Most of RMS's recent interviews have revolved around his insistence that GNU/Linux is the correct name for what Redhat, Suse and Mandrake grew rich selling. Most of the trolls connected to that also discuss how RMS criticizes Linus' use of BitKeeper for Linux kernel tree. Everyone seems to be so much about how he is Unreasonable and Impractical. So let's see rehash a few issues shall we ?.
Q: He is opposed to porting FOSS to Windows.
Wrong. He wrote his entire code base using Unix - a proprietary OS - so I'd say Firefox on Windows should be quite acceptable to him. After all entire GNU grew up from propreitary unix environments. The suggested idea is like banning visits to encourage immigration.
Q: He opposes making money from FOSS .
Wrong. He lived for around 3 years selling Emacs for $150 per tape. He predates (no pun intended) Redhat and Suse in making money selling FOSS.
I've met RMS in person and have had email conversations with him. He's essentially a Hippie. But unlike what others interpret it , he doesn't have any tie-downs to society. Hell ! he doesn't even have a password for root to his laptop. It is very hard to achieve that kind of disconnection from society. Indians would know know this as Karma Yoga - Salvation by Action (normally translated as "Service"). He doesn't want a compromise on Freedom - yours or his or anyone else's.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
--- Bernard Shaw
It's an Utopia he sees - but we may come near recovering the paradise selfishness destroyed ... Without him, we won't have realized what we LOST !.
Does the taxation economy screw the salaried employee ?. I've been thinking a lot about it recently. Government of India has a very profitable income tax department in which I fall in the highest tax bracket (ie people who are paid more than 160 USD per month) - which means that my cumulative tax burden comes to around 33% of my total income.
Let us compare that with a business man shall we ?. He is incorporated and has his own private company. He has a big house which is given to him by the company , a company car and take regular business trips abroad (to Switzerland , France or Maldives depending on the season). All in all, his company declares a profit of 8-10% and pays tax ONLY for that profit.
On the other hand, an employee of the same firm - pays tax on his entire income (the basic deduction is considered as the "normal expenses") and not on the profit. Essentially I'm getting screwed in no small fashion.
Economics is a strange thing - these people buy stuff to avoid paying taxes and I pay taxes - at least they get some bang for their buck (while I don't). All I get is a big Form 16 to fill in.
I wonder what I can do about it ... Nothing, I guess.I'm working on this PPC unroller - so I had to debug bits.
Program received signal SIGTRAP, Trace/breakpoint trap. 0x3003b158 in ?? () (gdb) x/4i $pc 0x3003b158: trap 0x3003b15c: or r9,r9,r10 0x3003b160: or r11,r11,r8 0x3003b164: stw r9,-32(r19) (gdb) set $pc = $pc + 4 (gdb) niIt's amazing ... I found this doc from the jikes RVM list - but that guy still didn't figure out how to do it the easy way by incrementing PC. Life's a lot easier now that I use gdb. Now to figure out how to make this a macro :)