Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement
news.slashdot.org
news.slashdot.org
But you have to keep in mind that RMS advocates the free software philosophy - the complete left end of the software spectrum - the white angel on your shoulder (not the red devil on the other).
And while I find some of his points too radical to implement practically in my own situation, I believe it's very important that we have someone like him in the tech world. As a result, whenever there is a RMS talk, I listen to it. And each time I gain new and valuable perspectives about free software that help guide future decisions.
Nobody is perfect, focus on one's strength serves everyone better.
I don't think this is true! There are notable portions of the free software community that are farther left (or whatever direction you may consider it to be) than Stallman and GNU.
Debian, for instance, rejects the GFDL as a non-free license when the "invariant sections" or "cover texts" mechanisms are used. These are clauses that allow GFDL documents to include words or even entire chapters that cannot be modified or removed from copies of the document. Stallman uses this clause to include a section about the ethics of the free software movement in documents like the GCC manual. Now, explaining the ethics of the free software movement is of course an important cause. But the manner in which this is done - preventing the GCC manual, or portions of it, from being freely modified in its entirety, from being recombined freely with other documents or code with otherwise-compatible licenses - is, in the view of Debian and others, incompatible with the free software philosophy.
This is a farther / more radical view. Stallman's view is that making some unmodifiable and unremovable sections in an otherwise-free work is an acceptable compromise. Debian's view is that there is no room for compromise. And Debian is an entire (and quite influential) Linux distribution.
Or take the AGPL, for instance, sponsored by now-defunct startup Affero. There are many people (myself included) who believe the AGPL is a restriction on use, freedom 0, because it prevents you from using AGPL software in certain contexts where the requirements cannot be fulfilled. Suppose I find some AGPL code with a neat algorithm for a session cache, or something, and I want to incorporate that into a TLS library. There is absolutely no way to fulfill the AGPL's requirement to make source code available to users who interact with my code over the network. The clause triggers, because users are indeed interacting over the network, but since there's no TLS extension to offer source, I can't actually do so. This is, it seems to me, as much of a restriction on use as "You can't use this in commercial settings" or "You can't use this for military applications." There's a reason that even GNU still uses the GPL for much of its software - they know the AGPL would make lots of their code effectively unusable in contexts where it ought to be usable.
Or, in the left-libertarian direction, consider the folks who want to abolish copyright entirely. The GPL fundamentally relies on copyright law, else it cannot have its particular effect over the MIT/BSD/etc. licenses where it requires redistributing source along with binaries. The GPLv2 itself starts by saying, "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions" - there is a coherent political view that this is contradictory. There is certainly a popular view, popular among the BSDs and others, that those licenses are freer than the GNU ones. But there is also the farther and more radical view that even the MIT and BSD licenses are a compromise, and the goal should be questioning the validity of software copyrights the same way much of the free software community questions the validity of software patents.
(In fact, among non-experts, you can find a very common view that because something is released to the public in certain ways it ought to be "public domain." The Berne rule of every creative work being automatically copyrighted isn't clearly obvious to the general public, and it's a relatively recent rule, too!)
Stallman is influential, yes, and very passionate. But that's entirely different from him being all the way at the end of the range of discourse. It is worth listening to folks whose positions are less well-known but more radical.
> The GPLv2 itself starts by saying, "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions" - there is a coherent political view that this is contradictory.
There will _always_ be such restrictions. For an extreme, but derived from the same philosophical core, example: the act of murder is an individual freedom, but it imposes on other peoples' freedoms. So we have to make a choice between which freedom is more important: that of the person whose life is at risk, or that of the person who wants to take lives. The formal concepts are referred to as negative liberty (freedom from murder) and positive liberty (freedom to murder someone).
The modern world leans heavily towards negative liberty because we recognise that freedom isn't some absolute individualistic freedom, but rather that it is better to balance freedom in favour of most people. That's why stealing, killing, sexual assault, and many other things are freedoms we deem unethical and unnecessary.
Some people say, "well, it's just software" which is dismissive of the idea that software can have very bad effects, indirect and direct, on the world, so we must empower ourselves.
> Or, in the left-libertarian direction, consider the folks who want to abolish copyright entirely.
There are also those on the left who want this, but also to go _beyond_ simply abolishing. If you abolish copyright without requiring code and build instructions to be open source as well, you just end up with people and companies who instead keep their code secret.
It's why, when slavery was abolished, it wasn't enough. The former slaves were free, but were now in a world where the power structures were not in their favour, meaning they could still be taken advantage of and treated like slaves and were still being oppressed.
Libertarian views are usually rejected by the left as right wing, instead when you talk about leftists with less authoritarian views, they call themselves anarchists (or even reject that label, and say they're "doing anarchism" rather than being "anarchists").
Your example seems messy because people seem very opposed to the notion of a freedom to cause harm as even being a freedom. So why not avoid that complication entirely?
I think there is an even simpler example that'll work. If one is truly a free person, can they sell themselves into slavery. If we say yes, then allowing slavery is part of the package of ultimate freedom. If we say no, then there is at least one restriction we must include in the package of ultimate freedom. Package of ultimate freedom just being a spur of the moment name I've given to the legal system under which we are most free. Lastly, an answer of the form 'no one should exist in a position of being able to stop you from doing such', such as provided by anarchists, it just an alternate way of answering yes to the question.
I don't get how these don't qualify as a government. A very small scale one, but still a government.
But either way, that isn't relevant to the example. It is still either a yes/no question, and <insert your chosen name for group that believes in no entities of any sort that can enforce their will on you or change your behavior without your full consent> claiming that there should be no group who can stop you is still answering yes.
IIRC, RMS rejected forfeiting rights, eg public domain, to better protect users of software. Maybe the thinking was that the absence of copyright would lead to seizure (capture) and exploitation of the works.
I'd love to know how that's actually worked out, empirically. Like comparing outcomes of similar projects which used different licenses.
Most people would probably find his views and recommendations as too extreme to be practical, but he really does practice what he preaches in terms of only using free software for his own computing:
Wow. My first thought upon reading that is that seems quite extreme. Having said that, it just shows you how normalized it's become to track all transactions.
He and you could both live by the principle that you do as much to fit your principles as you feasibly can.
If you have someone to help you get online anonymously for free, you do that. If you need to pay to be online, you do that instead.
If you can get by in life without buying things and being tracked, you do that. If you can't do that, because it's not the life you can imagine living, you don't.
The more important the principle (to you), the more you sacrifice to implement it.
Low-to-no military spending is important enough to me that I won't work for a defense contractor. It's honestly not important enough for me to purposefully earn less than the taxable minimum (and thus pay no taxes, and thus pay no military money).
And of course by evidence, "Anonymous internet" is important enough to RMS to live an ultra-hippie life, but not important enough to use no internet at all.
If you do agree with parent then you are simply communicating differences in what is worth what.
You then point out what you see to be RMS shortcomings, based again on disagreement with parent comment.
Don't get me wrong, all that is OK, just nowhere close to complete agreement to the parent comment.
Which is it?
Personally, I really hate all the tracking. But I also really need to advance some aspects of my life because time grows short and I ended up raising my granddaughter.
(She will either kill me off, or I get a lot stronger! Lol)
So, I pay. But will also contribute time and money to good causes. Not happy about all that, but I need what I need too, so does the fam.
Tons of people struggle like this. It has to be important to have the conversations sans the judgement.
True. I'm not saying he can control the impact of his viewpoint, I'm making an observation on what that impact may be.
>and there is much room for debate on whether or not they're extremist.
Also true. I classify RMS as an extremist, but recognize that reasonable people may disagree.
>Some viewpoints can be logically categorized as being at the end of a defined spectrum
That is pretty much the definition of extremism, being at the final end point on either end of a spectrum. But then that's why I don't gravitate towards viewpoints that exist only as a single point on a spectrum. I prefer a multi axial approach that takes various considerations into account. Unfortunately for me that often makes it significantly harder to convey a short answer on my views, because they are fairly nuanced.
As far as RMS, he may have planted a very good seed, but I don't think that OSS would have gained dominance in many areas if there had not been more moderate & practical people working in the area.
One perspective would say "RMS/Free-software advocates are saying only free games should be played" -- but another is:
"If we want to have access to the code for the games we play (as a value), what economic, legal and technical infrastructure (rather than depending on current copyright, DRM, etc) do we need?" If that's something we want, how do we advocate for it?
He expanded the Overton Window (wrt FOSS). He created the necessary space for us to even have these conversations.
I have no opinions on RMS the person; I've never met him. But I have great esteem for RMS the ideologue. And I too respect that he walks the talk.
The confusion comes from the fact that beer generally isn’t, well, free!
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms
How is that not always going to end up being "free of charge"? Someone is always going to end up redistributing it without charge.
• selling physical media (e.g. an installation disk or drive)
• selling downloads from a trusted, official server (with the bandwidth to serve a global audience)
• selling support
• asking for donations
• adopting a patreon model (if you want so-and-such feature or modification, please fund me so that I can do so)
and so on. Admittedly, it is more difficult to make money from libre software than non-libre software, but that seems to be a consequence of the law allowing non-libre software to be sold as it is (i.e. treating software like other copyrightable material). "It's more difficult to make money from libre software" is essentially "it's more difficult to make money when you don't threaten to sue people for inspecting, modifying, or exercising ownership of the tools they use". We could similarly say "it's easier to make money when you can threaten people at gunpoint", which would simply be true! were it not for society imposing a high price (imprisonment) for doing so.
> > How is that not always going to end up being "free of charge"? Someone is always going to end up redistributing it without charge.
If you redistribute it. Doesn't mean you cannot sell your own software and allow the user to have the source code. The GPL allows the end-user to redistribute it, for free if they want, but it's essentially a non-supported, always behind version.
If the end-user adds some nice functionality to the software AND they then redistribute it, then they are forced to provide the source for the changes they made, which allows you, as the vendor, to incorporate those changes into your product. The idea is that, for any piece of software, the entire community of users will have the ability to modify that software.
After multiple iterations, even companies will get in on the act because they save money by contributing to, and using, the commons.
The point of the free software movement is not to prevent companies from making money writing software (that's a side-effect, sure), it's to ensure that the end-users' freedom to change the software is guaranteed.
Now you may argue that such a position, taken to its logical conclusion, will result in software developers never getting paid again. You may even be right. However that is not relevant to the movement's goals. Their goal is having a particular right for the end-user. Their goals does not include the well-being of the software developer.
It is pointless to argue that the movement, if successful, will result in software development being a non-paid activity, because not only is that not a goal for the movement, it's not even a concern for them. Hence, the argument is irrelevant.
That is incredibly false. It is always legitimate to argue implications.
It's not "incredibly false"; like everything else in life, it's "sometimes it depends".
In this case, making a successful argument against free software based on a side-effect of the movement has little to no effect:
1. The movement doesn't care. It's of no concern to them, so at worst they'll ignore it, at best they'll suggest mitigations. They aren't going to stop their cause.
2. The developers of the free software don't care. Many of them are already paid well even though the movement has been around for most of their entire lifetimes, and for most of them their jobs already depend on free software. They aren't going to care about what the implications are because in the last 40 years there hasn't been any negatives for the clear majority of developers, while they currently depend on it.
3. The users of free software (which includes almost all developers alive today) care very much that free software continues being a thing. They depend on it. Doesn't matter how accurate your argument is, they'll ignore it too.
So, once again, who is the target audience of any argument against free software? If all the audiences are going to mostly ignore it because it is against their best interests, why continue tilting at windmills?
> ...I believe it's very important that we have someone like him in the tech world.
Indeed. It feels natural that these yin and yang extreme-opposite archetypes exist as they allow the rest of us to find the center, therefor balance.
i'm sorry but i just can't read this without laughing. what does stallman think gamers are like?
i can only imagine the average teenage gamer trying to get their friends to stop playing virtually every game on the market and instead play some obscure game and trying to teach them how to install gcc and git to get it running
As a matter of principle he is right but for practical reasons increasing harder to apply.
His vision of open computing is self-centred and user hostile. It's basically MIT CS Lab computing at scale.
It's not even a new idea. Open source was a thing before Stallman - see for example DECUS tape sharing - and it will continue to be a thing long after him.
But it's not enough. Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is.
Modern FOSS is the exact opposite of open computing. Computing affordances are trapped inside an inaccessible technical monolith instead of an inaccessible corporate monolith.
To most of the population there is zero difference between the two.
..you're blaming FOSS for not solving the "programming is hard" problem?
> To most of the population there is zero difference between the two.
Yes, if you ignore all the secondary and ecosystem effects, such as getting to use the resulting free software. I have not once looked at the source of the linux kernel, GNOME, KDE, or Firefox, yet I benefit enormously from the development method and spirit that gave birth to them. That is not zero difference.
So the direct utility of open-source in being able to fix your own itches is in fact extremely rare, even for people for whom programming isn't hard.
There is a better point about FLOSS creating an ecosystem of usable utilities for getting stuff done, one I have availed myself of on innumerable occasions. However, I will also point out that the Stallman stance on software has impeded this goal on several occasions, since GPL or even LGPL [1] licensing can prevent reuse of code. This leaves me wondering how necessary the FSF/GNU stuff was in bootstrapping the open-source ecosystem.
[1] LGPL requires you to link software in a particular way to avoid the license spreading to your code.
* Microsoft is apparently pushing to make it impossible to install Windows 11 without a Microsoft online account. [0] I know of no FOSS with the nerve to try something like that.
* Non-Free games that charge real money for in-game cheats, and are of course designed to prevent you from manipulating your own game-state
* Mobile apps that request clearly unnecessary permissions, for reasons never revealed
* Mobile apps that sell your location data, and anything other data they can get their hands on, with minimal regard for how this might impact your physical security
* Lies of omission about fixes to security flaws, and their specifics
* Intrusive telemetry that can't be disabled (although FOSS doesn't offer a total guarantee against this, see Firefox)
* edit Lies about security properties that are hard to verify without access to source code, such as falsely claiming proper end-to-end encryption
* For more see [1]
If you only run Free Software, you get many benefits even if you're unable to modify the software yourself.
> Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is.
This cannot be done. You can't make a car that anyone can repair, either. Software development is a skilled craft. That doesn't mean there's nothing to gain in Free Software.
Today I downloaded a free game and having fun [1]
$ colossal-cave-adventure WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS?
And everything gets released on GNU/Linux two months before it gets ported to anything else.
It's not just about free software either (that's a higher-level target), it's also about the hardware and freedom of running your software on your machine, and owning your computer in general. For example, anticheats in multiplayer games is the major driving factor behind locking PCs down with DRM and chains of trust. It's already so bad that you practically need a separate machine for many games if you want to run anything remotely resembling a VM on your main one, and it's going to get much worse. (ex. TPM requirement in some games on Win11)
And sure, an "average teenage gamer" is happy to give it away, because the only thing they care about is cheaters. The problem is, this is imposed on everyone, directly or indirectly.
Now it seems like the vast majority of the needs and requirements to run software locally have been replaced with networked services and a browser/thin client interface.
Which means, that in order to do anything useful, you need to communicate with some other service that is running software that has access to your data. The 'freedom' to inspect the code that runs on your computer is useless without both the freedom to see what happens upstream, and also some level of trust or confidence that the service you're using really isnt doing something nefarious.
Take something as old and as open as IRC. I have absolutely no way of knowing if the server Im connecting to is actually running the software I think it is, unmodified. The only people who have that level of access, have root on the server.
Even RMS's free game example is bad. One of the players can modify their copy to cheat, and the other players dont have any real option in that situation.
How is such freedom useless? I keep hearing this argument, yet I still run a significant portion of software locally and have no plans of replacing that with services, given they are a far worse option, precisely due to the loss of freedom and autonomy for not much additional gain.
Sure, if you accept that all your software are belong to them, then clearly the freedom to run libre stuff is useless, tautologically. But maybe you shouldn't be ready to give away that freedom just yet?
That you cannot be sure what someone else is running "over there", on a machine you don't control, is a fact of nature. Trading away your freedom for a foolish attempt to control that is misguided and shortsighted.
Your argument sounds like it is against the use of software that requires such an upstream service in the first place, which is a fair stance to take. The Problem is when that upstream service is Necessary for whatever you are trying to do. Like in circumstances where interaction and collaboration with other users is the goal.
Until that service (such as a bank) decides that your rooted, user-controlled phone is no good, and forces you to use one controlled by the manufacturer, if you want access to your bank account.
The fact is it’s not just us that are stakeholders in the devices we carry. Our mobile network provider is a stakeholder, the manufacturer is a stakeholder, our bank is a stakeholder. This is why e.g. we don’t have unlimited rights over the bank cards or those access code generator devices some banks used to issue.
If you want to use your phone for some of the functions of a bank card, then some of your banks interests in the functioning and management of that card roll over into your phone. If you want to play a social online game on your device, then now the games company and the wider community of gamers playing that game with you has an interest in the management of your device. If you don't like that, that's fine you should be able to have as much control over your device as you want ideally, but you wont be playing those games or using those services.
Cory Doctorow is one of the few people in the techie public space that seems to have a really good grip on these issues and some practical ideas on how to solve these problems, through chains of trust based on users owning the keys to the chain of trust on their devices. It’s a really hard complex problem though.
Ah, you mean in the case where you have a different computer available to you, that has not (yet) been locked against its user like your phone has. But we are so certain that this locking of compute won't spread, that we treat all other computers (that are locked), as an exotic exception, and the only remaining class of devices not yet locked (PCs) as the norm.
> Our mobile network provider is a stakeholder, the manufacturer is a stakeholder, our bank is a stakeholder. [..] some of your banks interests in the functioning and management of that card roll over into your phone.
Having an interest does not imply exercising that interest is legitimate. Especially when freedom-respecting options are nearly absent from the market, and one cannot in good faith argue that consumers choose locked products among equivalent unlocked ones.
But most importantly, there's one item missing in your list of interests: the interests of a free society, that needs a populace able to use software other than only what is approved by giant corporations. What use is free software if none but a handful of hobbyists can run it?
> Having an interest does not imply exercising that interest is legitimate.
Whether that interest is legitimate and acceptable is a decision for the user. If I decide to accept the terms for my banking app, what’s that got to do with you?
> one cannot in good faith argue that consumers choose locked products among equivalent unlocked ones
I refer you to the market share enjoyed by the iPhone relative to Android (when it was moderately ‘free’). Clearly a lot of people, myself included, are in fact making that choice.
> the interests of a free society, that needs a populace able to use software other than only what is approved by giant corporations
How valuable can a fundamental, essential freedom actually be when hardly anyone understand what it is or cares a fig about it, and most of those who do understand it still don’t care?
Whether you accept those terms has nothing to do with me. What has something to do with me is that there is no bank that allows me to access my account with my phone, without requiring me to relinquish control of that phone to its manufacturer.
But you're right, I can always use my PC for access, and, when that option too is removed, go to the bank in person, to one of their increasingly scarce physical offices, and slowly get locked out of more and more modern society. Alternatively, I can try to proselytize free software, to be met with "Sorry I can't install that, if I unlock my PC I won't be able to use my bank".
> I refer you to the market share enjoyed by the iPhone relative to Android (when it was moderately ‘free’). Clearly a lot of people, myself included, are in fact making that choice.
Sorry, I expressed myself poorly - what I meant was that one cannot argue almost all consumers are making that choice. As you point out, many people chose the moderately free Android. That freedom is growing more moderated by the day.
> How valuable can a fundamental, essential freedom actually be when hardly anyone understand what it is or cares a fig about it, and most of those who do understand it still don’t care?
Extremely:
Apple Removes App That Helps Hong Kong Protesters Track the Police - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/technology/apple-hong-kon...
Of 3,200 apps missing from the China App Store, almost a third relate to hot button human rights topics targeted by China’s censors, such as privacy tools, Tibetan Buddhism, Hong Kong protests and LGBTQ issues. Porn and gambling apps made up less than 5 percent. - https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/apple-censo...
Apple orders Telegram to block some Belarus protest channels [..] Among all the things that the Telegram CEO revealed, here is what’s most concerning: Apple apparently restricts app developers from informing their users that some content from their app has been hidden on request by Apple. - https://reclaimthenet.org/apple-orders-telegram-to-block-som...
Cattle that waits until the day of slaughter to attempt escape does not fare well.
(I don't mean to single out Apple - they get the most coverage, but I'm not sure if/how much better the situation is with Google's Play store. Which locked phones cannot escape.)
If the bank and the game cannot function in this reality, then the only solution is for them to provide separate devices for me to interface with them.
In fact, I find it a total jump in logic and a fallacy to conclude that I don't want or need freedom on my own device just because I'm a heavy user of upstream services. How does that even remotely follow?
I personally think that its important to have that control and freedom for its own sake, but I understand the sentiment that "if my data is getting shipped off Anyways to some unfree system then why bother? I can't make the same guarantees around privacy and security as I can with a fully libre application"
Personal machines are actually new-time'y, not old-time'y. In the old times there weren't that many computers, and you accessed one via a terminal.
The difference is more in how remote services are now things you can't program and modify and tinker with, but rather closed-source "products" or "services" in shiny wrappers.
The decline of the early open hacker culture in favour of corporate proprietary software during the 70s deeply informed the idea behind Free Software.
You are right about network services working hard to own more and more of the interactions and make it increasingly difficult to manage one's relationships and interactions without those services.
Frankly, I've responded by making damn sure I have interactions with the people I care about that are not owned by these services. Should one change, or I somehow am cutoff, I can maintain my relationships and interactions with people I care about.
Regarding IRC, the resolution to your dilemma is open data in tandem with open code. Sure, they could be running an IRC like thing. But, your data, interactions with others over IRC, are all open. Same goes for email and such. You can take it with you. You can change servers. You can read all of it without enabling technology.
Regarding cheating...
That's a social problem being attacked with technology and it's going to bring grave consequences. Personally, I would rather not play than deal with what's being done in an attempt to prevent cheating. The people interested in doing that are playing their very favorite game, and the cost of escalating that cat and mouse impacts all of us. Impacts you.
Any problem in the last couple of centuries is being attacked with technology. That's what the industrial revolution is about.
Steam engine? That's a transportation problem being attacked with technology. Covid vaccines? That's a healthcare problem being attacked with technology. Anti-missile missiles? That's an international relations problem being attacked with technology.
steam engine has been adapted to transportation, after transportation was invented, they haven't solved any social problem.
there wasn't a transportation problem, there was a problem applying the technology to transportation, for lack of better alternatives.
steam engine in cars were banned until 1920s, so cars used electric engines.
it worked (kinda) on trains
main application of steam engine still remains steam turbines for power (electricity) generation, which is a modern technological challenge by itself.
> Covid vaccines? That's a healthcare problem being attacked with technology
COVID vaccines helped an economic problem, people would have survived by avoiding contacts
they have been in fact deployed firstly and foremost in developed (AKA rich) countries (2.8 billion people around the world are still waiting to get their first shot).
modern drug manufacturing is not about society anymore and hasn't been for at least a century now.
> Anti-missile missiles? That's an international relations problem being attacked with technology.
That's a warfare problem that has always been about technology, since forever.
Furthermore, this restraint tends to impact people unevenly. As ineffective as the government may or may not be, at least the goal is for all people to be considered equal in the eyes of the law. With technology the power lives with those who own and create the technology, who have even less oversight and accountability than those who make the laws.
Right now, our tech is not capable of understanding meaning a mere child does easily. This makes it very poorly aligned with the problem domain in that applying it will create at least as many and probably more problems than it will solve.
Other problem domains have seen better tech alignment and have also seen greater success, though one could argue we also poorly understand the new problems created in some cases. (Global warming makes burning fuels a much worse deal than initially believed)
The side effects inherent with such blunt instruments as appear to be required to apply tech to social, human problems warrant consideration well beyond, "just because we can."
In the future, when our tech is much better, perhaps it can address human, social problems with far fewer costs to those subjected to the solutions.
Just how much control over your life and expression do you feel is necessary?
Right now it is well beyond anything I feel good about and it has just gotten started!
Otherwise, I had been denied boarding in the Covid era because the software had had a bug, so I tend to generally agree with your sentiment that the technology has too much control over my life already.
I think this is a good conversation personally.
Now, are you unconvinced that the act of cheating itself is a social problem?
I did use course terminology, it could be a moral failing as well. I lump a lot of those under social. And that's to my detriment obviously. But let's sort that out.
And then there's the part I'm convinced that I understand you on, and that is I believe our current state of technology is not a good fit for social problems, and you believe that it is. Or maybe more accurately, the solutions work and you're happy with that I'm concerned about costs and risks associated with said solutions.
I think once we understand one another there let's have a short chat.
I was coarse. Reading through, I was able to see it
Life, people, come with a bazillion, edge, corner, intersection cases, right? I am moved by the likes of Lessig, RMS, others in that we are super complex! And computer tech right now is missing a couple big things!
Meaning and reasoning basically.
Context is hard.
In the "we just want to play on a fair field" context, of course! I get it. Tech can help with cheaters for sure, though I do think it is a temporary help at best. The really brilliant people with resolve get through and may well be as great of a gamer as they are cheater. The challenge, "real game" is what really gets them going.
One could say the same of a cartel leader, thief, and others who play this game of life in that way.
And we struggle with tech and law constantly!
There are parallels.
Poor law causes a lot of grief, wasted time, people enduring punishment that should not, and we have a process for that.
And it is a shitty process!
I would feel a lot better with a similar dynamic applied where we do reach for tech tools.
Another parallel: mandatory sentencing. We put people, many of whom are elected, others selected, who we believe worthy of judgement (And I know how debatable that all is, just roll with it for sake of discussion please!), into a position of real power, and we accept that because our lives are generally better for having done it.
Mandatory Sentencing is a mess. Now we basically take this complex human capable of judgement and boil it down to a more rule based thing not so unlike what computers would do. I am not sure that ever made sense. Whether it does is an interesting discussion, but what I really want to say here is more about where tech falls short and put some meat behind "social", as I should have done.
We are perhaps not so far apart on this. Seems my lazy comment got me a robust discussion I find far more worthy than the comment was!
Nice when that happens.
Circling back then, if I am to say anything, it is process which bothers me the most.
When we are really impacting people, ruining lives or changing them seriously, or improving them frankly, there are no do overs. Our time here is our time and taking that very, very seriously seems like it should matter a whole lot more than it often does with tech and social / society.
We are trending toward more bad fits than good in my view.
RMS, character that he is, absolutely does take it hard to an extreme. He should not have ruling power, but we need that voice, just as we need ours.
In that context, your push back was solid and for me useful and productive! I am better for having worked at this a bit. And these matters are important. Increasingly so.
I hope my attempt to clarify and back away from the worst of my thoughts here is similar for you.
We both are likely to come away from this tuned up a bit and better at the topic at the very least. (True for me)
Cheers and game on!
One area where technology is not a good idea is civics. Our votes the law things like that. At the present time, humans are best at managing human Affairs. That includes things like cheating crime who will be the leader oh, what's socially acceptable downtown, all that kind of stuff.
With voting in particular, we are in a position of forced trust with technology. It is going to be cheated, exploited, and has multiple times, and we really don't have options. We need people to physically vote and deal with the votes, or we're going to be under the thumb of the people that own the machines. That's pretty clear.
I am open to the idea of cheating not being in that collection of stuff that humans are best at dealing with. I also think we should have more options like we used to, setting up her own servers and what not like what used to be possible. And frankly still is possible. From time to time I like to play a little Q3A, and I just set up a server and run with friends. I don't think that game will ever die for us.
I want a lot of us, myself included, oppose is the very blunt instrument currently being used to manage cheating. It affects us in ways that really hurt the open Libre software causes. We can't know what's running on our machines, we can't run what we want on our machines, and so forth.
I did this on voice fall in the car, so please forgive typos, but perhaps this puts the chat in a better place. We shall see.
Social problems are just very hard to solve, and they're rarely made simpler by automation or algorithms. They often require trust in another person's intent.
This describes every competition ever; person A wants the winner to be A, but person B wants the winner to be B. Should we stop doing doping tests at Olympic games, as it's an application of (non-free) technology to a social problem?
What we can do put process in the mix.
The available solution coupled with time tested, production proven ways and means is about as good as we can get. And that is not very good, but it is livable and people value that a whole lot more than is given credit for.
Bad things are gonna happen no matter what, right?
Humans doing the messy human works are important. It ain't cheap. Never was, and for sure isn't now. But when we do that work, people do get options and overall harm is reduced, but more importantly, consent, acceptance, compliance all go up.
That dynamic is exactly why so many people oppose electronic voting, electronic court "guidence" and other similar things.
People are super messy, complicated and the strength of automation coupled with the allure of doing less work is the root cause for an awful lot of unnecessary grief, despite let's say for discussion, the best of intent.
But also the network is profoundly different than the PC to the point where "free software" doesn't mean as much. Picking HN as an example because it is really easy:
1) We don't control the content we create for HN.
2) At some point all that content will disappear.
3) If viewed as an API, there is nothing complicated to it (disregarding dang's daunting fight with comment threading & similar issues). We get a "post" button and a text page.
So there seems to be a freedom problem here but it is about data control rather than software control - far harder to solve and also not so clear cut an issue. Does it, fundamentally, limit my freedom if all my HN posts disappear? Since they are public anyway, does it mean anything for it to be exploited by someone? Things like the piratebay.whichever and youtube-dl have been in the news today as part of ongoing examples that the network is still a very free place for who we can connect to and what API they can offer.
And its almost always done to remove agency from the user and give it back to the corporation. Again, RMS is right. You can only truly have digital freedom if you are running your own software on your own hardware. It only seems old timey because we have been drinking the everything as a service kool aide for so long.
It doesn't have to be this way and it's not necessarily technologically superior. Its due to business forces more than anything else.
>Even RMS's free game example is bad. One of the players can modify their copy to cheat, and the other players dont have any real option in that situation.
Not everything he advocates for is always practical, the game example is one. You have to have some kind of central control in multiplayer games to make sure people aren't cheating. But there is still wisdom in what he says. We have single player only games that are demanding the same kind of access and control that multiplayer ones are. Obviously that isn't to prevent cheating.
And sometimes he is still right about a problem even if he sees every all of them as technological nails to be solved with a FOSS hammer. That's not going to work but he is identifying the problem correctly. Banks and governments are weaponizing the financial system against people they don't like and can't be trusted. How do you prevent them from doing it? I think ultimately its not a technological problem, its a political/societal one. Banks need to be reigned in and politicians need to be more afraid of the people.
I don’t know, I’ve been laughing at him for 20 years and nothing bad ever happened because of that. How is it unwise?
> For example, anticheats in multiplayer games is the major driving factor behind locking PCs down with DRM and chains of trust.
The driving force was (and still largely is) protecting copyrighted video content. That is bullshit, of course, but cheaters and video games were far down the priority pile when hardware DRM was designed. Now, it’s all about secure computing and sandboxes, and video games are still pretty much an afterthought.
> And sure, an "average teenage gamer" is happy to give it away, because the only thing they care about is cheaters. The problem is, this is imposed on everyone, directly or indirectly.
The average teenage gamer does not care. There are things we can do to improve the situation with DRM, but “how do you do fellow kids” from an old neck beard is way off the mark, and indeed laughable.
To be fair, his position was interesting in the 1980s. But he’s been hopelessly out of touch with the vast majority of computer users since the 1990s. He can keep harping on about the GPL and keep watching the world pass by.
[anecdotal]
luck has nothing to do with being wise.
anyway, I think unwise in this context means that RMS has been right more times than he's been wrong.
And very few of those laughing at him have ever asked for forgiveness for laughing at him or recognize that we owe to him some of the benefits of living in the modern computer era.
https://banksyexplained.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/LAUGH...
> The average teenage gamer does not care
that's why kids have neck beard parents to care (by law) about their future and safety.
But whereas a lot of others think the problems are structural to how society operates, and that fixing it would require rebuilding under a new economic framework, Stallman's only insight is that software you can't modify is the devil. DRM is bad not because it upholds a capitalist supply-and-demand system by restricting theoretically infinite supply, but because you can't modify the .c files yourself or send them to a friend.
It's an extremely limited way of thinking that ignores any external structural or economic motivations, and focuses on an unreasonably small niche subset with a black-and-white moral answer. It sometimes makes good points, mostly accidentally, but it still has a lot of misses, e.g. the religious persistence on "software" leads to programs like the FSF's Respect Your Freedoms with incoherent policies around hardware, firmware, and ROMs, mostly from a place of ignorance.
The free software movement was quickly co-opted by corporations as the "open-source movement" by executives looking to offload their labor costs onto unpaid workers, leading to a lot of under-funded core software infrastructure as corporations rank in the cash. Stallman's "Open Source Misses the Point" essay doesn't talk at all about this, it doesn't talk about the ways that open-source is about externalizing costs, nor about the way that it's leading to maintainer burn-out, it just points out that it's kinda bad that they're releasing stuff under the MIT license instead of the GPL, and would really much prefer if people didn't do that, while not realizing that was the goal all along.
The FSF has very little force in accomplishing their goals; it's a wet paper towel tossed vaguely in the direction of actual change.
Ok, let me reframe it. Do you have any example of anything being adversely affected by the fact that anybody ever laughed at RMS? Sure, he sound profound and far seeing, but his rhetoric is anything but subtle. He’s been way off for about 30 years now.
> And very few of those laughing at him have ever asked for forgiveness for laughing at him or recognize that we owe to him some of the benefits of living in the modern computer era.
I know what we owe him, but his contribution is long passed now. It does not turn him into a kind of universal genius. He’s outlived his usefulness as far as software freedoms are concerned. These day he’s more of a boogeyman than someone to take seriously, and he’s got only himself to blame.
> that's why kids have neck beard parents to care (by law) about their future and safety.
Do you remember what you did when you were in this situation? Personally, I mostly told my parents to fuck off and did whatever I wanted on my side, which was mostly what they did not want me to do. A condescending tone when you tell them what they ought to care about is not going to cut it. And I am saying that as a neck beard father.
sudo apt install nethackI especially like this model. You get the source but the people who worked on the game still get paid.
Romero spoke about this a while back. Several members of the team at ID, Romero included, got started on the Apple ][ computers. Those machines were completely open, software driven everything! I keep one as a reminder of my own roots, and the machine is still fun! (Romero keeps his too, as do many from that time period, but I digress...)
The author behind Beagle Brothers software and educational materials was a huge impact on many of us, and ID. They released their code so that others may create and so that their games live on for the people who enjoy playing them. Open matters, and that's why one can play doom on almost everything these days, as one example.
It's a great model.
What I've enjoyed is seeing the ID team watch what others do, and share in all the fun from a secure position having been well paid, no worries beyond that.
And frankly, they can STILL sell those creative assets. People would still buy them.
He doesn't care, and likely has never given a single iota of thought to it, as he assumes what is best is to think like him.
And dear RMS acolytes who will almost certainly bristle at this statement; I spent enough time around him and his satellites in the 90s/oughts, to feel quite comfortable saying this. He has near zero interest (and I would argue the capacity) to try to understand what drives other people, just the self-righteous purity of his own views.
‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’.
Also, I think that looking at history, claim that all progress was due to unreasonable men is false.
This is because the definition of 'unreasonable' is relative. For Edison, wasting thousands of hours of lightbulb experiment was quite reasonable.
For most people before him, it was squarely in the unreasonable territory, and hence it took Edison for lightbulb to happen.
https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/or-not-thomas-edison-ligh...
did they?
I think that in history those that caused quite a lot of damage to the World are those that laughed at unreasonable men, thinking they could not achieve anything substantial.
Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead or wearing toothbrush moustache, is purely coincidental
And I wouldn't disagree with that as an abstraction, but being in direct contact/proximity with him is an utterly dreadful form of masochism.
Being dogmatic doesn’t help here I think. Start from the fact (people must play billion dollar budget games) and work backwards. How can privacy be improved, etc.
Saying “solitaire has fewer privacy issues than this AAA game” is like saying “walking is better than driving”. That doesn’t improve cars.
I also like your train of thought however. Which is why I'm happy to support Steam in their effort with Proton. They surely can't make everyone release a Linux version, so what if Wine could run all of the games instead? I like this idea in general and it also enabled me to not reboot into Windows to play some of my favorites.
See, when hardware was more open, I was able to preserve and continue to play the games I enjoy. In fact, I can disassemble them, learn from them, make my own.
The gamers of today won't be playing the games of their formative years on their terms, if they are playing them at all.
This is just one of the many things Stallman is right about. Laughing at him is generally unwise. Ask a bunch of us how we know. Seriously.
Do they care? Lots of these games are like fashion, where the core gameplay loop is pretty similar to exactly the same as previous games, just with a different art direction on top. The fact that its popular is what makes it popular until its not.
I guarantee you that they will.
They might not think so now, but when in a couple or so of decades they suddenly remember a cherished videogame from their youth (maybe associated with the joy of discovering videogames, maybe with a memory of a friend who's passed away, maybe just because of doing videogame archaeology) and they cannot play it at all because of DRM or unsupported hardware (and the impossibility of porting it without breaking some law), then they will care.
The nostalgists who want to get Jetpack Willy running again so they can relive a misspent youth number tens of thousands at most.
And in fact there are few/no DRM issues for these vintage games and emulations, because they're distributed as binaries.
If I really want to play Marble Madness on an Amiga emu, I can, even though the original code was never open sourced.
The emulator community your beloved games run on is rife with dodgy things. You know, how to get certain firmware, how they cracked this or that protection, and of course the ROMs themselves.
Gamer nostalgia is a niche within a niche? I totally disagree. It feels like a niche until you feel it yourself. Most gamers haven't aged enough yet.
PS "the modern hardcore gamer market": I care little about that short-sighted institution. I want to preserve the cultural digital heritage of mankind, and videogames are a vital part of it. And because they are games, they are meant to be played, so a blog post with some screenshots won't do. If you disagree -- we are not on the same page, and it's not worth continuing this conversation.
Think of the situation with today's games 40 years in the future rather than 40 year old games today.
A lot of people thought gaming is shallow, but it's really not. It has packed a major league punch on culture, tech itself given its age.
My take is we're going to have the early Roots stories oh, because things are open enough and simple enough but we can get them, and we're going to get them wall a lot of the people are still alive. But after that it's going to be a mess.
Thankfully, I am PC gamer so most things work, outside certain set of DRM...
and I'm sure someone actually into the scene could pump out a long list of much better links than these.
8 bit systems, and I mean consoles, computers, industrial automation, enjoyed relevance through what is seen today as a long, diverse era of computing and gaming. The Apple 2, 1Mhz 6502 systems, was sold in various forms from 1977 through to 1994, I believe. That is crazy!
Sidebar: I snagged a 1990's machine and if you want to explore this early era of computing, an Apple Platinum is the most recent system and is very reliable. Recommended.
End Sidebar
Today, there is an active hardware scene with people making new old computers and sometimes extending their capabilities a bit. Jim Bagley and Spectrum Next wishbone example.
The MISTer FPGA system is basically a hardware emulation of a ton of retro hardware. These are hard to distinguish from the real deal, and connect to newer and old displays for a great visual experience.
Hardware cards are being made for the Apples. I have several in mine. Great experiences.
Games are being developed, and Nox Archaist is an Ultima style RPG worth a look. The C64 is seeing a lot of releases, AtariAge is where you can go for news on that.
RetroRGB has news on a lot of consoles, MISTer and others.
Sorry, no links I am on mobile and just killing a few minutes here. But, a quick google on the names will get you somewhere fun in no time.
Retro is pretty big right now. There is a lot going on.
Since joining some C64-related facebook groups after buying my TheC64 retroclone, I was surprised to find the large number of new and original games for the C64 being released all the time. And they are commercial, not free!
Really happy to find the community lives on.
And what I appreciate is a modern take on these older systems. It is a sort of, "what if..." it had all continued. The Nox Archaist RPG I mentioned plays GREAT. All the hard edges Ultima style games had are gone for the most part.
The result is a very playable 8 bit game in that style, good elements maximized. Too fun.
Stallman isn't a free culture person
[0] https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guideli... (under Non-functional Data)
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.en.html
[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html#exte...
Many modern competition games like VALORANT or PUBG are free-beer with paid food, built on free-beer semi open engines like UE4, and are also streamed free-beer on Twitch or YouTube.
And kids are moving towards F2P from paid games such as Battlefield or Call of Duty franchise, because the former category is free(-beer). The former is also startin in to surpass the latter in quality.
It’s “just” a matter of turning free-beer into free speech, and I think it could well happen as an inevitability, just not in a quarter or two.
The answer, at least partially, lies in free tools, engines, and community content.
Anyway Doom has this great community around it not just because the tools are free, thought that’s a an important enabling factor, but due to its cultural significance to gamers and games developers.
Doom released in 1993, its engine was open-sourced in 1997 (4 years).
Quake released in 1996, its engine was OSS'd in 1999 (3 years).
Quake II released in 1997, OSS'd in 2001 (4 years).
Quake III released in 1999, OSS'd in 2005 (6 years).
Sure, in most those cases they were at least 2 generations of their own tech ahead when releasing source code, but considering how they were at the cutting edge of game development at the time, arguably those engines still held considerable value at the time and far from worthless.
i am missing my unreal tournament days and would even pay money, if one would build an opensource clone where i could load the original maps of Unreal tournament and UT2004 into the game like with Command & Conquer: Red alert.
(UT2004 crashes randomly on linux and it's always a hassle with the 32bit libs)
There are certainly ways to run Linux UT2004 binary in modern Linux but it'd be way more effort than running the Windows binary under Wine.
Edit: the maps are different, but yesterday I joined a server that had one of the Quake Arena maps on it.
Example:
I mean that's a bit what quake 3 did, the content kept its copyright.
I honestly don't think it's posing a threat to the company who makes the game, because there won't really be anybody forking the game and making it better than the original creator, in a short period of time, while also selling it. It will only bring bad publicity.
This does not give you as much (legal) freedom as opening up the whole thing does but gets pretty close and most importantly removes most of the technical challenges for improving and maintaining the game. It's also probably way easier to accomplish since writing, art and music has even less of an open source culture than software.
Basically he foresaw people will not be able to own books. He is a genius who *really* does not care about money. That makes all the difference. Very rare to find people with this trait. To top it off he is relentless in his cause. Think if there is any one who can meet these standards. Very few.
Phoronix reported that 5.18 removed the Andes NDS32 CPU arch code. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-51...
The reason they do this is because a lot of these systems can break as the internal kAPIs change all the time and the users will not know since the embedded custom distro of software + kernel is not upgraded. Support can be broken for these arches for years until someone gets these systems second hand and posts about them, but may not care to fix it or it is cheaper to replace it.
RMS calls this a major issue, specifically 32-bit support in Ubuntu. I do not agree. My last 32 bit computer died a long time ago after the battery died years ago. It was a Gateway so getting replacement parts would be difficult. I also was never able to get it to run Linux. Aside from my brother-in-law finding his old laptop no one I know uses 32 bit computers (well except for myself with my Pi Zero: ARM v6, which I used once).
It just feels like the wrong battle to pick when Linux's biggest competitor is forcing practically all PCs to use a bootloader signed with their key. Major vendors can choose to refuse to allow users to install their own key. They are already locking CPUs (Ryzens) to their brand of motherboards with a builtin fuse provided by AMD. He of course talks about it-it just feels like the 32 bit part distracts from it.
Pragmatism will always gravitate towards the “middle”. But the middle can never be truly found by pragmatism unless it can see either extreme.
Without Stallman, the closed software extreme has a ton of supporters (Microsoft, Apple, etc) but the free software extreme has almost none.
What Stallman does is define the free software extreme which allows the pragmatists to find a much better middle than if he wasn’t pushing that boundary.
Turns out a bios flash can in some cases enable the 64bit functionality.
Its not a particularly fast system though...
Source: https://liliputing.com/2015/07/install-ubuntu-14-04-lts-on-t...
A friend of mine had one of those laptops and I wanted to install Linux on it. It took me a few weeks for other reasons (those M.2 drives were the worst), but thanks to the work of Ian Morrison, it was possible.
It’s enough for an embedded system, but vastly underpowered for desktop computing or web browsing.
I suspect most kernel developers mostly operate with virtual machines in mind, but as a sysadmin I would argue that physical machines also has their use cases. I also suspect that if the linux kernel stop supporting 32-bit machines, others will continue. Are the BSD people thinking about dropping 32-bit support?
"Due to the increased usage of OpenBSD/amd64, as well as the age and practicality of most i386 hardware, only easy and critical security fixes are backported to i386. The project has more important things to focus on." [1]
OpenBSD includes their Xorg port in a base install, and you can run a reasonable graphical desktop on a 32bit machine. Firefox is not packaged for i386 I think. I just use Seamonkey when I test the 32 bit image now and again. There may be other package limitations relevant to server only use. Seems a rational approach to me.
Remove 32-bit x86 support, and it will pin me down to the few 64-bit machines that i have.
Also missing a discussion about the role of open standards as opposed to open implementations, such as POSIX/LSB, picture and A/V formats for personal storage and streaming, standards for messaging, and the absence of a GNU/Browser despite the presence of so-called web standards.
To deal with that, consider using GNU/Linux phone Librem 5 recommended by the FSF: https://www.fsf.org/givingguide.
> and Linux being used for cloud lock-in
What do you want to discuss here? There is always a possibility to use tools for the evil. Non-free software is used for that, too (much more).
The fundamental reason is the shift towards the web as a platform, not the abundance of Free Software. As for the oligopolies you mention, the process is as democratic as possible with extremely low barrier to entry: many of the current big players weren't millionaires who had to invest piles of money into factories and wait for decades for their dreams to materialize.
> What about Linux (Android) being used as the prime spyware vector, and Linux being used for cloud lock-in (k8s et al)?
I don't believe RMS would object to that, he is not a Linux fanboy and concentrates on Free Software instead.
It's not like closed-source software would have prevented any of this.
SaaS is the only way left to force most people to actually pay for the FOSS stuff they leach.
Take a look at Ardour for an example. Red Hat too.
I should also note that nowadays Red-Hat belongs to IBM, so there are other forms of funding beyond support contracts for Red-Hat enterprise.
Yeah there is CentOS Stream now, but that isn't what freeloaders want.
Alternatives popped up literally days after the annoumcement of centos stream. We got back to original point. If you know the history of rhel and its clones, you surely know they used to be tenth of projects similar to centos, some much more active/reactive. The redhat funding of centos as a perfect rhel clone is more a parenthesis in history than anything.
So in the end freeloaders still get exactly what they want.
> Yeah there is CentOS Stream now, but that isn't what freeloaders want.
I would say that isn't what some freeloaders think they want. All the feedback I get from people deciding to stick to centos stream and trying it out before a potential switch to something else has bern mostly the same: a lot of fuss for nothing, their life hasn't changed and centos is still meeting their needs.
Recurring income is a stronger business model, nobody's denying that, but that doesn't mean it's an improvement for the user or that those producing software with a goal of financial gain would have just released standalone open source software if only free software licenses had been more sympathetic to their needs. Rather, I think if SaaS did not exist, if their first goal is revenue, many of these groups would have just released straight up proprietary software.
The "free" in "Free and Open Source Software" is free as in speech, not free as in beer. We'd like to think that decision to charge or not charge for the product is orthogonal to the decision to make the source code available. In practice there is some interrelation.
But FOSS was never "you can't charge for it."
And surely using cloud service, no matter built on open or closed or free or not software, will tell very little of the modifications that were done to the service and the packages. Basically I know nothing about the cloud-based mysqls, elastic searches, etc that are provisioned for me by s.o.
Recall that the thing that kicked off the need for Free Software in the first place was the 1970's move to an enclosure of software under IP law to enable the existence of a "software industry" built on shrink-wrapped products. This move often comes in tandem with hostility towards users and non-repairability, but the underlying key point is that of ownership vs stewardship.
What has made the OSS/free world work historically is a dependency on a few key organizations like the FSF or Red Hat that finagled some marginal and often self-interested incentives for the creation and maintenance of the software. Much of it had huge gaps in function or documentation that gave open source an elitist image, of the "we use it internally but we can't tell you how to set it up" sort.
But more recently, we've see the rise of the Patreon developer, who can command some pretty big bucks by being a visible leader in a popular open project. You don't actually need a huge number of those to substantially propel projects forward, since if they do the job well, the drive-by contributors are much more effective, and more user issues get addressed. That is an example of how stewardship is starting to take over software. It is not an evenly distributed phenomenon, and brings certain inequities of its own, but there's some potential to devise better standard arrangements of this sort.
I'm not so certain. There has been a strong pull away from GPL software towards weakly-licensed software, which is difficult to resist. Hell, _I_ have not been able to resist, and my publicly-available software is 3-BSD-licensed.
So, I would say that advocacy for GPL-style licensing and virally-FOSS software is still very much necessary.
The same goes for many of the principles RMS argues for.
> What has made the OSS/free world work historically is a dependency on a few key organizations like the FSF or Red Hat
No. Since the software is free, we are not dependent on an organization maintaining it. Naturally, if the maintainer "drops" a piece of software, that is a problem and a challenge, but still.
> Much of it had huge gaps in function or documentation that gave open source an elitist image
Unlike commercial software, free software is unusable if Joe User can't it figure out themselves. So, without documentation and relative consistence of functionality - it's of very little public use.
> we've see the rise of the Patreon developer,
No, we haven't. What fraction of FOSS developer can use that as a living? I'd be surprised if it's 1 in 5,000.
> who can command some pretty big bucks by being a visible leader in a popular open project.
Again, very few projects are this bug. Most FOSS projects have a small number of users.
He makes GPL to give users control over programs. Companies end up using GPL software to power server side software which ends up giving users even less control than proprietary on-device software.
He makes GCC to break free of vendors dominating compiler development. IBM(through Redhat) ends up being the major GCC contributor.
He is worried that companies will use their proprietary software that is sold in exchange for money to maximize revenue by squeezing users. Companies and up using open source software to create proprietary services that are sold in exchange for attention, and to maximize revenue optimize for “engagement” which is now tearing society apart.
Most computer users are using proprietary systems, but now they are cheaper to build thanks to open source software.
Who had/has more control over their data, a Windows 95 user running Microsoft Office on a PC, or a modern Chromebook user running Google Docs? The later incorporates a lot more open source software.
It turned out to be easier in the long run to write a compiler from scratch, than to work with GCC.
I am thankful every day of being able to live in the world where this is possible and having been able to do so from a quite young age - at first because when I was a kid my parents did not have the money to buy any software at all so learning how to use free software & systems has quickly been a necessity, and now because I know that whenever there's a bug somewhere in the stack I have good chances of being able to peek at the exact issue and if not fixing it myself, at least reporting it to the person who most likely wrote the code almost directly .
If you think all information should be free, like all software, then the creators of information are not being financially rewarded for creating it. That’s how you end up with cloud data centres making huge profits whilst most OSS projects struggle for cash. It’s also where the business models of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok arise.
Lanier makes a rather odd statement about how web links should be two way to solve this problem. I get his drift, but a better idea is that the web should be built on a more rigorous foundation (see Joe Armstrong’s talk - “the mess we’ve made” - for how it could work). But the general idea is correct - in an information economy either everyone is fairly rewarded for the valuable information they provide, or else you end up with giant companies capturing all the value instead, which leads to gross inequality.
Tbf to Stallman, he is more focused on constraining the worst commercial uses of software, but his fundamental idea that (as per this post) “knitting patterns should be free”, originally something that sounded like an exciting and inspiring idea, has turned out to be absolutely disastrous. He was maybe philosophically correct but in practice, the idea does not serve the best interests of most people.
Information shouldn’t be free (!!! I said that on HN) but rather information should be provided at a cost that is based on both (a) the cost of its provision and (b) the economic value that recipients of that information derive from it. So, for example, OSS authors writing code that underpinned Google’s empire or someone’s SaaS, should get a (small) slice of that pie.
I think once you recognise this, you end up in a really exciting place: like, how could this work in practice? What new concepts do we need to apply to information to do it? Some of the ideas of crypto should come in here: we need to be able to identify information uniquely, for example, so we can track its value. We need to know how many SaaS products are using Bootstrap or whatever. A new type of economy based on fair reward for information is possible. And for once, we do actually need a technical solution to a social problem.
I wonder what Stallman would say about anticheat software. Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable.
But without it, there's a client-side arms race against the server code which is a different kind of metagame than most players would want.
[[Citation Needed]]. Trying to play a multiplayer game that doesn't implement effective anticheat is miserable. The arms race is unfortunate but 100% understandable, and I wouldn't play any game that doesn't implement some form of it.
More probably, the point here is most anticheats are very invasive and harmful to privacy, while also degrading game performance and often being ineffective at preventing cheaters.
[Citation needed] at the last part. Of course they're not gonna prevent 100% of cheaters, but I have doubts that they don't do anything.
OP's point here was that anticheat - while necessary in practice - is particularly egregious at invading privacy and/or degrading the user's experience, which i think is fair to say goes against the free software ideal. the experience would certainly be worse without any anticheat, but that doesn't mean anticheat couldn't be better or isn't still very non-free.
In the old days, you would play multiplayer with your friends and their friends on a private server or some kind of community server where cheaters could quickly be recognized and banned by the admins. Now this communal way of playing online games is largely gone and replaced by match making which makes multiplayer basically the same as playing against cleverer bots.
Match making is more convenient, especially for lone players, and I don't think the change was done out of malice. Still, it feels like something was lost with the disappearance of private or semi-private community servers, easy policing of cheaters being one of those things.
For a game to attract the amount of people required to finance AAA gamedev it needs console matchmaking (so people can enjoy it from the first minute), it might need to allow trustworthy competitive games bevause competitions are part of marketing.
Being able to switch off the anticheats on private/community server that are policed by admins would work. But again it’s a pretty small niche.
Anti-piracy: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling the sale of products because technology has radically reduced "manufacture" and distribution costs.
Anti-cheat: trying to address the lack of abuse of trust while scaling game coordination because tech. has made massive interconnectivity possible
Anti-cryptography: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling communication tools.
I do miss the quirky nature of private servers, custom maps and game mods, and all of that, but cheating was a big problem back then too.
The problem is mixing purposes to the point where most people don't even have access to a free computing system.
What has Stallman said about walled gardens and app stores?
Maybe a GCW Zero or an OUYA or similar (and yes, I'm aware of the current status of the system). Fortunately, because these are linux or android based and thus open source, you still have the freedom to compile your own kernels for them.
I do not hate anticheat as a gamer, but I do hate DRMs.
Claiming that knowing how the code works lets you break the code is basically advocating for security by obscurity which I'm fairly sure we're all aware it's not the holy grail of a secure system. If you will allow me a bit of a hyperbole, it'd be like saying that since I have access to the entire code of my SSH client, that gives me the capability of modifying it so it lets me connect to every server (even those that I do not own) without a password. That's simply not how it works.
>advocating for security by obscurity
There is nothing wrong with this as long as you understand what you are doing. The goal of anticheat is to prevent cheat makers from being able to make cheats for your game for as long as possible. Increasing the time and skill needed to reverse engineer your anticheat increases the time it takes for someone to develop a cheat.
>it'd be like saying that since I have access to the entire code of my SSH client, that gives me the capability of modifying it so it lets me connect to every server (even those that I do not own) without a password
With this kind of problem of authentication it is simple to design the code such that the time it will take for an attacker to break the security to be impractical. Anticheat on the other hand is not a problem that has a solution like that. If you want to check if a click came from a mouse or a cheat program and you trust the client to tell you where it came from it's impossible to prevent the client from lying. Since it's trivial to lie you need to find a way to slow down attackers to make it harder to lie.
There are already VMs that are used to run trusted instructions on a target (read: client) machine and regardless of you knowing how the VM works and what the code does, if you don't "play by the rules" (as is the world of cryptography), your data will not be accepted and you will get kicked/banned/disconnected.
Is it computationally expensive? Probably. Is it feasible? I don't know. Is it theoretically possible? I'd say so.
>Increasing the time and skill needed to reverse engineer your anticheat increases the time it takes for someone to develop a cheat.
This is the good ol' security by obscurity fallacy. Having it open increases the amount of people who have eyes on the code and contribute to the code and finds exploits to patch, etc. It's two sides of the same coin.
>Having it open increases the amount of people who have eyes on the code and contribute to the code and finds exploits to patch, etc.
If your detection is to collect the names of the open windows on a computer to check for a cheat's name and then send the anticheat server the hash of the binary that opened that window how is making that information public making the anticheat stronger. The more eyes that look at that code the more cheaters who know to name their cheat windows as "Notepad." To avoid being found. If you find an exploit there is no patch.
Detecting cheating by window names? Who is getting paid writing this crap?
I'm not sure what you are expecting. Either you try and locate cheats on the machine / in memory via some heuristic or look for software that is acting suspicious like trying to write into your game's memory.
How can you possibly verify the mouse was moved by a human rather than a script when the script had the ability to lie about any check you put in place. In the end it comes to making the check so hard to understand that you can’t work it out fast enough to keep ahead.
I don’t want to play a game with a bunch of cheaters, and I don’t want to have to filter down to “friends I know won’t cheat “ to play a game with others.
Also what if I don't have friends who play the same game and I'm not interested in making any?
Generally the people who are actually into multiplayer games accept anticheat software as a necessary evil. Yes, they're not exactly enthused about what amounts to game-supporting spyware, but playing a game that's rife with hackers is a miserable experience.
The only multi-player games I play are with friends or their friends, ie people I already trust. The only social media i use is group chats with friends. Of course, you can have more open and anonymous spaces like we have here on HN, but you need more moderation and the moderators need to feel some sense of pride/ownership to keep on working for free.
I used to play competitive dota (the original wc3 map) back in the day and the inhouse leagues were a massive pain in the ass. Same with all the various leagues for counter strike (1.6 at the time). UX was terrible, the moderation sucked and you still had to have anti-cheat as people would cheat even in private spaces. Usually the easiest way to get up the ladder was do something dubious and be good friends with the mods so they would rule in your favor.
People use cheats even at LAN events too. So yeah for competitive multiplayer anti-cheat is pretty much required.
For average players yes, central developer driven model is much easier and simpler.
Also smash is played on consoles that prevent one from installing cheats basically the fact that the whole platform is fully locked down is the anti-cheat. Still controllers are sometimes checked at tournaments for any additions that can run macros (most adapters that allow one to use a different consoles controller can do this)
https://www.polygon.com/2020/11/19/21578200/super-smash-bros...
This is more of an "exception that proves the rule" since Smash is pretty much the only competitive game with zero centralized support that has broken out of a tiny niche to compete with big names.
Fake lag is in a similar situation. The server could simply hold the true state of all positioning and ignore what the clients think is their position. This might work fine in a very low latency situation, but as latency increase it would make playing the game feel sluggish. It would also make aiming difficult, since the key press for fire would have to travel to the server in order for it to occur, and by then the location of players could have shifted.
Trigger bots however is mostly impossible to stop server side. Any action that is identical to human actions can only really be detected through statistics and heuristics.
Which is why games that do that will still send you data about player who you are almost able to see. This will be their exact position and look direction along with what they are holding. Even limited wallhacks can give a competitive advantage.
I think you misunderstand fake lag. With fake lag you get fake packet loss / latency which causes your character to stutter making it harder to aim at you. The server isn't getting a regular stream of updates of your position.
With Client side movement, Player A sends in even intervals their location to the server. Let say they move right for 3 unit of time, the location get updated from 0:0, 0:1, 0:2. The server then relay the information to Player B.
With Server side movement, Player A tells the server they want to move to the right. The server create a path over time, 0:0, 0:1, 0:2, ... and continuously sends this to player B.
Let now add a fake lag with client side movement. In the first case the we see Player A send locations like 0:0, 0:1, -, -, -, 0:5. The server sends this to player B. If Player B fired a gun at 0:2 at the third interval they might miss because player A is not there. The server might extrapolate an virtual path between 0:1 and 0:5, but that depend on game logic.
Lets now add a fake lag with server side movement. Player A tells the server that they want to move right. After 2 units they add a 3 unit lag, and finally sends tells the server a stop command. The server would construct the following path: 0:0 (start moving player A), 0:1, 0:2, 0:3, 0:4, 0:5 (halt moving Player A). If Player B fired a gun at 0:2 at the third interval, the server see that player A is at that location and will mark a hit.
This is why server side movement isn't vulnerable to fake lag. The server has the full game state and thus know at any point where all player are and what they are doing, and if the client lag then it simply mean that their input gets delayed. Server side movement is however vulnerable to real lag, as between any action there might be a delay and thus events might not occur at the server when players want it to occur. Server side movement is also slightly more vulnerable to ddos attacks if players can identify the IP address of other players.
Player A may send 0:0, 0:1, -, -, -, 0:2 0:3 0:4 0:5
The location for 0:2 that B would have been wrong via your approach. If player A's actual location at 0:2 isn't about the same B will miss his shot.
Imagine you are talking over the phone to someone who is driving, given them directions. That is server side movements. If you suddenly stop talking, the car doesn't just stop, nor does the traffic. All you have accomplished is that the driver is no longer getting any further instructions from you.
This exists with anticheat, too.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/04/16/238221/richard-stal...
https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/04/16/238221/richard-stal...
https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/04/16/2154203/richard-sta...
That is, are two different slashdot posts about the different aspects of the talk, and the above link is to the earlier of the posts.
We want original sources here. From the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):
"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
(For the purposes of that guideline, copying and pasting someone else's work counts as 'reporting on'.)
The original posted URL was: https://lunduke.substack.com/p/richard-stallman-the-state-of...
The grandparent comment says that Lunduke ripped off Slashdot. I don't see that. There is one quote that's the same and several that I see that are different. You claim you changed it to the original source... the original source would be the Libreplanet link here: https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/the-state-of-t...
So both Lunduke and Slashdot are posting news about LibrePlanet and it's not clear one ripped off the other, other than having one quote that's the same.
It seems like you went with the above commenters without investigating.
I have no affiliation with Lunduke. I'm not a paid subscriber to his journal, I just get it by email sometimes.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/04/16/2154203/richard-sta...
> “Due to unforeseen technical difficulties, RMS gave his talk over audio only.”
You can’t put the onus on him to personally write and fix all software he uses. He has written quite large amounts of software, so I’d say he’s done more than his share. He is still, if only tangentially, involved in some software, and you could perhaps reasonably criticize him if he were using, say, Emacs to do his presentation, and there was a bug preventing him.
Emacs doesn't have video conferencing yet?
I feel this all the time, especially on my iPad Pro: I'm buying much more idevices than before, because I don't like the direction Windows has taken, and Apple gets always the newest TSMC slots (I buy the newest products from TSMC, they just happen to be made together with Apple).
Had they been looking into definitively getting rid of un happiness, they would have killed everyone ASAP.
40 years later, trying to get something running on a modern Mac is painful, and they gatekeep it with Xcode and a variety of user hostile features. They have become what they despised in that 1984 commercial.
It makes me just a little angry. No wonder people are so nostalgic for 8 bit stuff.
Right click on app, select ‘open’. If you get a prompt warning about an unknown developer, pick the option to run the app anyway.
Getting angry about a prompt that you only ever see once (it won’t prompt you again) seems extreme.
Yeah, it works most of the time. But when it doesn’t, e.g. due to some post-build script that massages the binary after signing it, it brings you a world of pain.
Use codesign -s - path to binary to recompute the checksum.
And often enough, it just doesn’t work at all ([1] ballpark number of issues, [2] one example case where I can confirm that I was affected myself).
Apple’s codesigning is hell.
[1]: https://github.com/search?q=org%3AHomebrew+codesign&type=iss...
[2]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857#issuecomment-71...
Scenario: you want to sell an app for Mac.
You can put it on the Mac app store and pay Apple’s tax (and live at the mercy of Apple, who are a terrible business partner)
Or you can sell it through your website and not pay Apple’s tax. Except if you do this, Apple will tell your customers that you’re potentially a virus, and you have to invest more on customer support and education materials just to teach people how to launch your app (through no fault of your own). In some cases, it’s just not feasible to do this, and you just have to accept reduced sales and/or increased returns/chargebacks from angry customers that blame you for Apple’s decision.
Apple’s Mac app store has a huge competitive advantage thanks to this unfair practice. Your competitors will beat you if they put their app on the Mac app store, no matter how much money you invest into advertising and improving your product.
That’s anti-competitive behavior from a monopolist. It’s the same situation on Android (it’s actually worse on Android, as Google is the pioneer in this field)
Being forced to use XCode to sign .NET assemblies before they will run. You can build and run a self contained .NET program on literally anything from a Pi to a multi-processor rack server running Windows or Linux and it just works. Not on a Mac though, gotta jump through Apple hoops before that happens.
Apple deciding that your new iPhone isn't allowed to talk to your old Mac.
Being forced to use a Mac to do iPhone development, despite XCode being the runt of the litter of development environments.
Weird, old, crippled BSD for an operating system? Why not! Having to install a package manager as a seperate thing just to install boring stuff that comes with most Linux distributions. Why don't apple install Homebrew by default? Why do they pour so many resources into making the UI shiny instead of producing a modern OS?
Is your company using Docker for deployment? Why not give you a Mac which has the worst Docker development experience of any of the major OSs. What a wonderful idea.
They hate developers.
The Apple ][ is the iconic machine, as was the BBC Micro (which has a kick ass BASIC / in-line assembly environment in ROM many Apple ][ users would envy), and heck my machine came with schematics!!
The modern Mac is a bit painful. Agreed.
I build and run from source, both my own and from others all the time on my Mac.
Ran it through the Goog's speech to text. It's a quick paste of the raw pass, with no clean-up, although I added a couple of timestamps. Some irony in the choice of transcription engine, I know.
I was mostly attracted to the OP's coverage of the upcoming "GNU C manual" publishing, and if anyone knows anything more about it, I'd love to hear it.
With the light digging I've done so far, I'm not sure if it's supposed to be the same GNU C manual as listed at https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/ for which the latest revision was published in '16.
I did not know it was going to be ten years until his came out!
In any case, I did help him a bit on the new one, but not very recently. The main text, last I saw it, certainly spoke to the GCC dialect of C, and included some GCC historical footnotes, but the description he gave of the book sounds like he must have added even more GCC-specific content since I last saw a draft.
If you want details, there are some in my comment history.
The basic premise is that I try to live off of society's excesses without pulling new things out of the supply chain. So I tend to sleep in public spaces, eat food that's left over from others, wear hand-me-down clothes or "shop" in free stores, and so on. When I need to travel, I ask around for someone driving the same way.
For a few areas of my life, I still need new things, such as web hosting, occasional bus ticket, etc. For this, I allow others to interface with the currency system for me, and contribute to them in other ways, such as helping them with whatever they need help with.
As far as the bigger picture, I contribute by constantly looking for and doing things which need help doing, such as: cleaning up trash where it's not cleaned up, lending an ear to someone who needs to talk, teaching what I know to others, and so on.
I really resonate with the Steve Jobs quote that everything (man-made) around us was created by someone who had less knowledge and understanding of the world than we do today (because they did it in the past) and there's every reason to believe that each of us can do better if we put our mind to it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30321009
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043346
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30042841
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043104
Do you have a moral objection to centralised currency?
I wondered if anyone else was doing this thing, and I found freganism, "The Man Who Gave Up Money", etc.
And digging deeper into this, I realized several things after pondering them for a while:
a) I'm now operating in large part on my karma, and using money is almost always a karma negative. When I exchange one dollar for something, I'm setting in motion a whole chain of events to which I am karmically connected, most of which are negative.
b) When I work for money, all I get is the money. If I work for an employer for five years, all I have at the end of those five years is the money, which I am, honestly, not capable of managing well, something I have accepted about myself after so many years. On the other hand, if I abandon money, I have time to work on my relationships, something which pays infinitely better.
I'm all for free software and the less-free open source licenses out there, but the above sentiment is a form of fundamentalism that I think alienates people and makes them view FS as represent by RMS as extremist and somewhat irrational. We don't insist that all movies should be released with accompanying raw footage, or that authors should release all their drafts and editors' notes. These are basically the source code if those creative works. I know, the analogy isn't perfect, but I think it gets at some of the problems with taking this to an extreme.
Although my analogy falls short because even studios that don't allow fan fiction can't be as restrictive as most software, since everyone is still free to come up with fan fiction in the privacy of their own home. Not so with closed source software.
Therein lies the fundamental difference with software: Movie intellectual property is all stuff that's right there, and the audience can see it. With software, the algorithms are often totally opaque to the user.
Those things you mentioned behind the scenes of a film do not have ongoing side-effects on the audience. The hidden algorithms and obfuscated execution of non-free software do.
At this point though we're debating the analogy more than the issue, not always productive (though sometimes it is). Maybe we've (I) stretched it too far.
I’m all for free software but that’s hilarious and symptomatic.
App stores, the m1 macs, etc. And all under the guise of "security".
Meanwhile we experienced the mother of all "county password inspector" hacks last month.
https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/the-saas-...
I prefer the freedom to decide what’s good for me, and at least thus far have a better track record identifying what would benefit me than RMS has.
I don’t even care about video games, my go to is still winmine.exe but who is anyone to tell me I shouldn’t enjoy that?
I wish we would find a way to properly do this; I would insist on creating only Libre software, but for now, it is fairly random if it will make money while closed (saas) software is much more straight forward as in; if I have clients, I make money. With Libre software that I ask money for, I might have 100k stars and a lovely following while making no money at all.
> pattern emerge that are not Libre to pay back
I do not see this to be a pattern we will follow. We have a hosted offering which we earn revenue from.
The self-hosted offering always being free. All software is MIT, Apache2, or PostgreSQL licensed and we plan to keep it that way. We have the beneficial characteristic that we are a suite of tools, which limits the threat of competition from a cloud provider like AWS taking the software and offering it themselves. What would the offer from Supabase? Our Realtime server? PostgREST? The Dashboard? PostgreSQL? They already do. Our Postgres extensions? Hopefully they do, it will make it easier to run Supabase with RDS.
RMS should work backwards from that assumption and explain how to get such games into gamers hands while maintaining freedom. If he can’t then he should probably give up arguing that people should stop playing or switch to something completely different than what they consider a “game” is.
The main problem is that RMS lives in a world in which people care about freedom, when they only care about brand recognition - and that is in fact related to marketing and thus "millions of dollars".
There are other reasons than licensing and marketing that makes games cost hundreds of millions too. People expect games to be on the scale that they are, so the cost of developing these games will be astronomical.
It’s ok to care about freedoms of course but I don’t see how it’s a meaningful to argue that the most popular section of games should simply go extinct rather than work for making those more free or privacy conscious than they are.
> would AAA games be so popular without the millions spent on advertising?
Kind of a hypothetical, but I'm guessing yes. But to spend a billion on a game and then not tell anyone you did would be kind of silly. It's not like "advertising" or "marketing" is some kind of scam to get people to buy things they don't really like.
Hmm that's insightful.
I use Ubuntu because it came with the computer, although it is a old version, and I have removed many of the included packages. (If I was setting it up myself, then I might prefer one without systemd (and without Wayland, if possible); I would also need it to be based on free software, although I do not require that the package manager does not include non-free software, just that installing those packages must not be required.)
> What's getting worse? Well, the libre-booted machines that we have are getting older and scarcer. Finding a way to support something new is difficult, because Intel and AMD are both designing their hardware to subjugate people.
Yes, this is a problem (there are other problems with modern x86, and modern computers in general (e.g. USB and HDMI and UEFI), too). We will need better ones; I have many ideas about it, although none have been implemented (some other people also have some ideas that I think are good).
> Well, first of all, I don't think there's anything bad about playing a game. Unless the game is non-free — then it's bad for you, if you play it. ... But typically these games are not solitaire; you're playing with other people.
Actually, many games are solitaire, or at least the ones that I play, are.
However, emulated games are one case where I might use non-free software (although free software is still better for many reasons).
> Now, more free games? It doesn't satisfy an urgent practical need, obviously...
Well, there are people who write them (including myself), and there are many available.
> Planned obsolescence causes a lot of waste.
I agree; planned obsolescence is one of the bad ideas they have with many modern computers. They mention some problems, there.
> Stallman announcing a Manual for GNU C
Of course there is already a manual for GCC, but this look like a manual for learning programming in C, specific to GNU C. I think this is a good idea; the official standard is nonfree and contains many complicated and usually irrelevant stuff, so having a free manual will be an improvement, I think.
What's wrong with Wayland?
I get that Stallman's shtick is being as hardline as possible about free software, but it really feels like sometimes this hurts the free software movement.
Imagine trying to bring in a normal, non-technical person who plays video games as one of their hobbies (describes a lot of my friends at least), and they see this quote. Immediately, it feels bullshit and dumb to them - non-free games (which make up 99.999% of the market) are "harmful for them"? It's hard enough for me (a trusted friend) to explain the free software movement to them after seeing stuff like this, imagine a random person just stumbling upon it.
And yes, every community has their super-idealistic members that make extreme hyperbolic statements, but the problem is that Richard Stallman is one of the most influential and respected members of the movement (and the founder of it!). Sometimes I feel like we could get a lot more done for free software with a tiny bit of pragmatism - for example, in the video game space, pushing for Valve to open source the Steam client, which feels like the most likely high-impact goal to push for rather than the lost battle of trying to change the entire industry at once.
The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground. I don't think Stallman would agree that "lack of pragmatism" is really what's stopping things from changing for better.
Right, but to most people, that's still an extreme position. Because again, like 99.99% of games are non-free, and especially the way he phrased it is gonna come across as a crank.
Stallman strikes me very much as the kind of person who communicates poorly, in an inflammatory way, and gives zero shits how much this bothers anyone else.
Which for a random individual is probably fine, or at least tolerable, but is less good when you're the face of a movement.
In exactly which way is Stallman being inflammatory here?
If it has to be interpreted, it is poorly communicated.
I use plenty of proprietary software, but I also know it’s bad for me. Like someone who enjoys alcohol, I think the benefits are worth the negative effects, but whenever I can get the same benefits from free software, I prefer them. I keep one computer around that runs only free software, and it’s great. It’s a decade old, but gains on desktop software performance in the last decade have been slow.
Even Stallman gives one reason to use proprietary software: to make a free version of it. I’ll offer a liberal interpretation of that rule: most people work in technology need to use a wide variety of proprietary software to understand trends and developments in software paradigms, even if they are not directly copying it while using it.
And my prediction: one day, all software will become free. All proprietary software is only temporarily restricted. Future computers will be able to reverse-engineer any existing program and create code that is functionally identical. That still makes it harmful, but that harm will eventually end. We just have the responsibility to make better laws in the future. Most important is preserving political freedom, and software freedom will eventually follow.
Nothing you say addresses that.
He could definitely benefit from coming across as more pleasant and affable, though.
So no, the world just moved proprietary software to the cloud with parts spun-off and GPLed on paper.
In a way, it is a form of society-wide bargaining. Ask for everything, get something. Ask for something, get nothing. Start big, end up small; start small, end up nowhere.
That's not true, it gained ground for a long time after that. "Free" as in freedom software, by Stallman's definition, probably peaked in the early 2000s.
And I would say that the losses mostly started happening when the FSF stopped producing software that people wanted to use. They effectively ignored the entire internet revolution.
Or maybe the FSF has absolutely miserably failed at actually getting their message out there?
The Right to Repair movement has been more successful; there's quite a bit of overlap between the concept of Free Software and Right To Repair: both are fundamentally about "I can do to the machine I bought whatever I want!" And it seems both the public and lawmakers are receptive to this argument. Right to Repair hasn't been as successful as I'd like (yet), but a lot more successful than Free Software. It seems to me that part of the blame squarely lies with FSF's inability to actually communicate their message effectively. Open Source has been more successful either.
I never like this kind of externalizing of issues and blame other people/corporations/governments because it's just not helpful. Even if you're 100% correct about all of that, you can't change what other people/organisations do where you have no influence, but you can influence what you do, so it's almost always better to think about "what can I/we do better?" rather than "what can they do better?"
I don't think FSF communication really has that much of an impact on the success. Even if the average person understands the benefit to free software it just doesn't impact them in the same way that right to repair does and that will result in them not really caring about it.
In contrast, right to repair does not require abandoning the entire framework of copyright. In fact, it barely touches it. Furthermore, Louis Rossman is way better at explaining the problems with anti-repair bullshit than RMS is at explaining the harms of proprietary software.
[0] Yes I know GPL relies upon copyright to work. That was the backup plan - if we can't force all software to be Free we can at least keep our own software from being locked down.
I do think copyright reform has favored individual expression recently, and I don't see this changing.
Some practical scenarios:
- The game Guacamelee crashes at 30 minutes in to the game for me and quite a lot of other people, but I can't fix it or download an "unofficial patch" (how many games have reverse-engineered unofficial patches btw?).
- I happened to have bought Hyperlight Drifer on GOG.com today; it seems okay, but the controls are horrible to the point of being almost unplayable. Pretty sure someone would have fixed it if they could.
- Back in the day KPN (Dutch AT&T) gave everyone a wireless dongle with their internet, but the driver was bugged and after a certain Windows update it would cause BSODs, and I had to sell a lot of new wireless dongles because of that.
- How many people and organisations would have preferred running Windows XP/7 instead of more or less forcibly updating to 8/10 because Microsoft no longer maintained it?
- How many people wished they could get a version of Windows 10 that doesn't forcibly reboot on updates?
And many more. These are all things a regular person could take advantage of, and very concrete advantages for a regular person, and not all that different from "right to repair".
A big point of Free Software really is about "right to repair"; a lot of people really do want their software to do something different or is broken beyond repair, but there is no way anyone can actually make it work any different. Chances are that if you're struggling with $problemX someone else is too, and already released a fix for it. Or, especially in a corporate environment, you can hire someone.
The FSF takes a very high-level philosophical/academic views of things, as well as a very programmer-centric view, but it doesn't need to be like this.
None of the issues you brought up are necessaries in the same way right to repair can be. Right to repair can save people thousands of dollars while the examples you provided are more of nice to have sorts of things.
Don't get me wrong. I am very much in favor of free software and I think if people understood it they would like it as well. I just don't think they would really care about it anywhere near the same level as right to repair.
>The game Guacamelee crashes at 30 minutes in to the game for me and quite a lot of other people, but I can't fix it or download an "unofficial patch" (how many games have reverse-engineered unofficial patches btw?).
A lot of games have mods. These games are proprietary and the mods often are as well. Look at a game like Skyrim. There is literally a mod called the Unofficial Patch. It fixes a lot of the issues with the game. I think most people care about mod capabilities not an actual open source game. If all games had mods people would be content.
>I happened to have bought Hyperlight Drifer on GOG.com today; it seems okay, but the controls are horrible to the point of being almost unplayable. Pretty sure someone would have fixed it if they could.
How many people play games that don't have remappable controls? That seems like such a niche issue that it wouldn't impact the average person I was referring to.
>Back in the day KPN (Dutch AT&T) gave everyone a wireless dongle with their internet, but the driver was bugged and after a certain Windows update it would cause BSODs, and I had to sell a lot of new wireless dongles because of that.
I don't think this is really a big issue anymore. More and more people don't even have computers and when they do, they have wifi card built in. Again not appealing to the average person (in the present day).
>How many people and organisations would have preferred running Windows XP/7 instead of more or less forcibly updating to 8/10 because Microsoft no longer maintained it?
While this is probably the best one you brought up, I don't think you would have enough people maintain older versions of something as complex as an OS and this would create a massively insecure situation for users of it. I think this would do a lot to harm the free software movement.
>How many people wished they could get a version of Windows 10 that doesn't forcibly reboot on updates?
I think Microsoft already fixed this? There are also third party software that can fix this without modification to the OS.
Regardless, let's say that was not the case. If it was something desirable I have no doubt that it would have been trivial for Microsoft to implement. This means Microsoft would be choosing not to implement it. Windows being free software would do nothing to get this change implemented as Microsoft would not accept the pull request.
People would have to fork Windows to add this in. Given Window's habit of reverting settings the fork couldn't just change a setting and provide the ISO. This means they would have to continually provide updates. I have no reason to think Microsoft would collaborate with Windows fork maintainers so we would have slower updates assuming the forks actually update regularly.
When the forks inventively take too long to patch there would be security issues resulting in the negative press from security issues.
Linux and associated software are made by open source people for open source people. If Microsoft turned Windows into free software I just don't think they would make it convenient for people forking it since they would still want people to pay for Windows.
I understand these were just random ideas you thought of, but only one seemed like something the average person would actually care about and it could very likely turn into negative press for free software.
I think the fact you had to through out so many different items and still not find things that could appeal to the majority of users is the problem. When it comes to right to repair it is simple. Phones and cars. Large numbers of people have one or both of them and would like to be able to repair them instead of getting a new one.
I fully agree the FSF should get better at communication, but I think the issue is not their failure at communicating well but that the issue just doesn't really impact as many people.
That is just plain not true. If it were, that would be fantastic. Unfortunately that's only part of Stallman's message, and a good portion of the rest of it is either simply unworkable or batshit insane.
To quote David Schlesinger after RMS got up on stage and talked about how "women who have not been introduced to emacs are emacs virgins and 'relieving them of their virginity is a sacred duty of all members of the church of emacs'", Stallman continues to embarrass us all
I took him out to dinner once, my wife and I, and had a lovely evening talking mostly about his childhood experiences.
He was extremely respectful to the staff at the restaurant I recall. Going out of his way to compliment them on the food.
That at some point he said: "women who have not been introduced to emacs...sacred duty of all members of the church of emacs" is entirely possible. We all have said stupid things. Out of context especially, had these things been recorded, we would be ashamed.
To use that quote to define RMS is a gross insult, intellectually fraudulent, it is a political attack.
I do think it is important to play nice in politics. So if you have criticisms of RMS' stand on software, make them.
This sort of thing is insulting to all of us who do our best to imperfectly maintain standards of debate
Before I commented I tried to find the source, interesting digressions ensued, but nothing that suggests this is typical.
Also I mentioned I have been following him for a long time (nearly three decades, golly). I have never heard those sorts of words pass his lips.
So I accuse you of telling a lie here. It is not uncommon to make up stories and exaggerate faults of those you politically oppose. Still lies
>I have never heard those sorts of words pass his lips. >So I accuse you of telling a lie here. It is not uncommon to make up stories and exaggerate faults of those you politically oppose. Still lies
You must not be listening very hard. Making comments like these is even part of his wikipedia page as he had to set down from the FSF and MIT for a while for similar comments
That's the issue. Stallman's technical contributions and early political contributions were both foundational and heroic. That does not negate the fact that for the better part of two decades he's been a constant embarrassment that continuously degrades the movement in the eyes of anyone who hasn't developed a tolerance for him. Evangelizing free software was comparatively easy in the days when peoples' reaction to his name was "Haha, that guy who ate stuff off his foot on stage? Wild." It's gotten considerably harder now that the reaction is "wait, the guy who wrote those pedophile emails and harasses women at conferences?"
I'm tired of trying to advocate for free software when just the name "Free Software Foundation" is a conversational liability.
https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/EMACS_virgins_joke
There are references too.
No it has not.
I exclusively use Free Software outside my working life (for my sins, developing iOS software with Swift. A bit like Linux in 1997 - it mostly works)
I mean, we live in a world powered by Free Software, so, I don't know, really. If anything, corporation were kinda successful making money out of free software, but that's another can of worms.
I used computers in 1985. To suggest that the free software movement has only lost ground since then is completely absurd. Has it gone anywhere nearly as far as Stallman and others hoped it would? No. Has it gone much further than anyone who was around in 1985 to watch this being born thought it would go? Absolutely.
Are you joking? This was before my time, but there once was a time when you would not only have to pay for development tools, but pay for them seperately. Want a compiler? $500, please. Want something like Bison? Fork a few hundred. Want an assembler? Another few hundred. etc.
There have been setbacks, and it does look like the tide is turning towards everything becoming closed again but it's untrue to say that Free Software has "only lost ground" since 1985 -hell, GCC didn't even come out until what, 1987, 1988 or so?
In my opinion, this is one of the problems with Stallman's "moral authority" approach to the FSF. I would very much like to hear about these cases where a game's source is libre licensed but not it's content and see what Stallman actually has to say about it.
Not for nothing, but there are many network/online games that have both source and content libre licensed. Here are a few:
* Teeworlds - https://www.teeworlds.com/
* Minetest - https://www.minetest.net/
* Battle for Wesnoth - https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth
I'm sure there are many others of note but those are just the few that I have at least some passing familiarity with.
Stallman's reply? "You should not be making those games, it is unethical."
To say that is non-constructive would be an understatement; it's just shutting down any conversation and exploration and how we can improve things. There are a whole bunch of things one can think of: release the code but keep the assets (graphics, sound, music, etc.) proprietary, release under some sort of "source available" license, keep the core rendering parts proprietary SO/DLLs and release the rest as free software, and maybe a few other things. All of that would be a huge improvement over "100% closed".
But Stallman isn't open to any of that, and because the FSF is still very much Stallman's organisation, neither is the FSF. For at least 20 years the FSF has done nothing except preaching to the choir, and certainly hasn't actually made many significant meaningful every-day improvements. In the above situation the game dev essentially asked was "what is the best way to make my software more free?" and all he got was a rather insulting and condensing shutdown of that conversation before it could even take off.
[1]: I don't have the source for that right now; I think it was somewhere on YouTube. It may have been an interview with Lunduke, but I'm not sure.
Yet GNU and FSF aren't everything RMS is, so he has his own personal website. I would assume you've learned about his views on having children there.
Here you are. Discussing and arguing.
Good on you.
Yes, by working on unfree software, an occupation which he uncompromisingly condemns. Programmers working exclusively on free software would be earning much, much less on average.
All of the open source companies/people that come to mind are not selling libre software, they are all selling some kind of service - support contracts, managed hosting, etc - or they embraced some kind of freemium/"open core" model (so they are really selling non-free software), or they are funded by charitable donations and sometimes public grants, often by having some large non-free companies being sponsors (Linus Torvalds is paid this way for example, through sponsorship money from the who-is-who of the non-free corporate world distributed through the Linux Foundation).
So yes, although your observations are not wrong, they do not apply universally.
> Nevertheless, more than 6000 of these individuals choose to help fund the project to the tune of between $150k and $210k a year.
How is this not covered by the posters comment about it not being a business but a charity if you rely on people paying more than they need to?
If that's your definition, then sure.
That's not my definition.
It doesn't sound complicated to me to understand that you can sell games whose code is open source but the 3d models, graphics, levels building and artwork aren't. Customer would still retain all free software liberties, be able to port the game to other platforms and the dev studios would still get paid.
You mentioned exclusively, that's true that you might have to write custom, closed code for customers at many of those companies. But that's still better than exclusively working on non free software.
RMS' heart is mostly in the right place, but he's a fanatic who is 100% out of touch with the real world.
The same way anyone who think selling metamphetamines to vulnerable people and kids is unethical and wrong, then you should not do it and find another income to feed your family.
Nobody is put a gun to the temple and forced to write proprietary software to make a living. There are myriads of other jobs.
For most part of his life he was living in his office at the university, technically homeless. After that period he lived in a home designated by MIT, possible because they got tired of the building code violation of having a professor living in his office.
I understand he's forgone the amount of wealth he could have accumulated by just working in the software industry in the name of his cause, and that is laudable. However he thinks everyone should do this despite the greater burden they'd have to shoulder. All the people he tells shouldn't be making non free software so they can support themselves and their families are not going to be given free lodging by MIT.
However your comment above said he lived comfortably off the income of his own celebrity. We would have to twist the word income here for a bit to cover this kind of situation. The comfortably part is also a bit questionable, but I guess living at the office can be comfortable to some people. The description just didn't fit the situation that well, which is why I wrote the above comment.
Imagine if someone asked you for help and said "I don't see how to free my slaves while making a living, paying my rent, paying for my children's education". Would you tell them "You shouldn't have slaves, it's unethical" or would you try to help them find a way to run their business with fewer slaves, but still some?
Using extreme ethical examples to justify a statement is how Godwin’s Law came about, way back in the 90s. It’s a well known tactic to make one’s own position sound reasonable, by implying that anyone is still arguing with you may as well be saying the Nazis weren’t so bad.
It’s a good rule of thumb that rather than making a logical argument, you are in fact bringing a rational discussion to an end by invoking slavery, Hitler, or other incontrovertible evil. They are not in any meaningful sense useful analogies for most discussions.
The guy wasn’t bringing up anything like slavery. Therefore Stallman’s response is quite likely unexpected to most people.
This misunderstanding tends to be caused by (1) treating the rhetorical device literally rather than as an (intentionally exaggerated) analogy, and (2) - as in this case - by assuming that the argument being made is trying to draw some moral equivalence between the analogy and the original example. It isn't.
I wasn't making any point about whether Stallman is right or wrong on that, I was just pointing out that people are attacking the wrong part of his argument. If you disagree with him you should attack his base belief that proprietary software is unethical.
> Unless you have a low opinion of Stallman, why would you expect him to be so dismissive of the day-to-day concerns of someone who wants to support a family?
When have you ever seen Stallman be pragmatic instead of idealist about anything regarding proprietary software?
Wow. There is a continuum from good behaviour to unethical behaviour to evil.
To conflate and compare and equivalate unethical behaviours like theft with true evils like slavery or murder is beyond unhelpful.
I don't see how proprietary has even been established as unethical let alone a evil equivalent to slavery.
Please stop making this argument on Stallman's behalf.
I'm not saying those behaviors are all equally bad. I'm saying they are all bad, with an unspecified amount of evilness. I wouldn't help anyone do any of them. I won't help someone steal, even if I think murder is more wrong than it, because stealing is already wrong.
For Stallman, nonfree software is also wrong. You can argue with that, but you can't expect him to help someone write nonfree software and still hold that view.
> When have you ever seen Stallman be pragmatic instead of idealist
Pragmatism vs idealism isn’t the point. My question was why would you expect someone you haven’t met to be an asshole, if you didn’t already think they were an asshole?
I would expect the same if I asked any particularly idealistic vegan how to eat meat with less impact. The idealistic vegan will just tell me to not eat any meat.
Also, in no way is any of what I said contingent on Stallman being an asshole, but it also surprises me that someone thinks finding Stallman to be an asshole at all surprising. He is a man of strong convictions that won't budge, and it's easy to find many anecdotes where people paint him as assholish.
I’ve been to events supporting a cause. They are full of people who, in support of their passionate convictions, try to help and persuade people to join them without reducing personal dilemmas to simplistic answers.
It makes me wonder: if strong convictions don’t cause or correlate to how you treat people, is there another explanation for why it’s so easy to find such anecdotes?
Two things don't have to be exactly as bad as each other to be analogous circumstances.
You are supposed to apply to same chain of logical reasoning to the two situations.
Just expressing faux outrage with a "How dare you compare these two things" isn't actually defeating the argument in any way.
Society has moved on in the decades since Stallman started (for better or for worse), and we need to figure out a way to stay true to their vision around software and bringing new people on board with the free software movement. Having such extremist comments when someone is trying to figure out how to make their game opensource without breaking agreements for other parts they rely on isn't going to get anyone anywhere.
Try to imagine something that you find unethical but some others do not: burqas, abortion, war, public schools, private schools, eating meat, rolling coal or whatever it may be.
If you start from the position that such a thing is unethical, you can't enter an argument with someone who asks you "how should I do X to make you happy?", because you simply won't be happy if this gets done at all.
That means in this case it doesn't make sense to complain and argue about his answer to the developer, as his answer makes perfect sense given his premises. If you want to disagree with his advice, you have to disagree with his moral position on proprietary software and argue about that.
Expecting Stallman to help someone make money with proprietary software is like expecting a vegan advocate to help someone kill cows more humanely.
Note that I'm not expressing an agreement or disagreement with Stallman's worldview, only that his answer is exactly what follows from his worldview, and you should argue about that and not about the answer.
You did exactly that.
> The point is that Stallman does not find proprietary software bad for the user, he finds it morally wrong.
I truly hope that you are wrong and Stallman does not believe proprietary software to be an evil on par with slavery.
You may want to reread my original post carefully.
> I truly hope that you are wrong and Stallman does not believe proprietary software to be an evil on par with slavery.
I can't claim to know the internal ranking of evil things in Stallman's mind, but nonfree software is very clearly beyond the line of unjustifiable evil for him.
"While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.", from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
> Stallman: "we consider them all equally unethical."
This is my whole point in a nutshell; unethical and evil are NOT synonymous words and you keep treating them that way. Wage theft is unethical and should be criminal. Slavery is evil.
Many vegans are actually doing exactly that: enacting laws to improve the living conditions of animals. In the Netherlands we have the "party for the animals" in parliament for that. While their long-term goal is the elimination of meat, they also realize this is not realistic/practical in the short-term for various reasons. In the meanwhile they've been fairly successful in putting the topic of animal suffering on the agenda, making meaningful proposals to improve things, and hopefully coming closer to the long-term goals
I happen to be vegan (well, mostly anyway). Yes, you have the "extreme" vegans you might encounter on occasion, which me and my vegan friends tend to dislike as well, but most are significantly more pragmatic than you might think. It's just that you hear less from them as they're not as "loud".
If a farmer was to walk up to me and ask me "how can I improve the welfare of my animals in my factory farm?" then I'd do my best to make meaningful improvements, even though I think factory farming in general is unethical.
Now, back to Free Software: in broad lines I agree with Stallman, but just find his approach unhelpful, and I don't think that can just be hand-waved away with "but [he thinks] it's unethical".
However, in my opinion, this game developer interested in doing the right thing is the kind of person the FSF and Stallman should focus on and work on finding solutions for, because they could make a difference and even move part of the industry to free software. Telling such people they are not doing the right thing without giving any trail is not going to achieve much and could even repel them. That's counter productive.
One could say that the concerned developer should instead think themself of a solution. That's partly true. I think they should if they are really concerned. However, the whole goal of the FSF is to move the world to free software. They should work to provide trails to such people, because they have all the incentive to do so, even more than the concerned developer. They should provide a welcoming climate so such developer want to join (even more).
I think Stallman should be prepared to give a kind, low effort answer to such a "basic" question. It can be low effort because sometimes the question is low effort too, or even a bit ill-intended and yes, the developer should do their homework. But a nice, positive answer could make things change and engage people.
(I say "basic", but that does not mean the problem is easy. I think it's hard.)
There's no reason you cannot make a living by simply creating a payment method where you get the game + code. Yes, people will copy it. FAR from all people will. In the game add a pay/subscribe/support button. Frankly, I suspect you'll get more money; the game will be spread further and people will be willing to pay. You can even create a "bug bounty" program, where people can pay for bug fixes. Alternatively, have people "pre-pay" for new releases and send the code. There's plenty of alternatives.
That said, I do understand the view, but take a step back..
Stallman's point is that it's unethical to have closed source code running on your hardware. Effectively, you cannot understand, manipulate, update the underlying code. If I purchase a book, I can modify it. If I buy a car I can modify it. If I buy a song, I can modify it. Why can I not modify the software I purchased?
In terms of meaningful improvements, everyone considers licensing. Every company I've ever worked at, every code base, every project is evaluated, etc. It's taken seriously, something that was not done prior to the FSF. I'm currently writing this comment on hardware I can modify, with software I can modify. I don't even have closed sourced video drivers.. So I really don't see your point.
I thought this was a really interesting model.
Maybe it wouldn't work so well with singleplayer games. However, there's a similar example with the sprite editor / animation software Aseprite, which is open source but you have to compile it yourself, so it's cheaper for most people (in terms of time and effort) to just buy it for $15.
Jason Rohrer's game One Hour One Life has a few community spin-offs, which is also really interesting. There are also blatant clones, of course, but it seems to be a worthwhile tradeoff on the whole.
Now sadly no longer on the Apple App Store
I guess that is what happens over time at the walled garden: You don't pay, you don't play
[1] http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/
update: gotta go scrounge for my box of old iPod touches with dead batteries if they have the games as local iTunes sync no longer works.
https://dev.aseprite.org/2016/09/01/new-source-code-license/
Still, the latest version is on GitHub? But it's only for "personal use" according to the EULA (and not making your own fork for example).
This is probably one of the best critiques of his approach (and by extention the FSF) I've read. Very true, and it is a tremendous waste.
An idea that's inapplicable to reality even in principle is worthless.
Made me imagine one of those xkcd:
Me: here is the code.
RMS: what? this is the compiled software.
Me: but the code is there in assembly.
RMS: that's unethical, give me the source code.
Me: ok, here, the source right before compilation.
RMS: this is obfuscated code, still unethical.
Me: granted, here it goes without obfuscation.
RMS: no, wait, the code is so micro-optimized it's no easy to understand, that's not open enough, and, unethical.
Me: ugh but I didn't save the unoptimized version, I just kept optimizing until it got this way.
RMS: look if we can't understand it we won't be able to inspect it, so this is still unethical.
Me: fine, I refactored the code.
RMS: it's undocumented, how are most people going to understand it, imagine a whole operating system undocumented, just, unethical!
I would have just answered that the best way to develop free software games is to not be forced to rely on copyright in order to get paid. Get paid to work on it, rather than get paid after work has already been done. If one has to rely on copyright to get paid, a CC BY-NC license might be the best choice, as then the author still have exclusivity to put the game on stores. An other choice is a contractual trigger where once the author is not interested in exclusivity they they will release the code.
If you really think so, I’d argue that his hardline position is then justified.
To me Stallman doesn’t have any specific unfair advantage over anyone who would get on their soapboax and preach for a different approach. You or me could make blogposts and go talk to conferences, and rally people around a different approach. If we were to gain traction, there is no hidden lever for Stallman to pull that throws us in dark cave and nobody hears from us ever.
What gives Stallman his influence is that pragmatic approaches have at most kept the status quo, at worse allowed way more encroachment on our software and devices ownership. Even if we don’t reach the 100% free ideal, setting the goal at “a bit freer than now” won’t help in my opinion.
More and more the “realistic” approach feels close to accepting cops have some amount of violent abuse, because non abusing cops make 90% of the workforce and we better be in friendly terms with them to make things progress, right ?
Stallman can't/won't even defend the GPL in court; others have had to organize outside the FSF to do so because the FSF is only interested in stroking its beards.
In my opinion, if Stallman is an hermit that only serves as an anchoring for other people to move toward the right direction, I'd argue it's plenty enough.
Now I don't know much about the FSF finances and what we should really be expecting from it.
Talking to gamers about the evils of paid proprietary software and hardware should be relatively easy. But because Stallman is so fundamentally incapable of reading the room, and so exceptionally talented at alienating people, he manages to put out something that gamers look at, laugh, maybe make a meme or two out of, and then forget about.
> but the problem is that Richard Stallman is one of the most influential and respected members of the movement
Stallman hasn't been influential in at least two decades. He's so extremist that anyone actually interested in getting shit done has ignored him. He is completely lacking in perspective-taking, empathy, viewing anyone as anything approaching a peer, or even managing just to not talk at/down to them. He openly pities everyone, thinks us all stupid fools.
I think there was limited respect for Stallman's original concepts and his vision. But in the decades since, he's generated little to no work product, and mostly come off as jealous and bitter.
Any mainstream-open-source-community respect he had, he lost much of when all the stories about him being a serial sexual harasser (if not borderline predator) came out, and then his comments about underage sex...which to make the matter even worse, he's been nothing but petulant and defensive about.
Stallman is not a statesman, a diplomat, ambassador, or a leader. He's just an ideological zealot who has held back the open software movement by refusing to acknowledge his skill set, demeanor, and behavior are not suitable for representing and advancing the open source movement, and that if he truly cared about said movement, he would have long since changed his methods or let someone else take a whirl.
Some folks see him as a genius, but all I see is man who has spent over four decades yelling (largely) the same thing from the top of a mountain, thinking that one day everyone will suddenly see the genius and wisdom of his grand plan. Who lacks the self-awareness to recognize his lack of effectiveness, and the selflessness to step aside and let someone else try carrying the mantle.
RMS isn't preventing you (or anybody else) from doing so.
And it's being done. There's even groups such as the OSI.
As a product manager he has done a poor job. For years he prevented GCC from moving to a simpler more modular architecture because he said that would make it easier to build non-free software on top of it. In the meantime Clang implemented this modular architecture and started taking market share from GCC. Years later GCC moved to a modular architecture anyway because Stallman finally blessed it. At the same time he prevented emacs from officially embracing better integration with Clang and Clang style compilers that provide a richer debugging and syntax checking experience. He did this because GCC didn't support the same experience. Eventually (after years) emacs did integrate with Clang and GCC style syntax facilities.
He made similar stalling moves preventing the adoption of git for emacs (and other FSF projects). First he pushed Arch, the he forced repositories to migrate to BZR after git had clearly won the version control battle (I'm fuzzy, but emacs moved to BZR around 2009-2011). Finally he conceded and emacs moved to git in 2014. After emacs migrated to git he used the emacs mailing list asking for simple git support that he would have understood if he hadn't remained purposefully ignorant about the VCS.
The FSF still revolves around Stallman and he hasn't done much work to find and promote a successor to himself to lead the organization. He is a poor steward of his own movement.
There were also his comments about Minsky and Epstein. He is entitled to his opinions, but as a leader of an important org with such stringent beliefs, delving into other topics was a distraction for the org. Being a leader requires focus and direction, inviting controversy with comments on unrelated current events is the opposite of focus.
In total I think that a lot of Stallman's actions have more to do with his ego and self importance than advancing the free software movement.
You're likely aware, but I wanted to take this opportunity to surface that a lot of the coverage of his comments on Minsky and Epstein was misleading if not malicious.
Notably, articles from Vice and The Daily Beast accused him of defending Epstein and asserting that victims were willing, and both of those accusations are false, as can be reasonably discerned from careful reading of the quotes that appear in the articles themselves. Rather, Stallman defended Minsky and said that victims probably appeared to Minsky to be willing even if they were being coerced out of his sight.
In addition to any judgement we're applying over his choice of whether to talk about it in the first place, we should be sure we're judging him for what he said (which I do believe deserves criticism) and not for what some people want to pretend he said.
it literally sounds like a religious cult at this point. When I was growing up I had a friend from an actual cult and the family literally had their own invented board games (which were terrible) purged of all kinds of "immoral" references because they weren't allowed to touch anything out of mainstream culture.
Whenver I see this depluralizing behavior as if non-free software causes some sort of metaphysical corruption I have to think back to this.
The other stuff seems kinda BS.
This is wrong and disastrous. We need mostly pragmatism, may be a tiny bit of free-spirit and idealism.
Personally, I used to think that Stalmman was a crank. And as time passed, and as I watched some of his prophecies come true and as I noted ways in my own life in which my own devices became harder to use, and my own data became harder to store and retrieve in the ways that I wanted to - I began to change my mind.
Without that irascible, loud-mouthed, doom-sandwich-board-wearing maniac... who else would exist at the intersection of "knows enough to know what he's talking about to speak with authority" and "has nothing left to lose"?
My advice to anyone reading this is to not be so quick to "solution" on his behalf, or to reason against his ideas, in advocacy of a more "moderate" approach.
It may be useful to listen to a person who sounds unrealistic, but also proved to be right on some pretty important issues, like DRM and the cloud.
It does not mean we should immediately switch away from anything proprietary. But it does mean it's worth being aware.
We're almost there with our phones. At least on Android one can install 3rd party apps.
So I think RMS is spot on.
I like to own my device. Write, compile, and install software of my choosing on it, without some company getting into the way of that.
Companies want to control and monetize every possible use of our devices. We can't let that happen unchecked.
The again, in reality I take a less idealistic stance:
- I accept that the BIOS, drivers for the graphics card and the wifi chip are - for the time being - proprietary.
- For everything else I see absolutely no reason why I should use any closed source software.
- My OS is open source, all applications are open source, all games I (occasionally) play are open source.
Someone who thinks eating sick animals (most meat products) is unethical, isn't going to compromise their personal values just because you're treating them to a meal at the local steakhouse.
Similarly the packaging part: actual trend to "sell" containers, pre-build images is a clear trend toward a proprietary world sold as FLOSS just because somewhere there is some code available. Just consider this: we do not need snap, appimages, flatpack, docker images, ... we have cgroups if isolation is needed and we have NixOS/Guix System. Commercial software, OpenSource-enterprise etc need those tools. Try to imaging why observing how real FLOSS development model was there in the recent past, the role of packagers.
Unfortunately most devs are born trained to proprietary development model sold as the best and sole paradigm, they can't even imaging something different than copy-cutting GAFAM models.
Being direct creates an imbalance, for example when one describes an issue or person purely from a negative point of view, regardless of whether all of it is actually true. Most people will innately attempt to say something positive about that same person to restore some sort of balance to the discussion.
Generalizations are also an example of imbalance, with people typically having a strong reaction to it, even though I think most people would agree that if 97 times out of 100 something is true, it's safe to say that thing is true.
Lastly, as a special case of generalizations, taking an absolute stance is also seen as imbalanced, and therefore bad, because, I assume, most things in life aren't black and white - there's lots of gray areas, so it's pragmatic to start out assuming that in actuality there's a gray area with any issue.
This is all to say that Stallman doesn't speak in a balanced way, which is why I think his speeches and ideas do not appeal to the American audience, or any other audience that places a higher value on balance than on the actual ideas.
If he were able to convey those same ideas in a less absolutist, more nuanced and more pragmatic manner, I think he, as a person, would be more appreciated in the US and perhaps people would listen more closely to what Stallman has to say.
I've lived in several other countries, particularly in Europe, and generalizations, absolute positions and speaking in a direct manner are all generally appreciated by the society there, or at the very least it's tolerated much better and won't get you dismissed right away (since that's how most people speak).
At the end of the day, I personally think Stallman is right. When I look at what he says, I see a non-compromising idealist who places more value on truth, and how things "ought to be", than on pleasantries and gray areas, and that's a difficult sell to the American audience. When I focus on his content with the understanding that he's converting gray into either black or white, I see a dreamer and a believer in a utopian society. I too would like to live in a world where all software is FOSS and we all write FOSS code that runs on FOSS hardware, but I recognize that's a dream. It shouldn't stop us from trying to make that dream a reality though.
Tbh, I was curious what happened since last year and I didn't realize at the time he was somewhat apologetic, and honestly, it is hard for me to determine a lot of the veracity of the claims around him at the time and more so now. That said, as a leader of FSF and the free software movement, is he now recuperated, because his reputation since this episode, due to the truth or not, is pretty bad now and his being seen as a continuing leader of the movement could be seen as a liability. Should he be recuperated or should he not be?
The FSF today has the highest membership it has ever had. Most new members joined in support of RMS last year in defence of the attacks on his reputation. The Foundation is doing very well now.
One interesting (and little discussed) theory about the attack on RMS that I heard was that it was also an attack on the Free Software and the FSF as a kind of coup and championed by people working from and benefiting from the chip makers, corporations and manufacturers.
Now there's is some evidence for that the majority of attackers were from that group, however I suspect it's more likely a correlation between the new kind of professional cultural standard of Silicon Valley highly paid technologists and their income sources, than any coordinated attack on Free Software in principle.
There was some a relation between the more lax Open Source developers and the anti-RMS stance seen in previous times, but I think, again, it's not some conspiracy to take down Free Software but rather a relationship between the more pragmatic Open Source developers being able to work for the Silicon Valley industry and becoming part of that culture.
FSF itself is pretty woke nowadays so they have diluted and taken their mission in another direction.
As for the RMS attacks, he did the heresy of thinking out loud on a private mailing list which do-gooders promptly leaked and framed.
Your whole question is silly. He's not 'recuperated' since there's no authority to decide this. It's kinda hard when you replace institutions for woke mobs.
e.g. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html
I too am completely at a loss for what his actual agenda is.
What's your (actual) agenda?
p.s. Thinking more about it, it doesn't seem a question that ever has an answer. Seems like it means something like "I don't like that person, what they believe, what they say or what they do. They're so different from me I can't believe they're for real. So I'm going to insinuate they're guided by some concealed nefarious scheme. I heard a right-wing person use the phrase and I thought it was a pretty cool and effective debate tactic. Makes me sound like I've easily seen through their amateurish attempt at deception." Please correct me if I'm wrong, and it's actually a genuine question.
* spread his free software ethics philosophy to as wide an audience as possible
* persuade nonfree software developers to produce free software instead
* persuade software users to abandon use of nonfree software
* persuade software users to use free software instead of nonfree software
Think of it as a to-do list. What does rms want to happen as a result of his speaking? Education? Persuasion? Improved conditions for working software developers? Improved conditions for software end-users? What is he trying to accomplish?
The majority of the things he says seem like compulsive statements based out of his (obviously steadfast and unwavering) belief that nonfree software is unethical. The fact is, though, that inanimate things cannot be unethical. Ethics is a matter of human behavior.
So, does he want some or all of the following:
* employees of companies that make nonfree software to quit?
* owners/managers of companies that make nonfree software to dissolve their organizations?
* owners/managers of companies that make nonfree software to make only free software instead?
* owners/managers of companies that make nonfree software to set policies banning the use of nonfree software in their organizations?
* people not in software to get into software to make more free software to make the world more ethical?
* legislatures to ban companies like Google who exist only on the basis of extensive use of nonfree software?
It's not really clear what he's asking, and of whom. Who's the audience, and what does he want them to do, or cease doing? Why does he want them to do (or stop doing) that? Why should they? If the answer to the last is "because of rms's ethics", then why should they adopt his ethical framework over their current one (where there's nothing wrong with producing, selling, or using nonfree software)?
There are so many unanswered questions with rms.
Wait, why is Ubuntu's package manager "not freedom respecting" but dpkg is? I thought snap was licensed under GPLv3.
>It should be illegal to sell a computer that doesn't let users install software of their own from source code.
Agreed, but this is such a low bar that even iOS meets it. Apple has never attempted to restrict users' ability to compile and run source code. In fact, for almost a decade now the automatic signing in Xcode will sign and provision your compiled code, even if you didn't have a verified and paid-up developer account. The App Store rules about not executing code outside the app bundle also have exceptions specifically for apps that let users load apps from source. The whole debate people are having about sideloading is specifically about distributing binaries; not source - Apple's security model is that you don't get to do that unless they can review your app.
While I would much rather have an iPad that Apple just lets me unlock and accept the risk of doing so, and I do not oppose sideloading... I must point out that much of the people asking for sideloading are proprietary software vendors and not users. Being as vehemently opposed to proprietary software as RMS is means that he's actually on Apple's side of that debate, even though Apple is "the enemy" so to speak.
The comments about Macs being more locked down I don't entirely understand. Apple's bent over backwards to keep a working owner override on Macs, both for the operating system as a whole and individual apps. If you want to run an untrusted binary[0], you right click the app bundle, accept the risk, and continue on with your day. If you want to run a third-party OS, there's a process to do that. Apple even engineered cryptographic verification of the owner account so that, instead of just "turning off Secure Boot" like on PC, you actually sign the new kernel you want to run with your owner key and still have some level of verification that the kernel hasn't been changed behind your back. This is basically "everything the FSF wanted for Secure Boot a decade ago", with the only downside being that it requires a locked-down boot chain in order to provide security guarantees.
>Well, first of all, I don't think there's anything bad about playing a game. Unless the game is non-free — then it's bad for you, if you play it.
Ehhhheheh...
Modern game design has basically turned a lot of games into microtransaction pumps. This is a more complicated issue than just "proprietary bad", because proprietary games used to be far less harmful than they are now. You used to just be able to buy a game and enjoy it, despite it being chained to standard no-touchy copyright terms. Yes, you were running non-free software, but the usual proprietary harms did not apply as they did for other kinds of software. Now they do: games are constantly making excessive time or money demands before you can actually have fun with it and their developers are employing all sorts of psychological tricks to get people to overspend in them.
[0] I do want to point out that codesigning and notarization on macOS was a lot easier to set up than a lot of people have made it out to be.
The Snap server is what's closed-source.
> I must point out that much of the people asking for sideloading are proprietary software vendors and not users.
I know I'm just one data point, but I'm a user who wants sideloading.
> Being as vehemently opposed to proprietary software as RMS is means that he's actually on Apple's side of that debate, even though Apple is "the enemy" so to speak.
No he isn't. He's always in favor of users being in full control of their own devices, even if that control allows them to install proprietary software onto them.
> The comments about Macs being more locked down I don't entirely understand. Apple's bent over backwards to keep a working owner override on Macs
They're slowly boiling the frog, like with removal of kexts. I'd bet money that within 10 years, you won't be able to disable SIP on the newest Macs anymore.
> with the only downside being that it requires a locked-down boot chain
Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
As for sideloading... yes, I want it too. But the only thing that really gives me is the ability to run some emulation and virtualization tools Apple refuses to sign for reasons ranging from unfortunate to stupid. Epic Games did not sue Apple for my right to run old Nintendo games on my iPad. In fact, the videogame industry has been very explicit that users should not be allowed under any circumstances to format-shift games they own, and Epic has done nothing to indicate that they are less consumer-hostile than their peers. They also said they'd accept a two-tiered system where they got their Epic App Store but users still couldn't sideload. So, as much as Tim Sweeney is ideologically motivated to support user freedoms, Epic Games is still pushing their lawsuit from the perspective of a proprietary software vendor, just one that's willing to go rogue.
You're right about RMS not being on the "same side" as Apple, and I misspoke. It's more like this is a three-sided fight between users (FSF, EFF, etc), proprietary developers (Epic), and platforms (Apple/Google). My point is that if you are extremely opposed to proprietary software in any form and for any reason whatsoever, then Apple's argument against sideloading is actually more reasonable, because it's the enemy eating itself. However, if you are at least slightly tolerant of proprietary software, then the argument Epic makes of Apple being anticompetitive makes a lot more sense.
I'm still not convinced that Apple's end goal is to make the Mac just be an iPad with a mouse and keyboard. The whole owner override thing I mentioned above took a lot of time and effort, just so they could boil the secure boot frog less. It would have been far easier for them to just say "no, we're only allowing macOS to live in EL2". Nobody was expecting them to allow this, and Hector Martin still has to occasionally field questions of "why are you working on this when Apple is just going to block it" when they haven't for several years now. Furthermore, Apple's designer brainworms have insisted upon not converging their platforms in any way that would make having the same security policy make sense.
>Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
There really isn't another way to implement this while providing the same security guarantees for Free operating systems. The part that actually checks to make sure the code you're running was owner-signed needs to be both immutable from the perspective of malware and updatable in case of security bugs. You don't want this burned into a ROM chip since it's extra attack surface, even though that technically satisfies some weird exception the FSF made decades ago for the proprietary ROM BIOS in IBM-compatibles.
The only complaint I have about the way Apple did this is that they really should Free their boot chain code and have verifiable builds for it. However, there are very few, if any machines that actually have a Free boot chain. And the only harm a proprietary boot chain can do to Free Software is to refuse to load a Free OS. So as long as the boot chain allows us to do that, the crusade for a Free BIOS seems more of an academic or research concern than anything else.
[0] You're supposed to be able to enroll new secure boot keys, but AFAIK this isn't really ever done.
I think that an important difference here is that there are FOSS Web servers that are compatible with your browser, but there's no FOSS servers compatible with your Snap client.
> Epic Games is still pushing their lawsuit from the perspective of a proprietary software vendor, just one that's willing to go rogue.
I agree that Epic is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, but that doesn't make what they want wrong.
> My point is that if you are extremely opposed to proprietary software in any form and for any reason whatsoever, then Apple's argument against sideloading is actually more reasonable, because it's the enemy eating itself.
I still don't see how, since the ban on sideloading affects FOSS apps too. Remember the old issue with VLC in the App Store?
> The whole owner override thing I mentioned above took a lot of time and effort, just so they could boil the secure boot frog less. It would have been far easier for them to just say "no, we're only allowing macOS to live in EL2".
If they didn't do the owner override thing originally, then a lot of people might have jumped ship and forced them to backtrack. By taking the approach they did, they'll later say something like "look, our telemetry says 95% of Macs still have SIP enabled, so now we're going to make it mandatory".
> The part that actually checks to make sure the code you're running was owner-signed needs to be both immutable from the perspective of malware and updatable in case of security bugs.
> The only complaint I have about the way Apple did this is that they really should Free their boot chain code and have verifiable builds for it.
But those requirements are fundamentally incompatible with freedom. I'd rather not have that sort of "security". And your complaint doesn't address the tivoization problem at all.
The issue with VLC in the App Store was that an older version of the App Store T&Cs had standard EULA language that said you weren't allowed to pirate the apps on the store; which contradicts every version of the GPL ever.
VLC worked around this by relicensing their iOS port to MPLv2, whose copyleft is apparently weak enough that the App Store EULA does not conflict with it. I'm not entirely sure why.
This, however, is a moot point. Apple fixed the problem by letting you just write custom EULA language specific to that app that says the GPL overrules the App Store EULA for that app. This is how iSH legally ships an entire x86 userland full of GPL software on the App Store, for example. Even things like the Installation Instructions requirement (either GPLv2 or v3's) is satisfied by the fact that Apple hands out free development accounts like candy and will likely continue to do so for as long as the App Store exists.
But doesn't that fail the Desert Island Test?
The first two sentences are false.
Apple only lets iOS run signed apps. Self-built apps must be signed, and online signatures are provided from Apple. They can stop at any time. These apps will also not stay running 24/7, forcing you into Apple services if you want basic functions like messaging notifications.
You need to identify yourself to Apple (even without a paid developer account) to get an Apple ID to be able to request signatures to run those compiled programs.
Just because they hand out free temporary keys does not mean you aren't inside a jail.
Apple has deleted dev accounts for pointing out pitfalls in App Store moderation, and removed an app to let you check if an iPhone was jailbroken.
iMessage and iOS are equally capable of locking in users, one with network effects, and the other with the only apps that work with other Apple products. Unlocked bootloaders would allow more fair consumer choice.
Then the first photo I saw of Stallman made me wonder if perhaps he is some kind of Rainbow Gathering type of hippie. Well, fair enough - I appreciate the Rainbow Gathering myself, very liberating... but even there people know that free lunch does note exist.
So the general question about free software is who pays for it. Who pays for the development. It seems that unless it is paid for by governments or universities, the math does not add. Then there is this lack of distinction of what is core package, and business application. Certainly some parts of a larger project may be open-sourced, and even made free, but some can not.
So this generalization of "software" and "free" is at best very childish.
Now don't get me wrong, we've all used pirated software around here, and also used free software, shareware, all kinds of it. And now some tens of years later people also are still very confused about how open source differs from free software. And some of the Richard Stallman fans are even more confused, since one of the major open source supporters in recent years is the once-perceived-very-evil Microsoft...
The argument by some commenters here regarding the cloud lock-in is so valid. It is what we are facing as the biggest challenge - that we don't even see or touch the software that run the businesses anymore. Free or not. Is not on our premises.
And least but not last - I'm more interested in having open access to data created with free/open software and standards alike. What good is a government running free software, when its output is closed, not searchable, not accessible by reasonable APIs? I mean - who cares what CSV, DOCX, SHP, PSDs were created with, if they value 100x the software used?
I 100% support what they do and preach knowing FULL well I will likely never 100% do as they recommend. That's not actually a big problem.
And again, helpful to whom? Yes. Stallman's no diplomat or ambassador, but that's not the job he's trying to do.
With Microsoft and Apple the software is commercial and not free, but they do a good job of handholding the customer and working through bugs and technical issues over the phone.
With that said, I appreciate what Stallman has done, if nothing else, to shine light on what freedoms we're giving up, and on the contrasts between the different free and non-free models that are in use today.
It's more likely that we'd have the situation we had with UNIX; incompatible forks tied to incrutable hardware drivers that no one can fix with a zillion different combinations so that when you sat down at a terminal you had no idea what to do -thanks to people being able to take the BSD/MIT software and create their own contrarian forks.
GNU wasn't innovative because it was free, or even because it's source was free. It was innovative because it forced people to play nice.
The UNIX Wars demonstrated how well people play with others when left to their own desires (not at all).
In what world does Linux on the desktop provide "useful pressure" to anyone? The only Linux "desktop" that has provided any pressure on the desktop to Microsoft and Apple is ChromeOS. ChromeOS is decidedly not a "Linux desktop". If Google flipped ChromeOS to Fuchsia tomorrow it would provide the same pressure with zero Linux.
Third parties don't care about the Linux desktop either. If Linux is even considered it's a distant third place. If Electron dropped Linux support tomorrow a good number of applications would drop Linux support the next day.
Even the likes of Valve supporting Linux is more of a hedge against Microsoft than anything compelling about desktop environments on Linux.
For end users, WSL and Crossover do allow for more freedom than if these things didn't exist.
You can keep long-term goals in mind while also working towards smaller short-term goals. Almost every political party and lobby organisation in the world is doing exactly that.
Here Stallman again rails against Ubuntu. Okay, maybe Ubuntu isn't perfect, but s/Microsoft windows/Ubuntu/ would be quite an improvement, and especially since the 100% free/libre stuff he recommends are caveated to hell it's the only pragmatic/realistic option there is right now – not necessarily Ubuntu itself, but some distro which includes the same firmware, nVidia drivers, and such. And if a lot of people are actually running Ubuntu/Linux you end up having a lot more leverage.
By focusing only on the endpoint you're actually doing more short-term thinking rather than playing the long game.
Love your username btw.
Sure, but that was back in the 80s and this is now.
That someone had a lot of good ideas and did good work 35 years ago doesn't mean they're not hampering it today. I once worked for a business where the owner worked very hard to build things up (or so I heard), but when I worked there all he really used his business for was to show his boyfriends around to impress them or something; I rarely saw him. That's all fine, except that the business was directionless and basic stuff wasn't getting done (like, say, my employment contract). Eventually there was a bit of an intervention and he was ousted (his dad also owned part of the company), which was badly needed because he was really running things in to the ground, in spite of having built it up in the first place.
> Ubuntu isn't going to stop what they are doing because of Stallman's ideas.
No, but the FSF could be promoting Ubuntu instead of railing against it. If I'm interested in Free Software and find the FSF website then all I get are unpractical solutions.
But what the FSF really should be doing is lobby this kind of thing with governments, schools, corporations and such.
I'm trying to understand your meaning. You went on to say:
> You can keep long-term goals in mind while also working towards smaller short-term goals. Almost every political party and lobby organisation in the world is doing exactly that.
But every example of such political parties/organizations I can think of (in my experience) has 'puritanical' wings that serve to establish the key direction.
> It's not explaining the message very well, it's actively turning people off, and it's preventing some free software from being as useful as it could be.
I was unable to follow your logic. Perhaps actual example of this happening would be useful.
> By focusing only on the endpoint you're actually doing more short-term thinking rather than playing the long game.
Forgive me, but it appears like you're focusing on practically achievable goals rather than having a long term plan. If Ubuntu continued along its current path of just partnering with vendors, only "they" being able to build the signed boot images that machines boot, then it is not unreasonable to suspect that at some point users will lose all ability to build their own kernel for their machine.
I'm not sure that Stallman is intentionally positioning himself this way (he seems to sincerely believe his all-or-nothing stance), but I could see it actually working. The big problem with Stallman is that he has to be at least moderately credible in order to extend the Overton window, but he seems to perpetually be right on the edge of being completely dismissed. If that happens then the window snaps back shut.
Richard Stallman has largely been not averse to pragmatism, he is the sort that is willing to clearly articulate his stance as to what he thinks is right, but has also been willing to endorse all sorts of incrementalism. For example:
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/icecast-dev/2001-February/00...
"In response to the change of license, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation says, "I agree. It is wise to make some of the Ogg Vorbis code available for use in proprietary software, so that commercial companies doing proprietary software will use it, and help Vorbis succeed in competition with other formats that would be restricted against our use.""
(I am desperately trying to avoid inserting a Bernie Sanders analogy here..)
Stallman could have been talking about censorship and deplatforming here and it still would have made sense. His (and my) generation seem to care a lot more about idealistic freedoms than we do now as a society.
This is why Musk is trying to buy out Twitter, and he is trolling them with his wealth.
Don't forget removal from the APP Store or blocked by proxies.
Information still wants to be free, not stifled by tyrants just for being different opinions than the shareholders have.
Remember there is a reason why people want to root their phone, they want the freedom to install any app they wish to install. The more it gets locked down, the more people are going to find ways to unlock it.
Instead of deplatforming and censorship, ratings should be used instead for people to decide what they are going to read.
I want both sets of people to expose their views to the public. Disgusting though these views may be, it is safer for society if individuals are able to check and decide that someone else's views are reprehensible. If the people are merely told such by authorities, with the "offending" content immediately removed, then the authorities have enormous power to expand the definition of "offending" when it pleases them to do so.
Not really. You can spend days, weeks, and months; millions of dollars; thousands of paid shill accounts; all geared towards selling a single lie. And that lie can be exposed to millions of people in 10 seconds for free. But only if there is free speech.
I think you’re right about the dangers of giving authority over what does and doesn’t get censored, but there are also very real dangers on the other side of this. You don’t make consuming heroin normative, because you don’t want to make it easy to fall into an addiction by accident for those who are more prone to do so. The more harm the addiction causes to society as a whole, the more prerogative you have to protect people from accidentally becoming addicted.
Who decides what's reasonable? Who decides what constitutes a "Nazi" or a "Pedophile"? If someone tries to suggest that convicting a 14 year old girl as a sex offender for having nude photos of herself on her phone is preposterous that person can be effectively silenced by labeling them as a pedophile.
"But that's ridiculous. Nobody would do that." -Somebody who has never been on the internet.
Every idiotic position you can think of exists on the internet, and can be amplified to make it seem like it's a more popular opinion than it really is.
The only logical course of action is to allow all speech and let the reader discern for themselves.
The assumption being that most readers are discerning. Kind of reminds of the adage about markets working based on rational actors. In both situations, reality would like a word.
And the point is: "Who decides what's reasonable?" You? Well, yeah, I hope you do for yourself. But I don't want you to dare to even try to decide that for me. Nothing personal, of course: there's no single person on the planet I would trust to do that for me.
In other words, it's not about assuming anything about the most readers (it is rather about NOT assuming anything about them). And, in fact, I don't even expect any good outcome "for the most of readers". I am pretty positive most people will find a way to fuck themselves no matter what you do. The only assertion here is that it will be worse for everyone if you TRY to do something about it. I mean, it should be pretty obvious thing to say, as much as people like to tell stories about "how terrible it was when Stalin was in charge" — it is best for everyone if there's no individual or group of people who can enforce their ideas of what is right on the others.
(BTW, I don't believe that this is really avoidable too. It happes one way or the other. The only thing that makes me say anything about this, is that this is just scary that half of the society today doesn't even understand that they SHOULD TRY to prevent anyone from being able to control what they say or think. They WANT to be controlled. They WANT to fuck themselves and everyone around them.)
For myself I’m happy for you to have all the freedom of speech you like. What I’d like enshrined is the right to freedom from speech. In my country we are in the midst of an election campaign and it is impossible for me (both legally and technically) to stop political parties from spamming my phone. I would rather they didn’t spam my phone. I don’t have an opinion about your phone.
He is also the lead of a company that has seemingly fired an employee for posting about their publicly available features, and is also facing one of the biggest labor lawsuits ever in the state of California.
He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that it's all just exploitation.
But you tell me, did you buy that camaro, or did you build it?
Great goals, but in my opinion, a terrible ambassador for tech/engineering, and a completely ingenuine person. I do not believe he is buying Twitter to "restore free speech" at all, and I dont even think that itself is a particularly good goal without having laid out plans of what it means.
Him being in charge of companies that produce cool products does not make him a good person at all.
I haven’t worked for Musk, but I’ve heard he only hires fanatics who want to save the world. I expect that he expects things different from most employers.
>wealth hoarding
Most of his wealth isn’t in money or stocks, it’s in his companies. The money that is in stocks, well most of that’s in stock for companies that have actual assets and do actual things in the real world.
People always have power motives for doing things. But that doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them people who have objectives that require power, or perhaps power seekers who need to meet objectives (or claim they do). I trust the former far more than the latter.
I believe he built huge amounts of wealth because he's something like "genetically predisposed to"; he's not different from other billionaires, who I think have something like a mental defect that encourages them to rack up their score as high as possible.
It's just that he has more interesting hobbies (Space, EV, whatever) than the rest of them; but for any move he makes, first ask -- does this look like part of a play to just gain more money? And 9 times out of 10 the answer is yes.
> He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.
I wonder if we find a billionaire from the top 20 wealthiest who hasn’t at some level
No absolutely not. Id even say that you wont find more than a handful of billionaires who havent built their wealth on exploitation.
Its such a massive amount of wealth to have, it is virtually always precluded by harming others. The only exceptions I can think of are company founders who got exceedingly lucky, and even then you could definitely stretch the definition of exploitation to include them too.
The solution is to make such labor practices NOT legal and force everyone into a good field of play and rules for the game(s).
But in neither case do I believe that "the government is colluding to eliminate first amendment rights" which I believe is a reasonably specific definition of censorship. This is just culture culturing.
Or, ya know, they could just stake out reasonable, nuanced positions that organizations could adopt or at least be a starting point for further developments
Stallman is infamous for his inability to recognize viewpoints other than his own as having worth or validity. He is literally incapable of such a big-brain plan because there's no way he could see a moderate position as valid.
In other words, the fact that you don't see these positions I think is a result of a mild "embrace, extend extinguish" and not "no one thought of this before."
Also I agree 100%.
Toxic people shouldn't have a voice because then all sorts of people will decide to not get involved in a community where such people can be leaders.
Trust me in this, I should know :(
"Cancelled" and "toxic" are vague terms that we really need to stop using, please use the more precise words you mean. Has he broken the law or been unforgivably abusive, etc? If so, say that. If not, stop throwing accusations.
So, let's keep pragmatism, reality and wisdom above idealism.
If you decide you will not run any software on your machine who's source is unavailable to you, that is your right. It's your property.
So do I, but I disagree with moral judgement and shame being used as a weapon in that fight. I look forward to the day when RMS and his acolytes make a more convincing case and provide an alternative system that would allow us to inspect all source code, which I think is a goal to strive for.
Many people really don't know what Freedom actually means. The rights and origin of Freedom with computing should be understood. Is it a natural common law extension of property, for example?
But that last half was just highlighting that you are not after a discussion or answers to your questions, and that it was just rehashing the same old points.
Stallman and the FSF help encourage and motivate its use.
There are obviously some successes, but in general GPL license is not popular - overwhelming majority of the software is not released under GPL and sometimes never released to the public.
Apache and commercial no-cost is not the same. If the vendor decides to cut support for a piece of software and introduce something new, bloated and costs more. I have the choice to hire a programmer to maintain the current thing with GPL and Apache if it is worth it. That is a very important benefit, I have the choice, many business owners do not understand that, but the IT people they hire do and can use that to protect their employer (and their jobs) from exploitative practices. The GPL ensures it stays that way years down the road while Apache suffers from the MIT issue Stallman had when he maintained a Lisp system on his own. His competitor took his MIT licensed code and did not give back.
Those 'no-cost' licenses often become cost and very-costly in the future if they become popular enough with future versions.
As for the software products: they are still very common. Look at Flatpak or Snap stores. Krita made quite a bit of money on the Microsoft store believe it or not. Paid for and free Linux distro products dominate the server market that run Linux and GPL userland tools. Some Apache licensed web components (Grafana) is moved over to the AGPL.
They are the same in the sense that they are both not GPL. They just illustrate the spectrum of licenses that are not ideologically aligned with FSF, but may still do the job.
> As for the software products: they are still very common.
I will just repeat myself: there are some successes, but this is not the majority of the software. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s enormous pile of proprietary software, that is absolutely not free or open source. Think of Google, Facebook or Salesforce codebase. Think of all the banking or military software. Even some Linux distro can be dwarfed by those applications.
And we all know bored developers will make up work for themselves and bikeshed themselves to death.
> a strategy
I don't think it's conspiratorial, so much as emergent. All structures which persist have means of ensuring their persistence. Institutions (including open ones) will push for things that further their existence, status, funding, and ultimately their power. They will make themselves indispensable, regardless of their actual value-added.
In a modern product engineering process we in fact fight the increasing complexity by selecting for the implementation only features that have the biggest business impact. That code is created because someone is going to use it to address some user need, not to confuse a potential reader. Nobody thinks at the moment of the roadmap planning about harming free software, this idea is just absurd.
Now if you want to talk about real bloat, like JavaScript libraries, then you are citing a malignant practice anyways. There is no world in which we should compromise libre software principles so we can mindlessly continue using Javascript bloat, which should be taken out back and shot even if you aren't concerned about libre philosophy.
I understand this too well. You say: “one canary developer”. If our software was built in hope that someone will bring the canary to ensure quality, we would have terrible software. It is surely nice to have this opportunity, but you don’t have to release your software under GPL for that. Hiring QA or white hat team could work even better. I’m not saying that open source software does not work: there are of course some successful projects. It is just minority of the entire codebase, and not all open source software is released under licenses endorsed by FSF. If we care about our rights, we should think what could be the appropriate way to build trust in the software made by Google, Okta or Salesforce, because open source battle is lost there.
> Now if you want to talk about real bloat, like JavaScript libraries…
No, I do not want to talk about that mess. That particular example won’t prove anything. Sorry. :)
I feel this. You should be able to understand your computer.
The point: computers are different from everything else. Pre-writing man is a fundamentally different character to literate, historical man. (I do believe there’s an Egyptian dialogue on the matter.) And in the same manner, computing man is a fundamentally different character from pre-computing man. However, most people, despite their USE of computers, cannot really compute, because they can only get their computers to do what other people have told them to do, and not what they themselves have told their computers to do. In other words, to them the computer is an appliance. Now, not everyone can read Ulysses, or Durants history, and I don’t think it would be fair to expect that of people. But most people can read, and they can read the whole book if they choose. The qualitative shift of computational man finds that what he has read can be made into action, simply by it having been written, yet this does not hold true for a person who is handed Durants history of the world, or Livy’s history of Rome (before having been taught Latin, even!) and being told, you have knowledge, even though you can’t get through it all.
You start people with shorter books. Even picture books. You start them with simpler computers, with simpler software, and then more complex computers which do more complex things. And even in the professional world, of fully literate adults, you only break out the really complicated stuff for the really complicated things.
Software should be comprehensible, because it is meant to be comprehensible, it is not just execution but elocution, and is the explanation of its own intent.
I think you have much too high a regard for your own interests and craft. I can guarantee you a cabinetmaker, machinist, pilot, doctor, or lawyer can make any and more of the same style of arguments. A little bit of computational knowledge? Yes it's very useful, and that's what low-code tools like Excel/spreadsheets are for. Akin to learning the basics of reading. More than that? No I think you overestimate the usefulness of computing, and most people only have a working knowledge of reading and writing. The world is full of complexity everywhere. Computing isn't the only thing with this force multiplier effect for humanity.
I’m allowed to be idealistic about some things. Aren’t we all?
With the evolving supply chain attacks, US Government advised companies to better understand their software supply chains. With transparent and repeatable builds this goal would be much more simple using the approach documented above.
We can innovate on more ideas for making more transparent software. We can have signed dependencies, pre-built trusted (signed, hashes) dependency chains.
Security only explains why _some_ people should be able to understand how software works, and this is a different story. You do not need to make software open source or free for that, there can exist entire spectrum of various licenses and accesses. This is what I mean by delegating the work to institutions: you let someone you trust to audit the code for you. This can be a dedicated team in your company, a 3rd party expert or a government agency, the important part is only those people really need access to the code, because only they can understand it.
This is a very small subset of end users that can do that and will want to do that. Even software engineers may not dare to touch the code and seek for workarounds or ways to report the bug with less effort instead. The programming language and APIs can be unfamiliar, there can be lack of context etc. The distance between general computer science literacy and ability to read the code of a large product is very big - experts often tend to underestimate it. For the majority of other people value of this possibility is literally zero: they would prefer to have a warranty from vendor. There's very little consolation for them in having weak guarantees from community of volunteers that discovered bugs will be some day fixed.