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A comment on "Your criticisms are completely wrong": Stallman on software patents. Parent comment

Re:"Your criticisms are completely wrong": Stallman on softw... by jimbokun on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @03:37PM (#4816196)
Name me 10 hackers who have had a bigger impact on society than Stallman and the GNU Public License. We live in a world with so much free and open source software all around us, it's easy to forget the role Stallman's unwavering advocacy has played in creating this reality.
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Re:"Your criticisms are completely wrong": Stallman on softw... by chc on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @05:41PM (#4816710)
It seems hard to quantify. If everybody were using the BSD or Apache license instead of the GPL, would society be substantially different? My guess leans toward "A little different, but maybe not that much." Would BSD and Apache have caught on if Stallman hadn't been there? I don't know, but BSD at least predates GNU. Any answer would have to delve into the realm of historical fiction.
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Re:"Your criticisms are completely wrong": Stallman on softw... by geoka9 on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @06:46PM (#4816906)
> Would BSD and Apache have caught on if Stallman hadn't been there? I don't know, but BSD at least predates GNU.

Would _open source_ have caught on if Stallman (and GNU) hadn't been there? That's an interesting question.

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Re:"Your criticisms are completely wrong": Stallman on softw... by cwp on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @09:23PM (#4817256)
Of course it would have. It was pretty much inevitable once Internet access became wide-spread.
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Re:"Your criticisms are completely wrong": Stallman on softw... by SirDinosaur on Thursday November 22, 2012 @12:13AM (#4817575)
me thinks that is taking both the internet and open source for granted.
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Re:"Your criticisms are completely wrong": Stallman on softw... by mseebach2 on Thursday November 22, 2012 @03:15AM (#4817989)
Well, Ubuntu's unwavering pragmatism in getting GNU/Linux on the desk- and laptops of reasonably regular people has had a big impact.

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.

1: http://lunduke.com/?p=2273

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