Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
Why is it "the in thing" to hate RMS nowadays? What did he do that's so upsetting?

For the record, I've hated him for at least three years. I wrote to DDJ about it, and you might be able to find some guy's commentary of my letter.

That said, RMS is hated because he's a jackass. He thinks that he is the ultimate expression of "freedom" or something equally stupid. Read this, then imagine it said/written by someone far less charitable.

Quote: Original post by Oluseyi

Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
Why is it "the in thing" to hate RMS nowadays? What did he do that's so upsetting?

For the record, I've hated him for at least three years. I wrote to DDJ about it, and you might be able to find some guy's commentary of my letter.

That said, RMS is hated because he's a jackass. He thinks that he is the ultimate expression of "freedom" or something equally stupid. Read this, then imagine it said/written by someone far less charitable.

I read it, but I fail to see reasons to hate RMS in there. RMS apparently likes to portray himself in a positive light, even if it means bending the truth. Big deal, that's part of being a geek. One of the defining characteristics of geekdom is that they have a desire to be better than others. Geeks in general would be less asocial if it weren't so. Let's face it, a geek always thinks he's a really smart person, and will go to great lengths to prevent his image of being smart to be disturbed. Even if that means being asocial to avoid criticism, so be it, figures the typical geek. They can always use the excuse that "they hate people in general".

On a forum like this, you don't have to go very far to find examples of similar geekdom. Take for example the post where you so eloquently demonstrated that you are better than the rest of us cretins by explicitly pointing out that you are above the common microsoft hating scum that lurks here. Or claiming to hate RMS - what better way to claim superiority than putting yourself above RMS, one of the most well known hackers?

So RMS is a geek. If that's a reason to hate him... kettle, you are black.

So I guess we should hate RMS for his opinions then? I will be the first one to say I don't agree with all of his opinions, but he sure has put his money where his mouth is, and for that he gets my respect.

Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
Or claiming to hate RMS - what better way to claim superiority than putting yourself above RMS, one of the most well known hackers?

My intense dislike of RMS has nothing to do with claiming to be better than he is. He's a far better programmer than I am, or probably ever will be. I simply don't have the fortitude to slough through all the documentation and rigors necessary to attain his level of competence. But I do have a philosophical or doctrinal opposition to his position, and it is his invalidation of all positions other than his own that makes me hate the fool.

I have my opinions. You have yours, and I believe that you're entitled to yours. RMS doesn't. If you don't agree with him, you're obviously a malevolent force of evil or some similar claptrap. "Software morally wants to be free" my foot!

YMMV.

Quote: Original post by Oluseyi
I have my opinions. You have yours, and I believe that you're entitled to yours. RMS doesn't. If you don't agree with him, you're obviously a malevolent force of evil or some similar claptrap. "Software morally wants to be free" my foot!

So according to the opinions of RMS, he thinks people whose opinion differs are wrong/evil. You think RMS's opinions are not only wrong, but even worth hating him for.

This is different... how is it different again?

Quote: I have my opinions. You have yours, and I believe that you're entitled to yours. RMS doesn't. If you don't agree with him, you're obviously a malevolent force of evil or some similar claptrap. "Software morally wants to be free" my foot!

people might hate RMS due to his big mouth - but remember linux would've been nothing without him and his movement - GNU. take GNU out of linux and you have - "absolutely nothing".

His ideologies are clearly mentioned in the GNU GPL - and he doesn't say - "Everyone under the sun should follow it !!", its your own wish, if people are happy with what the redmond has to throw at ya.... (well then :-/)

Not flaming here... just that we should have respect for our peers - especially for someone who started a revolution.

Quote: Original post by hplus0603
In a monolithic kernel, there's a large set of system calls -- typically around 200. You call the kernel to open a socket, write to a file, allocate a semaphore, poll a pipe, etc etc. Inside the kernel, there runs code that's assumed to be trustworthy, and gets free reign of the system. So, for example, a bug in a sound driver can corrupt your screen display, or worse, take the whole system down.

In a microkernel, subsystems (disk, sound, video, networking, etc) are typically split into user-level processes, and the basic kernel only does the bare minimum to make it possible to separate these processes from each other, and have them communicate with messaging. There might be a very small set of system calls that actually to into ring 0 -- say, no more than 20.

In a microkernel system, when you call sendto() on a socket, you end up sending a message to the networking process, which potentially in turn ends up sending a message to the network card driver process, or which just writes to a memory-mapped version of the hardware device. If there's a bad network card driver, it will crash the network card process (which can get re-started), rather than the system itself.

Sadly, system calls are much faster than message passing, so the performance of microkernels has never been all that great. All OS-es that want to optimize for performance end up going towards the monolithic kernel -- it's just so much faster. (I know from experience, having worked on BeOS for five years of my life)

Well, microkernels can be designed to be as high-performance as many other monolithic systems as well. QNX rocks, for example.

It's just that microkernel OS's are many times more difficult to design well than monolithic systems; that's one of the main reasons why linux > hurd.

Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
[...]RMS apparently likes to portray himself in a positive light, even if it means bending the truth. Big deal, that's part of being a geek.[emphasis mine] One of the defining characteristics of geekdom is that they have a desire to be better than others. Geeks in general would be less asocial if it weren't so. Let's face it, a geek always thinks he's a really smart person, and will go to great lengths to prevent his image of being smart to be disturbed. Even if that means being asocial to avoid criticism, so be it, figures the typical geek. [...]

Umm.. NO.

'Liking to portray yourself in a positive light' to the point of lying to achieve it is not 'part of being a geek', it's most of being a psychopath. Unless 'geek' means something different to you than it does to me, a geek most definitely values honesty more than they value public face, otherwise they would pretend to be stupid and care about hair gel in order to be more popular.

Also FYI, it's hard to spend any significant amount of time programming without gaining an appreciation of exactly how stupid you really are... of course, it doesn't raise your opinion of all of the dumb doobies who wouldn't be able to write a complete sentence, let alone a functional program. :P

RMS sucks because he basically says that commercial programming (which is, let's face it, how most of us here on this board earn a living) is inherently morally wrong and that commercial programmers have 'sold out' their ethics. He ignores the fact that while there is a limited place for projects funded purely by goodwill and donations, most programming is done for corporate clients.

Most of all he pisses me off because, reading between the lines of what I've heard from him, he believes that I have an obligation to give him (and the rest of the open source community) all source code I write. I exist only to serve them.

Piss off.

[clarification: the final 'Piss off' was not aimed at our illuminated GameDev audience. Rather, it was to all of the RMS-quote-spewing GPL weenies everywhere, especially the ones who used to regularly harass me about releasing all my source code because 'it was the right thing to do'.]

[Edited by - fractoid on October 19, 2004 8:29:13 AM]

Quote: Original post by fractoid
there is a limited place for projects funded purely by goodwill and donations, most programming is done for corporate clients.

Ahem. Novell, IBM, Red Hat, Canonical, Mandrake, Sun, Intel, AMD, Cisco, Computer Associates, Ericsson, Fujisu, Hitachi, HP, Mitsubishi, NEC, Nokia, Toshiba, Transmeta, Trolltech, Wind River, etc etc etc etc all do free software development.

They may well do a few open source projects, but they do not amount to a hill of beans compared to all the non-open development that goes on....

Heck, you could even say MS likes open-source because they released the WTL, but compare that to the masses of non-open code they produce.

aren't micro kernels much better suited for the upcoming multi core cpus?

i read somewhere that the design of the monolithic linux kernel is very flawed in regard of the upcoming cpus.