[fsf-community-team] Blog post: Free and Proprietary Software, Pragmatism, FSF, Stallman, and de Icaza

[Ted Smith]

<http://blog.lassehavelund.com/2009/free-and-proprietary-software/>


> Back in the day, Richard Stallman started what could be considered a
> revolution, working to promote Free Software. Today, Stallman is still
> president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), founded by him back
> in 1985. And, while software development has changed dramatically
> (particularly over the past 5–10 years), the position and views of the
> FSF and Stallman himself have not.
> 
> What I’m specifically talking about is the rabid puritanism displayed
> by Stallman—on his own website, as well as the FSF website.
> 
> Take, for instance, the FSF Windows 7 Sins campaign website. The
> campaign “make[s] the case against Microsoft and proprietary
> software.” The way I read this, the FSF is suggesting that all
> proprietary (i.e. non-free) software is evil, and should be avoided at
> all costs, regardless of its function or replaceability.
> 
> However, I can still understand this to a certain degree. The FSF want
> people to use, support and work on Free Software replacements instead
> of supporting proprietary ones. Right? Sensible, but that’s still not
> exactly the message I get from the above statement. Oh well, nothing
> out of the ordinary coming from the FSF camp.
> 
> 
> Personal Insults
> Miguel de Icaza, the founder of the GNOME and Mono projects, has my
> deepest respect. Not only has he been the main catalyst of several
> projects, whose products I utilise every day, but he’s also a
> pragmatic. Mono, a project developing a number of programs, which
> allow the use of the C# programming language on other platforms than
> Microsoft Windows (hint: C# is designed by Microsoft), has given
> software authors a new tool to write Free Software. De Icaza has often
> been the target of Stallman’s rants, which are way below any standard
> I’ve come across (except, of course, Stallman’s).
> 
> 
> "Proprietary Software? Not on my watch!"
> What struck me, most recently, is this thread on the GNOME
> foundation-list mailing list. To most of you, it’ll be nothing new. In
> short; members of GNOME community complain about irrelevant and
> “offensive” content on Planet GNOME, Stallman responds by saying that
> if it’s not free, it shouldn’t be on the Planet at all. He goes on to
> support this by suggesting that because of GNOME’s ties to the GNU
> Project and, thus, to the FSF, it should not attempt to circumvent the
> FSF’s goal and aim in any way—“that is, to avoid presenting
> proprietary software as legitimate.”. Right, the RMS-crazies, we’ve
> heard of those before.
> 
> This prompted the important question: is it time for the GNU and GNOME
> projects to part ways?
> 
> Personally, I would welcome such a split. The GNOME project doesn’t
> need GNU; on the contrary, with this sort of aggressive policy, I
> think it’s a counter-productive approach, which only forces people
> away from the GNOME desktop—a desktop environment I, myself, love and
> adore.
> 
> 
> Conclusion
> Stallman was a reformer back in the day. I really appreciate his work
> with the GNU project. Along with the Linux kernel, it’s what keeps my
> computer running, after all. I do, however, think the time for
> zealotry is this kind is history. Stallman has succeeded
> unprecedentedly, with Free Software being found all around us—Firefox
> and OpenOffice.org are both widespread desktop applications, used by
> millions around the world. Routers and other devices ship with Linux.
> Or maybe the company they work for has a number of webservers in the
> basement running Apache.
> 
> It’s time to realise that we, despite supporting free and open source
> software, can work together with Microsoft and other corporations
> developing proprietary software today. I love large-scale (and
> small-scale) free software projects, and I find the way that several
> thousand people can work together on the same project, because they
> want to. And often, it produces amazing software; I’m on my Ubuntu
> desktop, writing a post on my WordPress blog with Chromium. All three
> of which are open source projects! Wow! Just wow!
> 
>

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