Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 11:41:11 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Evan Leibovitch on BSD Message-ID: <20010614114111.F9578@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010613150727.045b07f0@localhost>; from brett@lariat.org on Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 03:20:15PM -0600 References: <4.3.2.7.2.20010612164541.00c43ad0@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20010612123127.045a6690@localhost> <Pine.BSO.4.33.0106121816470.8578-100000@Aphex.NewGold.NET> <4.3.2.7.2.20010612164541.00c43ad0@localhost> <20010613102638.C57154@lpt.ens.fr> <4.3.2.7.2.20010613150727.045b07f0@localhost>
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Brett Glass said on Jun 13, 2001 at 15:20:15: > >You keep saying this, but never give a quote to corroborate it. > > I have many times. And you, perhaps because you have bought Stallman's > deceitful and intentionally misleading rhetoric, have ignored this > information and have furthermore pretended that you could not so much > as use a search engine. > > See, among other places, > > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html : > > "So the MIT AI lab that I loved is gone. and after a couple of years of > fighting against the people who did it to try to punish them for it I > decided that I should dedicate my self to try to create a new community > with that spirit." > > In short, like a vengeful "ex," he stalked his former colleagues and > attempted to sabotage them and others like them. More below. OK. So he did that for 2 years (less, I think), and stopped. (And not for the reasons you describe -- ie not because they were making money. More on that below.) The GNU project is his attempt to "try to create a new community with that spirit". And it worked: I didn't know much of the spirit of the MIT hackers in the 1950s, but Levy's picture of it is quite close to that of the free software hackers today. > >You > >name his GNU Manifesto, but that doesn't say its intentions are > >anything like this. > > Yes, it does. It specifically states that Stallman believes that decent > pay for programmers should be "banned:" > > "For more than ten years, many of the world's best programmers worked at > the Artificial Intelligence Lab for far less money than they could have > had anywhere else. They got many kinds of non-monetary rewards: fame and > appreciation, for example. And creativity is also fun, a reward in itself. > > Then most of them left when offered a chance to do the same interesting > work for a lot of money. > > What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other than > riches; but if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, they will > come to expect and demand it. Low-paying organizations do poorly in > competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the > high-paying ones are banned." Yes. But if you read the whole thing, the context is not to ban high pay, but to ban commercial shrinkwrap-license software. By "high-paying organizations" he means the shrinkwrap ones; he has no problem if Red Hat pays well (of course, nothing like Red Hat existed at that time). Again, from your KTH link: It was possible to get rich by working at a private company. All that was necessary was to stop sharing their work with the rest of the world and destroy the MIT-AI lab, and this is what they did despite all the efforts I could make to prevent them. You probably need to understand that the spirit of sharing is common in academia, so it is not at all surprising that he found the idea of not sharing so offensive. Apart from which, in the case of software as much as in academia, there are real practical benefits to sharing. > higher pay for programmers than they could get in academia. He vowed revenge > not only on Symbolics, but on all commercial ventures of its kind and on > programmers who desired to make a better salary than they could at the Lab. He vowed vengeance, as you like to put it, on programmers who wrote software which could not be shared, could not be fixed by the user, put you at the mercy of the programmer or the company. > You have your GPL blinders on. Levy saw and portrayed Stallman as a > pathetic figure, and correctly noted that Stallman was extremely vengeful. > Levy wrote: > > "This was RMS's opportunity for revenge.... Stallman had no illusions > that his act would significantly improve the world at large. He had > come to accept that the domain around the AI Lab had been permanently > polluted. He was out to cause as much damage to the culprit as he could." Levy also says later that this did not go on long; he knew he couldn't keep it up so he started a new project, the GNU project. The "act" he refers to in the extract you quote was not the GNU project, but his duplication of Symbolics' efforts (all by himself) to help their competing company; but of course you won't make that clear, with your selective quotations. With the GNU project (which came later) he did, indeed, want to improve the world at large (or at least, he says so and Levy nowhere contradicts it). Levy's book, if you read the whole thing, makes it quite clear that Symbolics' crime was not hiring programmers, but making them keep their work secret instead of sharing it with people (like Greenblatt) without whom all these things would not have existed anyway. Yes, he was angry with them (that's human) and wanted to damage them, but not for the reasons you describe. The reason was their destroying the "hacker ethic" as Levy called it. If you read all your favourite documents in detail, it's clear that the GNU project is, indeed, opposed to hoarding of software. It is not opposed to paying programmers. It recognises, though, that in a world where all software is free, pay will be less (similarly, pay will be less in academia than in industrial research labs). Think of the benefits though: if the researchers who had discovered the high temperature superconductors had patented it, it would have scuttled pretty much all future research into it. Similarly consider the recent magnesium boride superconductor which looks like it will already have applications within 6 months of discovery (well, the compound was known earlier, but suppose it hadn't been.) Stallman thinks of software as basic science, which shouldn't be hoarded. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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