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It's the problem now, but specifically this tendency of Stallman is why the FSF exists at all, and why there was a compiler and a complete, freely available Unix userspace already available for Linus to bundle with his kernel, and voila, free Unix.

It's also the reason we have an Open Source movement, that being the watered down and more corporately palatable version of Stallman's idealistic vision.

Yes, he's totally uncompromising, has no sense of pragmatic tradeoffs or weighing one thing against another or deciding what is a good hill to die on. That's not the way I think is best to live my life, and it's probably best that most people don't live theirs that way either. Still, there should be a place in the world for people like him to have the freedom to be able to create and run their own organization with their own ideals.



> It's also the reason we have an Open Source movement, that being the watered down and more corporately palatable version of Stallman's idealistic vision.

If you ever talked with Stallman, read his texts, listened to his talks, you'd know that in certain ways Stallman's views are much weaker than what most people think they are. He doesn't have any issue with corps taking over the FOSS world as long as it compiles on trisquel and comes with a free license.

That's why I'm glad that he's going away now. Hope we can get someone who actually will stand up against the issues that the FOSS world is facing now in his seat.


> He doesn't have any issue with corps taking over the FOSS world as long as it compiles on trisquel and comes with a free license.

The attitude you describe is much more represented by Linus Torvalds, and by the BSD folks, than by the GNU / GPL folks.


I've literally talked to RMS before about this. Torvalds etc might have such views too at more extreme levels, but RMS definitely has it himself.




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