News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Rust has been forked to the Crab Language. Parent comment

Re:Rust has been forked to the Crab Language by globular-toast on Tuesday May 30, 2023 @09:28AM (#36124629)
> Besides his anger management issues, I think that he made a major mistake in focussing on free software as a goal in itself, and not on programming freedom, which could have rallied many more supporters.

Programming freedom might have been easier, but I think free software is a more laudable goal. Programmers possess exceptional skills and it's mostly our choice to use and produce free software, or not. One of Stallman's essential tenets is that non-free software gives programmers power over the users. Giving programmers more freedom only serves to strengthen this power. Free software is supposed to give everybody (or nobody) this power.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Rust has been forked to the Crab Language by syntheweave on Tuesday May 30, 2023 @12:56PM (#36127258)
Free software moves the goalposts of freedom towards "sufficiently clued in user can operate and maintain free software", not "everyone of any skillset has a viable path to control their program". Programming freedom is the harder goal. Anyone can dump source code and say "yeah it's GPL now."

That's how it worked out that so much of the early stuff was, in respects small and large, "software for free, documentation for sale". There's no mandate for usability or conceptual simplicity. And we've only gotten better in the sense of having more developers interested in that stuff.

[ Parent | on HN ]