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Why free software shouldn't depend on Cocoa or GNUStep

The Free Software Foundations decision to develop and push GnuStep leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on Cocoa, so we need to discourage its use.

The problem is not unique to GnuStep; any free implementation of NextStep would raise the same issue. The danger is that Apple is probably planning to force all free NextStep implementations underground some day using software patents. This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.

This is not to say that implementing NextStep is a bad thing. Free NextStep implementations permit users to run their Cocoa programs on free platforms, which is good. Ideally we want to provide free implementations for all languages that programmers have used.

The problem is not in the NextStep implementations, but rather in applications written in Cocoa. If we lose the use of GNUStep, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.

We should systematically arrange to depend on the free NextStep implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing programs that use Cocoa. Therefore, we should not include NextStep implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions, and we should distribute and recommend non-Cocoa applications rather than comparable cocoa applications whenever possible

For those who don't get the joke, this is a response to this hypocritical garbage.

Posted by Jonathan Holland on 6/28/2009.

Tags: FSF   GnuStep   RMS   Hypocracy

Comments:

Poor joke , not funny and not very intelligent at all. Just because you do not agree with Richard does not allow you to call him hypocrite.

Gravatar Posted by xxx on 6/28/2009.

"Poor joke , not funny" Wrong, as I found it funny, hence all you have is an opinion. Now run back to whining about mono.

Gravatar Posted by XXX2 on 6/28/2009.

What a incredibly successful fail.

Gravatar Posted by dude on 6/28/2009.

This is very funny, and very correct. Look around, there's a movement building away from the FSF and towards real freedom. Apple's funding Clang and the Free and NetBSD people have their own GCC replacement, and RMS had to liberalize how GCC interprets the GPL in response.

I'm an easy case here - I run Linux and my requirements are a modern development environment (Mono and MonoDevelop provide this) and modern fast OpenGL (from the Nvidia binary drivers). And now both of those things are under attack and I'm evaluating FreeBSD and Mac OS X. I wonder if the FSF types realize the scale of the own goal they'll be scoring if they successfully drive everything ideologically impure off the platform.

Gravatar Posted by XXX3 on 6/28/2009.

i actually enjoyed it

RMS could have written that

Gravatar Posted by thomas on 6/28/2009.

Amusing and very on topic; although I think that replacing C# with Obj-C, instead of NextStep, would have been a bit more appropriate.

Gravatar Posted by jezra on 6/28/2009.

Apple actually does have a significant history of enforcing patent rights. Meanwhile, C# is a standardized language for which Microsoft has expressly given up some of its rights to enforce any patents.

Gravatar Posted by jeo on 6/28/2009.

My favourite programming language is Java. I don't know if this is relevant, but I just love it.

Gravatar Posted by Luís Nobrega on 6/28/2009.

You may have intended this as a joke, but I actually agree with the premise of it. This is not in any way different than mono/c#, and the conclusion reached is valid in this case as well.

Gravatar Posted by Mario on 6/28/2009.

"and the conclusion is valid in this case as well". Duh! Paranoia, and nothing more than that.

Exchange the words with any technology you want, and then you have another 'problem'. It shows that it's only a matter of paranoia, and that there's people that live always in the fear someone is going to attack them.

Very good joke, btw ;-)

Gravatar Posted by Carlos on 6/28/2009.

Brilliant!

This post should probably use a macro so it can quickly be repositioned to new targets depending on the day of the week.

For example, OpenOffice is a clone of office from the bottom up, so we could do: sed -e 's/GNUStep/OpenOffice/e' -e 's/Apple/Microsoft/g'

The options are endless! With Microsoft now owning the OpenGL patents (they acquired them for merely 30 million dollars in 2003 when SGI was going through some financial pains) we can do now:

sed -e 's/GNUStep/OpenGL/' -e 's/Apple/Microsoft/g'

And obtain a new blog entry.

Gravatar Posted by Charles on 6/28/2009.

To the poster that defended Apple above.

Apple has a history of being a lot more litigious than Microsoft has ever been (queue fake outrage over "Tom Tom" here).

For that matter, Steve Jobs has made it very clear that Apple will pursue anything that might violate their patents very strongly.

Gravatar Posted by James on 6/28/2009.

It is a GNU project. There is a big difference between Mono and GNUStep.

Gravatar Posted by You don't understand on 6/28/2009.

>It is a GNU project. There is a big difference between Mono and GNUStep.

Yeah, one of them actually releases high quality products and the other one bitches about things a lot and releases mostly vaporware.

Gravatar Posted by GNU Is Shit on 6/28/2009.

"It is a GNU project. There is a big difference between Mono and GNUStep.".

So, what's that difference? Could you explain, please?

I don't know why people is forgetting to explain things lately. They only come and say things like: "die this, die that; it's RMS, its the FSF; it's GNU; it's not GNU; it's MS". Wow

Gravatar Posted by Carlos on 6/28/2009.

NO, NO, NO. Repeat with me:

GNU IS GOOD, ANYTHING ELSE IS EVIL, GNU IS GOOD, ANYTHING ELSE IS EVIL.

Gravatar Posted by You don't understand on 6/28/2009.

Hahahahaha, sorry, I got it (later, but better later than never ;-) )

Gravatar Posted by Carlos on 6/28/2009.

Great post, very funny, thank you. What's perhaps even funnier is the replies of the outraged GNU zealots. :-)

How dare you ?!?

Gravatar Posted by Maxime on 6/29/2009.

"Poor joke , not funny and not very intelligent at all. Just because you do not agree with Richard does not allow you to call him hypocrite."

It's hypocritical if he applies his opinion inconsistently. He can't argue that mono should be removed while at the same side argue that gnustep should be used. That's pretty much the definition of hypocrisy right there.

Gravatar Posted by a on 6/29/2009.

You're forgetting Gnash, a project included in gNewSense.

Gravatar Posted by Not only GNUStep on 6/29/2009.

Nice post.

The bottom line is that RMS does not know whether Mono is something MS is bothered about or not. They did make the ECMA specs public, after all. He is not capable of evaluating actual risk, which involves talking to people at MS. (Even ignoring whether MS would prevail in the lawsuit, whether the patent can be trivially worked around, etc.)

It is fear without facts. I take risks crossing the street. But how much risk -- that is the question.

Gravatar Posted by KeithCu on 6/29/2009.

Funny. Loved it ;-)

Gravatar Posted by Sanakr on 6/29/2009.

Stallman is a joke.

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Gravatar Posted by Silver stick on 7/2/2009.






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