Sunday, December 12, 2004

Free as in Freedom - Part Two: New Linux

By Adam Engel

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  1. Please stop the madness!  I can’t believe I stuck
    it out and read this whole damn article. Adam,
    why are you so preoccupied with how in the hell
    you refer to yourself? Leftist, Anarchist,
    Progressive.... Who gives a shit.  You were
    attempting to cover some of the most interesting
    people and topics surrounding “the OS that shall
    not be named”, but yet your vanity just about
    shreds it to pieces.

    I suggest you read Rebel Code, and get a clue
    as to as to why your readers could care less
    about your meandering bullshit.... and stay on
    topic!

    Posted by Label Me from usa  on  12/13  at  12:54 AM

  2. You and ESR deserve each other. May you both keep emailing each other agressive nonsense for years to come.

    Posted by Roberto Alsina from Argentina  on  12/13  at  10:13 AM

  3. Do you realize that you ceased to make any sense whatsoever 2/3 through the article?  All I get from the article is that you’re trying to get Eric Raymond or someone to apologize for using the term Open Source instead of Free Software.  Who cares?  Open Source is a means to get large corporations to fund Free Software development by downplaying the social significance to said corporations managers; yes that is bad in many ways but so are most of the largest corporations in a social sense.  Only IBM seems to have played up the social aspect of what’s happening and that bored them after few short weeks.  End point.

    Now where is the rest of this story?  At some point in your shouting match with Eric Raymond you said that Part Two was supposed to be covering HOWTOs, documentation, distribution specific ease of installation, etc.  Where is any of that mentioned in this article?  Focusing on Eric Raymond misses the whole point.  He’s a single pixel in a massive picture.

    Posted by Jim Ignatowski from Los Estados Unidos  on  12/13  at  11:42 AM

  4. I think part of the problem with ESR and RMS is that they live in their own shells, and having lived in these shells for so long they can only see the inside of these shells.

    Hopefully, the world is full of more people who have worthwhile things to say. Frankly, they both have good perspectives on things, but neither is the sum of Free Software and/or Open Source. Both philosophies have a convergence which argument neglects.

    And both ESR and RMS are archaic. They are older men getting older; it is the younger people becoming older that are becoming more important. You are one of these. The future is not GNU or Open Source, it is not FSF or OSI. The future is *us*. Do not let them define us; rather, let us define them.

    That *is* the basis for FOSS.

    Posted by Taran from Dominican Republic  on  12/13  at  11:45 AM

  5. Your quick understanding of Stallman and your failure to understand Raymond are both due to your own ideological lens.

    As a writer, you should understand that copyright is a powerful tool for the individual. Copyright is the basis of the GPL. Copyright provides protection for “original works of authorship”. Without this protection the GPL has no meaning. The GPL may use copyright in a novel way, but nonetheless it’s copyright law that is being used. Your assumption, however, is that copyright is a tool of the Evil Corporate Overlords.

    Free/libre/open source software, whatever you want to call it, is about choice. Choice and competition. There is nothing ‘leftist’ about that. Choice and competition are part of a healthy free market system. Linux is an example of true capitalism in action, successful despite the roadblocks set up by some corporate and government forces working together to shut everyone else out of the market.

    It is actually taking a _huge_ leap to say that Linux “may be on its way to becoming a ‘proprietary open source’ system. That is, the code will be open, but someone will own it.” You show here a profound misapprehension of the subject. GPL’d code is not the same as code in the “public domain”. Under the GPL, the copyright holder owns the code. Others are licensed to use the code according to the terms of the GPL. (This includes taking the code and producing a derivative version, if one is so inclined.) Any code released under the GPL is always free code. “Proprietary open source” is a contradiction in terms.

    How did you manage to turn Raymond’s statement about “communistic flake cases” into a personal insult? He was talking there about how the free software movement might be perceived, about how it might be a good thing to be taken seriously and not dismissed outright because of ideological rhetoric.

    I understand the importance of software freedom. When i read an article that says Linux was created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, i email the author and point out that Linux is only the kernel, and that the operating system is based on the GNU project which was started in 1984. I use Debian GNU/Linux as my desktop OS. Yet i see nothing wrong with calling it an “open source” operating system. It’s a simple, accurate descriptive term.

    Bringing down the Evil Corporate Empire isn’t the main purpose of the free/open source revolution, it’s just a happy side effect.

    Posted by Pingus from Antarctica  on  12/13  at  01:49 PM

  6. Dude! You really don’t get it, do you? Pick up a copy of Raymond’s book “The Art of Unix”: it might be primarily about software development, it’s also a history of the origins of Unix and FLOSS. Take a read.

    And since when did being a Progressive become associated with Anarchists? Or Conservatives? Or Liberals? There was me thinking that being a Progressive meant believing that moving forward was a good thing.

    K. - A Progressive and a member of the both the Radical Centre and the Reality-based Community.

    Posted by Keith Gaughan from Ireland  on  12/13  at  03:35 PM

  7. Ok so all the Leftist dribble put me off half way through the article. The best bit was reading everyone flame it.

    Posted by Andrew from Australia  on  12/13  at  08:13 PM

  8. I didn’t flame it, and I wasn’t even critical of it… It’s healthy to explore the ideas of others, and I would like to encourage that. But in the same token, I’d like to read more of what you think. If I wanted to read what Stallman had to say, I’d be checking out his weblog (and yes, he does have one). If I were interested in what Raymond would have to say, the same concept applies.

    What do you think? What do you have to say? That’s really what I am getting at. Let Stallman and Raymond fight each other if they must; let’s not take sides of either… instead, we as individuals should be sifting through the ‘discussion’ of both and also adding our own. That’s not a flame… it’s a suggestion.

    If I wanted to read regurgitated data, I’d be at Slashdot. LOL.

    Posted by Taran from Dominican Republic  on  12/14  at  10:36 AM

  9. D’oh! It’s The Art of UNIX Programming. I blame caffeine.

    Posted by Keith Gaughan from Ireland  on  12/14  at  02:30 PM

  10. I want to congratulate you for daring to say what no one wants to say, which is that the idealistic drive that led to the creation of free software is being hijacked by those who would happily sacrificed the gains of twenty years for some arbitrary measure of technical excellence.

    If Linux is only about technical excellence, it is indeed a shallow and empty promise. If it is about empowering those who may otherwise not be able to learn how an operating system works, then it is much more worthwhile. If it is about providing the tools that we all need at a time when more and more of our cultural and economic output depends on software, then it is indeed promising.

    What all the self-proclaimed pragmatists forget is that without idealism, nobody would have worked as hard as we have to make it happen. Perhaps the only thing I would have to critique about this article is the following: 1) Co-opting your enemy is about the smartest thing you can do. Read Antonio Gramsci’s “Letters from Prison and his thoughts on counter-hegemony.

    2) The format and the writing need some serious polishing.

    Thanks for the hard work that went into writing it. Hopefully, a revised and refined version will see the light soon.

    Posted by Gonzalo from Spain  on  12/14  at  11:14 PM

  11. “but the thousands of HTML links within the files referred to those extension-less names as well...”

    But any competent web developer knows that’s the correct practice (see eg “what to leave out” in http://www.w3.org/ Provider/Style/URI ) ... so this typical know-it-all went and fu@ked it up.

    Posted by hume smith from chester NS  on  12/15  at  03:47 PM

  12. GNU/Linux began as a political movement and GNU’s refusal to be co-opted by Corporate Money enhanced by the smarts to outfox the corporate legal schemes and corporation friendly copyright laws, is astounding, truly a success the left should be harping on:  a community of people who love their work triumph over corporationate money and organization.

    Though I never mentioned my personal politics, I told Raymond that the purpose of this article was to introduce the topic of the free software movement and the phenomenon of Linux to the Left/progressive sites for which I write. Raymond’s assumptions about “progressives” should have sparked outrage in all commentators on this page:

    ‘Adopting the self-description “progressive” is, among other things, a way of announcing “I am so blinded by a Marxist-derived fear and hatred of markets that I cannot reason about anything related to economics without making ludicrous errors!” ... The open-source movement and corporations get along well because both are fundamentally about the same thing “voluntary cooperation in markets. The corporate market is primarily monetized and the open-source one primarily non-monetized, but that is an unimportant detail...But for “progressives” to really understand why it is an unimportant detail they would have to abandon their most cherished myth, of the market as an exploitation machine run by malevolent plutocrats. I expect them to get clear about this about the same time that we start seeing competent biology from Creationists or competent geography from Flat-Earthers.’

    No malevolent plutocrats around HERE!  Perish the thought.

    He not only equates progressivism, whatever the term might imply, with soviet style communism and vulgar Marxism, he but contempt for the people at GNU and the FSF, without whom there would have been no Linux, or at least no operating system to attach to the Kernel, which was designed with the GNU operating system in mind. 

    Even after this old news about his working with Netscape to use Open source to the benefit of Netscape, not the user, and Okopnik’s revelation that the DOD chose Linux over Microsoft in order to manufacture more high-tech machines of destruction, and Raymond deliberately twisted this of all questions it should be apparent that once the moral imperative of a free operating system is taken away, and it becomes just another corporate commodity, used by the Department of defense, which is currently murdering Iraqi civilians by the thousands.


    Adam Engel

    Posted by Adam Engel from NYC  on  12/16  at  03:41 PM

  13. GNU/Linux began as a political movement and This refusal to be co-opted by Corporate Money enhanced by the smarts to outfox the corporate legal schemes and corporation friendly copyright laws, is astounding, truly a success the left should be harping on:  a community of people who love their work triumph over a corporation of “employees.”

    Though I never mentioned my personal politics, I told Raymond that the purpose of this article was to introduce the topic of the free software movement and the phenomenon of Linux to the Left/progressive sites for which I write. Raymond’s assumptions about “progressives” should have sparked outrage in all commentators on this page:

    ‘Adopting the self-description “progressive” is, among other things, a way of announcing “I am so blinded by a Marxist-derived fear and hatred of markets that I cannot reason about anything related to economics without making ludicrous errors!” ... The open-source movement and corporations get along well because both are fundamentally about the same thing “voluntary cooperation in markets. The corporate market is primarily monetized and the open-source one primarily non-monetized, but that is an unimportant detail...But for “progressives” to really understand why it is an unimportant detail they would have to abandon their most cherished myth, of the market as an exploitation machine run by malevolent plutocrats. I expect them to get clear about this about the same time that we start seeing competent biology from Creationists or competent geography from Flat-Earthers.’

    No malevolent plutocrats around HERE!  Perish the thought.

    He not only equates progressivism, whatever the term might imply, with soviet style communism and vulgar Marxism, he has nothing but contempt for the people at GNU and the FSF, without whom there would have been no Linux, or at least no operating system to attach to the Kernel, which was designed with the GNU operating system in mind. 

    Even after this old news about his working with Netscape to use Open source to the benefit of Netscape, not the user, and Okopnik’s revelation that the DOD chose Linux over Microsoft in order to manufacture more high-tech machines of destruction, and Raymond deliberately twisted this of all questions it should be apparent that once the moral imperative of a free operating system is taken away, it becomes just another commodity, used by the Department of defense, which is currently murdering Iraqi civilians by the thousands.


    Adam Engel

    Posted by Adam Engel from NYC  on  12/16  at  03:48 PM

  14. You mentioned GNOME and KDE but forgot Xfce.  At this point XFce has become as much of a desktop option as the others, and it’s better/stronger/faster than the others and has more capabilities yet is so much esier to use.

    Posted by Joe Klemmer from Northern VA USA  on  12/17  at  01:35 AM
    15. Commenting is not available in this weblog entry. {/if}

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