Re: JFS

[Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>]

At 05:56 PM 2/8/2000 , Jack J. Woehr wrote:

>In the GNU Manifesto, Stallman proposed an alternate economic model for software
>production. 

No, he didn't. He proposed a NON-economic model.

He also stated, explicitly, that his intent was to sabotage commercial developers
and limit their career prospects so that they could make no more money than starving
graduate students. In 1984, Stallman wrote:

   "For more than ten years, many of the world's best programmers worked at the 
    Artificial Intelligence Lab for far less money than they could have had anywhere 
    else. They got many kinds of non-monetary rewards: fame and appreciation, for 
    example. And creativity is also fun, a reward in itself.

    Then most of them left when offered a chance to do the same interesting work for 
    a lot of money.

    What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other than riches; but 
    if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, they will come to expect and 
    demand it. Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, 
    but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned."

In short, spiteful about the fact that some of his colleagues were leaving the 
lab to pursue a commercial venture, he sought to sabotage them as a way of
discouraging anyone from doing this in the future. Stallman confirmed his
malicious intent 16 years later when interviewed by a reporter for Forbes
magazine:

   [Stallman] retaliated [against the computer scientists who left the MIT AI Lab 
   to form Symbolics] by sabotaging his former colleagues' sophisticated commercial 
   programs for powerful computers, singlehandedly hacking up his own versions and 
   giving them away. "They accused me of costing them millions of dollars," he says. 
   "I hope it's true."

(For the full text of the article, see http://www.forbes.com/forbes/98/0810/6203094a.htm.)

>If you go back and read the Manifesto, I would say the only criticism one
>can make, in light of subsequent events, is that Stallman understated his case, and
>vastly more wealth than he himself imagined is being generated by free software.

Not true. GPLed software (the term "free software" is an intentionally deceptive
label which is part of Stallman's rhetoric) has not made companies profitable;
it's only allowed them to accumulate paper wealth via IPOs. But the emperor has
no clothes. The big Linux companies have no profits, and most have no assets 
to speak of because they DO NOT OWN THE SOFTWARE THEY SELL. None have actually made 
money free and clear. 

BSD-licensed software makes sense, and DOES provide a means of generating wealth
if you use it appropriately and add a lot of your own sweat. (If you do, the money
you make will be the result of your own work, since you started with something that
was available for free. So, you MUST create value.) But the GPL is an attempt
to turn open source into a weapon AGAINST companies that make money. And it's done
quite well. The big Linux companies LOOK cool, and thus investors have been
buying their stock even though there is no value proposition behind it. But these
organizations are built on foundations of sand. The first strong breeze may well 
topple them. 

I won't write GPLed code, because I won't play into, or support, the malicious agenda 
that the GPL implements. I'll deal only with open source that is actually open -- 
hence my work on and contributions to BSD UNIX. I won't be an overnight millionaire,
but if I generate real value, I will at least earn the fair return that Stallman --
himself now wealthy -- would deny programmers.

--Brett Glass