From reading the other comments here, I understand that it's easy to pick something RMS said and say "Yeah, right..."
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.
>>> 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.
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:
I wouldn't describe the most extremist viewpoint on most matters as a white angel. Extremism tends to turn off some people from the cause when it looks somewhat irrational. Telling people they're bad and shouldn't play non-free videogames certainly isn't going to help things much. If you make someone who would otherwise be on your side feel guilty everytime they pick up a controller to unwind at the end of the day, that's hard to swallow.
The stereotypical angel, though, is usually encouraging you to make the incrementally best decision in any situation. That's not really the message RMS sends. If a proprietary software developer says "hey, RMS has inspired me, I'm going to make sure users have lots of control over this new feature I'm developing", have they done a praiseworthy thing? I think so, and it sounds like you might too, but I don't get the sense that anyone in the free software movement would agree.
As someone who has heard the name but never looked into his message until now, is Stallman always so gung-ho on "All software should be free software"? Specifically, when I hit his comments regarding video games, I was quite shocked. "Unless the game is non-free — then it's bad for you, if you play it.", if that's the case, then is any entertainment that comes at a monetary fee bad? How ahout proprietary software for niche fields? Perhaps I need to do some more research on his stance, but from this article it seems that he doesn't believe that the software industry should exist (using industry defined as "a sector of economy").
Surely the "red revil" would be these guys https://www.freebsd.org/ who, while certainly not having the exact same philosophy as RMS's, share a fair amount with it...
> But you have to keep in mind that RMS advocates the free software philosophy - the complete left end of the software spectrum
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.
> Now, more free games? It doesn't satisfy an urgent practical need, obviously... But the crucial thing is, free ones might make it easier for some people to say, 'Let's move off this non-free thing, and play a game that is free. So we can have the same pleasure, but without paying freedom as the price.'“
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
Around the 8 and 9 min mark RMS talks about old hardware losing software support, like 32 bit systems. I am a kernel developer and the kernel removes code for a lot of older systems all the time (often lesser known 32bit ARM systems).
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.
Missing a reflection about how abundance of F/OSS has pushed us towards SaaS as one of the few places left to make a living from pure software dev, and the oligopolies arising out of it. What about Linux (Android) being used as the prime spyware vector, and Linux being used for cloud lock-in (k8s et al)?
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.
The move thowards SaaS started long before the rise in prominence of F/OSS, it was the creation of the Internet that was the catalyst to the rise of SaaS, nothing to do with the FOSS-vs-Proprietary fight. In fact, in the beginning of the Internet, the first wave of SaaS was all built on top of proprietary solutions, Oracle was the king, Sun Java was the up-and-coming go-to platform.
I would be fine with far less features for a platform that was simpler and standardized. Users seem to be gravitating toward the same, with short form video and a search bar being their main anchors. A reflection on complexity versus free would be nice to see. The more complex a system is, the less free it becomes by virtue of implementation time.
> Missing a reflection about how abundance of F/OSS has pushed us towards SaaS as one of the few places left to make a living from pure software dev, and the oligopolies arising out of it.
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.
At least some people are sane enough to actually reason and try to figure the real challenge (problem) with free software. The thing is not about open or closed source, but open/closed data and standards that surround them. Not the free/not free software, but the things that actually run on your PC and those that not.
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.
"abundance of F/OSS has pushed us towards SaaS as one of the few places left to make a living from pure software dev, and the oligopolies arising out of it. What about Linux (Android) being used as the prime spyware vector, and Linux being used for cloud lock-in (k8s et al)?"
It's not like closed-source software would have prevented any of this.
Stallman has basically served his purpose at this point. The path forward is not further awareness-building of Free Software, because everyone is in the orbit of GPL-licensed software now. It is a problem of creating economic incentives for a commons in computing technologies.
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.
Stallman reminds me of a character in a Greek tragedy. He ends up bringing in the very thing he is fighting against.
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.
On the other hand it's 2022 and my GNU/Linux/KDE system is very close from 100% free software, and allows to do pretty much anything I want - audio and video creation and editing with Kdenlive, LMMS, Ardour, writing and typesetting (I mostly use LaTeX but LibreOffice works well enough to be used in most of the administration of my country - I'm nearly 30 and have had the luck of almost never having been exposed to MS Office either in school or professionaly), making presentations (I use QML but there's LO, Beamer or whatever Markdown or JS presentation framework of the day), browsing the web with firefox, managing and processing RAW pictures with Darktable, and then there are entire toolchains and development tools which are more than competitive with proprietary alternatives... and I forget a ton of things.
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 .
Related, the reason why Clang was created is because GCC was specifically made to prevent it from being used with non-free software. You can find that quote around 3:17 of this talk:
https://youtu.be/NURiiQatBXA?t=185
It turned out to be easier in the long run to write a compiler from scratch, than to work with GCC.
That’s a good point. Relatedly, Jaron Lanier says something quite insightful on the topic that gets to the root (pun) of the problem.
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.
And related to that I find that free-software focus often misses one of the biggest issues of our day; privacy. I care much more about software privacy then I do about software freedom (though I still want both). But when the FSF was founded the internet didn’t exist (so privacy was not as much a concern) and they have never brought that under their umbrella. Even though they are very related concepts.
> But typically these games are not solitaire; you're playing with other people. And using a non-free program together with other people? That's particularly bad. Because it means that those people are pressuring each other to keep running that non-free program.
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.
> Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable.
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.
>Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable.
[[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.
I think he would just say “I told you so”. To play a game I need to be running non-free hardware, to run a non-free OS (Windows 11) to run closed source software, that connects to a non-free server, that spies on me in proprietary ways to prevent cheating.
> Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable.
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.
I wonder What Stallman would think of ROM hacking, and other mod communities that reverse engineer proprietary games, and fundamentally transform (either through direct hacks or rebuilding from decompiled source) them into something more akin to open culture. Legally? No, which is why I doubt he'll ever comment on it, but I imagine he might say that this is a distopian notion where people have to break laws to take ownership of culture because everything is fundamentally non-free.
It looks like Lunduke just cut-and-pasted all the quotes that Slashdot published (presumably their transcription from the FSF's audio file) on Saturday.
,, Macintoshes are moving towards being jails, like the iMonsters. It's getting harder for users to install even their own programs to run them.''
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).
Half an hour through the ~90min presentation, I was wondering about speech-to-text solutions out there to really skim through it. For anyone else who would similarly like to be able to skim through a transcription:
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 always appreciate people that live by their principles but some of this stuff is downright comical! Making other people buy things online for you to avoid using non-free javascript?! Lol
That example feels extremely dishonest and hypocritical. The correct answer in that sort of case is not to buy it in first place. Having someone else do it for you doesn't change anything, just makes you dishonest hypocrite. If you disagree with thing like that you shouldn't be giving them money in any case.
>Unless the game is non-free — then it's bad for you, if you play it
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.
The sad part of RMS being called a fanatic and unrealistic, is that the things he predicted about jailed hardware, software restrictions, and the like have steadily become more and more true.
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.
Did he say anything about cloud providers/the SaaS loophole? I mean they do anything with GPL licensed software, as distribution does not happen. The AGPL addresses this issue, but it does not seem to be used much.
[+] [-] jasoneckert|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thesuperbigfrog|3 years ago|reply
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:
https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
[+] [-] ineedasername|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] specialist|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SpicyLemonZest|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] synergy20|3 years ago|reply
Nobody is perfect, focus on one's strength serves everyone better.
[+] [-] sleepymoose|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterTea|3 years ago|reply
> ...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.
[+] [-] gjm11|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geofft|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] waplot|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] csdreamer7|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fsflover|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] SkeuomorphicBee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] largely_sitting|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hdjjhhvvhga|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] larodi|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jrockway|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmoriarty|3 years ago|reply
It's not like closed-source software would have prevented any of this.
[+] [-] syntheweave|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jcelerier|3 years ago|reply
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 .
[+] [-] omoikane|3 years ago|reply
It turned out to be easier in the long run to write a compiler from scratch, than to work with GCC.
[+] [-] randomsearch|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] celeritascelery|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CoolGuySteve|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Arainach|3 years ago|reply
[[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.
[+] [-] oceanplexian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] andrewclunn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moonchild|3 years ago|reply
This exists with anticheat, too.
[+] [-] danamit|3 years ago|reply
I do not hate anticheat as a gamer, but I do hate DRMs.
[+] [-] MilnerRoute|3 years ago|reply
https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/04/16/238221/richard-stal...
https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/04/16/238221/richard-stal...
[+] [-] throwaway81523|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Tao331|3 years ago|reply
> “Due to unforeseen technical difficulties, RMS gave his talk over audio only.”
[+] [-] xiphias2|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] boneitis|3 years ago|reply
https://pastebin.com/Fgrh68WY
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.
[+] [-] whowe1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ekaros|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgotmypw17|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineedasername|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tambourine_man|3 years ago|reply
I’m all for free software but that’s hilarious and symptomatic.
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MichaelMoser123|3 years ago|reply
https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/the-saas-...
[+] [-] eyelidlessness|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] wetpaws|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhatemyjob|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|3 years ago|reply
Hmm that's insightful.