Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 15:20:15 -0600 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: "Joseph A. Mallett" <jmallett@xMach.org>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Evan Leibovitch on BSD Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.2.20010613150727.045b07f0@localhost> In-Reply-To: <20010613102638.C57154@lpt.ens.fr> References: <4.3.2.7.2.20010612164541.00c43ad0@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20010612123127.045a6690@localhost> <Pine.BSO.4.33.0106121816470.8578-100000@Aphex.NewGold.NET> <4.3.2.7.2.20010612164541.00c43ad0@localhost>
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At 02:26 AM 6/13/2001, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: >> He also cannot so much as fathom the notion that the GPL might be >> unethical -- despite the explicit statements of Richard Stallman, >> the author of the GPL, that it was intended to hurt programmers and >> to "punish" small software developers (in particular, the spinoffs >> from the MIT AI Lab). > >You keep saying this, but never give a quote to corroborate it. I have many times. And you, perhaps because you have bought Stallman's deceitful and intentionally misleading rhetoric, have ignored this information and have furthermore pretended that you could not so much as use a search engine. See, among other places, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html : "So the MIT AI lab that I loved is gone. and after a couple of years of fighting against the people who did it to try to punish them for it I decided that I should dedicate my self to try to create a new community with that spirit." In short, like a vengeful "ex," he stalked his former colleagues and attempted to sabotage them and others like them. More below. >You >name his GNU Manifesto, but that doesn't say its intentions are >anything like this. Yes, it does. It specifically states that Stallman believes that decent pay for programmers should be "banned:" "For more than ten years, many of the world's best programmers worked at the Artificial Intelligence Lab for far less money than they could have had anywhere else. They got many kinds of non-monetary rewards: fame and appreciation, for example. And creativity is also fun, a reward in itself. Then most of them left when offered a chance to do the same interesting work for a lot of money. What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other than riches; but if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, they will come to expect and demand it. Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned." --Richard Stallman, The GNU Manifesto In the above passage, Richard characterizes the new companies as if they were Nirvana for his departing colleagues: all of the fun and interesting work of the AI Lab, but with decent pay, too! Angry and spiteful, he begrudged his colleagues their good fortune. He literally advocated "banning" higher pay for programmers than they could get in academia. He vowed revenge not only on Symbolics, but on all commercial ventures of its kind and on programmers who desired to make a better salary than they could at the Lab. > You talk about Steven Levy's book, but quite >apart from the fact that Levy is not Stallman, I didn't get a negative >impression of RMS from that book at all. In his afterword (1993, I >think) he sounds quite admiring of Stallman. You have your GPL blinders on. Levy saw and portrayed Stallman as a pathetic figure, and correctly noted that Stallman was extremely vengeful. Levy wrote: "This was RMS's opportunity for revenge.... Stallman had no illusions that his act would significantly improve the world at large. He had come to accept that the domain around the AI Lab had been permanently polluted. He was out to cause as much damage to the culprit as he could." Q.E.D. --Brett Glass To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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