His role is to yank the Overton Window back towards rationality. Meaning his job is to create the space for a more constructive policy debate.
Stallman is not a politician or a diplomat. Nor should he be. Trading horses and compromise is someone else's problem.
You are confusing unwavering with stubborn. A stubborn person would not react to new evidence that invalidates their beliefs. An unwavering person would.
The only information I have relates to the outcomes of their decision process: speechs they give, statements they make to media (or reported by media), bills they sponsor, their voting record, etc.
Because this is all political theater, I don't even really know what they are actually trying to do by making these statements, these votes, etc. So there are at least two layers of obfuscation between the ideas a person holds sacred and my ability to measure those things. The result, is that when we say a political figure is unwavering, we really just mean that these little plays they act out for us always have the same theme. Even if their beliefs change they cannot afford to rewrite their own character in the middle of the scene. That would just be confusing. Better to bring in a new character entirely.
Stallman's ethical and philosophical approach is awesome, and his unwavering stand behind those things is also. I don't agree with everything the man says, but I agree with a lot of it and it's clear he's thought it all through.
I really, really, really hate this when applied to politicians though, because they ought to change their positions based on evidence. When they're crowing about how unwavering they are it's usually because they're flying in the face of common sense and raw, obvious fact.
Politicians are an odd breed though. By the time you've made it to elected office you've almost certainly had your beliefs and how (or even whether) you can express them so warped that I almost think it's unfair to hold what they say against them. They're the product of a screwed up system - most of them are (or were) smart principled individuals until they got too close to government.
Only in the movies. In real life, this trait can be disastrous towards making any progress for the betterment of society.
If you see Stallman's role as the personification of an ideal, you probably laud his "unwavering" position. If you see his role as that of a pragmatic politician, who should try and find small wins when large wins are out of reach, you see probably find his "unwavering" as impractical.
You mean the movies made about people who were unwavering in real life? Gandhi, MLK, Lincoln are a few high-profile figures that spring to mind, but there are countless throughout history who have made a difference by standing up for what they believe in.
I understand your point, that romanticized notions rarely have a place in reality. But I think Stallman, even with all of his eccentricities, is the perfect figurehead for these ideologies. He is a believer, and that gives others permission to believe themselves. It's a very powerful thing.
EDIT: To add to the discussion - not many people are aware but MK Gandhi was indeed very thorough in his use of Non-Violence and other means of protest. On few occasions when a protest became violent he was the first to call off the protest. When most of India & Pakistan were celebrating their independence he was busy caring to people affected by Hindi/Muslim riots. Having unwavering attitude is not just stuff of movies.
> There is no such thing as "Gandhism," and I do not want to leave any sect after me. I do not claim to have originated any new principle or doctrine. I have simply tried in my own way to apply the eternal truths to our daily life and problems... >> The opinions I have formed and the conclusions I have arrived at are not final. I may change them tomorrow. << I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and non-violence are as old as the hills.[120]
(emphasis mine)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Prin...
Gandhi actually has some interesting quotes on this topic, e.g. http://www.mkgandhi.org/momgandhi/chap07.htm
Some picks:
"I have sacrificed no principle to gain a political advantage."
"All my life through, the very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise. I saw in later life that this spirit was an essential part of satyagraha. It has often meant endangering my life and incurring the displeasure of friends. But truth is hard as adamant and tender as a blossom."
"Human life is a series of compromises, and it is not always easy to achieve in practice what one has found to be true in theory."
"My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth."
I read him as saying that you can be uncompromising on your core principles while still being neither uncompromising nor adamant in your opinion. In particular, I think that "On basically all political issues, unwavering is a good attribute" is a common and dangerous perception, in that it denies you the opportunity of admitting that you were wrong. If you change your stance after learning more, or even after the underlying situation has changed, you will be accused of flip-flopping and inconsistency.
But if this is the case, then it was his belief in his country that motivated him and that qualifies Lincoln as a believer. In my mind that was enough to not delete his name after typing it. :)
It's a thin-ish book and I highly recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Long-Pursuit-Lincolns-Thirty-Year/...
MLK Jr's early campaign to desegregate the city of Albany, Ga., for example, is usually considered to have been a failure (in terms of return on investment) because the political dream of desegregating the entire city was seen as too big to effectively organize a campaign for:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albany_movement
> “The mistake I made there was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair” (“Martin Luther King: A Candid Conversation”).
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/encyclo...
What followed, of course, were the Birmingham bus boycotts and other campaigns with a much more limited scope. To me, this represents a "waver." In retrospect, we can say that MLK was just changing tactics and he never wavered in his belief against segregation...but is that something you would've guessed if you were one of his contemporaries? Or would you have thought, like many of his anti-segregationist rivals, that MLK was being an "Uncle Tom" and deliberately aiming for small-victories as to not upset the white status quo? It's easy to say "Well, MLK was unwavering all along" 50 years later...but had his smaller campaigns not gone so well (and he was most definitely not the only person making inroads in the civil rights movement) and resulted in only localized successes, then we would be viewing MLK as a man of compromise today.
The larger point is that effective revolutions encompass a large degree of compromises. Sometimes a leader will give on something to reduce the number of opponents he/she has to face.
So to the original commenter's point, it is not admirable in politics (art and martyrdom is a different thing) to be unwavering, at least by those who practice it and want a real degree of success.
And with respect to "art and martyrdom" - These figures, all of them, had a very real degree of success affecting political change. The fact that they are martyrs is secondary and the argument could be made that they were martyred because of their political success. In fact, these 3 sprang instantly to mind when I wrote my original comment specifically because I think it's possible (not necessarily probable) that RMS could join them in both regards. Successfully banning patents on software could potentially effect a lot of people's wallets and history has shown this to be a good motivator for creating martyrs.
No one should suggest that Stallman should have to change his beliefs. Instead, he should realize that his goal is pretty much impossible to accomplish in the current political climate. Because it is impossible, he should seek to achieve the smaller goal of successfully reforming patent law, because a small win is better than a big loss. It doesn't mean that you have given up, it just means that you realize that you aren't going to win the war in a single day.
I think the point that they were trying to make was that accepting reality and compromising ones beliefs are two different things. It's unrealistic to act as if you can enter a conflict with a party that thinks you are 100 percent wrong, and successfully negotiate an agreement that gets you 100 percent of what you wanted. But minds can be changed over time. If we can place limits on software patents, and the changes prove themselves to be conducive to a healthy economy, then we will have an easier time convincing people that the copyright system is causing more harm than good.
This was exactly my point. The parent was suggesting that MLK compromised on his stance but presented only evidence of a change in tactics.
I agree completely with your other assertions.
I think it would help to distinguish that there are really 2 arguments happening here, muddying the waters: Unwavering belief and unwavering actions.
I personally think that unwavering belief in something is commendable and this is where my comments have come from. I think this is necessary in order to effect any real change as the process is usually long and arduous.
Unwavering commitment to a losing tactic, as danso points out, is stubborn and foolish. A person who is unable to adapt when facing challenges does no favors for their cause.
This is what I was trying to get across, but you expressed it much more concisely than I.
This would seem to require -some- people to be unwavering.
That's where Stallman's stubbornness bites him in the ass.
Both approaches are needed. Diplomacy will get you further short term, but unwavering commitment will be able to change things in a more sustainable way, longer term.
But consider the gist of MLK's situation:
1) His primary goal was to create equality among whites and minorities. I'll agree that he never wavered from that. In the same way, every major figure on either side of the abortion debate, at every point in the continuum, will argue that they've never wavered for their respect for human life. The problem is getting to that big goal, and that path almost always requires wavering.
2) In support of my point, the idea of desegregation was so big that organizing a campaign against it devolved into a messy unorganized effort (current-day example: Occupy Wall street). When he tried to campaign against ending desegregation in Albany, he had very little success. He underestimated the widespread opposition to such a sea change.
3) In Birmingham, he changed his strategy to attack obvious injustices that moderately conservative whites could back. Yes, changing the bus-seating policy is a form of desegregation, but it was possible to change that policy and still have Jim Crow laws still be the law of the land.
So if you were an observer of the civil rights movement at that time, yet outside of King's inner circle, what could you possibly conclude except that from Albany to Birmingham, MLK has moderated his stance against desegregation? Certainly, as the audience that MLK wanted to reach -- the white status quo -- you could get on board with treating blacks more decently, as long as they didn't go to the same schools your kids do.
It's only after the successes of these limited campaigns that King himself could be seen as a successful leader of the movement. His strategy to fight small battles as to be more palatable to segregation-supporting whites was critical...and it was politics. Politics is about compromise and choosing battles wisely. The problem with your argument is that you don't see that one man's "choosing battles and running away to fight another day" is another man's "spineless flip-flopping appeasement", which MLK certainly was accused of being. It's only through the passage of time, when all those events are compressed into a convenient explanatory narrative, that you can think of it as MLK Jr. being a constant, unwavering political force.
I'm also impressed by your knowledge of the Civil Rights movement. I'm not sure that it sheds a lot of light on the current argument, but your comments are definitely a good read.
I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know how he is being portrayed in current pop-culture, but the only thing Lincoln was unwavering in his support of was keeping the Union intact. That is generally not the issue that he was considered 'unwavering' on, but it is.
Anyway, kind of OT.
Would _open source_ have caught on if Stallman (and GNU) hadn't been there? That's an interesting question.
But being right (even very right) in the 80s and 90s doesn't make you automatically right forever after; I found his assertion that you should starve rather than write or run a single line of unfree code[1] to be wrong and very counterproductive to spreading free and open source software.
The biggest challenge with lobbying is education. That whole reality-based thing. I've only lobbied on issues that nearly everyone is in complete agreement over (e.g. fair and accurate vote count), but the details were in dispute (e.g. touch screens are secure, reliable vs all forms of electronic voting are bad).
In the case of patents, the original US law states their purpose is to foster innovation.
The current game winner's defend the status quo making the argument that the patent system is working. Stallman and other advocates are arguing that patents hurt innovation.
Same values. Different policies.
Personally, I think that it has had the opposite effect. OSS (both the software and the ideology behind it) has changed the world. Almost all computing appliances run OSS code or interface with other machines which do. People without much money can use state of the art software for free, leaving them more to spend on the basics. All of this has been due to an unwavering political attitude.
Perhaps it is not whether an attitude is unwavering which influences the net effect but the content itself. A good idea is a good idea whether you firmly believe in it or not. Firmly believing in a good idea has a positive impact whereas the same belief in a bad idea will have negative consequences.
Both types are needed. Because Stallman is uncompromising, he'll never be in a position to make change. But he can pressure and try to convince those who are.
The complete inability to compromise is the defining point of the republican party. I don't consider this to be a good attribute at all.
I spent years in the "the FSF are unrealistic nuts standing in the way of open source" camp too. The problem, looking back on those years, is that RMS was right about pretty much everything that mattered. I give him a lot of slack these days in my personal judgements, and the occasional shouting match with a law professor seems like a small price to pay.
Two key things have driven my desires for a GPL world. (1) Reading about historical software now unavailable and (2) working in the corporate world as a tools developer.
The question is pretty much, are you weighing the distributor's freedom more than the user's freedom? When you want someone to be able to use your program and not publish their fixes, MIT-style licenses become more your style. This is preferred by corporations, AFAICT. However, when you want the end user to be able to modify software and to be able to trust the software, you start wanting the GPL world. Of course, the idea of a typical non-technical user doing technical work is illogical. But with the GPL, they have the freedom to hire people to do technical work. That can be really important for things like crypto!
Another way to consider the situation is that the GPL enables viral transmission, and more broadly, forcibly enables a survival of the fittest. If software is really good and GPL, it'll get used, and the users must publish to their users, and so forth. So good software can now survive longer, perhaps after its starting point's death. This in particular struck home with me when I was reading of the software systems from the '50s and '60s. They were doing things then that were not to be done for decades. As a social value, some of those old software systems would have been tremendous. I'd like to build on old & reliable stuff, not reinvent the wheel!
A concrete way to approach this idea is to consider infrastructure tooling. I write that, every day. It's my job. Sometimes I ask myself: Don't a hundred other companies already do this? What if software licenses were so written as to require these tools to also be published? We've been able to publish one Mercurial extension, and it has been a great experience. But what if we did that with everything? I wish all the companies that developed infrastructure opened their source and worked with each other to build a common world of amazing. The GPL style license is key, because it requires this republishing thing. Under the GPL, sharing becomes required. And then someone else can build on that, and they must also share their additions.
That's the kind of world I want to live in. Not a world where we guard our little towers replicating each other's work time after time. We can go do different things, safe in the knowledge that in the common areas, improvements will be published and worked on by all.
edit: With respect to RMS-
In particular, his short story Right to Read really hit home with me when I read it in 2008 or so. I have read one or two other things by him from the... 90s I think... that really indicated he understands the logical outworkings of certain processes, as his predictions came to pass in the late '00s. I figure if you're going to agree with someone, you had best agree with someone who seems to be proven right. :-)
An Apache-licensed kernel would appear in phones as a useless blob.
Can I get a buildable kernel tree for my Android phone? Yup.
Unwavering opinions, in the face of shifts in the situation: bad.
Sometimes, it's hard to distinguish the two.
There's a separate, important question of how much to prioritize strategy versus tactics. Probably, we need some people to keep an eye on each, but unfortunately infighting can get bitter.
Now, whether it has changed in a way that makes the positions held by rms less relevant or appropriate is quite another question. It sounds to me like you read my comment as some kind of attack on rms: it was not intended to be anything of the kind; I very much value the man's input to our collective discourse, and tend to agree with him more than not.
It's the only relevant question in this thread. I'm sure that there's been some global temperature change since the GPL was come up with, but I'd like to hear a case about why it matters.
> On basically all political issues, unwavering is a good
> attribute
I'd understand Stallman's position in the world few decades ago, when almost all software was by developers for developers. In todays world it is bordering on absurd (imho).
"Eccentric" is synonymous with "odd". It would be irrational if people somehow found him eccentric and not odd.
He wants everyone to only use the GPL and ignore everything that's not GPL, he even dislikes the term 'Open Source' and the rest of the Libre licenses.
That's a clash of interests and the reason for our dislike.
Somehow, people find this odd, wrong, and or bad, and I dont understand it. On basically all political issues, unwavering is a good attribute. Even being an eccentric is better than not caring for the issue. eccentricness is often a key aspect before a change reach a critical mass.
Take a random politician opinion about abortion or nuclear power or any other common political subject. Say his/her opinion is "well, some should be able to do it, but then again there are problems so maybe not, and the issue is not one that need to be address today, and the system today do continue to work, and well, legal greyness is not that big of an issue, only for those in the courts...".
Clear, direct, and consistent opinion is a good thing. Diplomacy and "meeting half-way" has it places, but in politics, there is also times when it should be clearly avoided. In software politics, there are plenty of people working the diplomatic route. There is no shortage of diplomats, and a few eccentric and unwavering voices is then much more useful to maintain the goals of where we want to actually go without moving the goal in favor of diplomacy.