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!