Date: Wed, 12 May 1999 19:50:44 -0500 From: "G. Adam Stanislav" <adam@whizkidtech.net> To: kuehl@lgk.de Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Richard Stallman came to town Message-ID: <19990512195044.B217@whizkidtech.net> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.990512202019.kuehl@lgk.de>; from kuehl@lgk.de on Wed, May 12, 1999 at 08:20:19PM %2B0200 References: <3.0.6.32.19990512083944.009769c0@mail.bfm.org> <XFMail.990512202019.kuehl@lgk.de>
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On Wed, May 12, 1999 at 08:20:19PM +0200, kuehl@lgk.de wrote: > > P.S. Have you noticed that the first four letters of Stallman and Stalin > > are the same? > > Excuse me, that comparision is really beyond all comprehension. Well, first of all, it was not a comparison, it was an observation made half seriously, half tongue in cheek. Nevertheless, I can see why such a comparison could be incomprehensible today when Stalin is only remembered for his atrocities. He is history now. He was not history during my childhood. Indeed, he was presented to us as a gentle person whose sole concern was for what benefits all of us, while the Western capitalists were the monsters. He was protecting us against greedy capitalists. He made everything into common property for the benefit of all. No one was to have any financial interest in the improvement of technology (among other things). The fruit of everyone's labor was to help everyone and immediately. He even got away with copyright protection: Anything anyone wrote belonged to society at large (including anything written by authors living in other societies). I was still a child when Stalinism was overturned (but not until after his death). It was only then that it was officially admitted that Stalin was not that good, indeed, he was way off. Progress had been very slow during his era. Engineers were simply not motivated enough. (Nor were workers, managers, or anyone else.) Do you see the parallels now? Stallman, too, is presenting the capitalists as the evil people, and he is trying to protect us from them. He, too, wants technology to belong to everyone with no financial interest for those who work on its improvement. He, too, got away with copyright, replacing it with copyleft: Anything a programmer writes does not belong to its creator but to society at large. Once a programmer releases code under GPL, he gives away all rights to it for the ephemeric benefit of all. Even the original author is not permitted to reuse his own code, except under GPL forever. He has created an atmosphere in which it does not pay to be a programmer. Whatever original ideas you might have, you cannot make a living off them. As soon as you release a new and original program that took you years to develop, and try to make it pay your bills, some kid will copycat it and release under GPL (it is quite easy to write a program that does the same thing as another program, the hard part is in coming up with the idea of what a new program could do). So, why even bother coming up with new and original ideas? He has also created an atmosphere of fear: I would be afraid to look at any of GNU source code out of fear that I might unconsciously and unwittingly use some of it in my own code and relinquish any and all rights to the fruit of my labor. > Not every paradigm one can't agree with is that fatal. Yes, and thank goodness for that. Alas, this particular paradigm is. > And it would be quite reasonable to take into consideration > that GNU tools played an important role for achieving a > free BSD. It would also be quite reasonable to consider that few of the GNU tools were original ideas conceived by GNU. Most of them simply take the creative fruits of others and copycat them. Did GNU invent the C language, make, fortran, assembly language, lisp, yacc and lex? Did they really help advance technology? Between Stallman on one side and Microsoft on the other any effort to produce anything new and original is a waste, because no matter what you create, the two will take it away from you. FreeBSD is an oasis in the desert the two have created, a sign of hope that human mind is capable of dealing with adversities, no matter how hard they are. They both know it. That is why Stallman calls us misguided, while Microsoft is trying to pretend we do not exist. Adam To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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