Photo by Sumardi.
And RMS will down a teh tarik for you. That’s Richard Stallman, the father of Free Software Movement.
Last weekend was the FOSS.my 2009, a conference for free, Open Source software enthusiasts. We had a lot of rockstars who were gladly to come over to our shores and share their knowledge & experiences with the local community. We had our own rockstars like John Lim of AdoDB & Dr. Yusseri of Omnilogic. It was the BOMB! Cantik menarik kau memang the BOMB!
But my FOSS high was flipped over when I saw this on Facebook (you need to be logged in Facebook to view the status post. You can view the tweet as well). That my friend, is totally not right.
That statement is misplaced because you are giving the impression to developers in OSDC.my to not to advocate the free software philosophy. That is just not right.
Without Free Software Movement, there will be no Open Source Software movement. That is history. True, proven, factual history of real life. Point one. 500 Internal Server Error.
RMS shocked a lot of people. He amazed people in the room with his own personal stand in the Free Software Movement. But after his talk, a lot of people have found themselves having a tough time to separate the man & the philosophy. Although the man is the founder, he admits that the philosophy was not built by him alone & him alone. He carefully use the word “we” if you listened carefully.
RMS is the most extreme example of a Free Software Movement believer. It is his personal stand that he doesn’t believe in the open source philosophy. That is his opinion. That is his opinion. That is his opinion. Point two.
There, I repeated it 3 times. We cannot take home all of his opinion just because he is Richard Stallman.
But we can take him as an example of how life as a software hippie can take us to different, greater heights. Do not confuse yourself with the debate between RMS and Brian Aker of Drizzle. Brian Aker already made millions by working on Open Source projects (aka MySQL) and RMS have millions of followers worldwide by advocating the freedom of software for all these years. These two are out of my league and yours too. Both have valid arguments & the necessary experiences to have that kind of fight. You need to understand that.
What is dangerous is that some people now sort of “realize” the differences between the free software philosophy & the open source philosophy. Referring to something a fellow peer have said, “Free Software is a philosophy. Open Source is pragmatic.” Which is true. It’s like Barisan Nasional & Barisan Rakyat. BR is a philosophical coalition party (welfare based state, remember?). BN is a pragmatic coalition party. And I literally support none of them. But I understand why each has to be different, although the same.
And what makes it more extremely dangerious is that some of these people can influence national policies. If you can’t grasp the philosophical concepts behind Free Software & Open Source at the beginning stage, then I utterly have no confidence in the policies that you will imply in the near future. That doesn’t worry me as much, but I worry for the developers because I am one of them. I am one of the guys from that room who writes code for a living. I really think that some of you must take the time to fully understand how this works in real life. Point three.
I will say this again: don’t confuse yourself. Learn more about the force. It is just sad to know that our Malaysian mindset is not ready for someone like Richard Stallman. And all these while you keep saying “Malaysia Boleh”. Funny. Point four.
ROCKS!!!!
Comment by sweemeng — October 26, 2009 @ 12:53 PM
“Without Free Software Movement, there will be no Open Source Software movement. That is history. True, proven, factual history of real life. Point one.”
This turns out not to be the case. As someone who was around when the whole thing came to be, “Open Source” existed by default once upon a time before PCs were the norm. Shipping binaries wasn’t a practical option for any serious program because there were no standard ABIs and you HAD to compile from source to get an app running on your machine at all.
RMS’ creation of the FSF was a reaction against the movement to closed binaries (with horrifically annoying license keys) that came about when companies started releasing apps solely as binaries and kept core source to themselves. He did a great job raising awareness of the issue but his conclusions went against what a lot of the early proponents of open source believed. Talk to the BSD folk next time you wanna credit RMS for being first or everything in the OS world being dependent on his work.
For those of us who always believed in having the source available (we called ourselves hackers and still do), we had to come up with the Open Source moniker to differentiate ourselves from a pure GNU/FSF philosophy and focus on the parts that we had felt were the true core issues all along. I’m not here to debate GNU vs. OS but your history needs correcting. Unfortunately RMS never corrects people of this gross misconception and continues to insist on taking credit for things (like Linux) that he really has no business doing.
There is no doubt that RMS deserves a lot of credit for raising awareness about OS issues. The Open Source movement would, however, be around to this day with or without him.
Comment by Ben Scherrey — October 26, 2009 @ 5:50 PM
Awesome writeup. Spot on regarding the policy makers.
I wont bite the BSD vs GNU flamebait, or we will have a similar MySQL vs GNU flamewar as per the video, which is irrelevant to the scary issue at hand.
Hopefully with a little bit of education we can solve this.
yk
Comment by Yoon Kit — October 26, 2009 @ 6:09 PM
well bro, point taken. thank you for being open and educated me about this and thank you yk for point me here… but still i can’t really accept where Free software is not related to Open Source Software where Open Source Software is related to Free Software and why is this statement being mention? and what is so different about the two movement? i value your opinion as a programmer and as a freedom fighter of Free Software and i can honestly say that you’re well knowledgeable than me on the matter as well as those hundred of people who attended foss.my 09, but to educated you cannot enforce people to choose the way that you think is right the way you think it should be and if so that what needed to do then we’re “bebas” anymore in anyway at all. i may not be a coder but looking at the blood and sweet of those that i know it drive me to make it better. all this while i been fighting to make a stand for Open Source Software and i never mention once that it is a Free Software, all together we’re fight a different course of war. but I’m open if it suit the need of the industry and it bring what it should bring to the people/public.
Comment by Rafe — October 26, 2009 @ 6:35 PM
@Ben My bad. I wrote this out of spur of the moment. I had the history a bit mixed up. I get your point about the BSD & Linux issue that surrounds RMS. It is bad if he takes all the credit to himself. Thank u man for pointing it out for me :)
@Yoonkit I too don’t want to bite flame. I’m not even close to the level of knowledge to even start to argue about it. I only feel sad.
@Rafe I am not the most knowledgeable person. If I was, I would have not need a job & would tell myself to take a hike hehe :) I only hope you would realise soon and if you would be able to recap the day itself again, RMS had never enforced anyone to be like him. He looked as if he was preaching and enforcing everyone to be like him. But from my point of view, he never did force me to be like him. I did not even feel the pressure. And I think 99% of the hackers in the room felt the same way too. It was a culture shock listening to him outright refusing the concept of Open Source. RMS is just like Dr. Mahathir or Anwar Ibrahim, a figure that people look up to and will listen to. But people do not necessarily follow them right up to the nines, right? Same situation applies to us hackers as well. We believe in RMS strong principles, but we are not that hardcore. My only hope is that as a person who can influence policies, please do not straight away jump the gun after listening to RMS. Your actions & words are very important to the community that you are spearheading. Furthermore, it’s the same community that built it’s values on both the principles of Free Software Movement and Open Source. But if you start to separate these 2 beliefs, I can only hope the best for OSDC.my. I learned the hard way for making mistakes & being publicly irrational with my own words. Like Ben have mentioned, it’s only a moniker for distinction. To separate the hardcore believers like RMS from the rest of us. But the cause is the same. Hence, the BN/BR example. I personally will never let down the principles behind free software and open source. But I will be less of a zealot if I wanted to build a business around it. It’s contradicting, I know. But that is the reality of the world we live in. Can’t make everyone happy right? But I hope you don’t get me wrong Rafe :)
Comment by Mr. Buyot — October 26, 2009 @ 8:33 PM
Yes he never did, but giving an impression will leave an impact regardless. Bro, as much as i would love to so, but I’m not the policy make nor someone who can effluent the policy I’m just another guy looking and listening. agreed on the principal, as my first statement were if these are build on the same foundation and believed why is it being treated so differently? I’m not trying to break a marriage here but i would love the see the logic behind it as it would bring a big different in the industry. but none the less THANK YOU Mr. Buyot hope one we can have teh tarik together and teach me more the way of the force :)
Comment by rafe — October 26, 2009 @ 10:31 PM
Hehe one day. I’m no Yoda. I don’t think I’m capable of teaching with my mood swings :)
But jokes aside, there is no logical explanation why both movements are treated differently by RMS. It’s an issue with the belief system. From my personal experience, these kind of issues cannot be explained logically and why must it be different. For RMS, it just had to be that way.
For the rest of the community, it’s much healthier to move on & let the belief system absorbs itself into the practitioners of free open source software & the philosophy behind it.
Maybe in the near future, you are the person who decides on policies. But from what I see now, you can influence it :)
Comment by Mr. Buyot — October 26, 2009 @ 10:54 PM
Free Software only -> ugh …
Open Source only -> uuuugggghhhh …
Free and Open Source … yay
want it or not, these 2 philosophies are dependent on each other.
having only one of them = i believe we would be staying in the world of proprietary – with very few choice of non-proprietary. with the non-proprietary softwares ended up proprietary in ways similar to MacOS become proprietary from FreeBSD.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
“Open source software and free software are different terms for software which comes with certain rights, or freedoms, for the user. They describe two approaches and philosophies towards free software. Open source and free software (or software libre) both describe software which is free from onerous licensing restrictions. It may be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction. Free software is not the same as freeware, software available at zero price.”
Long Live Freedom! whatever you choose to call that as.
Comment by KageSenshi — October 27, 2009 @ 7:10 PM