Talk:Richard Stallman

Latest comment: 17 days ago by Some bored kid at school in topic activism -> terminologies

Jobs anecdote edit

When verifying this paragraph:

In 1993, while Jobs was at NeXT, Jobs asked Stallman if he could distribute a modified GCC in two parts, one part under GPL and the other part, an Objective-C preprocessor under a proprietary license. Stallman initially thought this would be legal, but since he also thought it would be "very undesirable for free software", he asked a lawyer for advice. The response he got was that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them, and a judge would ask whether it was "really" one program, rather than how the parts were labeled. Therefore, Stallman sent a message back to Jobs which said they believed Jobs' plan was not allowed by the GPL, which resulted in NeXT releasing the Objective-C front end under GPL.

using the cited source I was surprised to find that the source was primary: Stallman bringing up this anecdote himself in an email. We shouldn't use a primary source for such a big self-serving claim. In addition, the date is wrong, the email is from 1993, but the email itself mentions "a long time ago" in 1993, so the anecdote must be well before 1993. Overall, I would suggest to remove the anecdote entirely unless it is covered in reliable secondary sources. I've made a small edit to address the biggest issues. AncientWalrus (talk) 22:53, 28 November 2023 (UTC)Reply

The paragraph has been like this for at least 8 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richard_Stallman&diff=prev&oldid=625815748. Anecdote inserted 9 years ago here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richard_Stallman&diff=prev&oldid=625688744 AncientWalrus (talk) 23:13, 28 November 2023 (UTC)Reply

activism -> terminologies edit

the link "closed source software" redirects to "proprietary software", which is linked a few words before, so i feel like "closed source software" should not be a link - some bored kid at school 20:13, 2 April 2024 (UTC)Reply