Re: Steven P. Jobs 1955-2011: Here's to the crazy one who inspired us all...

[Richard Stallman]

    I would directly reflect upon Jobs' positive contributions, as well as bad
    ones.

The most important thing to say about these positive contributions is
that they were secondary, in comparison to the danger.  To exaggerate
them and create an impression that they balance would be to miss the
main point.

    I would reflect upon the positive contributions: Apple's contributions to
    GCC, contributions to LLVM and Clang, expansion of LGPLed KHTML into WebKit.

The contributions to GCC, they had no choice about.

I visited Jobs at NeXT in 19989, and he asked if the GPL allowed them
to distribute the Objective C front end as .o files and have users
link them into GCC.  I said, "I will have to discuss that with my
lawyer".  Fortunately the lawyer said that it would violate the GPL,
and I relayed this to NeXT.  In effect, Jobs tried to get me to agree
to something that would have undermined copyleft, but I didn't fall
into the trap.

As for LLVM, I think Apple's motive for pushing that was to outflank
GCC and get out of the GPL.  I don't regard this as positive.  The
idea that this was helpful because it forced us to compete with them
is perverse and twisted.  Yes, we had to work to limit their success,
and that may have resulted in GCC improvements that are useful; but
it was nonetheless an act of hostility to the users' freedom.

I published an article about Android a couple of weeks ago; I don't
think it is necessary to go into detail about that in this context.
Nor Meego, which in any case I don't know enough about to write
an article about it.

By all means publish your views on this matter, but I don't think they
are a different way of expressing the same views as mine I think they
are different views.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use free telephony http://directory.fsf.org/category/tel/