Re: [wlug] How Psychology Today Sees Richard Stallman
He is a control freak, and a prophet. He has been right more than once (the dangers of software patents, pitfalls of online services). But some of his policy decisions (e.g. the reluctance to allow a plugin architecture into GCC for fear it would lead to evasion of the GPL) have, I think, been counterproductive.
But isn?t it grand that Free Software is all about having a choice? That we can use what he and everybody else working for the FSF has been responsible for, without necessarily having to subscribe to every tenet of his philosophy?
You can't expect anyone to be 100% correct on everything.
On 05/09/2017 05:13 PM, rowan schischka wrote:
He is a control freak, and a prophet. He has been right more than once (the dangers of software patents, pitfalls of online services). But some of his policy decisions (e.g. the reluctance to allow a plugin architecture into GCC for fear it would lead to evasion of the GPL) have, I think, been counterproductive.
But isn?t it grand that Free Software is all about having a choice? That we can use what he and everybody else working for the FSF has been responsible for, without necessarily having to subscribe to every tenet of his philosophy?
You can't expect anyone to be 100% correct on everything.
That example could have gone either way. If the compiler developed such that that it would be unusable without non-free plugin code, it would have become defacto non-free as well. Stallman erred on the side of caution, which, in lieu of crystal ball scrying was the correct decision.
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rowan schischka