I just modded up circletimessquare (444983) again. The end is potentially nigh.
I read
Same here. This may be the lamest troll thread I've ever seen on
I have mod points right now but your post was so misguided that I feel obligated to post here instead of using them...
He goes so far in the article to try to confuse the meaning of 'free' versus 'open', implying they are essentially the same thing. They aren't, and never will be.
The only person confusing 'free' and 'open' here is you. TFA contains only a single occurrence of the word 'open' and then only in relation to standards, not software. RMS has never been a proponent of 'open source' software per se, and takes every opportunity he gets to distinguish the difference between the OSS movement and the free software movement.
Now that OSS has become even slightly accepted his usefulness as a supporter of OSS is diminished, so he's taking it to the next level and trying to say all non-free software is bad. Read that carefully, 'non-free'. Not open. In this article he in a round about way attacks 'open' standards that are not 'free' by his definition.
He was never a supporter of OSS, he is a supporter of "free software". Nor is he now "taking it to the next level"; he has been at that same level for longer than many of the people reading this have been alive. He has always said that all non-free software is a bad thing. His goals have been clearly stated since the original announcement of the GNU project in 1983. The only reason the attacks on standards that are 'open' but not 'free' are roundabout in this article is that it is a minor side issue to his main point about web applications; if he were writing about standards I expect he would be quite direct on his opposition to any standard that is 'non-free'.
If anyone is the unclear on what the difference between 'free' and 'open' is in this context, I suggest reading 'Why âoeOpen Sourceâ misses the point of Free Software'.
All of that having been said, I do not personally agree with RMS about the inherent wrongness of using or working on 'non-free' software. In fact I have made my living working on a commercial web application for the last several years. Despite this, I fully support his idea of making it easy to know how the software you run is licensed (even in the browser) and giving users the choice of whether or not to allow software licensed in a way they do not appove of to be run on their machines. With regard to the idea of allowing modified Javascript code to be used, I like the idea in principle, but having worked on a large web app and having had to debug issues caused by cached obsolete Javascript, I have concerns about the practicality of ever using such a feature.
Finally, I think you are a jerk and a troll. Comparing RMS to the Church of Scientology? Really? Get a life.
You will have many recoverable tape errors.