stallman

Richard Stallman: Break free of e-book 'chains'

Richard Stallman, who bridles to see the idealistic purity of his free-software philosophy debased into the more pragmatic open-source movement, can be a prickly character. But I find myself agreeing with some of his concerns about e-books.

In a piece titled "The Danger of E-books" (PDF), Stallman bemoans the e-book's loss of freedoms that most of us take for granted with physical books and places the blame on corporate powers.

"Technologies that could have empowered us are used to chain us instead," he said. "We must reject e-books until they respect our freedom...E-books … Read more

Stallman: Chrome OS is 'careless computing'

Richard Stallman, one of the computer industry's most outspoken defenders of open software, doesn't like Chrome OS.

Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, continued to speak out against the notion of cloud computing today, telling The Guardian that the notion of Chrome OS' cloud model might better be described as "careless computing" than as cloud computing. Chrome OS is loosely based on a project near and dear to Stallman's heart--GNU/Linux--but "it is delivered without the usual applications, and rigged up to impede and discourage installing applications," he said.

That's developer … Read more

MySQL co-founder: Oracle should sell it

MySQL co-founder Michael "Monty" Widenius is leading a chorus of voices expressing growing apprehension over the proposed Oracle-Sun merger.

In a statement posted on his blog on Monday, Widenius said the European Commission is "absolutely right to be concerned" about the $7.4 billion takeover of Sun by Oracle, and he urged Oracle to sell MySQL to clear up any antitrust issues.

Although the deal received the thumbs-up from the U.S. Department of Justice in August, the Commission opened a probe in early September, citing fear that Oracle's ownership of MySQL could pose a … Read more

Stallman: GPL doesn't guarantee software freedom

The freedom to fork is the essential right of open-source software. Until Oracle's attempted acquisition of Sun/MySQL, however, few realized just how important it would be to retain the right to fork one's own code.

After all, just because you have the letter-of-the-law right to fork doesn't mean you have a meaningful ability to do so. So long as you're not the primary copyright holder, you're always going to be second place, with second-place commercial opportunities in the software.

MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius hints at this in his letter to the European Commission, citing … Read more

The wrong marketing for open source

Open-source advocates for years have waved the banners of "freedom" and "no vendor lock-in" to sell the value of open source. It hasn't worked. Chief information officers don't buy vague concepts. They buy high-quality software at a compelling price. To better market open-source software to the world, open-source advocates need to match their message to what CIOs actually want to buy.

This is the heart of my argument about open source winning out over free software. (See Carlo Daffara's excellent response.) I wasn't really talking about licensing, but rather about ideological emphasis: … Read more

Free software is dead. Long live open source

One of the most inspiring things I've witnessed in my 10-plus years in open source is its gradual embrace of pragmatism. By "pragmatism" I don't mean "capitulation," whereby open source comes to look more like the proprietary world it has sought to displace. Rather, I would suggest that the more open source has gone mainstream the more it has learned to make compromises, compromises that make it stronger, not weaker.

Let me explain.

There have long been two camps within what we typically refer to as "open-source software." The first is led by free-software advocates … Read more

Richard Stallman finds a home

Richard Stallman, godfather of the free-software movement and co-author of the GNU General Public License (GPL), has apparently found a home:

It's not clear whether it's a retirement home, a private club for members, or what, but I'm sure they'll welcome him anytime he's in London, where it's located. Let's hope it's nearby Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's Zune House, as the man doesn't seem to have much love for the iPhone, according to this story in Ars Technica.

(I think GPL, in this case, actually stands for Garden Picture Library, … Read more

Stallman warns of Mono 'risk'

GNU project founder Richard Stallman has called on developers to pull back from Mono, arguing that increasing use of the open-source toolset could prompt legal action by Microsoft.

Mono is a .Net-compatible set of tools designed to allow applications based on Microsoft's C# programming language to run on platforms including Linux, BSD, Unix, Mac OS X, and Solaris. A number of popular open-source applications, such as the note application Tomboy and the photo manager F-Spot, depend on Mono to run. As a result, Linux distributions such as Debian have said they are considering including Mono in the operating system'… Read more

Ubuntu misses Stallman's cloud-computing rant

Free Software Foundation President Richard Stallman recently went on a tirade against software as a service (SaaS), suggesting that consumers of SaaS are "putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."

Apparently, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, missed Stallman's memo, because it's advertising for a Salesforce.com developer to help it manage its proprietary (gasp!), SaaS (gasp!) CRM system.

Not that Canonical is alone. Red Hat, Hyperic, MySQL, and other open-source companies also use Salesforce. Are they bad? Are they putty in the hands of Salesforce? Maybe. But they're also companies that need to … Read more

Richard Stallman is warning us about cloud computing?!?

I read Richard Stallman's commentary on cloud computing in the UK's Guardian. Stallman is full of warnings about cloud computing:

One reason you should not use Web applications to do your computing is that you lose control. It's just as bad as using a proprietary program.

But he completely neglects to mention that he had a chance to seed the cloud, which is largely built using open-source software, with an upgraded GNU General Public License (Version 3), and he demurred. Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation failed to protect the cloud when they had the chance, … Read more