The tombstone of Nicos Kazantzakis (The Last Temptation of Christ)
has the following inscription:
I hope for nothing.
I fear nothing.
I am FREE.
Perhaps this is a tiny bit closer to my personal perception of
freedom than the metaphysics of the Free Software Foundation.
Ian Jackson continues the discussion on Haskell/Clean issue, and
says about the possibility to modify the sources:
> We're programmers here, aren't we ? Modifying source code is
> what we do. If I encounter a bug in software I'm using I don't
> want to be prevented from finding and fixing it !
>
> In fact, despite been very much a newbie to the Haskell world I
> have already built the Glasgow compiler from source in order to
> make a few small modifications to it that I needed, and I've had
> a level of support from the GHC team which is not usually
> available for proprietary software at any price I could afford
> (and I'm not poor!).
Well, so did I (without asking for help, it worked dès le premier
coup). My favourite pastime is the recompilation of Hugs, because
ALL, ALL, versions are distributed with HAS_DOUBLE_PRECISION=0
which I hate (this is the perpetuation of the anti-numeric
philosophy of the ex-Sheriff of Nottingham, you know whom I mean.)
But I have other things to do!!!
Modifying source codes of your development tools is clearly a
pathology if not a perversion. It diverts you from your principal
task which should *exploit* those tools. So, when somebody sells
a piece of software and promises the full maintenance and guarantees,
which come with the product, I believe that this is a justifiable
approach. As moral, as any liberal initiative may be. I don't
want to discuss the 'profound' problems of morality vs. liberalism,
because there is no solution to those issues.
Simply: If I don't want to waste my time, I buy. (As I buy
books instead of making xeroxes of them, although I am not
rich...)
I mentioned that once already: the phenomenon of passing from
free products to shareware and commercial packages is a persistent
one, because the manufacturers spend too much time developing it,
and they CANNOT, CANNOT do it for free. They want to hire people,
often to give some paid work for their PhD students, to buy machines,
etc. This is the way which permits the survival of a project
otherwise its situation becomes easily precarious. Want some
examples? Clean is an obvious one.
The symbolic algebra package Form of van Vermaseren. Form 1 is free,
but they could not keep that, so Form 2 is commercialized.
Another CA system: MuPAD (Univ. of Paderborn). You can have for
free, but a nicer version is sold.
And another one, Cayley which became Magma.
And the academic initiative ScratchPad which became the commercial
product Axiom.
Several 3D modellers on the market: Rhino, AC3D, Blender.
Several image processing tools, beginning with PaintShop.
Scientific tools, such as Khoros.
======
> Fundamentally, I like to work in a programming environment where
> I can do everything right (as I see it), and where I can treat
> the people I meet as friends and colleagues rather than as
> revenue and/or costs.
I like idealists, I am one myself. But when we needed a fast,
simple and powerful implementation of a Logic Language for
our teaching, we *bought the license* of BIN-Prolog of Paul
Tarau, because he was and he is considered to be a decent
fellow. Perhaps one day I would buy Clean for our department
(I won't, because I am entitled to use it for free...), because
*I happen to know* that the commercialization thereof is not
the matter of revenue for Rinus and his friends, but they need
some resources for the development. Do you think that the
Maple group at Waterloo made millions for their pockets?
(On the other hand my opinion about Mathematica is a bit more
harsh, but I won't explain why, everybody knows this saga...)
==
You write:
> ... But, as a novice to functional programming, I prefer to use
> an existing compiler than write my own !
Exactly. But you contradict yourself, apparently you have nothing
against hacking the existing ones...
+++++
> As an aside, it's obvious you have a bit of a chip on your shoulder
> about GNU and the FSF. I'm sorry if free software advocates are
> annoying to you, but we feel that this is one of the most
> exciting and important issues in the software world at the moment.
> I hope we'll convince you, and look forward to seeing you on
> our side of the barricades when the revolution comes :-).
I am grateful and I respect the GNU people. They are important
and extremely useful. But they are sectarians, their philosophy
is a little bit demagogic, which I don't like, even in a noble
context. I would say only: "don't want to buy, don't buy. Want to
give away: do it, if you can afford it. That's good. But stop
these nonsensical offenses addressed to people who think
differently.
The revolution will not come, I sincerely hope. Do you know
what is the most crazy and annoiyng feature of the communist
system |*in this context*!|??
Well, the answer is: they work as hell to find the "correct"
way to distribute goods, and they don't give a damn about
producing them...
Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Caen, France
