[Gllug] amongst the maddness

[Alain Williams]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 10:56:42AM +0100, David Damerell wrote:
> On Saturday, 15 Sep 2001, sean at uncertainty.org.uk wrote:
> >as far as RMS is concerned I see him as a bit of a mad genius - I think
> >he has started something incredible but I feel he no longer helps
> >further the aims of open source that I care most about - he is far to
> >fundamentalist for my taste and certainly seems to scare of a lot of
> >techies who are curios about open source.
> 
> RMS has never cared to further the aims of 'open source'.
> 
> [And a good thing, too; the Free Software Foundation have given us
> gcc, emacs, bash, dozens of other tools... What's the big achievement
> of ESR and the 'open source' movement? Netscape. Yeah, that was a big
> success.]

IMHO the difference between the points of view are (at risk of simplification):
*	RMS/FSF is fundementalist. They have a point of view that they believe to be
	abolutely correct and do not want to dilute their principles.
*	Open Source people are pragmatists who want to use free (deliberately vaguely used)
	software in order to achieve their aims (that are many and varied).
	They realise that in order to do this they need to work with Closed Source
	or other licenced software as well.

Both are needed in the ecology of the computer world. Hopefully as Open Source gains
in big world acceptance the fundementalists will see less that upsets them. However
I believe that some solutions will remain proprietary for a very long time.

At this point in time I believe that the major ``publicity'' effort should go on
achieving ``Open Protocols*'' over Open Source. Open Protocols puts all software on
an even footing and allows the best to prevail.

[*] by which I include file formats & similar.

-- 
Alain Williams

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug