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One must share computer programs.

It's the little word "must" in that sentence that hangs up in my throat.

Within the concept of "sharing" it is implied that such sharing is voluntary. Involuntary "sharing" is theft or robbery. To be consistent with that implication, Stallman should have said, "One should share computer programs." Had he done so, I might agree wholeheartedly. As it is, though, the "must" is a deal-breaker to me.

I love the concept of F/OSS, with the absolute requirement that such sharing be voluntary and intentional. I simultaneously reject the idea that closed-source software is inherently eeeeeeeviiiiil.

Voluntarily giving of one's time and talents to make the computing world a better place is one thing; holding to the article of faith that proprietary, for-profit work is somehow morally wrong is an entirely different matter.

Ditto on ‘must’ the author is either in the stallman camp or does not realize that stallman is running a hamlet where as most OSS users are living in a metro area where oss and closed source work together.

It's the little word "must" in that sentence that hangs up in my throat.

Same here. It takes quite a bit of hubris to think he can tell all programmers what they have to do with their creations.

"It's the little word "must" in that sentence that hangs up in my throat."

Same for me, and I'm a past president of our local Linux user group.

I was never all that hot on the politics of the free software movement. I just loved Unix, and thought it was really cool that people were volunteering their time and talent to make sure anyone could have a Unix for their PC. Stallman has become every more militant though, with every passing year, and I'm playing around with FreeBSD now (which has a really free license...as long as you give credit where its due for the code you've recieved, you can do any damn thing you want with it). There's a real schism brewing right now in the open source community (not the same as the free software community...important differences) over GPL version 3. Linus Torvalds has said the Linux kernel is not going to adopt v3 of the license, but FSF partisans say "oh yeah, how are you going to use a Linux distro without all the libraries and user space code that will be v3?", which is frankly, a kind of threat. And I don't like being threatened.