IMO Richard Stallman is dangerous.
I would say just the opposite. The ones that I think are dangerous is
folks like ESR, who don't mind watering down the freedoms they expect,
just to get a "win" by wooing some big company.
Me, I don't expect Oracle or any other big name to jump up and make
their stuff GPL. I do like the idea that the GPL software I use today
will not get pulled, closed down, or restricted from me some time in the
future because it became popular. If someone decides to pull the plug
on development of a GPL program, or tries to tie it in with TPM to both
give it to you, and lock it away, someone else can pick up where they
had left off and keep developing.
He does easily as much harm as good to
the community that supposedly doesn't exist. We're talking about the guy
that pretty much singlehandedly made the KDE license war last an extra two
years because he insisted on GPL or nothing. At the time, I asked the
people at Troll Tech what was wrong with the GPL. Their response was
three letters: RMS. There's such a thing as going to far, and he'd gone
it. I saw the email and what Richard was doing. It was designed to piss
them off and coerce them into the GPL. The more he pushed, the more they
pushed back. Only after he stopped pushing and let tempers settle for a
couple of years was it possible to speak reasonably about the topic.
Sorry, I wouldn't touch KDE until the whole QT license was taken care
of. IMO, QT was stalling because they were wrong, but didn't want to
admit it. RMS didn't back down because it was a good example of how
wrong some can be.
He's not going to listen to me, though. By my own choice, I'm now pretty
much an unknown in the community unless someone remembers me from my
fortune file. This kind of thing is why I left the community proper.
The sad truth is that the community needs extremists, not because their
way will end up being the norm, but because without someone pushing in
that direction, we never end up in the middle.
Thanks,
Chris
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