CASE AGAINST FREE SOFTWARE

I am writing to protest the recent article "All software should be free, software developer maintains" [CW, Dec. 24] in which Richard Stallman was given a platform to propound his advocacy of "free software" and the abolition of copyrights.

One need ask Stallman only one question to understand why he endorses such a vague concept as free software. How will software produers live if not by selling the fruits of their labors?

Stallman knows the answer - by government subsidy. You can bet Stallman, spoiled by government-funded academic research programs, longs for the day his kind can dictate the course of the software industry from some ivory tower in Washington D.C.

Stallman claims that the arts and sciences progress "most quickly when people build on each other's work." Yet, how does this work of others come into being in the first place? Does Stallman honestly believe in effects without causes?

No. Stallman's position is an act of moral cowardice to evade the fact that science progresses precisely by the discoveries of independent minds pursuing their own goals and interests. Stailman denies the existence of independent men in order to defend by unspoken implication his own vices — dependence and parasitism.

Allow me to quote the U.S. Constitution on the subject of progress in the arts and sciences: "The Congress shall ... promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writing and Discoveries."

Stallman's assertions that anyone who will not subordinate his life and work to the unearned benefit of others is an "enemy of society" and that trade is an "offense" to the traders are the type of totally fallacious misconceptions one would expect to see editorialized in some third rate Marxist tabloid.

Stallman's feeling of "shame" when using the products of software companies reveals a fundamental hatred for the pride of the creators of these products, and consequently, a hatred for man's highest faculty, his creative mind. There is no more evil doctrine, and no "golden rule" will ever justify it.

This man brazenly proposes to "interfere as much as [he] can with other people's attempts to interfere with the sharing of software." In other words, he In-tends to obstruct enforcement of the copyright laws. Obstruction of Justice, which Stallman apparently doesn't realize, is a felony.

In closing. I vow to seek every legal remedy from this man should he ever steal any of my company's software products.

-- Thomas A. Murphy, Roseville, Mich.

He's right. Stallman is responsible for the popularity of C and Unix turdware, the enemy of science and progress. Hardware and software from the 1960s and 1970s are more advanced than what we use today.

>>2
What kind of advanced, genuine 1960's vintage hardware you talk about?

>>3
The kind made with those newfangled transistors.

>>4
Preposterous, these can't hold a candle to true and tried vacuum tubes.

his advocacy of "free software" and the abolition of copyrights

fucking commies

>>6

"I don't believe that people have the right to hoard software. Those who do are the enemies of society." --Richard Stallman, COMPUTERWORLD, Dec. 24, 1984

>>7
Hoarding software is how we progress. Think about how fast software and hardware evolved in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, and how stagnant it is today. This evolution happened because of hoarding. Companies had to develop their own hardware and software to be able to offer something better than the competition. All we get today is faster hardware and more bloated software. Innovations like the GUI wouldn't even happen if they had the mentality we have now. Would anyone make something like the Xerox Alto or the original Mac ever again? Mainframes had more ``under the hood'' innovations, like virtual memory, superscalar processing, and virtual machines. These were all fueled by competition caused by ``hoarding'' ideas. Other people couldn't just copy ideas, so they had to develop their own better ones. Evolution also means creating smaller systems by throwing away junk. In the 80s, this was MacOS and other GUI systems that never had this junk to begin with, but free software loves Unix, badly made garbage built for tape drives and teletypes.

Everyone is dumping everything into the GNU/Linux community and making more bloated trash that people have to put up with instead of enjoy using like the Macs used to be. It's basically another form of Hegelian dialectic, based on consensus. The same thing is happening with programming languages and UIs.

Because of free software, the focus shifted from innovation to ``ecosystems'' and legacy backwards compatibility. Even Haskell is promoted primarily for backwards compatibility. If people had 64 KB RAM and 1 MB storage to work with, they wouldn't even think about making C++, Haskell, or a Unix-like OS.

>>8
Competition is only good insofar as it creates options. Hoarding does not lead to innovation, it leads to needless reinvention of the wheel. Placing restrictions on the usage of software entails creating artificial scarcity, causing effort that would otherwise be devoted to the creation of revolutionary new software, or improvements of existing software, to be devoted instead to creating new software that does the same thing the old software does, differing only in license terms. The implicit assumption behind your assertion appears to be that hoarding of software creates demand, but that is untrue. It reduces supply (in a manner similar to sales tax), but does not affect demand, which originates from the inherent utility of software. Software that may be freely used and distributed encourages innovation by eliminating the need for wasteful expenditures of creative effort.

The argument is that if song/software/book is copyrighted it forces everyone else to invent something original.
Instead the reality is that anything similar is deemed infringing on copyright.

The Greeks were only capable of contemplating philosophy and math all day because they had helots. In order for software to be free, subliterate niggers must be enslaved.

I want an anime slaveboy to penetrate all day long while I create mathematical proofs that construct haskell programs by themselves.

>>12
Mr. Turing this is a public forum.

>>8
Your main assumption here is false. Stallman talks a lot in his essays about the culture of "free software" that pervaded before the late '70s. Large universities and other research institutions would certainly allow students and departments to share software (obviously with access to source code) with each other at will, and would often share with other large institutions. It may seem like software was being hoarded, but that's only because access to software was concentrated in a relatively small fraction of the population since computers were so expensive and the internet didn't exist.

You're fucking gay

>>14
That software was still ``hoarded'' and not freely available. Stallman didn't use any of it in the GNU project. What they are using is low quality garbage being produced by the Free Software ``community'' who say ``it's free what do you expect?'' Would anyone pay money for GCC or systemd? No, because they're crap. Only in the free software world can this crap thrive.

You're fucking gay

``Go fix it yourself, you have the source code.''

>Would anyone pay money for GCC or systemd?

for systemd? no. for GCC? probably, I'd say GCC extensions alone would be a selling point for some companies. now, I'm not saying that GCC is the best C compiler out there - but which of the commercial ones is better?

>>16
Clang is better

>>15
You're safe here, I'm gay too

>>15
If GNU is ``crap", please explain why there are half a dozen software packages to create a GNU-like development environment on Windows, while there are precisely zero software packages to create a Windows-like development environment on GNU? Windows doesn't even come with strings or objdump.

>>19

Windows is high quality software product, which is hard to replicate, especially when your team consists of undergrad students and hobbyists.

>>19
Mono

>>20
Windows has been replicated by fossies, ever heard of Wine? And it's arguably a higher quality of replication than MinGW, MSYS, or Cygwin since it's binary compatible with Windows executables, while most GNU-like environments for Windows are merely source-compatible. I think WSL is the only binary-compatible GNU-like environment for Windows, and that only came out recently, and if I'm not mistaken, requires using actual code from the system it's emulating, which isn't the case for any of the other compatibility environments. Even Wine manages to run Windows executables directly without using any original Windows code.

Furthermore, the point is that while Wine exists, it is not primarily used for development tools, in contrast to MinGW/MSYS/Cygwin. It's mainly used to run games and obscure business/scientific programs, the former because Windows has traditionally had better support for graphics and other features required by games, the latter because Windows has better market share. The specialty of GNU (and Unix-like operating systems in general), in contrast, is software development. There aren't many people who use GNU who find the lack of Windows-like development tools to be a major deficiency, though there are many developers on Windows who find the absence of a GNU-like environment to be problematic.

>>21
Not really a ``Windows-like development environment", it's really just a reimplementation of a managed language runtime that originally got started on Windows. It would be kind of like saying that the presence of stdio.h on Windows makes it ``Unix-like". I mean unless Mono lets you download a Visual Studio project from Github and build it as-is on GNU, it's not really what I'm talking about.

>>17
I said commercial you illiterate fuck. Clang is free and open source

>>23
Intel compiler then

>>24
is it really? can't find any recent benchmarks

Clang is maintained by Apple. They could close the source anytime, since its BSD licensed.
All these newfangled languages depend on Apple(which loves breaking backward compatibility all the time) not breaking their LLVM code.
I have 5 versions of LLVM installed because of this.