lots of things I may call it
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@boomzilla said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Thanks for that, Humpty Dumpty.
Does not compute
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@LB_ said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@boomzilla said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Thanks for that, Humpty Dumpty.
Does not compute
"When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
http://www.bartleby.com/73/2019.html
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@boomzilla said in How did you start hating opensource?:
it doesn't even have the benefit of being correct
so there is some fundamental difference in the GPL that makes it free in a way other licences don't?
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@Jaloopa said in How did you start hating opensource?:
so there is some fundamental difference in the GPL that makes it free in a way other licences don't?
Is this your way of admitting that you've just been trolling and haven't been reading the thread?
You really can't explain the goals of the GPL and why it was different when it was created? Other licenses have adopted some GPLish things since then, of course.
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@lucas1 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
The term free means for the majority of the population means "zero cost", the FSF re-defines it to mean "kinda open source as long as we like the license".
So you think free speech means they have to give you a microphone and soapbox to stand on?
@Kian said in How did you start hating opensource?:
My biggest problems with viral licenses are the assumptions they make about who is a user and what kind of software development economic models are acceptable.
Have you actually read any of Stallman's work? To me it was quite clear that he didn't expect everyone to use Free Software. He just wanted to make sure they had the option to.
@boomzilla said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I suspect blakey levels of intentional illiteracy in this thread. It's perfectly legit to value RMS' kind of software freedom less than some other kind. Just don't act like you can't speak English.
Take note, everyone: when @boomzilla and I agree with @flabdablet and @another_sam on anything, the other side is just plain wrong.
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@antiquarian said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@Kian said in How did you start hating opensource?:
My biggest problems with viral licenses are the assumptions they make about who is a user and what kind of software development economic models are acceptable.
Have you actually read any of Stallman's work? To me it was quite clear that he didn't expect everyone to use Free Software. He just wanted to make sure they had the option to.
I do have agree here, though with a caveat. Stallman's objection, first and foremost, was that selling and distributing compiled binaries hurt the consumer because they could no longer fix bugs themselves, read the source code to understand the program better, and use good ideas from the code to improve their own programs.
In other words, he sees closed source as a cause of inefficiency. That is, and always has been, his primary personal motivation: restricting access to source is offensive to him as an engineer, because it interferes with the ability to improve both the software and other programs which others might want to write.
He's come up with a long list of justifications and ethical arguments to bolster this position, but in the end, he wants to encourage people to share source code to make the software ecosystem more efficient. He sees it as giving people a choice, but when he tried to get people to go along with, he saw all his work taken by others who then claimed what he created as their own. Which again offends him mainly from the standpoint of efficiency, because it distorts the responsibility for the code and makes the user ask the wrong engineer about the program when they need help with it.
This is also where his ideas about economics in general come from. He sees everything through the filter of his own idiosyncratic ideal of a world of perfectly engineered tools and behaviors, and tries to apply that ideal to everything regardless of whether it makes sense to do so or not. Worse, he literally seems to believe that everyone else sees the world the same way - not that they should, but that they do - and can't understand why any sane person would object to his vision of Utopia.
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@ScholRLEA said in How did you start hating opensource?:
his vision of Utopia.
Ah! Paradise! Where the rivers run with toejam!
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@blakeyrat If you object to eating toe pickings, it doesn't pay to think too hard about cheese.
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@flabdablet don't mind him, he is being controlled by the proprietary software on his computer
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@antiquarian said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Have you actually read any of Stallman's work? To me it was quite clear that he didn't expect everyone to use Free Software. He just wanted to make sure they had the option to.
No, I haven't. However, from how discussions around free software go, it appears that the position against proprietary software is an ethical one, not a practical one. Not so much "we want open alternatives to exist", which I don't object to, but rather "proprietary is wrong". Which means economic models that rely on proprietary software as a tool are not acceptable to them. That they can't prevent it is beside the point.
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@Kian said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Which means economic models that rely on proprietary software as a tool are not acceptable to them. That they can't prevent it is beside the point.
Free Software does tend to attract people from the "profitz == evil" crowd, but I'm not sure it's fair to blame Stallman or the GPL for that.
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@Kian So you probably didn't appreciate how crazy that guy is, let me select a few quotes from his page for you:
I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me.
The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't know what it means for a programming language to be powerful and elegant. Once you learn Lisp, you will see what is lacking in most other languages.
A friend once asked me to watch a video with her that she was going to display on her computer using Netflix. I declined, saying that Netflix was such an affront to freedom that I could not be party to its use under any circumstances whatsoever.
I reject Facebook because it requires each used (i.e., person used by Facebook) to have just one account, which means that all the person's activities are grouped together. They also insist on knowing the person's usual name.
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If we're done with the silly ad-hom attacks...
Anyway, as I said, his problem is less about selling programs than it is with selling them without providing the source code. He just can't figure out how to get people to sell the source code without giving it away to all and sundry, because he knows that once you sell someone the code, they'll start passing it around to their buddies. However, his answer to people not respecting software licenses is a better software license, which seems, ah, counterintuitive to say the least, especially in light of what he considers 'better'.
It also is worth remembering that his attitude was formed mainly from his experiences with the ITS community at MIT, and the collapse of that community when the fighting over the rights to the LispM design and system software started. In the late 197os, the MIT hackers were a pretty isolated and socially inbred lot, and everyone passed their code around without giving it a second thought. However, when the idea of doing something that they thought would escape their ivory tower - because they thought that LispMs would be the Next Big Thing and everyone would be using these elaborate, $40K glorified terminals (while each LispM had a CPU, it only ran part of the system, and the first ones at least needed to connect to a PDP-10 to actually run) - they started arguing over how to do it, with one side wanting to have a loose sort of garage start-up, and others wanting to get VC and build an IBM-style complexly structured hierarchical company with factories and professional management. This schism fucked over the whole camaraderie of the MIT hackers RMS was so in love with, which more than anything is what pissed him off.
In other words, he's the equivalent of someone who is still moaning over how much better The WELL was than all these crappy modern webfora. Since sharing everything was such a big part of the community, and it all fell apart when they stopped sharing (well, the other way around really, but you can't argue with crazy without going crazy yourself), he's butthurt over not sharing.
This is only one side of it, of course, but if we're going to argue over Stallman's goals, we might as well get a bit of perspective on Stallman himself.
Which also means remembering that there was a reason people were listening to him when he started this crusade. He was well-known for his mad skillz, and at one point was REing (i.e., without seeing their source code) every program change that Symbolics came out with and reimplementing them, solo, on the LMI systems, often with a turn around of one day. He was able to single-handedly out-code a dozen expert programmers day after day, gratis, while also working as the admin on a half-dozen big ITS, Unix, and TENEX systems at MIT and Harvard. No matter how crazy he might be, at one time he really was an amazing programmer.
The crazy comes when he assumes everyone else is the same way. Again, not should be, but are, and if you don't act like you are then either you are being lazy and deceitful, or something is wrong with you (man, sounds like my late father's belief that everyone is secretly into BDSM, and people like him were heroes because they were brave enough to admit it; scary shit). Yeah, he really does see things like that.
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@ScholRLEA if the guy sounds like a fucking nutter which Stallman does he isn't going to be taken seriously.
I don't fucking care about the circumstances that led up to him being a nut job. I just care about whether he is now.
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@dkf said in How did you start hating opensource?:
That's why applications created using scripting languages like Python or Javascript are a fairly good idea. You've got the application? You can (theoretically) modify it. The notions you're talking about are actually more similar than you think.
TIL @dkf doesn't know about .pyd files.
@ScholRLEA said in How did you start hating opensource?:
[Stallman] sees it as giving people a choice, but when he tried to get people to go along with, he saw all his work taken by others and get others then claim what he created as their own.
James Watt is widely renowned as the father of the steam engine. Technically he isn't; the steam engine was invented by a guy named Newcomen. Newcomen steam engines were huge, coal-guzzling monstrosities that they used to power the incredibly energy-intensive task of pumping water out of mineshafts.
Watt was an engineer who worked with Newcomen steam engines. After looking over the design and finding several parts about it that sucked, he improved upon it, fixing some important design flaws and making it far more efficient. He went on to invent the sun-and-planet gear, a gearing system that converts the back-and-forth motion of a steam engine's piston into a circular motion suitable for turning wheels, and before you know it, railroads were born!
Watt didn't invent the steam engine, but everyone gives him credit for it because he was the one who figured out how to make it useful to society in general.
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@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
He went on to invent the sun-and-planet gear, a gearing system that converts the back-and-forth motion of a steam engine's piston into a circular motion suitable for turning wheels
Actually that was invented by William Murdoch, one of Watt's employees, as a workaround for James Pickard's existing patent on the crank. Watt just patented Murdoch's invention.
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@masonwheeler OK, but that story could be fodder for either side of the argument. On the one hand, Newcomen did sort of get screwed out of the credit he deserved; also, Watt was only able to improve it because he had access to what Newcomen had already done.
OTOH, Watt deserves the credit because, well, Newcomen's steam engine wasn't practical, which is the same thing you get when talking about priority on the telephone or the electric lamp. Bell's machine worked well enough to be a usable system, and Bell had the business talent to make it happen; As I understand it, Meucci lacked the former, and Grey the latter, so Bell got the credit.
OTGH, history is written by the winners, or in some cases, the whiners; one can argue all day about the importance of priority and credit all day long, but at the end of the day the one who gets someone else to shell out royalty is the victor, whether the deserved it or not. The patent and copyright systems are supposed to help redress the worst cases of theft and plagiarism, but as we've seen with the catastrophe that is software patenting, it still usually depends on convincing a non-expert that you are doing something different from what this other guy already did.
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@ScholRLEA said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Newcomen did sort of get screwed out of the credit he deserved;
I don't know about your history books but Newcomen was mentioned in ours. It even made it into my brain ... go figure ...
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@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Actually that was invented by William Murdoch, one of Watt's employees, as a workaround for James Pickard's existing patent on the crank. Watt just patented Murdoch's invention.
Yes, I'm aware of that. I was giving a simplified version of the history in order to draw a parallel;
ry was not the goal here.
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@Luhmann said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@ScholRLEA said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Newcomen did sort of get screwed out of the credit he deserved;
I don't know about your history books but Newcomen was mentioned in ours. It even made it into my brain ... go figure ...
In the US? Are you kidding? They didn't even mention Watt.
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I'm not sure they mentioned steam, come to think of it.
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@Luhmann said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@ScholRLEA said in How did you start hating opensource?:
They didn't even mention Watt
WAT?
He means Watt Van Fux, the guy that invented this website before @apapadimoulis made it marketable.
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@ScholRLEA said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I'm not sure they mentioned steam, come to think of it.
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@Luhmann said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@ScholRLEA said in How did you start hating opensource?:
They didn't even mention Watt
WAT?
On second.
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OK, I can be the (ahem) straight man for once...
@flabdablet but who is at home plate, then?
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@ScholRLEA That's right.
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@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Technically he isn't; the steam engine was invented by a guy named Newcomen.
Thomas Savery wants a word with you.
Although Newcomen's was the first steam engine of "modern design" (meaning: it had a piston.) Savery's worked fine, was practical for pumping water and was commercially successful.
(Arguably Savery's engine had a "piston" too, since it used a column of water as a piston of sorts. But anyway.)
@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Watt was an engineer who worked with Newcomen steam engines.
"Uh actually" he worked at a university building scientific instruments and models, and was asked to repair a non-working model of a Newcomen steam engine.
His brilliance is that:
- He realized the model didn't work right not because it was built incorrectly, but because the square-cubed law fucked it over so the cylinder volume was all off
- He also realized that the engine spent a ton of its energy repeatedly heating up the cylinder after cooling it during the condensation stage
- He thirdly then realized that since the steam would escape into a separate vessel, he could attach a separate condenser that'd keep cool at all times, while the cylinder remained hot at all times
Based on the concept of a separate condenser, he build a steam engine that was something like 3 or 4 times more efficient than the best Newcomen design.
@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Watt didn't invent the steam engine, but everyone gives him credit for it because he was the one who figured out how to make it useful to society in general.
Both Savery and Newcomen engines were useful to society and commercially successful.
Watt's engines were the first that were efficient enough that they could be placed somewhere without access to a ready supply of coal. (Previously, virtually all or all steam engines were used at coal mines to drain them. Watt's was efficient enough to haul the coal to the engine instead of having to have the engine being right at the coal mine.)
And Watt's engines still didn't have a good enough power-to-weight ratio to haul themselves like, say, a locomotive. That required the development of high-pressure steam systems. (Newcomen and Watt's boilers actually produced steam at less than atmospheric pressure, which is why they worked on the principle of vacuum instead of expansion.)
BTW, Douglas Self on his site has tracked down a self-acting water engine that was designed in 1618. So it's probably not true that Newcomen invented the self-acting steam engine, although it's unclear whether he was aware of the earlier self-acting engine design or not.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
And Watt's engines still didn't have a good enough power-to-weight ratio to haul themselves like, say, a locomotive.
Wikipedia says he patented a steam locomotive in 1784, which may or may not have been invented (or at least, heavily contributed to) by William Murdoch.
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@masonwheeler Possibly, but did he build it and determine whether or not it was practical? I'm actually having trouble finding any information about his steam locomotive patent, but that fact alone means it probably wasn't very successful.
Watt was also an early believer in the "patent literally everything you can get away with and see what sticks" strategy.
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@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
TIL @dkf doesn't know about .pyd files.
If a computer can read it can execute it, a computer can also disassemble it and report something vaguely meaningful.
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@dkf said in How did you start hating opensource?:
If a computer can read it can execute it, a computer can also disassemble it and report something vaguely meaningful.
The same can be said about compiled C code. That doesn't make binaries anywhere near equivalent to open source.
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Principle of explosion - Wikipedia
