When Rob Pike first met rms

http://commandcenter.blogspot.se/2006/06/i-cant-find-this-on-web-so-here.html

by willvarfar • 14 years ago

117 53 14 years ago

commandcenter.blogspot.se

Software patents are bad, okay? He got into them before that became obvious. Now it is. He is too stubborn or too blind to state this truth; instead he hides behind "business community is still excited".

Stallman organizing protest can not be more wrong than Pike not acknowledging the problem.

willvarfar5• 14 years ago

That post shows Rob's opinion in 1982, 1991 and 2006.

I wonder what his opinion is now.

Whatever it is, its going to be considered. But it doesn't mean it hasn't evolved.

gcb3• 14 years ago

my bet, it's an opinion that helps google monetize on software research. whatever that is.

nknight2• 14 years ago

How can it be said to show his opinion in 2006?

This is the only part of that post written in 2006:

"I can't find this on the web, so here follows a note I wrote in 1991 of an odd event in my computing career."

Everything after that is from 1991. You have no basis for interpreting the 2006 posting of this 1991 note as anything, save preservation of history.

luriel• 14 years ago

Yea, I'm a big fan of much of Rob's work (from Plan 9 to Go), but about this he is plain wrong.

At the same time I'm a big critic of RMS and his work (from GCC to the GPL, passing by the Free Software Song ;) but he is right that software patents are a very harmful monster.

mkopinsky• 14 years ago

What's the criticism of GCC?

stcredzero5• 14 years ago

As a devil's advocate, I'll ask, would software patents be as bad if:

    1) The Patent Office gave proper attention to prior art
    2) The Patent Office implementation of "obvious" was sane?

I'll posit that, given these two stipulations, most of the bad in software patents wouldn't be with us.

gruseom2• 14 years ago

That would help, of course, but what about the situation where A works hard to solve a difficult problem and puts out a product, only to find out later that B had already patented that solution? If A's work was independent of B's, why should B own it? Especially in the egregious and common subcase where B never actually produced anything other than a patent.

ahi• 14 years ago

Yes, but even if those two stipulations were sufficient, neither seem to be possible with software.

fffggg2• 14 years ago

"would software patents be as bad if"

You've chosen difficult wording here. When you ask if things would be so bad if we lessened their badness the answer is obviously no -- things would be incrementally better if made incrementally better. But this is no more than a tautology. Software patents are bad, in any form. They can be made not-quite-so-bad, but they will always be harmful to the intellectual development of society.

pfedor• 14 years ago

At the very least you'd also need

    3) Software patents expire after three years instead of twenty

which as far as I know would be a harder change to make than abolishing software patents completely.

watmough• 14 years ago

This is a lovely outcome, and illustrative of how people can exercise their right to assemble peaceably and make their views known.

In the wider World, we should think twice about criminalizing peaceful protesters, as some recent laws seem to be doing.

cite: http://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/ready-occupy-what-you-n...

babarock• 14 years ago

I enjoyed the story, but something bothers me (just a little bit). I don't like his attempts at sensationalizing the event:

> The protesters were surprised, I think, that my subject was interesting to them. At one point they all applauded spontaneously when I described a feature of the system.

Rob Pike is a renown scientist, at the time working on Plan9 , the most exciting project of the moment. He tried to portray the protesters as mindless sheep blindly following rms, where indeed they were smart people genuinely against the idea of software patents. After all, this is MIT we're talking about, is anyone surprised that these guys actually showed interest in Rob's talk?

I know that if I were there, I would've definitely put up a protest sign, while still being thrilled to attend the talk.

gcb3• 14 years ago

Rob Pike is one of my software architects idols. but he is a AT&T/google ambassador.

and a public figure. this is a good propaganda piece. it's interesting, but you can't ignore the semiotics of how it makes stallman looks pathetic (no eye contact) and the events all turn out to play right to the good side (a more pragmatic analysis would say that 100% of the audience were people already intending to attend anyway and they just decide to do so carrying signs).

all that said, i believe having both sides is healthy. and i'm not against patents. i learn a lot about reading them. my only 3 grips with the patent system are 1) patents have more legalese than technical details 2) patents last damn too long 3) because of #1 they give out patents for too generic stuff.

kiba• 14 years ago

Have you ever read Against Intellectual Monopoly? It's a fascinating account against patent and copyright in general.

I learned that the patent and copyright of today are totally not unique to our time. It doesn't matter if you do software or steam engine. Patent trolls exist in both era, and people who we think as heroes, aren't.

georgemcbay2• 14 years ago

"it makes stallman looks pathetic (no eye contact)"

I used to hang around the FSF/Media Labs frequently as a teenager in the early to mid 1990s (the era this story is from) and met rms several times and this description didn't seem out of place to me at all.

rms is many things, some of them quite admirable, but he is also one of the most socially awkward penguins you could ever meet.

kunj2aan• 14 years ago

>I also think they were surprised that the inventor of #4,555,755 was funny, theatrical, and clever

I respect Rob as a programmer, but that came off as a little too self congratulatory.

SamReidHughes• 14 years ago

And your post comes off as a bit too smug.

antithesis• 14 years ago

Yeah, it's certainly noteworthy, but one is allowed to do that. What I wouldn't like, though, is if he were overexaggerating, but we can't check that.

kanja• 14 years ago

I don't think this article could have made rms look better. He increased attendance to an educational event, while protesting a piece of immoral legislation. Everybody wins!

gwern2• 14 years ago

> I was congratulated warmly and people were excited about the future of software patents. Nowadays, however, the climate in universities at least is very different, and Richard Stallman is almost single-handedly responsible for the change. (The business community, on the other hand, is still excited.)

Written in 2006... O tempora o mores!

gpvos• 14 years ago

Actually, in 1991.

gwern2• 14 years ago

Hm, so it was. Still, he didn't modify or add any kind of footnote or disclaimer or update when he posted it in 2006, which is suggestive. One indeed wonders if he is still keen on patents...

chris_wot• 14 years ago

Seems to me that the protestors furthered their cause very well. By being peaceful, respectful and non-violent they showed that they were not just mindless drones - they were thoughtful folk of a technical persuasion.

Software patents are bad for everyone. Even those who have patents get sued routinely by those who have other patents. They must file patents as "defensive patents", even if they have no intention of using them. The whole situation is predicated on greed and stifles research and innovation. The only folk who make any real gain out it are lawyers.

huggyface• 14 years ago

"of which the worst is that AT&T has never threatened to sue anyone over the patent"

Earlier in the piece it describes AT&T sending off demands to prospective licensees, and then those licenses being "politely" returned. Is Mr. Pike really so naive that he doesn't understand that the demand for a license is entirely backed by the implicit threat of a lawsuit to force the same? If that weren't the case the participation level would be 0%.

romeodelight• 14 years ago

This is amusing.

I was told that among MIT undergraduates a bizarre form of political correctness had developed, putting Stallman in charge of a pack of eager misguided nerds who in a healthier environment would probably be protesting the killing of rats in biology class.

fffggg2• 14 years ago

This comment stood out for me as well, and strikes me as extremely disingenuous.

Another that caught my eye was "Free Software is like Free Love, a hippie pipe dream in which computing is free from venality, commercial interests, even capitalism"

I was upset that Pike could write such things in 2006 as this is demonstrably untrue -- contrary to being a pipe dream, Free Software has completely replaced the space previously occupied by ATT unix. But, then I realized this piece was authored in 1991, which makes this opinion merely lacking in foresight.

kamaal• 14 years ago

>>Free Software has completely replaced the space previously occupied by ATT unix. But, then I realized this piece was authored in 1991, which makes this opinion merely lacking in foresight.

I think it would difficult for anybody to predict how things would pan out. Linux wasn't yet there. Perl was still just the sysadmin's tool, yet and extremely powerful one though but still looked like a little advanced awk. Not until a couple of years later, when Linux was everywhere. Perl had eaten severely in most languages share.

No body could have predicted somebody could co ordinate an effort like building of a language or kernel from distributed locations, yet managing to build high quality software that would go on to rule the world.

And also look at the kind of people who built it. Although I agree that Linus Torvalds and Larry Wall had strong university background. Development of things like Linux and Perl happened in the most unconventional environments, to solve the most unexpected problems. Software design was taken over by hackers from academics and researches in big labs run by corporates.

For most talented people who didn't participate in those movements at that time, they basically a lost a shot at making their mark in history. Rob Pike is just one of such many smart people who missed the boat. That fact will always remain.

Rob Pike might be a genius. But the future generations of software won't seem him in the same light as RMS, Linus or Larry Wall.

algolicious• 14 years ago

I looked twice to verify that she needed the wheelchair.

I'm not quite sure why Pike wrote this. Was he afraid that the wheelchair concealed a weapon of some sort? But how can you visually verify that a person needs a wheelchair?

I also wonder what Pike thinks now that his employer is being sued over the violations of patents in their open source GUI software. The swipe-to-unlock patent strikes me as about as obvious as backing store.

icebraining• 14 years ago

I'm not quite sure why Pike wrote this. Was he afraid that the wheelchair concealed a weapon of some sort? But how can you visually verify that a person needs a wheelchair?

Considering the sign she had, I think Pike considered the hypothesis that she was using the wheelchair as a "theatrical prop".

tuxychandru• 14 years ago

The woman was carrying the sign "Patents Cripple Software.". Rob might have thought the wheelchair was symbolic.

pasbesoin3• 14 years ago

These reader-oriented top-level Blogspot domains are really starting to piss me off.

(The posted URL is blogspot.se, while the author is Pike, who is in the U.S. and most likely uses blogspot.com for his access.)

What, again, is the rationale for this? Other than enabling some sort of lame country-specific filtering?

P.S. Or is it in part specifically to provide a route around the U.S.'s arbitrary domination/control of .com domains? Symbolic as well, if practically speaking the U.S. government is unlikely to just shut down blogspot.com .

So, I guess I'm going from pissed off to trying to remember past conversation/explanation around this change.

willvarfar5• 14 years ago

my bad, didn't spot that when I posted it; hadn't even noticed I got redirected to a .se version before. I'm presuming its the same content.

pasbesoin3• 14 years ago

I didn't mean to address particular annoyance at the poster. If annoyance is merited (I'm no longer sure, but based just on the concept/precept of having a "unique" or canonical-shared identifier for content, I'm troubled), then it would be at Blogspot for creating this circumstance.

stcredzero5• 14 years ago

In the end, it turned out to be an example of restraint and civility in the tech world.

mtigas• 14 years ago

Note: The AT&T patent in question is actually 775 rather than 755: http://www.google.com/patents?id=UOMZAAAAEBAJ&dq=4555775

This was posted a few years ago and that also resulted in a fairly interesting HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607335

vph• 14 years ago

>"[RMS]: You may have heard that AT&T has a patent on a simple technique called "backing store" which consists of saving the hidden parts of a window in off-screen memory."

Rob Pike didn't seem to correct this as wrong or overly-simplified. If true, the patent is kinda nasty. The idea of saving hidden parts of a window seems like a basic idea to anyone who develops a windows system. I don't this particular idea is deserved to be patented.

enneff2• 14 years ago

Easy for you to say now. The patent was awarded more than 30 years ago.

downvoteme• 14 years ago

This seems strange. His employer uses GNU Linux, open source software and has built an entire business on it. So, in retrospect, who was right?

When Rob Pike first met rms

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