Comment Name-calling or serious misunderstanding? (Score 1) 480
In the recent Clang thread, you seemed to say quality of software either isn't important to you, or at least is less important than the software being free software.
I'm not sure what post of Stallman's you're referring to because you linked to nothing and quoted nothing. Your statement is without a clear basis in anything he said, and therefore seems specious. I'll assume you're referring to his post on the GCC mailing list in which he says:
For GCC to be replaced by another technically superior compiler that defended freedom equally well would cause me some personal regret, but I would rejoice for the community's advance.
So when you follow up with:
As someone who writes software for a living, this seemed like a "jump the shark" moment. (But maybe you jumped this particular shark long ago.)
you seem to have no serious issue to raise, just name-calling. What part of what he said to the GCC list convinces you that Stallman "seemed to say quality of software [...] isn't important" as if that was to be a seriously considered alternative? For many years, GNU programs have been known as considerably powerful, GCC being one of them. Given the totality of what Stallman has been saying since 1984 it seems so much more reasonable to conclude that Stallman believes software freedom is more important than technical superiority that I suspect you're trolling.
Code quality is an achievement won with hard work, to be sure, but the fight for securing software freedom has historically taken considerable time in addition to any technical improvements needed. When people's attention is diverted away from ethics, the community suffers. This is true in every field of endeavor, software development is no exception. As the open source movement was designed to not talk about how people treat each other (1, 2), we need a careful and thorough rejection of the notion that programmers can afford to ply their talents without regard for how helping proprietors hurts our community. The free software movement gives us that ethics-based critique and it also gives us practical software with which to further improve our community.