Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
From the horse's mouth
Author: Brett Glass Posted: 8/24/2000; 10:33:31 PM Topic: Next survey: Are you an open source developer? Msg #: 20163 (In response to 20158) Prev/Next: 20162 / 20164
Stallman is, as usual, hypocritical and self-contradictory.In the message you quote above, Stallman claims that he worked hard to "thwart the plans" of Symbolics. Webster's Collegiate dictionary defines "sabotage" as follows:
sabotage 3a: an act or process tending to hamper or hurt
So, by hurting Symbolics and hampering its plans, Stallman was indeed committing sabotage.
Also note that Stallman says that Levy's account of his actions, in the book "Hackers," is accurate. I've just pulled that book off the shelf, and here is what Levy had to say about Stallman's activities.
"This was RMS's opportunity for revenge," writes Levy. "Stallman had no illusions that his act would significantly improve the world at large. He had come to accept that the domain around the AI Lab had been permanently polluted. He was out to cause as much damage to the culprit as he could."
Thus, Levy corroborates the Forbes reporter's account. For nearly two years, says Levy, RMS pursued a singleminded, spiteful vendetta against Symbolics. Symbolics ultimately folded for reasons unrelated to Stallman's assault. But by then Stallman had expanded his spite and malice to target all commercial software developers. His vendetta lives on in the form of the GPL.
But perhaps the most telling quote of all is from Stallman himself -- from a recent interview in BYTE Magazine. In this interview, Stallman said:
"I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage."
The GPL attempts to control whether programmers can use freely available code. Therefore, by Stallman's own definition, it is sabotage.
--Brett Glass
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