One has to admire rms for sticking to his guns and living up to his ideals. He is a bit brash, true, but a) he has been proven right many times before when it comes to software and b) he is consistently being himself and doing his thing. See him eat a piece of his foot on camera while giving a lecture (it's on youtube) and you'll perhaps have a Zen moment. He is a walking, talking media antidote.
To extend your a) a little, Stallman has every right to be suspicious of a company which has; deliberately targeted GNU/Linux in the past and said it's coming after it, said GNU/Linux infringes patents, is a convicted monopolist in the USA and the EU, deliberately uses its power over system-builders to shove GNU/Linux out (desktops options and netbooks), used its market power to make ACPI/power management difficult for other operating systems and much more. People seem to forget these things all the time when discussions come up. IBM used to be the big bad guy at one point too, but they now have a track record of community contributions to point to and say "we are different". There is no such thing with MS, and the top management went from Gates to Ballmer who sees rivals commercial or otherwise in a very combative way (going to "kill Google", GNU/Linux a "cancer"). When someone who was/is considered to be part of your community works with, helps and defends an entity which has tried to attack you and desires to do so in the future then "traitor" isn't a bad name for them. There's plenty of money to be made with GNU/Linux without doing any of the MS stuff he does.
Miguel de Icaza never got over his incapacity to land a job at MS (it was no visa because he didn't have a degree it wasn't because he was stupid) and has always sought to emulate them and defend them from that point onwards in some weird psychological relationship. Novell is suspicious in its intentions and it seems they'd gladly see others get sued if they had a waiver. They are not a community player at all.
Miguel putting "God" and "Love" in his post he doesn't clear up any of the issues while he sits there trying to evoke an open source hero mystique while working on a Microsoft platform clone... for the iPhone.
While i find some truth in your post , about Microsoft, it would be good to put things in perspective, and imagine for a second what the GNU/Linux landscape would be without miguel's contribution.
The guy has been proven to behave like an asshole, but i find it good to judge people on what they do. The contribution of miguel , in usefulness for a regular Linux user experience today ,is certainly comparable to RMS's.
And while i, like many others ,am very suspicious about the mono story, i would really like like to see this project succeed, if only because there is IMHO a desperate need for a decent multi-language VM on linux (other than java, wich is pretty unusable for desktop applications on linux).
Also, the patents infrigement threat has been hanging on diverse parts of GNU/linux for a very long time, and i've yet to be convinced of the solidity of the case microsoft could have against mono, since after everything i've read i couldn't reach a clear conclusion.
So yeah, RMS is true to himself. But i don't find that admirable at all. There is no balance in what he says, ever, and i don't view that as genius ...
I don't want to live in his free software world, because he looks like a totalitarian. Even if his views and his works are to be valuated, i respectfully disagree with him on almost anything ideological. And i don't like people insulting others in public, for any reasons ..
Like if i was watching a movie, i have real huge problems picturing miguel in the position of the ugly traitor, sorry ...
Expanding on allenbrunson's point, that's why it's correct to refer to them as a convicted monopolist. The word is indeed there precisely because "monopolist" does not carry the meaning of "convicted".... to be honest I'm not actually sure what your problem with the phrase is.
My problem with the phrase is unless I'm missing something, Microsoft was not found guilty of a crime (as sid_0 pointed out, U.S. vs Microsoft was a civil matter) and therefore the word "convicted" is meaningless. Actually, it could be considered slanderous.
This so far has been a community that prides itself on accuracy. If you're going to accuse someone of criminal acts, they should at least have been tried and found guilty in criminal court.
In his Conclusions of Law, Judge Jackson showed them to be in violation of sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act by being a monopoly and engaging in tying. A 'crime' is an act in violation of law, the Sherman Act is a law, and they were in violation of it.
How are these facts changed by the case being brought before the court as a civil action?
No. A crime is an act in violation of criminal law. From wiki (apologies in advance) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime -- "While every crime violates the law, not every violation of the law counts as a crime."
It is true that while every violation of civil law comes before the court as a civil action, but is it true that the existence of a civil action implies that no crime was committed?
Your mention of murder down-thread is an excellent example, as someone can commit an act of murder and face a criminal murder trial and/or a civil "wrongful death" case. O.J. Simpson is a famous, high-profile example of this.
You are basically taking the same position that his P.R. people might: that since he was acquitted in the criminal case, he is not a criminal - even though he lost the civil case. Yes, in the "innocent until proven guilty" sense of the word "criminal", you and they have an excellent technical point.
But you and they would have us to believe that O.J. actually committed no crime, and that might work on anyone who does not reserve the right to draw a distinction between having committed a crime and having been convicted of it.
Back to Microsoft, ask yourself what the Sherman Act is: is it civil law or criminal law? As it happens, the Sherman Act includes both criminal and civil remedies for violations. That is why, for example, books like this exist...
The DoJ pressed the matter as a civil action. This doesn't mean that Microsoft's violations were merely civil violations. Rather, it means that the civil violations were the ones that were successfully prosecuted. Whether or not their violations were also criminal in nature is a question that was never pursued.
So, yeah, Microsoft's actions were non-criminal an an O.J. kind of way. I'll give you that.
> but is it true that the existence of a civil action implies that no crime was committed?
Clearly not. However, if a court hasn't decided on the matter, whether the act is criminal or not is at least partly a value judgment. My value judgment is that while Microsoft did a lot of horrible stuff in the '90s, none of it warrants the tag "criminal".
I don't want to "win" anything. I just want people to use the right word for the right thing.
The word crime has very different connotations for me than the words civil suit do, and it really disturbs me when people substitute one for the other. Let's reserve the word crime for acts like rape and murder, please.
Which is a bad law, that doesn't make sense and was created to cleanup the governments interference in train system.
It's like saying someone who broke laws during the civil rights era, to integrate their establishments etc... being convicted of a bad law is meaningless.
were you in the software business circa 1992? quite a few companies who thought they were creating good businesses for themselves were in fact doing market research for microsoft, to mangle something pg said in one of his essays. microsoft's antics managed to retard software innovation for a good long while. i, for one, am glad they are no longer the unstoppable juggernaut they once were.
I'm not defending their actions; I'm saying what they were doing should be legal. Lots of things are legal that I don't agree with, for instance I don't agree lots of ideas that are expressed in music but I by no means think they should be illegal.
I am more worried about the grammatical mistakes I see in my post than your objection. Why? Well I would hope that if we were talking about something else and I said "convicted killer" you wouldn't fly into a exclamation marked rage over the fact I should have said "convicted murderer" because there are circumstances under which it is legal to kill people. I think it's pretty clear what I was saying in that post. But you are technically correct in that it's theoretically possible to have a company that is a monopoly and does not abuse that power, although I cannot think of any examples in the real world where corporations in such a situation behave. Allenbrunson has the rest in his reply to you. And before anyone else objects regarding the details of the EU case[1] it sometimes use different terms as the EU is not quite a state yet but I'd argue "convicted" captures the meaning there too.
Look you aren't "genuinely curious" you are being a total wanker.
Wiktionary definition: "A specific act committed in violation of the law."
Wikipedia (the sentence before you earlier nitpick quote): "Crime is the breach of one or more rules or laws for which some governing authority, via mechanisms such as police power, may ultimately prescribe a conviction."
Wordnet: " an act punishable by law; usually considered an evil act" and "an evil act not necessarily punishable by law"
N.B. The definitions from Wordnet, my uses passes BOTH. So it seems that if a governing body passes a law or regulation against a certain activity and then the government (through whatever process) finds someone in violation and sanctions them, you don't want to call it a crime (despite this being well within the broadest definitions), you want to have a big cry. Well sorry buddy, this isn't a court of law, this is the English language. You are the reason people hate lawyers.
I agree completely. Love or hate RMS, you have to respect that he says what he means and means what he says. He has absolutely no filter and is pathologically incapable of telling a lie. I don't always agree with him but I do admire him.
I'm not sure it's good to admire ideological extremists. In fact, I think the opposite, what is admirable is empathy, the ability to see something from someone else's perspective. RMS seems incapable of this.
Well, if you have some empathy then you can admire somebody for their good qualities while at the same time being aware of their faults.
The existence of free/open source software owes a big debt to RMS's idealogical extremism, and Emacs, GCC and GNU are pretty major (and admirable) achievements in programming. That's why I say I admire RMS, even if I wouldn't want him to date my sister.
No, we don't owe a debt to his extremism. There are thousands of people out there who have created open source software without the extremism. We do owe a debt to his work on those projects, but not to his extremism. The work could have, and often is, done without the extremism.
