Here's the thing about Richard Stallman -- he's absolutely correct in all of his principles and all of his underlying thinking. He's as intellectually farsighted as anyone I can think of in tech. However, all of the movement around him and the resulting "outreach" efforts have been rather shortsighted in comparison.
Let's use environmentalism as an analogy. There is a place for an absolutist intellectual position, when it comes to the underlying science. However, much of the tremendous progress that has been made with respect to the global environment has been a tenacious "foot in the door, while they're slamming it" struggle, where allies and politics are vital. This is why I found the FSF animosity towards "Open Source" perplexing. If a group is advocating for freedom, I find it perplexing when they seem to be coercing me to be free in exactly the way they deem correct. While leadership is vital in any movement (I think that leaderless movements generally fall off the rails and tend to spawn extremist groups) one of the primary reasons leadership is vital is to set the tone and morality of the movement. A firm philosophical and intellectual grounding is also vital, but it can't stand alone if the tone and morality of the movement allows it to succumb to any human group's natural tendency towards jingoism. RMS always got the intellectual far-seeing right. In terms of tone and politics: fairly close to dead wrong. Basically, he could impress college aged me, then alienate working aged me.
"We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects."
“This procedure thus implies a certain logic of exception: every ideological Universal–for example freedom, equality–is 'false’ in so far as it necessarily includes a specific case which breaks its unity, lays open its falsity. Freedom, for example: a universal notion comprising a number of species (freedom of speech and press, freedom of consciousness, freedom of commerce, political freedom, and so on) but also, by means of a structural necessity, a specific freedom (that of the worker to sell freely his own labour on the market) which subverts this universal notion. That is to say, this freedom is the very opposite of effective freedom: by selling his labour 'freely’, the worker loses his freedom–the real content of this free act of sale is the worker’s enslavement to capital. The crucial point is, of course, that it is precisely this paradoxical freedom, the form of its opposite, which closes the circle of 'bourgeois freedoms’. - Slavoj Zizek
Stallman's greatest strength - his uncompromising, liberty or death approach to computing - is also his greatest weakness. With all due respect, by refusing to use proprietary software under any circumstances, and taking extreme measures to avoid various forms of tracking, he isolates himself into a sunshine and rainbows bubble of free software. Stallman is very good at predicting what the worst case scenarios may look like under various regimes of technological oppression, but he has no idea what the current state of affairs is outside his freedom bubble. He can't see what direction the state of the art is moving in, and has no first hand experience with any of the various evils he dedicates his life to fighting.
Stallman wrote my favorite text editor, and the original version of the C compiler I've fiddled with for the past decade, so I can't complain about the guy. He's a living legend. I just think that the potential negative results of hard-line free software purism don't get enough discussion within the free software community.
Environmentalism is the quintessential example of why compromise doesn't work. Climate change is an existential threat to humanity and has only become more of a threat since the origins of the modern environmental movement. I'm not sure how you can represent a failure of this catastrophic magnitude as "tremendous gains".
Consider the concept of the overton window, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window -- the cause of software freedom needs at least some people taking an extreme view in order to help shift the discussion and normalize more moderate views.
Here's the thing about Richard Stallman -- he's absolutely correct in all of his principles and all of his underlying thinking.
I disagree with this.
There are things you can (are allowed to) do, things you know you can't do, and things that are inconceivable / impossible.
His position is that #2 is evil (because knowing you could fix that printer driver if only you were allowed to is fucking annoying), and there is a moral duty to minimize it.
I think that #1 is good and should be maximized, and there is very little practical difference between #2 and #3. Minimizing #2 at the expense of also reducing #1 is bad and harmful.
In practice, there is a flow of things from #3 to #2 to #1. Things are moved out of the impossible with funds from paying customers, and then made open by people re-implementing them once the hard exploratory part is done.
There is also a smaller flow of things directly from #3 to #1. Some research is publicly funded or due to individual curiosity, instead of corporate internal. Some kinds of products can be funded from support instead of initial sales.
Destroying category #2 would choke off the first, much larger, flow. The second would not be able to make up the difference. This result would be good according to Stallman's ethics / priorities. I think it would be bad.
There is this quote by the late, great philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser. I really like it, and I have shared it with RMS who, to my surprise, wasn't familiar with it. Professor Morgenbesser, whose field of study was American Pragmatism, was asked about his thoughts on pragmatism.
It's all very well in theory, but it doesn't work in practice.
If you're familiar with left-wing groups, it's a fairly recognizable pattern (and heavily mocked by Monty Python in Life of Brian). It's even harder on the FSF because the OSI was very clearly set up to push the same ideas while dropping the part that the former considers crucial.
> he's absolutely correct in all of his principles
I don't think principles are matters of fact. A set of principles may be consistent with each other, and/or you may agree with them, but that is not to say that one who holds them is correct.
> However, all of the movement around him and the resulting "outreach" efforts have been rather shortsighted in comparison.
I'd say it's the exact opposite: Stallman is a hopeless idealist with absolutely no anchor in reality. The only thing that keeps the FSF relevant is the people running it besides Stallman.
But it works. Somehow the free software movement survives and still makes influence in the modern IT world where it seems everyone holds convenience above ethics (how many people believe that privacy is good and mass surveillance is evil and yet use things like Facebook, it's absurd).
Corporations need to be treated as if they could have radically different managers at any moment (because they can). The Best Company Ever of today could be bought by Worst Corporation In Existence tomorrow.
It essentially doesn’t matter what a company is currently doing or “promises” to do or not do, if those behaviors are not legally binding. And even then, if you have to read a hundred-page document to figure out what the legal binding is, assume that the company has carefully placed a nice escape hatch somewhere in their legalese.
It was supposed to be true that if one vendor does something you don’t like, you simply “vote with your wallet” and go to one that you do like. That works great when buying toasters. Yet now, with essentially your whole life tied up in one or two devices and key services like Internet being dictated by one company based on where you live, it is REALLY hard to just walk away from one crappy technology experience and find something you like better. This is a real sign that it is not a good idea to have so much technology powered by so few corporations.
If anyone needs an example of the first point, look to what happened to Sun's free/open projects and firmware downloads after it's acquisition by Oracle.
It also works great when you buying a satisfactory toaster is the problem. It works less well when your neighbor buys an insecure IoT toaster that DDoSes the website you want to read an article from.
"Voting with your wallet" seems a pretty absurd concept to me anyway. If you could vote with money, there'd be no need to call it a vote. One may as well be a proponent of "voting with bombs" for all the rational good tying power directly to wealth will do you.
Managers don't make a company good or evil. Culture does. Culture bends managers, reward some behaviors and suppresses others...unless you change management en masse, the culture is persistent and strong.
Interesting that the more "advance" technology gets, the lower our reasonable expectation of privacy becomes.
I want to know when the average person gets on a computer, and surfs around, what data do they expect is kept for just themselves vs shared with the service.
I don't think the "average person" even thinks about data privacy at all.
I've seen people tell other people to "get off MY feed!" as if it's a thing they own and can control. As long as the platform can maintain this illusion, everyone will be happy.
I think it's because of the common assumption that the system that controls your data must also house the application that interacts with this data. When decentralized applications finally arrive (the inklings are already here) users won't be forced into this false choice. In that sense, companies like Google and Facebook are behind the curve, and don't really represent technological "advancement", but rather a social shift that has legitimized itself by falsely presenting itself as inevitable.
Expectation doesn't become less. But awareness of implications does. People aren't easily digesting realities of digital space. Abusing this lack of awareness and making it look like lower expectation of privacy is evil (and some clearly try to do that, to justify their breaches of others' privacy).
It's really a cultural (judicial?) shift that is immensely reluctant to apply the traditional standards of public interest (of which privacy is a sub set) to new technology.
The continued expansion of IP rights and copyright extension is part of the same shift.
And yet, today's big opensource projects often are driven by big corps.
I wonder how rms would reconciliate that. Maybe we can get there the difference between opensource and freesoftwares?
In any way, having big companies publishing opensource code tell us how past we are the time when every single company will just publish proprietary software and let you guess the specs.
I think there's a few drivers for big corps getting involved in open source:
1. Getting intelligent people to work on projects for free. This is actually rarer than it sounds. But it does happen.
2. Protecting dependencies. Once a large company depends on a piece of technology, it has a vested interest in the future of that piece of technology. For proprietary code bases, this might mean buying the supplier. For open source, it means getting involved in the project.
3. It's their business model. Create a popular open source project and then provide paid support to organisations that use it.
4. Recruitment. Getting involved in the communities where skilled people hang out, and being seen to be involved in those communities, is great for recruiting those skilled people.
5... other reasons (I thought of a few more but decided not to attempt an exhaustive list)
It's all commercial reasons - how to make more money from this software project.
RMS' view often seems to come from a place where all commercial organisations are inherently evil and out to do their users harm.
I believe that 99.9% of the market for a piece of software are never going to be interested in taking responsibility for the safety of that software. You can give them all the rights you like, but they're not going to use them. The supplier of a piece of software will always be held responsible for its safety. It's not surprising that the supplier will attempt to exert some kind of control over the use of the software, if only to reduce their liability.
Again, commercial interests. Trying to do the best thing for everyone.
I have no idea when this "law" was written or said, but I think this type of thinking--in 2016--is exactly the cause of what it's prophesizing.
Instead of thinking from "corporations vs. us", a better approach would be to think of humanity as a single entity.
I do understand that all this "open software" movement could have an impact because it was very polarizing and moved a lot of people. But in a world where open source is the norm, it should not be about fighting against corporations. The discussion should be on a higher level.
For example, you should think deeper about why it looks like: "While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users".
Only when you look deeper into the corporation's motivations you'll be able to figure out a way to defeat this. Otherwise it just reads like a rant.
The opposite happened when mainframes and minis transitioned to PCs, but he's right from the 2000s onward.
Something changed, and I'm not 100% sure what. Tech is reflecting the larger political trends of the world where strong man rule and other forms of authoritarianism are ascendant.
I do think the driver is democratic to an extent. People seem to be demanding less freedom in exchange for convenience, security, simplicity, etc... in tech and in life.
No, you can't just take a statement and call it a "law", even in a facetious sense.
Murphy's law, Betteridge's law, or other facetious laws are at least roughly formulated as "if X, then Y" (or sometimes "Y happens"), which mimics the structure of actual scientific laws. Stallman's statement is formulated as "if X, then maybe Y" (or "Y could happen").
"If corporations dominate society and write the laws, then each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users."
Also, you definitely can, tongue-in-cheek, call a general statement a "law." It's not meant to be taken in a literal sense; it's meant for humorous or broadly pragmatic effect.
I wish Stallman got back to its printer roots. Hardware is where the battle is. Good enough GPU / DSP / NIC and the rest is set. Sane not too hard to write drivers that works fine under open source OSes, enjoy prolongated lifetime for your devices and more interesting uses.
While there's a grain of truth to this, to insist on this generalization is to twist Stallman's meaning to suit your own purposes. It's quite clear that Stallman is, here, speaking /quite specifically/ about corporations -- inveighing against them, in fact. I am sure that he would agree that governments can engage in similar behavior, but the target of his criticism here is corporations alone. Forcing governments into the conversation is a way of derailing specific criticism of corporations.
I worked for a corporation for 12 years, and I was in a team developing software for CT scanner operations. What's wrong with that? Then I also worked for a very small company, where I coded... games. So according to the RMS, that could be morally less wrong. :-)
This is tangential, but isn't http://www.root-servers.org/ still the authoritative source for DNS. I was browsing DNS options (switched to open-DNS) but the main http://www.root-servers.org/ site is down. It appears to be cached as recently as this month with a map, but is not responsive. A few other "detector" sites have it down. Is this important, or does it not show up because it is a resolver?
[+] [-] stcredzero|9 years ago|reply
Let's use environmentalism as an analogy. There is a place for an absolutist intellectual position, when it comes to the underlying science. However, much of the tremendous progress that has been made with respect to the global environment has been a tenacious "foot in the door, while they're slamming it" struggle, where allies and politics are vital. This is why I found the FSF animosity towards "Open Source" perplexing. If a group is advocating for freedom, I find it perplexing when they seem to be coercing me to be free in exactly the way they deem correct. While leadership is vital in any movement (I think that leaderless movements generally fall off the rails and tend to spawn extremist groups) one of the primary reasons leadership is vital is to set the tone and morality of the movement. A firm philosophical and intellectual grounding is also vital, but it can't stand alone if the tone and morality of the movement allows it to succumb to any human group's natural tendency towards jingoism. RMS always got the intellectual far-seeing right. In terms of tone and politics: fairly close to dead wrong. Basically, he could impress college aged me, then alienate working aged me.
[+] [-] ktRolster|9 years ago|reply
I think you've misread something somewhere. Here is what the FSF says about "Open Source," and it doesn't seem like animosity: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.htm...
"We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects."
[+] [-] JacksonGariety|9 years ago|reply
“This procedure thus implies a certain logic of exception: every ideological Universal–for example freedom, equality–is 'false’ in so far as it necessarily includes a specific case which breaks its unity, lays open its falsity. Freedom, for example: a universal notion comprising a number of species (freedom of speech and press, freedom of consciousness, freedom of commerce, political freedom, and so on) but also, by means of a structural necessity, a specific freedom (that of the worker to sell freely his own labour on the market) which subverts this universal notion. That is to say, this freedom is the very opposite of effective freedom: by selling his labour 'freely’, the worker loses his freedom–the real content of this free act of sale is the worker’s enslavement to capital. The crucial point is, of course, that it is precisely this paradoxical freedom, the form of its opposite, which closes the circle of 'bourgeois freedoms’. - Slavoj Zizek
[+] [-] uabstraction|9 years ago|reply
Stallman wrote my favorite text editor, and the original version of the C compiler I've fiddled with for the past decade, so I can't complain about the guy. He's a living legend. I just think that the potential negative results of hard-line free software purism don't get enough discussion within the free software community.
[+] [-] imagist|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbrownaw|9 years ago|reply
I disagree with this.
There are things you can (are allowed to) do, things you know you can't do, and things that are inconceivable / impossible.
His position is that #2 is evil (because knowing you could fix that printer driver if only you were allowed to is fucking annoying), and there is a moral duty to minimize it.
I think that #1 is good and should be maximized, and there is very little practical difference between #2 and #3. Minimizing #2 at the expense of also reducing #1 is bad and harmful.
In practice, there is a flow of things from #3 to #2 to #1. Things are moved out of the impossible with funds from paying customers, and then made open by people re-implementing them once the hard exploratory part is done.
There is also a smaller flow of things directly from #3 to #1. Some research is publicly funded or due to individual curiosity, instead of corporate internal. Some kinds of products can be funded from support instead of initial sales.
Destroying category #2 would choke off the first, much larger, flow. The second would not be able to make up the difference. This result would be good according to Stallman's ethics / priorities. I think it would be bad.
[+] [-] pseudalopex|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yesbabyyes|9 years ago|reply
It's all very well in theory, but it doesn't work in practice.
[+] [-] icebraining|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmluke|9 years ago|reply
I don't think principles are matters of fact. A set of principles may be consistent with each other, and/or you may agree with them, but that is not to say that one who holds them is correct.
[+] [-] egh5oon|9 years ago|reply
Stallman is flexible enough to accept using closed hardware, closed firmware shipped with a device, non-GPL licenses.
On the other hand, patent and copyright laws...
[+] [-] hota_mazi|9 years ago|reply
I'd say it's the exact opposite: Stallman is a hopeless idealist with absolutely no anchor in reality. The only thing that keeps the FSF relevant is the people running it besides Stallman.
[+] [-] Fice|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] totalZero|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] edblarney|9 years ago|reply
Stallman is completely wrong in all these statements.
He's very shortsighted in fact, his views are 19th century if anything, and they're not even very intellectually founded, or well expressed.
[+] [-] makecheck|9 years ago|reply
It essentially doesn’t matter what a company is currently doing or “promises” to do or not do, if those behaviors are not legally binding. And even then, if you have to read a hundred-page document to figure out what the legal binding is, assume that the company has carefully placed a nice escape hatch somewhere in their legalese.
It was supposed to be true that if one vendor does something you don’t like, you simply “vote with your wallet” and go to one that you do like. That works great when buying toasters. Yet now, with essentially your whole life tied up in one or two devices and key services like Internet being dictated by one company based on where you live, it is REALLY hard to just walk away from one crappy technology experience and find something you like better. This is a real sign that it is not a good idea to have so much technology powered by so few corporations.
[+] [-] zdw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThrustVectoring|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retra|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] totalZero|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DasIch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roflchoppa|9 years ago|reply
I want to know when the average person gets on a computer, and surfs around, what data do they expect is kept for just themselves vs shared with the service.
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|9 years ago|reply
I've seen people tell other people to "get off MY feed!" as if it's a thing they own and can control. As long as the platform can maintain this illusion, everyone will be happy.
[+] [-] omphalos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Slackwise|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whybroke|9 years ago|reply
The continued expansion of IP rights and copyright extension is part of the same shift.
[+] [-] oelmekki|9 years ago|reply
I wonder how rms would reconciliate that. Maybe we can get there the difference between opensource and freesoftwares?
In any way, having big companies publishing opensource code tell us how past we are the time when every single company will just publish proprietary software and let you guess the specs.
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|9 years ago|reply
1. Getting intelligent people to work on projects for free. This is actually rarer than it sounds. But it does happen.
2. Protecting dependencies. Once a large company depends on a piece of technology, it has a vested interest in the future of that piece of technology. For proprietary code bases, this might mean buying the supplier. For open source, it means getting involved in the project.
3. It's their business model. Create a popular open source project and then provide paid support to organisations that use it.
4. Recruitment. Getting involved in the communities where skilled people hang out, and being seen to be involved in those communities, is great for recruiting those skilled people.
5... other reasons (I thought of a few more but decided not to attempt an exhaustive list)
It's all commercial reasons - how to make more money from this software project.
RMS' view often seems to come from a place where all commercial organisations are inherently evil and out to do their users harm.
I believe that 99.9% of the market for a piece of software are never going to be interested in taking responsibility for the safety of that software. You can give them all the rights you like, but they're not going to use them. The supplier of a piece of software will always be held responsible for its safety. It's not surprising that the supplier will attempt to exert some kind of control over the use of the software, if only to reduce their liability.
Again, commercial interests. Trying to do the best thing for everyone.
[+] [-] cocktailpeanuts|9 years ago|reply
Instead of thinking from "corporations vs. us", a better approach would be to think of humanity as a single entity.
I do understand that all this "open software" movement could have an impact because it was very polarizing and moved a lot of people. But in a world where open source is the norm, it should not be about fighting against corporations. The discussion should be on a higher level.
For example, you should think deeper about why it looks like: "While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users".
Only when you look deeper into the corporation's motivations you'll be able to figure out a way to defeat this. Otherwise it just reads like a rant.
[+] [-] api|9 years ago|reply
Something changed, and I'm not 100% sure what. Tech is reflecting the larger political trends of the world where strong man rule and other forms of authoritarianism are ascendant.
I do think the driver is democratic to an extent. People seem to be demanding less freedom in exchange for convenience, security, simplicity, etc... in tech and in life.
[+] [-] gaur|9 years ago|reply
Murphy's law, Betteridge's law, or other facetious laws are at least roughly formulated as "if X, then Y" (or sometimes "Y happens"), which mimics the structure of actual scientific laws. Stallman's statement is formulated as "if X, then maybe Y" (or "Y could happen").
[+] [-] tehlike|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flukus|9 years ago|reply
Well he did, so apparently you can.
[+] [-] bertiewhykovich|9 years ago|reply
Also, you definitely can, tongue-in-cheek, call a general statement a "law." It's not meant to be taken in a literal sense; it's meant for humorous or broadly pragmatic effect.
[+] [-] known|9 years ago|reply
Rule #1: Keep Them Afraid
Rule #2: Keep Them Isolated
Rule #3: Keep Them Desperate
Rule #4: Send Out The Jackboots
Rule #5: Blame Everything On The Truth Seekers
Rule #6: Encourage Citizen Spies
Rule #7: Make Them Accept The Unacceptable
http://www.alt-market.com/articles/198-the-essential-rules-o...
[+] [-] agumonkey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] necessity|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bertiewhykovich|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kome|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atemerev|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greyman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phn|9 years ago|reply
However, each technological advance is also an opportunity to break free from restrictions and mistreatment from the previous status quo.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] icomefromreddit|9 years ago|reply
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo...
[+] [-] vonklaus|9 years ago|reply