Re: [Sheflug] RMS Talk

["Perry Ismangil" <nospam [at] acm.org>]

On 26 Oct 00, at 22:10, the honourable Richard wrote this about [Sheflug] RMS Talk:

> Anyone interested in starting a discussion about the subject of Open
> Source vs Free Software thread that RMS started in the lecture theatre
> on Tuesday night ?  I've been through about two days of discussion
> about this with all sorts of international Linux and BSD companies.

I'll bite...

Last March I attended a LinuxWord Conference/Expo in Singapore, where 
Bob Young (RedHat) was a keynote speaker, also with Bob Chassell from 
FSF (Treasurer, I think). The atmosphere was, of course, 'open 
source' rather than 'free software'. And Bob Young, when asked about 
RMS said "...the most difficult man I had deal with...". And since 
exhibitors include Corel, IBM which of course are non-free software 
vendors, I guess RMS wouldn't come near such expos.

Strangely, the guy from FSF was nowhere near as evangelical as RMS. 
Oh, he talked about ethics, philosophy, principles, but it came 
across as rather bland.

[RMS would {probably} at this point shout GET TO THE POINT PLEEZE]

So, the point being even in religion (since RMS touched on Free 
Software as an ideology) I suspect there are more 'practical' 
followers, who go through the rituals, observe holidays etc that 
'evangelical' followers, who understands the principles between the 
lines of religious text.

The open source people, I guess, all agree that 'free software' is a 
'good thing'. However, since open source movement (OSM) is not 
pushing it across as an ideology, people are more receptive. As RMS 
said, there are 20 million GNU/Linux users but only a small 
percentage are aware of free software movement (FSM) as an ideology.

I see nothing wrong with that. Despite what RMS says about OSM, in 
the end I personally believe that both OSM and FSM are a good thing 
for the software community as a whole.

Best regards,

Perry Ismangil

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