For what else could it be, if not pure-as-the-driven-snow coincidence?

Perhaps we will see some private correspondance revealed and some third-hand gossip in blog comments about RMS and college girls working on the GNU Project next? Perhaps someone might call RMS a “fascistic extremist“?

Now that’s The Spirit of Fauxpen Source™ in action!

In this corner…

So, RMS has a new blog entry “Lest CodePlex Perplex“, where he insightfully analyzes the CodePlex situation. Among the clear points he makes:

1. There is reason to be wary, but we can not know at this time that the Microsoft CodePlex Foundation will be “bad”.
2. One day we can judge the Microsoft CodePlex Foundation by its actions, but right now all we can do is anticipate based on best available information

He also lays out concerns about how Microsoft may intend to subvert Free Software to the greatest degree possible through actions such as:

1. Emphasizing Open Source “practicalities” over Free Software ethics. This is quite a success already, with many  Fauxpen Source supporters gleefully assisting Microsoft efforts directly or indirectly to downplay any “Freedom talk” at all when discussing FLOSS.
2. Restricting FLOSS to Open Source additions/extras to a Proprietary and Closed Source core – increasing dependence on the Closed base, and greatly limiting the real value of such FLOSS.
3. Making sure Microsoft Windows or other Microsoft platforms are the preferred/only platforms for development.

This is illustrates not only some of the problems with the Microsoft CodePlex Foundation and the current debate in the community, but it also shows RMS is perfectly “in touch” and still foresightful about Free Software issues (refuting a common baseless attack that he is a “dinosaur”, “out of touch”, etc.)

There is a bit that will get all the attention though, and I predict it will not only overshadow the deft summary RMS plots, but also will spur a new round of the same old ad hominems against RMS and the more generalized fallacious arguments against Free Software supporters.

RMS calls Miguel de Icaza an “apologist”. Presumably a Microsoft apologist, although he didn’t explictly use that phrase.

And, In This Corner ….

Now, Mr. de Icaza has posted his reaction. As always, it is good reading because you can really see where the dangerous mindset is coming from; not only from the “top”, but also from the “ground troops”. Just read the blog entry and see – it’s right there for anyone who cares.

For example, you ask?

Mr. de Icaza leads off with:

Richard Stallman does not seem to have anything better to do than launch personal attacks against me.

This is a light ad hominem, and hints at the common theme that any criticism is invalid because there are better things to be doing, or the critic makes no other contributions, or that criticism in general is without worth. This is an extremely common theme for Team Mono.

Continuing we have this:

In his last piece he has decided to call me a Microsoft apologist because I do not participate in his witch hunt.

Um, no. He called you an “apologist”, because you are one. An apologist is ”one who speaks or writes in defense of someone or something“. Mr. de Icaza has an enormous output of spoken and written defenses of his actions. To go further than RMS explictly did, I will state that Mr. de Icaza has an enourmous output of defenses of Microsoft specifically. He does it in the very response under discussion, when he talks about how ”great people” inside Microsoft are steering the company into becoming a “community citizen”.

Disapproval is not Fear

This is a bit of a funny point. Mr. de Icaza loves to imply or outright state that those people critical of Microsoft are afraid of Microsoft.

This is so foolish I can scarcely understand why Mr. de Icaza loves this line of argument so. Understand this, when I criticize Nickelback, it’s not because I am afraid of them. It is because they suck.

When people criticize Microsoft, it is not because of fear. It is because they are tired of vendor lock-in, overpriced and insecure software, hindering the industry, illegal behavior, lies and slander against projects they devote time and effort to, and so many — many — other offenses that Microsoft has committed, and continues to commit.

“Fear” is not even a factor.     

But, I guess the desire to attack the opponent by hinting he is a coward (or fear-monger) is too strong to overcome.   

“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything” – Mark Twain

One thing you will notice if you pay attention to Team Mono rhetoric like I do, is that it is rarely even logically consistent with itself.

For example, one of the big defense points that came out when the Microsoft CodePlex Foundation was announced is that it was an independent body, it was only because things needed to be set up so quickly that it was so heavily staffed by Microsoft people, and so forth.

But, in his blog entry, Mr. de Icaza defends — dare I say apologizes — for his participation by saying:

Working at CodePlex is a great way of helping steer Microsoft in the right direction.

Eh? If it is an independent Foundation, then how will it be “steering” Microsoft? Lots of multi-billion dollar international monopolist corporations being steered around by independent foundations that I’m not aware of out there? Who knew?

Disregarding Intent

Finally – because this is already too long – Mr. de Icaza reveals his naive disregard for intent by casually dismissing Microsoft’s recent patent sell:

As for the patent sale, they are now in good hands: the OIN, so they are not a problem.

This absolutely ignores the fact that Microsoft locked OIN out of the orginal bidding, that Red Hat (among others) expressed concerns about Microsoft targeting patent trolls as buyers, and that the general agreement is that OIN simply “outmaneuvered” Microsoft.

The director of the OIN himself said that “the open source community lucked out“. (My emphasis).

But, Mr. de Icaza breezily passes this off in a footnote, as if saying “Well, he may have shot at you, but he missed, so why all the concern?”

Summary

I’m sure this is far from over, but I think it is worth it to carefully read both RMS’ and Mr. de Icaza’s statements here, and for color pay attention to the comments on Mr. de Icaza’s blogs. Not only will you be ahead of the talking points power curve – but more importantly I think the clear contrast between then rational analysis based on fundamental principles and historical actions by RMS and the logical fallacies and wide-eyed naivety of Mr. de Icaza’s defense is quite striking!

This article was also posted at The Source.com!

Word on the Blogs is that RMS sent us up the bomb in no uncertain terms on Miguel de Icaza and the CodePlex Foundation, but I would like to get some transcript or video to be sure exactly what was said.

Here’s one report on RMS’ comments:

Miguel de Icaza “is basically a traitor to the Free Software community” This was in response to my question about the new Microsoft “Open Source” labs. He went on to say that Miguel’s involvement in the project doesn’t give much confidence as he is a Microsoft apologist. The project looks to be concerned with permitting “Open Source” programs to work on the Windows platform and thus divert valuable developer time away from free platforms such as Gnu/Linux. He also went into an interesting story about Miguel and the FSF (as Miguel used to sit on the FSF board), but I’m hoping there is a good transcript of the event thing somewhere online.

Mono framework is not so much of a problem, but C# shouldn’t be used in core apps as legal problems would be hard to work around. Recommends uninstalling any apps using C#.

So yeah. I would like to verify the comments and find out what the “interesting story” was.

Open-source extremism, and how the OSI can help, followed by Apache and the future of open-source licensing.

Stage One: Introduce yourself

In the first article Mr. Asay asserts that the Open Source community is “stagnant”, “insular”, full of “group-think”, and the tent needs widening. He also suggests that the community rejects “anything that fails to discuss knighthood and/or sainthood for Richard Stallman”

His solution: include representatives from Microsoft and Oracle on the OSI board.

Now there’s a whole shipment of stupid in this article, starting with they very idea that our community – however you want to call it – is full of “group-think” and one-mindedness. If anything, we have too much debate. I’m not calling for less debate – I’m just saying there isn’t any shortage of it, on any topic you are care to choose. Asserting that we are all of one mind is so out-of-touch with the reality of the situation, it makes me wonder why Mr. Asay would even say something like that.

Then we get into the dig at Richard Stallman. I think the issues of the past few weeks have shown there is a significant portion of the community that does not think Mr. Stallman is up for “knighthood and/or sainthood”! Furthermore, there has always been a large portion of the community that feels the MIT/X11 approach is “more free”. I disagree, but I do confess I see their point and do not rail against non-copyleft or non-GPL software.

Finally, we end up with the positively absurd notion that Microsoft should be on the board of the OSI. I can only guess that this is because the “commercialization” of Open Source is seen as the ultimate end goal for some interests. I do not think there is anything wrong with commercialization, but it is a by-product, not an end goal.

Stage two: Hit ‘em with the good stuff

In the second article, Mr. Asay asks us if, through the GPL,  “did Stallman simply create an alternative way to release proprietary software?”

At one point he links to Zed Shaw’s reasons for using the GPL, and then manages to misrepresent Mr. Shaw’s entire argument and throw in some more craziness:

Shaw, and perhaps other coders, have turned to the GPL as a way to protect their software from use they deem objectionable. But isn’t this precisely what the proprietary software licenses do? The only difference is that the GPL forces code to be open, rather than closed.

Read Mr. Shaw’s piece. It’s long, but interesting. And it’s not at all about “protecting his software from use he deems objectionable.” It’s more along the lines of : ”I’m tired of building other people’s businesses and not even getting patches back or a word of public recognition.”

Then we have the fallacy that protecting software from objectional use is precisely what proprietary software licenses do – which is wrong. To the extent they do that, it is only as a side effect of maximizing profit, increasing user reliance on the vendor, and maintaining an advantage over competitors.

If a company felt it could give away code and still achieve those 3 goals, they would not give a tinker’s damn how you used the software or if you could see the code. Sort of like Microsoft and its “Shared Source” program, which they try so hard to conflate with “Open Source”.

Finally, the assertion that the only difference between GPL and proprietary licensing is not just open/closed code. There are all sorts of good things in proprietary licenses unrelated to the visibility of code like:

• You can’t use this product to develop on competing platforms
• You can’t publish benchmarks without our approval
• You can’t developed products that compete with our products using this product
• You agree that we can use your CPU for some purpose
• You agree that we can maintain some personal information on you

and so on, and so on.

That Mr. Asay manages to get so much so wrong in just one paragraph makes me wonder why he is even bothering. The rest of the article is filled with the same quality of reasoning, so it’s not worth going over, except as an exercise in descontructing poor arguments.

Stage 3: Dodge Tomato(e)s

Well, I came for the Stallman/Open Source talk, but I stayed for the stupid. I just thought it a bit of interest that the man relases two articles in two days each with a bit of anti-GPL / anti-Free Software / anti-Stallman angle in them.

Also, I’m not implying anything sinister about cnet or Mr. Asay. See the question mark up there in the blog title. I learned that trick from network news. You can put a question mark at the end of any headline and you are totally an unbiased reporter. Watch:

• Is RMS God incarnate and walking among us today?
• Is Mono actually funded directly by Bill Gates and Kim Jong Ill?
• Are mono-critics really all frothing morons with no point at all?

See? Perfect objectivity through punctuation!

That was a pretty strained opening. Nevertheless, we proceed. Just wanted to point out a few other people’s take on the on-going character assassination of rms. Each one is worth a read, including comments. You might see a pattern developing.

All hail the windmill tilters

In which Christian Schaller expresses his thoughts on the matter. We get some really vile allegations in the comments section by the creater of the “afraid of code” slur-meme:

Given that death threats have been sent to Mono developers frequently by said fundamentalist fans of Dr. Stallman, we instead decided to launch the “I am not afraid of people writing code” meme.

ps. Yes, death threats are exactly and precisely the level that these fundamentalist people have reached. And yes, the Mono guys are exactly and precisely the most pragmatic guys (about such things) in the community. But you can’t ignore certain things anymore. They are getting increasingly fanatic, increasingly crazy and Dr. Stallman is increasingly positioning himself in support of those idiots.

Once confronted, he does the old reliable backpedalling dance. Read the comments for context and weak sauce explanations. “I meant that rms was supporting those idiots, not the things they do! It’s totally not the same thing!”

By the way, there is an interesting entry on the gentleman’s blog: Why females should participate in agile software development. It is because their brains are different, you see. Soon, I hope to see the series continued with such enlightened entries as “Why Asians should participate in mathematical software development” and “Why Blacks should participate in sports software development (but not hockey) .” Also, Stallman is a sexist.

There’s another nice appearance of the main motivator behind the recent sexism scare, who humbly asks us “were the folks who weren’t African-Americans who joined and vocally supported the Civil Rights movement in the 60s wrong to do so?”

Yes. You read that right. This man’s fight, bold and uncomprising in principle – is to be compared to the Civil Rights movement. Oh! To be alive now, when such magnificent humanitarian efforts are a-foot! One is truly honored to read the words of such a courageous leader.

Once again on RMS and sexism

In which Patryk Zawadzki expresses his thoughts on the matter.

Again we are treated to some keen insight by Rev. Dr. Martin “Lefty” King:

Yeah! And all those folks who joined the Civil Rights movements in the ’60s who didn’t happen to be African-American were wrong to do so. After all, the African-Americans should be perfectly capable of complaining themselves if they see fit.

Right?

Hell no! Struggle on, Brother! Too long have our Software Sisters sat behind a GUI while the Stallman lorded emacs over her! All that is short come to an end now that the Rev. Dr. Martin “Lefty” King has struck out against the Great Satan rms, fearless and bold behind his keyboard, uncompromising in his campaign of slander, lies and deceit!

Again, read the comments for the full on self-righteous martyrdom of this joker.

Don’t forget a little bit of the Godwin before you go though:

Ever hear the one that starts, “When they came for the Jews, I said nothing, because I wasn’t a Jew” and ends “When they came for me, there was no one left to say anything”…?

So, now it is Rev. Dr. Martin “Lefty” King-Schindler I guess. Stay classy, San Diego.

Summary

So now that we have Stallman painted with the “sexist” brush, I see some people casting glances to the “Death Threat Crazy” and “Nazi” brushes.

Let me clear: I wasn’t at the conference, and I don’t know exactly what Stallman said. It is possible he made an inappropriate remark. Some reasonable people say it was a joke gone bad; stuff like that happens.But, even if it were an honest-to-good malicious sexist remark (unlikely considering Stallman has a long record of supporting women’s rights in his writings and interviews), the character assassination has been totally disproportionate to the event. He may indeed need a word of correction from a trusted friend or even a letter of concern from a respected group. What he doesn’t need or deserve is a pack of snarling jackals lumping him in with lunatics making death threats and freaking Nazis. (Assuming the death threat thing is legit, I haven’t looked it up. I know I got a lot of death threats from owning peeps in Quake, so that junk can be serious business.)

Apologia

This is another one of those times I have to adopt a mocking tone, because if I were to give these cretins a serious response I would work myself into a right powerful rage, disturbing weather systems and startling genteel ladies everywhere with my sexist body. I know this is not quite up to my normal Aristotelean discourse. Double your money back if not satisfied.

And they have. Again. And Again. And Again.The push is on to paint him as a “sexist”. Watch as mono supporters everywhere jump on board. Jump. Jump. Jump. Jump. Jump.

These attacks are especially vile, being in no way related to factual or technical issues but pure personal attacks. It is 100% Grade-A Columbian Smear Powder. A smooth white line of character assassination.

If one were interested in getting a more rounded picture of Stallman’s attitude, one could consider his comments when asked directly about women and Free Software:

I am strongly in favor of equal rights for women, and always have been. I think that I somehow escaped learning the ideas of “machismo”.
I never learned to think that women ought to be subordinate to men, so I never had to unlearn it.

The ethical ideas of free software are gender-neutral. Human rights apply the same to everyone, both rich or poor, both male and female.
Every woman should be free to share and change software, just as every man should be.

I can’t suggest any specific “role for women” in the Free Software Movement, because the very idea would be sexist.

But that would put the kibosh on the latest Two Minute Hate from Team Mono and the Lynchmob Lackeys.

Read the interview. Read his website. Read his essays. Educate yourself if you don’t know what rms is about.

The sad thing is, much of the damage is already done. Stallman is facing a concerted attack on his character and competence and stands little chance of coming through it unscathed. Such is the penalty for daring to critize Mono. This garbage is already all over Planet Gnome, Planet Debian, Monologue and spreading.

“A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.” – Charles Spurgeon

It also notes that a FSF statement will be forthcoming.

If rms and the FSF won’t get behind – or at least won’t withdraw opposition to – mono, then the community will remain divided. The level of flat distrust for Microsoft and the level of flat trust for rms are obstacles to big to overcome by any argument I’ve ever heard Team Mono make.

If I were on Team Mono or Novell and wanted to put things to bed, I would try to get an statement from the FSF on what they want to see that would be satisfactory, instead of straight negative criticism on how the Community Promise is unsatisfactory. A rejection without suggestions is hard to overcome; but a “checklist” of things that need to happen provides an opportunity to at least do something constructive with.

I doubt this is going to happen, though. I think we had a chance here to move this thing closer to a resolution, but it seems like it is slipping away.

Team Mono + Novell + Microsoft simply do not have the credibility to overcome a rejection by rms + FSF.

Also: watch the knives come out for rms big time after the statement. I am predicting a blind rage from mono apologists attacking rms every way possible – and a ratio of 1 valid address of his points :  250 personal attacks.

This dude is my favorite pretend Linux journalist. He’s sort of like the Mono Rob Enderle. Seriously, if you have time just scan back through his mono / moonlight articles. Worth a chuckle.

Anway our hard-hitting investigative journalist starts off with a balanced look at the news:

Microsoft has announced that it will apply the Community Promise to ECMA standards 334 and 335, the specifications that describe the C# programming language and .NET Common Language Infrastructure. This means that Microsoft is providing a legally binding guarantee that it will not enforce its patents against Mono and other third-party implementations of the standards.

This is perfectly accurate except that it means nothing of the sort. Oh well, after 11 paragraphs of talking about how awesome mono is, how Open Source friendly Microsoft is, and how how awesome mono is, he finally slips this in bit at the end of paragraph 12:

The area covered by those standards includes the C# programming language, all the relevant parts of the runtime environment, and the standard library. It does not include ASP.NET, the WinForms APIs, or other proprietary Microsoft technologies.

And he follows this up with:

It’s worth noting that the popular Mono-based desktop Linux applications that were mentioned previously in this article are all using GTK# and other components of the GNOME stack. This means that they fit within the boundaries of what is protected by the Community Promise.

But I don’t think so.

I said I was willing to temper my criticism and give mono apologists the benefit of the doubt on this deal. It is looking like there is some fast-and-loose going on with the fact that Banshee and F-Spot do indeed rely on stuff outside of the standard.

Finally, I’m sad to see at least one mono apologist continues the grand tradition of vilification:

It’s unclear, however, if anything will be able to change the views of the vocal minority of extremists who believe that Mono is part of a ploy to undermine the Linux platform.

It’s funny, becuse I don’t look like an extremist. (rms sorta does though, I’ll give you that.)

He’s still against C#, but he has corrected the part about Debian packaging. This is hardly his fault as it even took Debian developers several attempts to explain exactly what the hell the packaging change meant.

I also wonder why the focus is on “C#”. It seems easier to me to point out the don’t-even-try-to-pretend dangers of the non-standard bits. I’m not saying that there might not be a few problems with “C#” specifically, but there are certainly larger – and clearer – problems with mono as a whole.

Mr. Neary adopts a reasonable enough position: don’t encourage mono, but he disagrees with rms that active discouragement is the proper course. He then rightfully goes on to point out the law is an ass.

The part I take issue with is the suggest that “ignoring the patent system” completely is the right answer, and “let the chips fall where they may”. This sounds nice and idealistic, but let me raise on issue:

Most companies are not going to “let the chips fall where they may”

You may get a brave individual to make a stand for a cause, but you will have a hell of a time finding a for-profit commercial entity to do so. That’s just the nature of things…and it is something that Novell and Microsoft exploit: time and time again, codephrases like “respecting intellectual property” and “piece of mind” waft up from the bowels of PR departments, always inferring (if not flatly stating) that Novell/Microsoft is the only safe choice.

Therefore, I see ignoring patents to develop on mono, but “respecting” them in Novell PR as developers rewarding Novell’s tactics. That just rubs me the wrong way.

You see, I  think Novell should be at Microsoft’s door everyday saying, “Listen. You guys have to clear up this issue – it’s too divisive and it’s hurting us all.” But they aren’t. Novell is content – if not downright pleased – to play up their exclusive arrangement with Microsoft and other proprietary sources. In fact, that’s largely the backbone of Novell’s current strategy – and just happens to be the vast majority of the Novell revenue stream as well.

So, it’s a bit strange to suggest that some individual developer or non-Novell project should be the one making the stand. It is Novell that is pushing mono – so it is Novell’s responsibility to make sure everything is clear for everybody. Until they can do that the community has the legal and ethical responsibility to limit the spread of mono.