On Thu, 4 Dec 2014 11:26:08 -0800
John Albietz <inthecloud247@???> wrote:

> Signal vs noise. I think it's reasonable to expect a lot of venting
> of frustrations. A prior startup I worked at eventually created a
> separate philosophy list that these discussions would go to.
>
> Surprising to hear that RMS wasn't necessarily into unix philosophy.
> Hope it's possible to get a public statement from him on that. Or at
> least direct from him on a public list or video.
>
> Linus and RMS are very human after all. Where are our gods now? DJB
> is the only one standing.
>
Honestly, I never thought much of the very popular "unix philosophy"
idea.

I'm pretty much coming from an egineering standpoint, where "Keep
it simple, stupid" covers all the major bases - but then I am also not
afraid to look back at my previous efforts to admit that this or that
should have been done better.

The problem with "philosphy" is that it runs the risk of becoming a
"religion" and I consider RMS to be a case in point. The GPL 3, as
far as I am concerned, is a license "gone bad" that tries to do more
than it should. A license should state what you can't do in "plain
English" and anything else should be acceptable. The idea of the GPL3
adding the "Additional Terms" section bothers me. If I wanted
piecemeal conditional licensing, I'd use proprietary software. The GPL3
is something that could have been done better. It was a license
conceived more out of RMS's philosophy than a real world need. That is
why the Linux kernel is still GPL2.

Frankly, I agree with Linus on that, regardless of what RMS thinks.