I think FOSS can "embrace and extend" just as well as Microsoft!

(FWIW, I respect rms's purity of ideology, and I respect how it broadens the debate, but I don't think his extreme represents a desired end goal.)

I don't think one can say that RMS didn't achieve much. He supplied the seed, directly or indirectly, to many free and open software accomplishments. I don't think that would have happened if he'd been wishy-washy, flexible, easy-going guy. He'd certainly have been easier to like, but probably not as effective.

And to reiterate, I don't subscribe to rms's opinion, or think he's right on everything, or anything in particular without further investigation. But I do think lack of compromise is harder than it looks.

So I look at something like Mono, it's a remarkable piece of technology. It's a fairly lightweight managed VM, just like Java but completely and 100% opensource, built on opensource for opensource. It works too and it works pretty well at what it does. There is no "good" or "evil" component to it. Now Microsoft potentially have patents that cover parts of it that they could threaten to use, that's a risk but that risk will also expire at some point. The Linux kernel also has patents that potentially cover parts of it, including patents the Microsoft owns but that's not being treated as a taboo... RMS waters his own statement down by blurring that line between technologies and how the technologies are used.

Instead of bullying Miguel, he should bully MS to further clarify their stance and continue to open their position on the technologies used by Mono. he should be fighting to free that stuff rather than bash one of the biggest contributors to his movement.

There is nothing in ideological purity that demands ignorance of other opinions. And just because you're cognizant of someone's opinion, doesn't mean you have to agree. RMS can say what he wants, and I'm sure he's not ignorant of other's opinions. If you don't like what he says, don't do what he says. If you don't like his philosophy, maybe you shouldn't use GNU software? He doesn't force you to use any software. (Which is more than can be said for lots of corporations.)

Commercial != non-free. Stallman doesn't, to my knowledge, have an issue with the former. He rather dislikes the latter.

Hackers nowadays take free software for granted, but without rms, it may well never have happened. If we (developers who rely on open source software) can afford to compromise and parlay with the enemy now (and make no mistake, before rms got pissed at the path software development was taking and took it upon himself to start a one-man war on behalf of all of us, proprietary software was an enemy), it is because the movement has gained sufficient momentum and become too strong to destroy.

I mean, imagine the reaction of a pragmatic person to the decline of the hacker culture at MIT's AI lab, where it all started. Shrug, move on to whichever job paid the highest/offered the most interesting work, continue living life. If every hacker were pragmatic, then open source would never have gotten started. It took someone who was willing to do it when it didn't make sense to do it to get the entire movement started. I think rms was not only important, he, or someone like him was necessary at the time. He was the snowflake that started the avalanche. Come the moment, come the man, as they say, and rms was that man.

Oh well, I doubt I will convince anyone who is unable or unwilling to imagine how difficult it is to give up personal advancement for the sake of others that rms deserves respect, if not gratitude, but there it is. I think it needed to be said.

On a tangential note, is anyone else going to FOSS.my 2009 at KL? If so, are you planning to attack rms as a ninja? :)

Maybe, but this does not mean that Open Source would not have happend.

Project Gutenberg, for example, was already started in 1971 to to archive and digitize cultural works. The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) started in 1977. The GNU project, however, started in 1983.

In other words, the idea of sharing copyrighted works such as literature and software was known before Stallman. Basically, Stallman was quite late in the game. Additionally, other attempts to freely distribute code started after the GNU project, but independently of Stallmans ideas. For example, the Apache project, IIRC.

Overall, it's save to say that we'd have some sort of Open Source movement, due to earlier examples of code sharing and independent attempts, even if Stallman would not have done what he did.

Maybe, we'd even have a "better" Open Source movement.

Also, the ability to have an ideology does not deserve respect, per se. There were quite a few people with ideologies who made millions of people suffer.

If all the software that deIcaza and Stallman helped produce would be removed from your average Ubuntu box it would probably not get into booting, let alone do something useful. That doesn't give either of them the right to pretend to speak for everybody or to try to carve up the world of software in to camps.

(I'm firmly in the "This man is completely insane" camp).

It takes real conviction to literally dedicate your life to projects like this, and RMS has that to spare.

He's not insane, he is just the opposite of politically correct, and while that can be charming in a person that is not the perceived spokesperson of a large community when you are you'd do well to moderate your language.

If you don't it costs because it gives your opponents plenty of opportunity to claim the moral high ground.

The funny thing here is that if RMS really wishes to see closed source vs open source as a battlefield then his way of going about waging the war aids the enemy by giving them a couple of really good opportunities to get him bad PR.

I don't think that's smart.

There's something comforting about Stallman's intransigence. Win or lose, Stallman will never give up. He'll be the stubbornest mule on the farm until the day he dies. Call it fixity of purpose, or just plain cussedness, his single-minded commitment and brutal honesty are refreshing in a world of spin-meisters and multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns.

—Leonard, Andrew, Salon.com

And I find name-calling and posturing to be in conflict with 'brutal honesty'.

Comparing closed source with slavery is pretty insane though.

I'm sorry, but however much I disagree with a lot of RMS's opinions the man has been making spot-on predictions about the development of proprietary software for over 20 years and time has only been proving him right. While many of us appreciate de Icaza's efforts on GNOME, all Mono has done is provide more validation to a fundamentally proprietary platform, when that effort could have been spent creating a FOSS stack that could rival Java and .NET while trying to solve some of their problems.