[NTLUG:Discuss] RMS's Speach

[Christopher Browne]

On Fri, 26 Jan 2001 11:40:06 CST, the world broke into rejoicing as
Steve Baker <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>  said:
> Christopher Browne wrote:
> > On Sun, 21 Jan 2001 21:37:20 CST, the world broke into rejoicing as
> > Steve Baker <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>  said:
> > > kbrannen at gte.net wrote:
> > >> For the record, I have no problem with commercial software.  I
> > >> think it has a place, a small one, but it's not inheritantly evil.
> > 
> > >I agree - programmers need to eat, so there has to be commercial
> > >software.
> > 
> > I don't want to be blindly following RMS, but I think there needs to
> > be a _bit_ more of an ethical framework than that.  I could use
> > largely the same constructs to generate:
> > 
> >  "Torturers need to eat, so there needs to be a commercial sector of
> >   torture and inquisition."
> > 
> > There needs to be some more useful distinction than just "programmers
> > need to eat."  After all, inquisitors also need to eat :-).  Music and
> > movie executives need to eat.  Lawyers need to eat.  None of which
> > justifies the more aggrevious excesses of those various professions.

> Yes - but if you were a lawyer - (or an inquisitor or torturer),
> you'd agree that you need to eat - so you either charge for your
> services or change jobs. Since I'm a software engineer - I'm offered
> the same choice...do commercial software - or change careers.

> RMS has never (to my knowledge) sucessfully answered that question.

In the case of inquisitor, the _right_ answer is more likely to be
that someone with a reasonable ethical framework should probably
consider some other career.

> The closest he comes is by arguing that we can charge for
> distribution, documentation, tech support, etc.

> But I don't *want* to become a distributor, a technical author or a
> tech support person.  I'm a good programmer.

... And for the most part, the things that are the "major evils"
surrounding the licensing of software represent forms of income that
the average programmer never sees.

The sort of income that gets largely eliminated by the GPL is royalty
income.  But I don't get royalty income, and I expect that you don't
either.  I work as a programmer; I am largely paid as a result of the
need for "technical support," not as some form of royalty on
intellectual property.

>>> HOWEVER, I don't think that software that forms part of the
>>> infrastructure of our computer systems should be commercial.

>>> Hence, I'd be happy to pay for a decent wordprocessor - but I want
>>> my NFS server to be OpenSourced.  I'll pay for a game - but not an
>>> OpenGL implementation.

>> What if someone starts building "document management systems" atop
>> the decent word processor?

> You can construct artificial examples like that if you like - but it
> doesn't change my 'gut feeling' that system functions should be free
> and Wordprocessors don't have to be.

This is _hardly_ an artificial example.

Legal firms have been building macro schemes for constructing legal
documents atop WordPerfect since the days when MS-DOS was "king."  

Microsoft would like few things more than for:
 -> All Email messages to be Word documents, thus meaning that every
    email client _has_ to include Word.

 -> People to build document management systems such as schemes for
    working with legal documents and templates thereof which treat
    Word as "basic infrastructure" and then provide the ability to do
    highly customized stuff with documents.  Automatically filling in
    fields, and such.

> If pressed on this point, I'd say that the low level libraries for
> writing text to a file and reading it back should be free - because
> those are the common infrastructure that both Wordprocessors and
> Document management systems rely upon.  However, the higher level
> editing functions, GUI, etc that turn that into a product don't have
> to be free (IMHO).

The issue a year back when Microsoft tried to argue that Internet
Explorer was to be an inextricable component of Windows demonstrates a
slippery slope here.

>> Microsoft would like nothing more than for that to take place with
>> Word; they'd doubtless _love_ to see people writing applications that
>> assume Word as "basic infrastructure."

> ...and if they released appropriate low level libraries (such as
> '.doc' format I/O routines) then that would certainly happen.

They offer VBA which allows this very thing to be done from _inside_
Word.  No need for it to be "low level" external stuff when you can
push it inside.

>> One of the less-well-articulated things about the "GNU/Linux"
>> controversy is the fact that there are some interesting extreme
>> positions.

> Yes - that's certainly true.  I *try* not to be on any of the
> extremes...but from someone at RMS's particular extreme, it may
> appear that I'm right at the other end.  It's a logarithmic scale I
> think!

>> One of the "GNU Positions" is that "Linux" is merely an operating
>> system kernel, which requires a whole bunch of "GNU things" in
>> order to have the user space that makes it useful to you and I.
>> And regardless of whether or not you agree with RMS on the "I want
>> credit for the name" side of things, this position is not
>> ludicrously unsound.

> No - it absolutely isn't.  GNU deserves at least as much (and perhaps
> much more) credit than Linus for what happened.  But Linus deserves
> more credit than his lines-of-code count would imply.  Without the
> Linux Kernel, people would be running GNU tools on...what?
> 
> * HURD - I don't *think* so.  That has been churning for longer
>   than I can remember - and how many machines have you ever seen
>   running it?
> 
> * BSD - Possibly, but the impression I get is that BSD only became
>   popular outside of VAX minicomputer users once Linux lead the way.
> 
> * Minix - Maybe.
> 
> * Windoze - Probably.
>
> The most likely scenario is that most of us would be using a Cygwin-
> like environment under Windoze.  (Is RMS demanding that we call it
> GNU/Windoze?)
>
> But demanding that everyone call it something different (and
> expecially something as clumsy as GNU/Linux) is just unrealistic.
> Humans use language as a convenient shorthand for their ideas and
> all attempts to legislate changes will fail.

The thing to keep carefully in mind in understanding this is that RMS
is, above almost all else, an academic.  He "grew up" in one of the
most academic places possible, the MIT AI labs.

His attitudes towards credit are entirely consistent with the academic
usage of this, where it is considered an important ethical issue to
ensure that the progenitors of ideas are given credit.  _Any_ doctoral
thesis will begin with a literature study which looks to every
previous researcher that has a reasonably similar idea to those
presented in the thesis.  It is not at all uncommon for the giving of
credit to others to represent 20-30% of the thesis document.

Outside of pure academia, people get rather more pragmatic.  "I don't
care who gets credit, so long as the results are useful."

That contrast seems crucial to me; RMS is very clearly an academic
scientist, and gets quite enraged when people break the rules of
academic credit.  Academic credit isn't so important to you and I who
don't live in worlds where academic credit is the main currency we
carry around.

The "academic ethic" does explain RMS further; his views on how people
should get paid fit well with the way the scientific community works
as opposed to the way the commercial community works.  

Seeing as how not everyone is a scientist, it is not too surprising
that his positions are at odds with "nonscientific" pursuits...
--
(concatenate 'string "cbbrowne" "@acm.org")
http://vip.hyperusa.com/~cbbrowne/nonrdbms.html
Why is  it that  when you  transport something by  car, it's  called a
shipment, but when you transport something by ship, it's called cargo?