The Richard Stallman event

This Friday I had been invited by a friend to an event where Richard Stallman gave a one hour long speech. After that we – the friend and me, not Stallman :) – had a meeting to discuss the project, so it was a sort of warm up. Of course I agreed to the paln, I was curious about Stallman, lets hear the speech – I have read some articles from him, and his idea on the Free Software, and I was curious what changed in the last couple years, if he has anything new to say – so I went to the Millenáris, and listened carefully.

Well, I was totally and absolutely unimpressed by him. He had nothing new, nothing inspiring, nothing exciting to say, same old ideas. Plus the outburst against how Cloud Computing is the evil, how DVD is the evil, how… is evil. Then he auctioned off his book for about 200USD – you can download it for free here. And then sold a bunch of lapel pins, buttons, badges, keyrings, etc. Ok, be fair it all went to the Free Software Foundation. But it still was a bit weird for me. Imagine a bearded guy without shoes standing on the stage, auctioning his books and then selling badges. But it must be me.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of his ideas. I am all for open-source software, I like the idea of free software, I really like the idea of revisioning the current copyright rules in the favour of artists and the public as opposed to the sole interest of the publishers, but I try to be realistic.

I know that Linux is a good OS, and that by now you can have a passable desktop PC experience with it, still it took the community almost two decades to get to the level of Mac OS or Windows – we can start a big argument here that Linux beats Windows hands down, or Mac pawns all, but it’s beside the point. I know that Apache is the most popular server on the market, and Tomcat is the most popular container, and MySQL and PostgreSQL are big too. As I said, I know that free software can be good, very good indeed.

At the same time I know that big banks are somewhat reluctant to jump completely on the free software bandwagon, and I am not sure you want Heathrow to run on PostgreSQL and that air traffic control systems should be open source and free for all, maintained by a community of interested developers, branching every half a year on issues like “should we differentiate between Spitfires and Cesnas or not?”. I am not sure that we don’t need commercial, proprietary systems where the actual software can not be downloaded freely by all – especially in industries where that given software can give a competitive edge measurable in real dollar value.

Also, I am not sure that if the developers are not paid for developing – because the software is free -, they can maintain their work for long. And while I am aware that there are business models for this, giving away software, selling support, I am not sure that we really want to push the developers of the air traffic control system toward the “we get paid for tracking down bugs and correcting them” business model. I want them to get paid a load of money and I don’t want an enthusiastic bug hunt after deployment of the system, when I am sitting 10 000 meters in the air.

But even if we step back, and talk about not so life-or-death kind of systems, I think there must be a viable way to pay the developers. Stallman never talked about his idea of putting money into the pockets of developers. That just supposed to happen somehow. Or probably one of the “theoretical and non-existent issues”.

Now step away from the development part, and look at the poor user. I am not convinced by the “only software running everything on your own computer is acceptable” argument of Stallman, as I don’t want to bother with maintaining and paying for my own flickr and twitter servers. I don’t even want to know if they need a server. I don’t want to run my own Zoho or Google Doc, so I can use my netbook or iPhone or whatever to look at my data.

And I have some more differences. For example I don’t think that Microsoft or Apple is evil incarnate as Stallman says. I am not a fan of a man who dismisses every real concern or idea that does not align with his point of view with an “I don’t concern myself with theoretical and non-existent issues” statement. Also, while I agree that a lot of people in Hungary has problems when it comes to speak English, mocking your audience for their lack of language skill is not stylish. If you don’t understand the question your response is not “that was an incoherent question which made no sense at all” waiting for the laugh from the audience, but “could you rephrase it, please?”.