We finished the internship at Software Santa Fe. We learned a lot with César. We worked with .NET on a company project. Unfortunately, most of the time we were with Visual Basic… You’ve surely heard a lot about it: let me tell you, it’s a horrible language.

We also turned in the final practical assignment for Design and Implementation of Data Structures, which I already mentioned a bit in a previous post. One outcome of it was a mathematical expression evaluator. If we wrote “5+x*8/(1+x!)” with some value for x, it returned the result to us. We released all the code (the authors are Sebastián Galiano, César Sandrigo and me) under the GNU LGPL. That is to say, if I’m not mistaken, the code can be linked by a free or non-free program, and in the case of being a library it can be “used by” a proprietary program. The copyleft restrictions are applied to the library itself, and they don’t “spread” (as happens with the GPL) to the programs that link to it.

The repository holding the source code of the practical assignment (Java), which has a plotter and approximator, is http://opensvn.csie.org/tp_died.

The people at SSF (Software Santa Fe), on one of their projects, needed software similar to this one. We proposed that they use ours, letting them know that it was free, and that the changes made had to be published under the same license as well. After consulting with the people who make these decisions, they accepted and we started working. The work consisted of porting almost all of the Java code (from the practical assignment) to C#, and adapting it to the needs of the SSF project. Soon I’m going to upload the changes from the latest revisions of the evaluator written in C#, which, while it is a bit specific to the project we worked on, is still a useful piece of software.

Without going into details about this, and getting to the point, a few weeks ago I discovered an article by Richard Stallman that I liked a lot, and which I have now finished translating, but which still needs to be reviewed. In a few days I’m going to get in touch with the people in charge of handling this type of contribution.

I’m going to dare to quote some of Stallman’s words in translation. It’s possible there may be translation errors. If you know English, it’s better that you read the original.

My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.

Very beautiful words. As beautiful as those of Jesus, which I put in the previous post. Words that without acts, without deeds, are just words carried away by the wind. However, in Stallman’s case he seems to be very committed to this.

This example is very interesting:

Consider GNU C++. Why do we have a free C++ compiler? [Only because the GNU GPL says it has to be free]. GNU C++ was developed by a consortium of companies, or MCC, starting from the GNU C compiler. MMC normally releases its work as proprietary software, as proprietary as it can be. But they [created the C++ interface] as free software, because the GNU GPL said that was the only way they could release it. The C++ interface included many new files, but since they were going to be [linked] with GCC, the GPL applied to them. The benefit to our community is evident.

Maybe it’s a good idea to make a habit of releasing our practical assignments as free software. I think the appropriate licenses are the GPL or LGPL. Why? Because we want (do we want it or not?) our work to keep being free. That’s why we put those restrictions on our code. As Stallman says in the article, we use copyright to give other collaborators an advantage: they can use our code.

I like these words a lot:

The GNU GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy. It says “no” to some of the things that people would like to do. There are users who say that this is a bad thing–that the GPL “excludes” some proprietary software developers who “need to be brought into the free software community.”

Richard’s words continue in a somewhat different direction from the one I’m going to take now. I once read that the GPL is not truly free, because of the restrictions it imposes. What do you think? I believe it also mentioned the BSD, and that this one really is free, since it allows you to do almost anything with the code.

At this point an analogy can be drawn with the freedom of man. A man who is an alcoholic, is he free? One day he, with his own freedom, and with the perhaps many problems of his life, decided to drink. The same happens with a drug addict. They are decisions that affect our freedom. Someone who goes out every weekend, gets drunk, goes around with a lot of women, does drugs… is he a free man? It would seem so, because he does what he wants. Maybe later on, for some reason, he realizes he was leading an unhappy life, but that it’s not easy to turn everything back. Is freedom simply about doing what we want and feel like doing, that is, letting ourselves be carried away by our impulses?.

We shouldn’t forget that, besides being free, we are also intelligent and have will: why not use intelligence to recognize those decisions and acts that can ruin our freedom, and the will to say “no” to them? In his thoughts on soccer, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who was not yet Pope) said that “man’s freedom is also nourished by rules and self-discipline”.

Many times some people ask: why doesn’t your religion allow having sexual relations before marriage? And the answer is about what we’ve been talking about. Some time ago I read some words from Pope Benedict XVI addressed to young people on the subject. We want to be happy, but to do what we want always, at every moment. It would be like wanting, in life, to be a great soccer player, but getting drunk every day and going to practice whenever I feel like it. You can’t… you have to give up some things to attain other more important ones.

Those seemingly harmless little customs create habits. And a habit, if it isn’t controlled, turns into a need. I remember a phrase by Saint Augustine that says something like that.

In another part of the article, Stallman talks about resisting the proposals of some big companies that tell programmers something like “Let us use your code in our proprietary program, that way a lot of people will use it”. It’s tempting, but you have to resist, says Stallman, thinking about the long-term goals that this resistance to the pressure will bring. Incredible… this really is the attitude we should take toward other temptations in life, into which we often fall because we forget the benefits that firmness in saying “no” is going to give us.

I’ll finish with the following words from the “evangelizer” of free software:

Pragmatically speaking, thinking about longer-term goals will strengthen us to resist this pressure. If you focus your mind on the freedom and our community that we can build by staying firm, you will find the strength to do it. “Stand for something, or you will fall for nothing.”

Wow… what a great phrase that last one is!. Similar, very similar are the words of Xavier Caballero in a reflection on a gospel, which I transcribed in a previous post:

What is truly astonishing is that the vast majority of people do not fight to «be» someone, but to «have» something; they are not passionate about filling their souls, but about occupying a seat; they do not ask themselves what they have inside, but what they are going to put on outside. Perhaps this is the reason why in the world there are so very many puppets and so few, so very few people. Yes, you have to love the struggle. To believe in something very serious. To fight for it. To keep fighting when we get tired. To keep going when we get tired of walking.

I think Stallman is an example of a person who believes in something and fights for it. In this sense, he is very much like a true believer of some religion, like a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim, who in the face of so many obstacles that appear on his path to keeping his faith, in the face of so many doubts, in the face of the insults and the laughter, stands firm. Because he seriously believes in something, and he defends it, even in weariness.