This is the we hate Richard Stallman thread

[Sysman]

Excellent responses folks, and I'm with VM on this one.

Just one little thing about Firefox is that it has gone commercial. I can easily forgive someone who contributed to its development feeling somewhat miffed about this. I picked up a comment the other day about bugs not being fixed and that there only seemed to be 3 developers active. That may just be speculation, but it does make me wonder.

[NickFitz]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the GPL prevents you from making a commercial application out of an existing open source one.

No, it prevents you from making a proprietary version of the software. If you build your own product on somebody else's work, then you have to accept that they want you to apply the same principles to your product as they apply to their code, without which you wouldn't have had a product. Seems reasonable.

Also, you conflate "free software", as espoused by the subject of this thread RMS (as Richard Stallman prefers to be known), with open source. They're different, and RMS explicitly rejects the philosophy of the open-source movement as being insufficiently accommodating of the principles of software freedom that he espouses.

I shall assume that when you say "open source", you mean "free software". If you actually meant "open source", then you're arguing against the wrong thing for a thread about RMS.

Furthermore you still seem to believe that what RMS calls "proprietary software" is the only form of "commercial software". Again, I shall assume that when you say "commercial software" you mean "proprietary software", as otherwise what you say would make no sense (I don't mean that in a snarky way, but if we don't use consistent language it would be impossible to have a sensible discussion, and your terms are imprecise compared to RMS's.) "Free software" is free as in speech, not as in beer; as I posted above, RMS has never argued that "free software" should not be sold as commercial software.

Personally I feel open source can only lead to lower standards, and less software overall.

It's had quite a few years to achieve that effect. Got any evidence for this yet?

It's ironic that Microsoft have generally been demonised over their anti-competitive behaviour, despite the open source approach being far worse for competition. If you can get software for free, why would anyone pay?

Microsoft's anti-competitive practices have been acknowledged by both the US DoJ and the EC. The question you're really asking, though, is about business models: you seem to believe that the only viable business model is one where proprietary software is sold under licensing terms that restrict the freedoms of users. The fact that such companies as Red Hat and, indeed, IBM have constructed successful business models around free software (GNU/Linux, in their case) suggests that your assumption is not correct.

Why would anyone try to develop alternatives? Taken to it's extreme, there wouldn't be a software industry. There'd be no choice of software, and what there was would be of low quality churned out by a few geeks because all us professionals will have moved on to other paying careers.

The evidence of reality over the last few decades is that people do, in fact, develop alternatives, and that many professional people provide a choice of high quality free software (whether for a monetary charge or not). Again, it's down to business models: you believe that the proprietary, closed-source business model is the only way to make money from software, when a glance around will show you that this is not the case.

What is the most widely-used web server software in the world? Do you really believe that Apache is developed by a few geeks hacking away in sweaty underpants in their mums' basements? No, it's written by highly professional people, who make a good living at what they do despite giving away the source.

And the other question is: who pays? Whether it's employers, universities, or the DSS, somebody somewhere is paying for people to give their time for free to open source projects.

Correct. IBM pays, Yahoo! pays, Google pays, even my current client pays: we are actively contributing back to the Django codebase on our current project. It's like saying "Thank you" for the fact that it was free - as in beer - in the first place.

The free software that powers, for example, the web isn't made by people giving their time for nothing. Again, you seem to think that the word "free" refers only to monetary considerations, whereas it explicitly refers to non-monetary considerations in RMS's philosophy.

One of the creators of Django is working with us as a consultant, and he's not doing that for free as in beer (I'm sure he's getting more than me): again, it's a different business model, and he's able to make far more than if Django had been kept proprietary.

I don't want to release my source code. My source code is mine, and I don't want other people making money out of it. I'm happy to admit that, but I wish the open source brigade would admit the same.

Fine. Do so; nobody's trying to stop you. Again, your comment about the free software brigade seems to be based on your failure to understand the purpose and terms of the GNU General Public License. It's not trying to stop you making money, it's trying to prevent you restricting the freedom of the user to use your product in any way they see fit.

There I was thinking the BSD based TCP/IP stack was one of the fundamental problems with Windows networking. But I may be wrong.

I don't know enough about the matter to comment, other than to say that I've never heard that suggested anywhere else. But I don't know.

I actually don't agree that Firefox is better (yes I'm the boy that dared to ask why the emporer was naked), but that's beside the point. You used an important word: "rival". Firefox has been driven by the desire to oust Microsoft from dominating the browser market more than anything else. If MS had never bothered with IE, would we still have Firefox, or would everybody be using a crappy old version of Netscape? Competition is good; it's what drives one group to produce something better, even if it's not for money.

"Better" than what? IE? It's worthy of note that Microsoft's IE team have thrown away the existing rendering engine, so that IE 8 will default (for web sites that suggest they are standards compliant) to using a new rendering engine that implements the same standards as Firefox's Gecko engine, retaining the old rendering engine that ran from IE4 to IE7 merely for backwards compatibility with cruddy old tag-soup sites.

There was a market for an alternative to IE, if for no other reason than to be anti-Microsoft. However if I wanted to do that, I'd need say 50 software engineers for a couple of years, and that'd cost several million pounds. But because of Firefox doing it for free that would be financial suicide. MS and the Firefox backers between them have bought the market, and effectively fixed the price at zero. Yet it's only one of those parties that are ever in trouble for it.

Ever heard of Opera? They're still chugging along quite nicely.

Apple are also giving away a web browser (which is better than all of the rest for everyday use).

And Microsoft are getting quite a bit of kudos from the Web Standards brigade, as you'd probably call us, for their decision to throw IE 7 and down into the dustbin of history, and finally do what FF, Opera and Apple have been doing for years, so it's not right to say that they are in trouble - they were only ever in trouble with those concerned about web standards for polluting the market with a substandard, non-standards-compliant piece of bug-ridden junk, and they're finally making amends

As to why you'd want to create a new web browser... well, you might as well want to develop a new spreadsheet application. I cannot imagine any circumstances in which it would make sense for an individual to do that.

I don't know what world the open source people live in, but this idea that users want to modify software for their own aims is well, a bit of a joke. There aren't six billion software engineers in the world all looking to make their own versions of Linux. There are people that want quality products, and that means there has to be competition, they have to be developed by professionals, and they have to cost money. Open source is selling a lie: that quality can be free.

Why would people with a legitimate version of Windows want it to phone home to Redmond, decide incorrectly that something iffy was going on, and disable itself until they paid again? That's where Microsoft took itself with its addiction to the proprietary software model, and its own customers hate its guts for it. Not good business sense.

Ordinary users just want it to work, and hopefully to get better over time. By deliberately infecting their customers' purchased software with an application designed to protect the proprietary software business model, which then went wrong for some customers, Microsoft revealed the fundamental reason why software should be free: not so you can recompile the kernel with your own changes, but so that your working installation doesn't suddenly get turned off in a flawed attempt to protect the vested interests of its manufacturers' shareholders.

BTW, Microsoft are now involved in several open source (although not free software) projects, and have also started releasing specifications under Creative Commons, and with guarantees of no patent enforcement. Maybe they know something about the way the world of software is changing? Or has BillG become an RMS fanboy?

Whatever, you keep your source code to yourself. We don't actually need it. Whatever you've got, somebody else has done it as well or better, and will be setting it free (as in speech - not necessarily as in beer).

[NickFitz]

Just one little thing about Firefox is that it has gone commercial. I can easily forgive someone who contributed to its development feeling somewhat miffed about this. I picked up a comment the other day about bugs not being fixed and that there only seemed to be 3 developers active. That may just be speculation, but it does make me wonder.

Firefox - or to be precise the Mozilla Foundation - has been sponsored by Google and other commercial operations for years. Seriously old news. And contributors to the project are glad that the Foundation is financially stable... as I've said, free software is about freedom, not free in the shallow monetary sense.

As for the idea that there are only three active developers...

There are quite a few more than that, I assure you

Check for yourself, if you want: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

[blacjac]

Crickey NickFitz, you have a bad case of insomnia last night?

[NickFitz]

Crickey NickFitz, you have a bad case of insomnia last night?

[blacjac]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the GPL prevents you from making a commercial application out of an existing open source one.

You're wrong
I've made plenty of money taking free( as in beer and in speech ) stuff under the GPL, modifying it then selling it on.

[VectraMan]

I shall assume that when you say "open source", you mean "free software". If you actually meant "open source", then you're arguing against the wrong thing for a thread about RMS.

Perhaps you should tell us what you mean by the terms? You seem to be under this paranoid delusion that proprietary software has to come with a raft of restrictions on use. Well I've paid for XP (a couple of times), Office, MS Visual Studio, and you know what? None of them have put any restrictions on what I can do with them (well okay there's that thing about not being used for terrorism that was in the old NT installs, but I can live with that).

In fact, if there were any restrictions on VC++, or any royalties on what you could make with it, there's absolutely no way I would use it, or could use it.

[blacjac]

Perhaps you should tell us what you mean by the terms? You seem to be under this paranoid delusion that proprietary software has to come with a raft of restrictions on use. Well I've paid for XP (a couple of times), Office, MS Visual Studio, and you know what? None of them have put any restrictions on what I can do with them (well okay there's that thing about not being used for terrorism that was in the old NT installs, but I can live with that).

In fact, if there were any restrictions on VC++, or any royalties on what you could make with it, there's absolutely no way I would use it, or could use it.

You can't add a new option to the File menu in Microsoft word that, when selected, would play a wav file to sing happy birthday to the user.

You can with Open Office.

That is what NickFitz means by free and unrestricted.

[VectraMan]

You can't add a new option to the File menu in Microsoft word that, when selected, would play a wav file to sing happy birthday to the user.

You can with Open Office.

That is what NickFitz means by free and unrestricted.

I see - well obviously I realise now how wrong I've been and what's been missing from my occasional MS Word experience: the ability to add pointless crap to menus.

Free software rules.

Back in the real world: can't be bothered to find out, but you can customise the menus in MS Word and I wouldn't be at all suprised if you could add custom command, like for example, play a happy birthday wav file.

[bogeyman]

... Back in the real world: can't be bothered to find out, but you can customise the menus in MS Word and I wouldn't be at all suprised if you could add custom command, like for example, play a happy birthday wav file.

Indeed you can. VBA is your friend - it's not a friend I like very much, but there we are.