With the New Year upon us I am going to try and start posting more. My topic today is Richard Stallman, aka rms. Let me start by saying I have nothing against open source software. I use it all the time, and I must say, the fact that it is free makes it awesome. My use, however, is based out of practicality given my circumstances, not some ideology (Well I guess if we want to be technical my ideology would be pragmatism then. Also, one can take pragmatism too far, and therefore one does need to take a stand at some point, but thats outside of the scope of this post). Lets look at two examples; first with browsers I use Google Chrome. I use Chrome because it truly is very fast (Try it out if you have no already!). It also fits me better. When I browse the web I want the website to be my focus, not the browser itself. Chrome is also non-intrusive on my web experience. I use Chrome because it works better for my circumstances.
For a second example with my mail client I use Outlook. Once again this is because Outlook fits my needs better. The integration it has with a calendar, contact list, and task list is superior to Thunderbird 2, Evolution, Pine, and Emacs. I tried all of them, Outlook won. Outlook is a bloated piece of software that crashes every now and again, but the feature set it has works for what I need it for. That reminds me, Thunderbird 3 came out recently. I need to give it a shot.
The interesting fact is when I say I use and like Outlook and other Windows products I get labeled as being a Microsoft fanboy. Ill defend myself by saying I am not a fanboy by any stretch of the imagination. Microsoft does good and bad, just like every company and human on the planet. The people that swear their life by XYZ are the real fanboys. I do not swear my life by Microsoft.
My point of going on this rabbit trail before hitting my main topic of rms, is that Stallman is simply a Free Software Movement fanboy. He is blinded by his ideology and to put it bluntly is he is blatantly unscientific. I did a bit of Googleing and found these outrageous statements rms has made:
This first one comes from the GNU su man page.
23.6.1 Why GNU su does not support the wheel group
(This section is by Richard Stallman.)
Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)
However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The wheel group feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.
I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.
(Another man page quote)
This program does not support a "wheel group" that restricts who can su to super-user accounts, because that can help fascist system administrators hold unwarranted power over other users.
Yup, you read that right. I did not make it up. Now, Im the first person to joke about wishing we never had passwords, because lets be honest if you dont have priv keys setup it can be annoying to type them in each and every time. The fact of the matter is there are evil people out there. Passwords prevent them from doing evil things most of the time. Having someone in charge isnt not fascism, is just plain old good practices. America is a republic, not a democracy. We elect representatives. If it was a democracy I would be going to DC and voting on whether Bella the cow gets grain from the government or not. I dont have time for that, thats why we have a representative democracy, aka republic. I elect someone who basically has my views and he/she votes on my behalf.
Another one of rmss outrageous comments recently was made in relation to the GNOME project. The thread is quite entertaining to read, but then again it demonstrates someone who is a fanatic and is not reasonable. If you read Stallmans comments on mono you will find some that you cant help but shake your head too. Stallman must think Microsoft is full of Trolls and Gnomes that eat children for dinner.
Continuing with this idea, there is a popular picture saying, When you program open source, youre programming communism. Now, of course that statement is outrageous. Ive helped on open source projects and I am anything but a communist. It does stem from a seed of truth though. It is fair to say the Free Software Movement at times has hints of communism. They are idealistic, saying everyone is nice and wont ever try to make a virus. We should all own all computers: to each according to his need and from each according to his means. Does that sound familiar? Open source is cool and I love a lot of what comes out of it. The Free Software Movement on the other hand is a fanatical ideology that should be avoided. Dont publish you code under the GNU licenses. There are many other good ones out there like the Apache, Mozilla, Eclipse, or my favorite, the MIT/X11 licenses.
Lets end on a happy note, go to this site