Stallman: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do? [LWN.net]

Stallman: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

Posted Dec 9, 2012 17:31 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Stallman: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do? by jwarnica
Parent article: Stallman: Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

I'm also reminded that RMS was shocked - shocked! - at the explosion of ASP's in the 21st century, delivering software as a service, and the (arduous) scramble to put together a new version of the GPL to address this evil.

This one completely misses the mark. RMS is perfectly Ok with "software as service" concept - that's why even GPLv3 does not forbid that. He is very much not Ok with tivoization which is quite novel phenomenon: Multics or Compuserve (or indeed any Unix out there) does not permit modification by just about anybody, but, of course, they are free to hack on for the owners of said system.

AGPL does exist, it does address needs of anti-SAS people, but these are not RMS's concern. He was ready to change GPLv3 to make it compatible with AGPLv3, but he was not ready to push it as a default.

That such a device doesn't have a GPL'd bash makes it evil, that it doesn't have any shell makes it useless, or so his logic goes.

The fact that it does have bash is not a big deal, the fact that it does not have a means to run bash is the problem. The fact that there are plethora of people who try to make it possible to run bash (well, usually not bash but something like XMBC but it's the same thing for this discussion) on game consoles shows that RMS is not loony. Note that most of these guys don't give a damn about GPL or RMS, but they are peeved by the fact that they paid good money for a piece of hardware which they can not actually use as they please.

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