Same thing with laws -- they just keep the honest people honest.

You can't legislate away crazy people.

Is a bow and arrow a toy? How about an BB gun? How about a set of darts? How about an airsoft gun? How about a nerf gun?

Just because your mommy wouldn't let you have the sharp scissors until you were 18 doesn't mean that the rest of us can't entertain ourselves with adult things responsibly. Target shooting is a fine pastime.

PS - work on your vocabulary, words sometimes have multiple connotations.

toy
noun ...
2. a thing or matter of little or no value or importance; a trifle.
3. something that serves for or as if for diversion, rather than for serious practical use. ...

Why don't you enlighten us with your literacy and tell us why the JVM isn't one of the most influential and important software inventions in the past 20 years. I'd personally love to hear your reasoning (read: i think you're full of shit).

It's just an event driven application architecture that uses asynchronous I/O to provide efficiency. It incorporates technologies like Netty and Hazelcast to provide extremely simple, highly-concurrent applications that can handle lots of connections - so its good for building services, i.e http services.

Anyone who tells you it's not worth much doesn't know their head from a hole in ground. It's a JVM based take on an idea whose time has come. You should check out the background on Node.js to see what all the talk is about.

If out of the 20 things he complains about, one is a good idea, you should look at it as a net positive.

Id make him pick one or two he is surest about, tell him to make a chart or document explaining whats wrong and how to fix it and make him explain it to you and his peers. Then critique him, accept or reject, and move on.

The number of people we can use to man a program is finite.

If our companies are anything more than trivial in size, which can't be micro-manged, we will need some of our technical staffs to step up and lead.

If you experienced guys wont step up, you don't just get to double your staff so you can keep them. If they arent leading/architecting, then why are they any better than the young kid out of school who tries hard and did his homework? They arent. They are filling the same role for twice (or 3 times) the price.

This attitude of yours may work for a place with say 20 or less employees, but once you really start growing its untenable.

HIPAA protects patients from medical entities and corporations, not from citizens on the street who have nothing to do with the dispensation of medical care.

CROOKED COPS.

All the posters saying that C is just for embedded programming are high.

Node.js's platform layer is written in C.
Perl is written in C.
Python is written in C.
Ruby is written in C.
The non-Erlang parts of Erlang are written in C.
The non-bootstrapped parts of Haskell (GHC) are largely written in C.
Some versions of Google go are written in C.
Python, Ruby, Haskell, Java, Node, Rust, Go, Perl and Erlang all are natively extended via C code (some of these offer additional options, some dont)
Most operating systems include healthy amounts of C code.
The C ABI is the defacto standard for compatibility between compilers and languages.

Your computers wouldn't be the same without modern C software.

You can think anything you want about right and wrong, but you cant enforce your beliefs on me without support from the community. By extension you can't use your personal beliefs as to what is right and wrong as a rational argument judging my behavior in the public square without the support of the community thats affected.

Stallman's primary argument is that non-free software controls people unfairly and thus is unethical. These are not facts, they are conclusions. He needs to tell us why it's unfair, and to do so he has to put a value on the creation of a software invention. He's fine with other kinds of inventions being non-free, just not software ones, so he's not even consistent in his thinking.

Regardless, his use of his personal feelings to dictate how the software market should function is specious at best.

I can appreciate the time he spends on it, the fact that he's given it thought is laudable.

I don't think he's especially articulate. His arguments are rather emotional.

And just because people use free software doesn't entitle anyone to count them in their ranks as intellectual compatriots. If I start handing out money I guarantee that people who would normally spit in my face would take the cash. Likewise, most open source software users never contribute. I think you might want to reconsider how many people would actually walk through the fire with him -- i.e. if they had a good idea for a program they would give it away under gplv3.

Everyone has their own concept of what they think is ethical, but ethics in terms of a social dialog is agreed upon by the group. I can say that computer use in general is unethical, this doesn't mean anyone should or would accept that to be so. In contrast society accepts that using computers to lure children into relationships is unethical, and its our agreement that gives those ethics authority.

Unless he can get agreement across the greater portion of society, he has no standing to use his definitions of ethics to deride people in a public forum -- at least not if he wants to be taken seriously on an intellectual basis.

I dont think hes a bad guy, I just think he should be able to defend himself on an intellectual basis rather than a rhetorical one.

He certainly knows how to stick to his guns.

What qualifies Stallman as an expert on ethics?

I like free software as much as the next guy, but Richard's personal software peccadilloes don't constitute a new ethics -- only society as a whole can define what is or isn't ethical.

Actually I think he puts it in terms of ethics as a shortcut to having to defend the legal and financial ramifications of what he is suggesting. He's basically saying you should give away your software because it's the "right thing to do". If someone claims that his stance isn't friendly to competitive markets he claims they are calling him a communist and that he's the victim of a personal attack.

This guy is full of rhetoric and I'm not sure why he would still be considered a leader in this movement.

You sound like you pattern all aging software engineers after yourself and the guys who "worked on the first computers" -- since you're concerned about unfounded and unbalanced claims, you might want to review that one.

My comment is patterned on 16 years of experience and working directly or indirectly with engineers at dozens of companies.

Good engineers either move into architect roles (referring to planning, architecture, directing, and reviewing) or into more direct management roles (like running companies, departments, marketing and prop writing and the like).

I can tell you unequivocally that if you see an older coder who has been in the business a long time doing the same tasks as the entry and lower-mid level engineers, grunt coding so to speak, it is highly probable that they are lazy, lower-end coders and/or have personality issues that keep them in those roles. If that somehow rings a bell with you that hurts your feelings I apologize -- obviously I dont know your case.

I agree, the primary attribute for a programmer who will have real longevity is the guy who is learning right till the day he retires.

I make it a point to not let the kids get a lick in on me. I learn the new languages, I use the new libraries, and I rub their noses in it that they didn't find it first and bring it to me.