An open letter to Richard M. Stallman

Re:An open letter to Richard M. Stallman by omega_rythm on Saturday January 10, 2015 @09:58PM (#8868859)

There's ethic, and there is practicalities. RMS stands by the former, while many engineers think mostly about the later. I wouldn't say that thinking ethically is a bad thing, but it may hamper things, because it usually deals very poorly with a situation already unethical in nature.

There are more than 7 billions people on Earth, but barely enough resources to content everyone. Pushing resource extractions will damage the ecosystem, but not doing so will provoke millions of deaths. Preserving nature is a laudable goal IMHO, wouldn't you agree?

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Re:An open letter to Richard M. Stallman by anon1385 on Saturday January 10, 2015 @11:51PM (#8869066)

>it usually deals very poorly with a situation already unethical in nature.

Allowing code completion and complex refactoring in emacs is "unethical in nature"?

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Re:An open letter to Richard M. Stallman by omega_rythm on Sunday January 11, 2015 @02:20AM (#8869352)

For RMS, allowing non free code to be derived from free code is unethical, it goes against all the ideal of his movement. Indeed, from your standpoint, the thing he is fighting against seems trivial, but there are deeper consequences.

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Re:An open letter to Richard M. Stallman by dragonwriter on Monday January 12, 2015 @11:29AM (#8874751)

For RMS, non-free code period is unethical, regardless of its derivation.

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Re:An open letter to Richard M. Stallman by esrauch on Sunday January 11, 2015 @01:07AM (#8869222)

He seems to think that gcc could output a incomplete AST that could be used to implement all necessary emacs features without being usable for compiler backends. The other emacs maintainers seem to think that is fighting with one hand tied behind their back.

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