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AI.MIT.EDU!rms
From: r...@AI.MIT.EDU
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: info-gcc is not a common carrier
Message-ID: <8905310246.AA00550@sugar-bombs.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 31 May 89 02:46:22 GMT
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The GNU mailing lists are not an open forum for all purposes. We set
them up to promote free software and that is all they should be used
for. Any other advertisements of proprietary software, or activities
in support of monopolies on software, is also misuse of the list. We
certainly would take steps to prevent persistent, deliberate misuse.
Whether we decide to permit hostile commercial activities to use our
mailing lists has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Freedom of
speech means the freedom to address the public with the assistance of
such people as wish to help. Apple can do this no matter what I say
or do. They have the money to place ads in dozens of magazines every
week.
However, Apple's freedom of speech does not mean we are obligated to
republish whatever Apple wants to say. FSF is not obligated to lend
its mailing lists to hostile purposes. Likewise, Apple isn't
obligated by our freedom of speech to publish our criticism of Apple
in the publications they give their customers (and they surely would
not).
I am not considering adopting policies like those of Apple. I don't
think we should block messages which merely criticize us, like Berry's
latest message. I am considering blocking messages which actually try
to block our work, such as his previous message.
I haven't decided yet what to do. My first attempt to fight back was
by reminding all of you of the harm that Apple was trying to do,
hoping that this would make up for whatever Apple gained by misusing
the list. But if people did show Berry their hostility, they didn't
tell the list, and it didn't discourage him. So I must now look for
a different way to fight back.
The decision may be affected by what you people think. However, if
you wish to argue against monitoring, you should use arguments other
than "Apple's freedom of speech", since (as explained above) I think
that is not valid.
However, if you do disapprove of us for considering "censorship", I do
wish to hear from you. Even though I think you are mistaken, I still
want to know how many of you there are. Likewise, if you disapprove
more of Apple than you did two weeks ago, then I wish to hear from
you.
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garcon!garcon.cso.uiuc.edu!grunwald
From: grunw...@flute.cs.uiuc.edu (Dirk Grunwald)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: Re: info-gcc is not a common carrier
Message-ID: <GRUNWALD.89May31000443@flute.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 31 May 89 05:04:43 GMT
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In-reply-to: rms@AI.MIT.EDU's message of 31 May 89 02:46:22 GMT
I think that the efforts of FSF would be best served by supporting the AUX
version of gcc.
My reasoning is that e.g., a (good) C compiler on Apple would cost the
equivilent apple compiler a significant market share; this hits a
company like apple where it does the most -- in the wallet.
Similarly, any FSF sets of tools which replace commerical apple
functionality should be encouraged. Thus, using gcc to produce a good
version of the X server for an Apple would be inline with that.
However, this could make the apple more appealing to users; personally,
I doubt it, since it's very over-priced. People wouldn't be buying
an Apple because FSF tools worked on it, but they would use them & not
buy the equivilent Apple tools.
--
Dirk Grunwald
Univ. of Illinois
grunw...@flute.cs.uiuc.edu
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cs.utexas.edu!uunet!shelby!polya!shap
From: s...@polya.Stanford.EDU (Jonathan S. Shapiro)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: Re: info-gcc is not a common carrier
Message-ID: <9599@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 31 May 89 07:06:45 GMT
References: <8905310246.AA00550@sugar-bombs.ai.mit.edu>
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Reply-To: s...@polya.Stanford.EDU (Jonathan S. Shapiro)
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In article <8905310246.AA00...@sugar-bombs.ai.mit.edu> r...@AI.MIT.EDU writes:
>The GNU mailing lists are not an open forum for all purposes.
Bull****.
>We set them up to promote free software and that is all they should be used
>for. Any other advertisements of proprietary software, or activities
>in support of monopolies on software, is also misuse of the list. We
>certainly would take steps to prevent persistent, deliberate misuse.
[... context removed in which it becomes clear that the author is
talking abuot info-gcc ]
First, financially I have as much right to use the info-gcc mailing
list as you do. You simply don't have a leg to stand on, because you
have no right of ownership on the mailing list in question.
More to the point, if I post something to the netnews group gnu.gcc,
and it gets cross posted to info-gcc (which I am doing right now), it
is *your* fault, not mine.
>However, Apple's freedom of speech does not mean we are obligated to
>republish whatever Apple wants to say.
If you were a publishing agency in the first place, this argument
would have some merit. Since you aren't, it doesn't, and the group's
interaction with public forums such as netnews renders the argument
largely vacuous, even if you were a private publishing agency.
My damn tax dollars payed for your machines at MIT.
> FSF is not obligated to lend its mailing lists to hostile purposes.
FSF doesn't own the mailing list.
>
>However, if you do disapprove of us for considering "censorship", I do
>wish to hear from you. Even though I think you are mistaken, I still
>want to know how many of you there are. Likewise, if you disapprove
>more of Apple than you did two weeks ago, then I wish to hear from
>you.
I submit that you are exercising the same sort of fascism that Apple
is. It isn't helpful to Apple, to David Berry, or to FSF.
FSF gets a lot of rope on it's image as "the good guy" in this whole
mess. This sort of crap, if it continues, may destroy that image, and
it is particularly dangerous now that the media has caught on to FSF.
Just think about it, and if you must make proprietary arguments about
FSF, ground them in fact instead of fantasy. If you want to be
fascist, that's up to you, but don't be fascist about things that *my*
tax dollars are ultimately paying for.
Jon
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tiemann
From: tiem...@YAHI.STANFORD.EDU (Michael Tiemann)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: info-gcc is not a common carrier
Message-ID: <8905310749.AA01977@yahi.stanford.edu>
Date: 31 May 89 07:49:42 GMT
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It is naive, if not selfish, to believe that FSF can further its goals
by supporting, in any way, their software on machines built by
companies such as Apple. The rationalizations given are shallow, and
are very much like the ones given as to why the U.S. should continue
to do business with South Africa: while we pour millions of dollars
into the pockets of Pretoria, buying diamonds or selling weapons for
the purposes of "maintaining influence", we enrich and reward the
perpetrators of evil, which only gives them more power to brutalize
and exploit the people we claim are being helped by our policies.
By supporting GCC on A/UX, we only empower the people who would seek
to destroy us. There may be gains which can be seen by microscope,
but pull yourself away from the microscope! If we sit there, trying
to determine if GCC on A/UX has cost Apple $1000 or $10,000 in lost
compiler revenue, they are building a legal jail around us. If we
don't look up soon, they will complete that jail, free software will
be illegal, and years of hard work and all hopes that sparked it will
be locked up forever. In the case of Apple, compromise carries a far
greater cost than any benefit it can deliver.
Michael
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tiemann
From: tiem...@YAHI.STANFORD.EDU (Michael Tiemann)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: more bull****
Message-ID: <8905310809.AA01988@yahi.stanford.edu>
Date: 31 May 89 08:09:22 GMT
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My damn tax dollars payed for your machines at MIT.
[ ... ]
Just think about it, and if you must make proprietary arguments about
FSF, ground them in fact instead of fantasy. If you want to be
fascist, that's up to you, but don't be fascist about things that *my*
tax dollars are ultimately paying for.
Let's get facts and fantasies straight here. Your tax dollars are a
consequence of your income, which you derive from your job as a
computer professional. The high demand for computer expertise is a
consequence of the breadth and depth to which computers have become a
part of our society. Computers may well have remained top-secret
technology, built by the few for the few, but people at MIT brought
them out of the closet and into the hands of the people--you and me.
Were it not for the MIT hackers, computers would have remained toys of
the military that paid for them. MIT opened up computing. They made
it possible for us to play with, then to study, then to work
computers. The portion of your taxes going to MIT are but a small
fraction of the money you owe them for making your job possible.
Let's not forget that connection.
Michael
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!shelby!polya!shap
From: s...@polya.Stanford.EDU (Jonathan S. Shapiro)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: Re: more bull****
Message-ID: <9600@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 31 May 89 09:30:33 GMT
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In article <8905310809.AA01...@yahi.stanford.edu> tiem...@lurch.stanford.edu
writes:
>
> My damn tax dollars payed for your machines at MIT.
>Let's get facts and fantasies straight here. Your tax dollars are a
>consequence of your income, which you derive from your job as a
>computer professional. [...] MIT opened up computing. They made
>it possible for us to play with, then to study, then to work
>computers. The portion of your taxes going to MIT are but a small
>fraction of the money you owe them for making your job possible.
>Let's not forget that connection.
Whether this is "fact" is seriously debatable. MIT as an organization
has done absolutely nothing of the sort. Certain individuals at MIT,
acting on their own behalf, have done a tremendous amount of laudable
work of the kind you describe.
I have no objection to FSF being supported in part by my taxes, by way
of DARPA, NSF, and other funding mechanisms facilities that payed for
most of the machines and the supporting networks on which the FSF work
is done. I think it is money well spent, if for no other reason than
the fact that FSF has promoted some competition which has led to
generally better compilers.
What I do object to is when people use that revenue for the sort of
fascist bull**** that our friend at tut and a few others have been
engaging in. Kindly do that on your own dollars, not on mine and the
supporting dollars of over a thousand companies across the US and the
world that pay directly for the transmission of the newsgroups.
Newsgroups and mailing lists cannot rationally be said to "belong" to
a group that isn't the sole funder of the relevant newsgroup or
mailing list.
Jon
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triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl
From: k...@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: Attitude
Message-ID: <KARL.89May31090246@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 31 May 89 13:02:46 GMT
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<9600@polya.Stanford.EDU>
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In-reply-to: shap@polya.Stanford.EDU's message of 31 May 89 09:30:33 GMT
Would everyone do me a large favor? Please push your chair back away
from your desk, take a deep breath, and relax. Go get yourself a Coke
or a beer or <pick your favorite beverage> and reduce your blood
pressure by a good ten points or more. Put your feet up for a few
moments. De-hyperventilate a bit.
Sheesh.
A point or two, mostly reality injections.
Ownership of mailing lists and/or newsgroups could be asserted to one
degree or another. For example, Len could shut down the mailing lists
unilaterally and decline to give anyone copies of the old alias files.
"Possession is 9/10ths of the law" and other trite phrases apply. I
don't think Len would do such a thing (he seems to be too mellow an
individual, frankly), but he *could*.
Similarly, I could bend a lot of people's minds out of shape by
annihilating a dozen aliases from /usr/lib/aliases here, as well as a
dozen lines in my sys file. That would dry up the info-gcc/gnu.gcc
connection really fast - and thereby nothing written on gnu.gcc would
ever reach RMS, since he gets this stuff via info-gcc rather than
gnu.gcc.
(In exactly identical terms, I "own" two mailing lists, firearms and
firearms-politics. I exercise rather complete control over them, to
the extent that I installed a "fire extinguisher" filter on firearms
last week in order to forestall certain antisocial tendencies on the
part of certain subscribers. I can permit or deny access to anyone I
wish. And I daresay that there are no addresses of the form
....@apple.com in Len's alias files.)
You will, of course, immediately inform me that you could recreate
either the mailing lists or the gnu.* mail/news gateway yourself.
True enough - post a note to the Usenet in suitable newsgroups, and
you can resurrect the mailing lists; get a copy of Erik Fair's gateway
code, and you can rebuild the mail/news gateway. However, in the
process of doing so:
[a] You will lose time, the most valuable of commodities; figuring out
the configuration of the gateway alone will take you a month, working
from scratch - it's deeply contorted stuff, hence the occasional
breakages which we find and Bob gets fixed. It's amazing to think of
the thousands of irritated people out there when breakages happen -
and just think, *you* can take on the privilege of getting the
flammable mail when it happens. (Bob does essentially all the
news/mail gateway stuff - I am blissfully unaware of any but the
highest-level configuration details.)
[b] You will lose readers/participants, if for no other reasons than
that many would stop participating without RMS' presence, or a lack of
motivation to get re-subscribed to new mailing lists which might or
might not be as well run as Len's.
Granted, transport depends largely upon the ongoing largesse of
governments and corporations which pay to push the bits around. But
transport control != logistical control.
It's been suggested that taxes paid over the past N years constitute
repayment of debt for work done by CS researchers over that time
period. That's like asking for first cause in the Palestinian debate.
You're not going to get an answer, so stop asking the question.
As for whether Apple's stuff belongs here or not, well, I've got an
opinion but I'm going to be exceedingly diplomatic and refuse to say
what it is. There are several issues to be considered beyond the fact
of Apple's litigious tendencies. There is the question of whether
anything done by FSF can be large enough to have an effect on Apple -
it is entirely possible that there are simply far too many people out
there buying MacSE's to use as "dumb" Macs who are completely unaware
of the political outlook of either Apple or FSF, and those people may
constitute the real financial base of Apple. In juxtaposition against
that, there is the possibility that FSF could raise the level of
awareness of exactly those people and hence become sufficiently
"large" in their minds to have FSF's desired effect. The issue goes
both ways. Pseudosupport of Apple via availability of FSF products
could push the matter either way.
But temper altitude and bad attitude won't do it, no matter whose side
you're on.
All I really want right now is for folks to answer RMS' question
regarding how you feel about Apple, and for everyone to keep their
tempers in check while this happens. A civil question was asked; a
civil response is in order. Kindly keep the vulgarity and the
generally bad attitudes between yourselves and your officemates;
genuinely skillful use of obscenities is uniformly absent on the
Internet. Distribute some useful data for FSF's consideration
instead.
--Karl
Sysadmin of tut.cis.ohio-state.edu,
Home of GNU mail/news gateway
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garcon.cso.uiuc.edu!grunwald
From: grunw...@flute.cs.uiuc.edu (Dirk Grunwald)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: Re: info-gcc is not a common carrier
Message-ID: <GRUNWALD.89May31082402@flute.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 31 May 89 13:24:02 GMT
References: <8905310246.AA00550@sugar-bombs.ai.mit.edu>
<GRUNWALD.89May31000443@flute.cs.uiuc.edu> <16219@paris.ics.uci.edu>
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In-reply-to: schmidt@ics.uci.edu's message of 31 May 89 07:17:15 GMT
Several people pointed out that AUX doesn't charge extra for compilers -- I
had assumed that they were like XENIX & some other UNIX machines where you
had to buy a ``software development'' package to get a compiler.
If it's not the case that FSF products compete directly with priced Apple
products, then no, little effort should be put into maintaining Apple
compatibility.
However, on the same foot, should IBM products be support? They've engaged in
dubious pricing practices in the past, although that's largely behind them now.
And DEC has been suing anyone who builds BI-bus hardware and third-party disk
and memory makers. What's the criteria to be used.
--
Dirk Grunwald
Univ. of Illinois
grunw...@flute.cs.uiuc.edu
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!b-tech!zeeff
From: ze...@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us (Jon Zeeff)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: Re: info-gcc is not a common carrier (really gcc on apple)
Message-ID: <9410@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us>
Date: 5 Jun 89 14:07:47 GMT
References: <8905310246.AA00550@sugar-bombs.ai.mit.edu> <6808@ardent.UUCP>
Reply-To: ze...@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us (Jon Zeeff)
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Organization: Branch Technology Ann Arbor, MI
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>However, on the same foot, should IBM products be support? They've engaged in
>dubious pricing practices in the past, although that's largely behind them now.
>And DEC has been suing anyone who builds BI-bus hardware and third-party disk
>and memory makers. What's the criteria to be used.
This is what concerns me. It seems to be a personal decision by RMS.
Who wants to support FSF when they might quit supporting your machine
at any time? ALL companies have done things that are contrary to the
goals of FSF.
Don't ruin FSF in the process of trying to save it.
--
Jon Zeeff ze...@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us
Ann Arbor, MI sharkey!b-tech!zeeff
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!AI.MIT.EDU!rms
From: r...@AI.MIT.EDU
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: Don't blame me for what others suggest I do.
Message-ID: <8906051843.AA00243@sugar-bombs.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 5 Jun 89 18:43:46 GMT
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Person one:
>However, on the same foot, should IBM products be support? They've
>engaged in dubious pricing practices in the past, although that's
>largely behind them now.
Person two:
Who wants to support FSF when they might quit supporting your machine
at any time?...
ALL companies have done things that are contrary to the
goals of FSF.
Now here is my explanation of what is going on in these messages.
The background is that I said that one company is doing something
egregious, much more threatening than the unethical things all the
rest do; therefore, I will boycott it.
Then person one said that HE wasn't convinced that company's action
was worse than the unethical activities of other companies. So he
wasn't sure HE would chose to boycott that one and not the others.
Then person two assumed, from this, that I am likely to boycott any
and all companies that do something I consider unethical. (Note that
this contradicts what I said on the issue.) And he proceeded to get
bent out of shape.
This kind of thing happens all too often. Whenever anyone speculates
about what the FSF might do, or about what I might think, someone else
takes the speculation as fact, and takes off from there.
As a result, much of the discussion on info-gcc accomplishes nothing
except to waste my time and mislead the readers.
Who wants to support FSF when they might quit supporting your machine
at any time?
It is true we might quit supporting anything at any time. However, it
is not true that this is related especially to politics.
The FSF has never promised the public to support anything in
particular. And we don't plan to make such promises. Every one of
our programs carries a disclaimer saying so in no uncertain terms.
There are dozens of reasons, mostly technical, why we might refuse to
support something. There are machines already in the distribution for
which we won't lift a finger to investigate a problem. There are
features other people have implemented which we aren't boycotting but
refuse to spend time to look at.
Is this a reason not to support GNU? Perhaps for some of you it is.
But for most of you it is overreacting.
One of the virtues of free software is that you aren't dependent on
any single organization for maintenance. If the FSF won't give you
the support you want, you can call up someone on the service list. By
contrast, if a commercial supplier goes bankrupt, you are completely
helpless.