Richard Stallman Calls LLVM A "Terrible Setback"

[beetreetime]

Stallman seeks the truth, period. But he hasn't gone far enough.

His talking as if BSD like licensed software is between GPL (free) and proprietary software. But from what I see, BSDL is more proprietary then proprietary software itself because it causes proprietary sftware prolifaration while proprietary software does not.

It's like who's more evil? The Bomb (proprietary) or the Bomb maker (BSD)? It's the bomb maker (BSD)?

Death to BSD and permissive licensed software.

[beetreetime]

The only software I can think of that has any value for the open community carrying a BSD license is ssh and ntp coming out of OpenBSD.

OpenSSH and OpenNTPD from WideOpenBSD are proprietary and not free. They'll soon be replaced by far superior GPLv3 implementations once OpenBSD from electrical bills.

[beetreetime]

I firmly believe that Theo's strong belief in a pure open source model (I would say he is one step further down that road than RMS actually) is the only reason they managed it. FreeBSD on the other hand doesn't seem to have any particular ideology.

Theo de Raadt is far behind Stallman in freedom. His a hippocrite accusing linux of excepting binary drivers while also OpenBSD has binary blob and worse, licensed under the BSD and ISC license.

FreeBSD does have an ideology. Anti-GPL and proprietary friendly, that's their ideology and they sacrifice usability and performance for that.

http://aboutthebsds.wordpress.com/20...f-freebsd-yet/

[mrugiero]

That's exactly what our ancestors fought - communism and socialism, this is deeply anti-American, anti capitalist and anti free market, it has a "sharing" agenda and forces you to do so. Given that Stallman regularly visits China to give speeches I think he secretly works for the Chinese government.

Your ancestors also fought against countries independence and sovereignty, they didn't give a shit when dictatorships were functional to them. I know because my country had several of them. Did USA intervene? Nope. Did they cut commerce with them? Nope. Governments killing their own citizens were suddenly not that important. To put you in context, the way the latest dictators in my country selected people to kidnap, interrogate, kill and drop to a river, all of this extra officially, was looking through the phone book of people, for reasons varying from having political activities to acting in an independent theater, being a writer (we have an iconic comics writer who died this way), anything related to science or arts was a good reason to die, and the best one: owning a big media and not wanting to sell it, aggravated by being jews. But OH DEAR don't you dare messing with free market or we'll kick you so hard your shit will come up through your mouth. So, please, go sell 'murican freedom somewhere else.

Yeah I meant tapping into BSD software and the validity of it. And its not about "ethics" unless you talk about these kinda things that cause massmurders because of skin-color or believe in the wrong invisible man in the sky, and that just kinda described my picture of RS (Its not about threats, its about unfounded ideologies).
I wouldnt even try talking to him, but I can argument against him.

It's a matter of ethics. The thing is, he will not argue outside of his. You are obviously allowed to not share his ethics, and this means you could even consider software outside of the scope of ethics (which I guess you do), but this doesn't change the fact that inside of the scope of his ethics, his conclusions are correct. He considers a developer is morally obliged to keep four basic freedoms. To talk ethics you don't need to talk about things that cause mass murders (for any reason) or believe in the wrong invisible man in the sky. You can have an ethic that, for example, directly prohibits imposing your own ethics to someone else, which is actually my case. I do care about explaining my views, and other's if I think they are being misunderstood, but I don't really think I should be telling you what you should believe, mostly because there isn't even a guarantee that my beliefs are right, although I wouldn't do so even if I could somehow find out what the "true" (personally, I don't think that exists, but talk hypothetically) ethics are. To go further into what I consider a matter of ethics, and why I consider it doesn't need to go as far as to religion or any kind of fanaticism, let's see tolerance. When you say tolerance is good or bad, you are making a judgment based on a given set of ethics, usually one consistent with the most widely set of values (which is called moral) in a given context, at a given time. That's why some Christian groups consider a sin to be homosexual but at the same time some governments try to legalize gay marriage: because A) it's a matter of ethics and B) both have different ethics, consistent with different morals. Both groups think they are doing the right thing. In that particular case, I'm inclined to support the governments trying to legalize, not because I'm gay (since I'm not), or because I'm anti-christian (which I'm not either, although I'm partially anti-vatican: I'm not against their religion, but I'm against their entitlement to do lobby with governments, no religion should have more weight than the citizens), but because I don't think someone should dictate what's right or wrong in the personal lives of people. If the Christians believe homosexuality is wrong, they are free not to marry them by church, but they shouldn't be even trying to make it illegal to get married by State.
And well, with software comes the same, you can have set of ethics that says "software doesn't have any inherent ethics", another that says "software should be free, and we should enforce it" or maybe "software should be free, but I'm nobody to impose this requirement on others". The first is consistent with pretty much any license, the second requires copyleft, the third requires liberal licenses to be used by the person who believes it.

Can we all agree that BSD offers more 'freedom' while GPL offers more 'free software'?
BSD allows people the freedom to build off of an existing piece of software and then sell it, yes. This means that any modifications don't have to be shared which is nice for people trying to make a living.
GPL allows people the freedom of always being able to see and fork the crap out of the source code. This means that any modifications to the source code is public to everyone and the improvements can be shared.

Unfortunately there are downsides to both.
BSD's freedom includes the freedom to be a butthead and essentially take another person's work and effort and turn it into their own personal gain.
GPL's lack of the previous freedom means that many companies will not back a project, because they don't like putting their money into something that their competitor could use too.

Your post is quite agreeable, sir. Although I wouldn't say either provides more freedom, but different kinds of freedom, as freedom is a word whose meaning depends on the ethics applied.

Yes, but, no.
Because the GPL code can be used by everybody that is fine with GPL or need or want the GPL, and I'm glad for them, and it does not take anything from people not fine with the GPL: they had nothing before, they have nothing after, so it's cool. And if someone else decide to build a non-GPL project to fit their needs, good for them! They don't take anything from the guys using the GPL project, they even give them more choice. Not every one has the same needs, and that's the actual point of freedom if you think about it.

If his ethics consider that something "good for some" that is not "bad for others" is a problem, well, his ethics suck, and I feel entitled to tell it

I agree with your post word by word. Specially in the point you are entitled to think his ethics suck, and I do share that this part sucks, I don't think anybody should dictate other people's ethics. I just tried to point out he is not "wrong". He might have shitty ethics, but when he talks, one must understand he talks in the scope of those, and he is reasoning in a correct way with those as a base, so he is "correct". The whole point is that "correct" and "wrong" are context dependent.

The "bickering and fighting" starts if someone claims the words "freedom" for their own purposes, and herds of sheep are following them without thinking...

The big picture in this thread, the way I see it (I'm aware I could be wrong, though) is people arguing with actual arguments pro and against a posture. So I wouldn't consider anyone here part of a herd of mindless sheep. I do see some exceptions, though.

Your first paragraph is wrong. LLVM is building low level virtual machine (assembly like) binaries, with lots of optimization (bytecode extensions for different styles, like big vectors). It's the first time i hear that can build only for one instruction set. While i have build experimental gpu shaders, i haven't found any option for a specific ISA only. And anyway the heavy LLVM part and the reason of choose is about virtualization. If we had something like LLVM years back, maybe today's we could have an open CPU, that could run Wine and first class games compiled with LLVM.

Yes, that is the IR, intermediate representation. Still, most real world usages (at least, the ones competing in the same ground as GCC) transform this into binaries to a given architecture, which CAN NOT be ran outside of such architecture. I tell you, I do it. I can give you a binary created with CLANG that you can't use in a PowerPC or MIPS or whatever other architecture than x86, for example. Of course, my code is open source (except for a project I'm working on, which is open source and GPL but I didn't release yet, because it's not even usable yet, but I plan to release it in the near future), so it's not important if I only provide binaries for a single architecture. I do my best to keep the code portable, but having no other platform to test in home makes it pointless to provide the binaries, as I don't know if they will run, and I'm too lazy to cross-compile for several architectures..
Also, IIRC MIPS is an open CPU. Anyway, this has nothing to do with freedom, but with technical design. GCC does have an IR too IIRC, but it's not as flexible as LLVM's.

Anyone using the term "anti-American" loses all credibility instantly. It's a stupid term.
I don't want to be American, so anything "anti-American" would seem like a positive thing in my eyes.

There should be a term for "I don't care what America wants, as long as it doesn't conflict with what I want", as anti-American seems too much to be "I really look out for America to fail at everything".

When you build with LLVM, you have ASM bytecode output. An LLVM binary is universal with no ISA linking. Then at the runtime a JIT compiler final-forms the code for an ISA. The final form is not saved somewhere.

There exists several static compilers based on LLVM. In fact, there are few JIT compilers based on LLVM, AFAIR.

[boltronics]

Glad to see RMS continuing to stick to his guns, although I expected nothing less from him.

The primary reason that Clang and LLVM exist in their current form is to avoid GPL3+. Companies that support it (Apple, Google, etc.) hate giving their users free software (unless it suits their commercial interests), but love to use it for themselves whenever possible. Just look at Google making Android increasingly proprietary with every new release, or the way Apple ripped off software under the BSD-style licenses.

We need to keep GCC's license as is, and continue to support it (and other GPL software) to limit abuse from proprietary software vendors.

[jasonditz]

It is already happening. Xcode is proprietary, as is the whole of ios and osx. PS4 with its development kit also. Exactly how has the open license of LLVM made them realise that they should share what ever code they build on top of it back? There seems to be a surprisingly large crowd not realising that all the openness we enjoy today has been very hard fought through decades with copy-left as the main enabler. There is nothing wrong with permissive licensing, it has its usage, but please do not confuse that with the success of open source. I believe it is the other way around. Through the success enabled by copy-left, large software houses realised the tremendous value provided by open source developers. Permissive licensing is in many cases their attempt to tap into the value without committing to anything. Apple wants your code, but only if you are happy with paying them for the same code further down the road.

It's admittedly been awhile since I looked at Xcode, but aren't the compilers they use essentially just vanilla GCC and LLVM? I know the IDE itself and some of the fiddly bits are proprietary, but is there a proprietary C++ compiler that's materially different/improved?

Ditto with the PS4. Never seen an actual kit in person, but my understanding was the compiler is just LLVM and not an exotic fork.

[profoundWHALE]

Your post is quite agreeable, sir. Although I wouldn't say either provides more freedom, but different kinds of freedom, as freedom is a word whose meaning depends on the ethics applied.

Thank you, and I would agree with that as well; different kinds of freedom.

[aphirst]

[shitposting intensifies]

BSD: Free, but doesn't require derivatives to be Free
GPL: Free, but requires derivatives to be Free

HMM I WONDER WHICH IS ACTUALLY MORE FREE
YEP DEFINITELY THE ONE THAT PERMITS ARBITRARY REMOVAL OF FREEDOM DOWN THE LINE

HURRR

In This Thread: Paid BSD-license shills desparate to bait-and-switch humanity out of software Freedom and back into an all-proprietary dystopia

[jasonditz]

[shitposting intensifies]

BSD: Free, but doesn't require derivatives to be Free
GPL: Free, but requires derivatives to be Free

HMM I WONDER WHICH IS ACTUALLY MORE FREE
YEP DEFINITELY THE ONE THAT PERMITS ARBITRARY REMOVAL OF FREEDOM DOWN THE LINE

HURRR

In This Thread: Paid BSD-license shills desparate to bait-and-switch humanity out of software Freedom and back into an all-proprietary dystopia

Who pays BSD-license shills? Seriously... that sounds like good work if you can get it.

[aphirst]

Who pays BSD-license shills? Seriously... that sounds like good work if you can get it.

Apple, Sony, and anyone else with a stake in proprietary compiler technology (Intel anyone?). Possibly also anyone with a more general interest in proprietary software who realise the effect this could have in their favour.