I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contributions but at the end of the day just figured he was wearing a tin foil hat.
Over the course of my life the tinfoil to warranted concern has been the general trend. Mostly in areas where unchecked ambition for control, power, and influence have allowed greed to convince people to do evil unto others.
The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying. It's the creation of new, useful information that needs to be incentivized; that's where UBI or some other hire more public works creators / maintainers would be good.
The hardware still matters too, and much of why _that_ is under attack are greedy actors who want to have a cartel of control and manipulation; so that they own all things and can have them work against end users.
We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough.
Might not be able to pay out a quarter million a year like the FAAAM crew does, but we need a bunch of jobs paying half that to write and maintain open source. If it isn't competitive with the other options, it won't attract the best people.
I don't have a plan here. I found my niche but, like most of them, it isn't scalable. But we have to keep plotting if we want something sustainable.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot. Most of my ideas have been variations of creating a scholarship fund where interest from the initial investment goes to pay for continued development on a specific project.
The big question though is how to run the investment without it being wasted on people aren't helping the project at all.
Some notes (I'm planning on eventually writing a blog post on this subject):
- You probably need to pay people differently depending on whether they're the maintainer or a minor contributor
- There needs to be a balance of power between users and the maintainer. A simple balance could be, the maintainer is dictator for life (or until they lay down the mantle) but compensation is based on number of users.
- Maybe compensation is done on a per-feature basis, e.g., users put a bounty on a feature and the interest money doubles that bounty.
Traditional Judaic society has a caste of people who do nothing but study sacred texts, and they've got a decent track record - I think it comes down to how much public admiration there is for the best open-source coders, if there's a lot it would attract a lot of talent.
But importantly, a brilliant scholar of humble means is considered a desirable partner. If a brilliant coder of open-source were similarly desirable in our hypothetical future, I'm sure things would work out.
Agreed. So if we wanted to go that route (disclaimer: I think it's our best bet) we'd have to somehow confer high status to the best open-source code monks.
We talk about the software a lot, but we mustn't overlook the hardware. Talking about, say, the next 10 years, we need to find a way of making Open Hardware truly affordable: I can't afford a Purism device but I could probably afford a PinePhone. However, that would probably not be powerful enough for me nor the average user. The Raspberry Pi is looking tempting again but it incorporates non-free BLOBs. What we need is a Open Philanthropist who'd be willing to recognise the problems and throw money at them. We recognise the problems and have ideas about solutions, but I get the feeling we're missing the tools to get up on the next rung of the ladder...
> We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough.
I think you underestimate what UBI would do, or you are only looking at very narrow direct effects. There probably wouldn’t be that many coders that would directly move to 100% coding while living off $1,500 a month UBI. But there would be lots of people already making decent money that would be able to rely on that extra $18k a year cushion to start their own business, or reduce their hours to work on a passion project. All the people that could go to school full time to learn skills useful to society because they didn’t have to also work full time. All the people that could afford to take a pay cut to take a more fulfilling job. All the people that could step back and take meaningful steps to get a higher skill job because they were not 2 paychecks away from homelessness. All the business that could push automation because they were no longer the only thing standing between thousands of minimum wage employees and poverty. Things like Wikipedia are just examples at the extreme end of the spectrum. UBI would free up an almost unimaginable amount of human potential to try new things and start the process of decoupling us from having to find some sort of drudgery for every single person in exchange for not starving.
This is something that Gitcoin Grants solves fairly well. Quadratic funding of public goods allows open source developers to be funded full time by the community.
1) you'd still budget 125k a man-year? Why? That's only needed for devs in SV, NYC, London and other places with mad rent, besides - all you're gonna get in these places are fresh university grads and hipsters, not seasoned people with actual experience that tells them to not use a two months old JS framework for something that is supposed to live long.
2) Why limit it to USA? Other countries have decent programmers too, with way lower cost of employment. 60k is going to fetch you quality in Germany, 30k in Eastern Europe.
Besides, the best way to finance all of this, other than pressuring government to procure only/preferred open source is some rich startup exiter putting a couple billion dollars into some sort of trust fund and pay the development from the interest.
60k, even in EUR (about 71k USD) will not give you quality in Germany. A senior developer in Berlin is about EUR 85k, and may go up to 120k for strong tech leads.
That only works if you're willing to attach a scam to your software and it gives you no incentive to work on the software since it doesn't generate value.
They created a new business model for a new type of open source software. It doesn't do anything for all the existing types of open source software. Nobody is going to turn glibc into a blockchain.
That's just a sign of glibc being stuck in the wrong millennium more than anything else. Add a couple functions to create ERC20 tokens and add the EVM as a supported architecture and I'm sure that can change. It's high time to remove those unsafe APIs like strcpy and printf that cause CVEs all the time and refocus effort on things that actually matter.
Greed is not the problem, and trying to avoid it is going to frankly impossible and would require a degree of control that honestly none of us should want.
The problem is that the individual is not being greedy enough for their own control. They are being greedy for many wrong things, not exclusively but many.
This problem is solved with education not control, which is what stallman had tried to do. People should understand what they should be greedy for i.e. protect at all costs
Well if we are making acting in your own best interests defined as greed, which is all that corporations are doing, then I think it's a fine generalised definition to say protecting your own control is greedy as well.
Edit: for clarity I not implying negative connotations to either side. I think corporations are doing exactly what they should do. But I also think people need to be more responsible for their choices and the consequences thereof.
Education won't help with systemic problems. Even if individuals would be equally, ruthlessly greedy as corporation, you're still talking about uncoordinated individuals taking on a money making megamachine.
Living by greed in the market economy is an exercise of exploiting a positive feedback loop. Larger entities benefit more from it, and the larger they are, they more they benefit.
In a market economy you are free to not use their product. No one is forcing you to use Apple or Google or Microsoft or whomever.
The problem is that there are political entities that can be manipulated to give unfair advantage and or effective monopoly control by making that cost of entry so prohibitively high.
Education will ensure people will understand that political entities are no more inclined to have your best interest at heart than a corporation, there both made up people it would be moronic to think they'd act any differently.
Doesn't this assume these same political entities won't be manipulated into giving unfair advantages to educational approaches that benefit the manipulator?
Of course. It's patently obvious that the current education systems pander to interest groups that are not necessarily in the best interests of the recipients of said education.
Educational policy is not exclusively for the benefit of the recipient either intentionally when pandering to teacher unions or unintentionally when said policies set targets that drive the system in the wrong direction per Goodhart's law.
The problem with that is it breaks the value signalling we get from paying for things. With commercial software, it only gets developed and supported if customers pay for it, proving that it has value to them. How do we know this as against that open source project is worth funding? How do we tell how many users it has, and what value it provides to them?
Suppose we already have an open source project developing a snazwozzler, now somebody else develops a new kind of snazwozzler software with a better UI and more scalable architecture but missing some features the new developer doesn’t think are necessary. How do we tell whether to allocate resources to the old project or this new one? Customers can tell you this in a way that users can’t.
> only gets developed and supported if customers pay for it
Not exactly. A feature gets developed if it brings in more money from customers, but not always because the customers are happy to pay.
Consider putting ads to the software.
Consider turning software to a subscription service.
Consider preventing other software from interoperating with yours without a license, or at all, and locking users down on your platform.
I agree that when a user votes with their money, it is a great incentive. But the way it currently works with commercial
software is a bit far from a meritocratic ideal. Other mechanisms are possible (see sponsorship, Kickstarter, bounties), and I hope they will grow in popularity.
You can try a different reasoning track. In the 'old days' software was more often than not driven by intrinsic motivation. I just loved making games that me and my friends could play. I loved writing software so writing useful apps for myself and good people around me did not need an extrinsic financial reward. Later I worked in academia for a long time. Again the research. gaining new insights in the company of other passionate and smart people was the intrinsic driver.
It was not until much later, due leaving good environments for bad reasons, that external financial motivations became a driver, providing a temporary bad self justification for not leaving sooner. Even then, solving the puzzle, exceeding the clients expectation. We're still the most rewarding parts of the job.
If you love what you do, money just becomes an issue in just 2 cases.
(1) When your needs for living in comfort (and with that I mean the luxury of not having to worry about money) are not met.
(2) When you feel others are exploiting you financially (you see disproportionate gains by others based of your work)
Now. Against this background, let us return to the question of 'will software still get written if we allow the free distribution of it'?
My believe is yes. While it is most certainly not for everyone, a certain type of people just love to create digital platforms and solutions. In fact their passion is now more often than not exploited, see for example the practices in the major gaming industry. There are more than enough specific needs that people will want to prioritise to offer financial incentives for their prioterization even if that means the result will become part of the commons. Current exclusive IP exploitation rights very seldom reward the creators, most often just those who have constructed layers on layers of financial instruments confining and leeching of the creative.
Finally IP protection most certainly stifles innovation. It restricts forms of further creation. The question is Wether this reduction is compensated by a boon in extrinsic driven creation that would be missing in the absense of guaranteed monopolies on exploitation. My guess once again is no. Science, innovation in knowledge, has progressed for centuries through the free sharing of ideas. The Eastern electronics industry has thrived in a climate of fluid copying and absense of IP enforcement. Most of the 'major' industry investments carry disproportionate public investments through grants and incentives while still locking up all rights on the publicly funded results.
We might see a different software world if copying and extending of all software was free, but not one whete creators go hungry, or innovation ceased to exist.
"The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying."
Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue.
The 'cost' is that of 'creating and developing'- and FYI it's not 'information' - in most cases it's 'creative works' not some kind of 'discovered knowledge'.
MS Windows is a 'Developed and supported Product' - not 'Information'.
In much the same way it only costs $2 to 'make' your pair of Nike shoes - it's definitely not the 'cost of parts and labour' (though that's obviously an input).
Making anything working, of material value is usually an excessive grind involving a lot of people. 'Software' is not 'the implementation of some algorithm' it's all of the ugly complexities around that and the sausage-making realities of getting things to work well and play nicely with other platforms. And then of course it requires ongoing support, maintenance, docs, training, security updates etc.. That's real work.
In then 1990's when we 'controlled' the software that went onto our Mac/PCs ... that we didn't have access to Windows or Adobe Photoshop source code wasn't really an excessive problem.
Especially the fact that there was a clean delineation between 'OS and Software' (other than for say MS Office Products) - then it 'mostly worked'.
IP protections are absolutely not going away, for good reason, the challenge is to make those work as the situation evolves, moreover, they are not the 'real problem' frankly, as excessive platform control (i.e. Apple, now Google) represent a more fundamental issue, and consider that happens while technically most of Android is open source anyhow.
Even Linux is open and popular, and to this day it's still a mostly 'dev/interest' OS that most people don't use in their homes, partly due to distribution power controls by MS/Apple, but also because frankly managing massive real world deployments of 'Moms, Dads and frankly most people' who 'just want it to work' is an operational challenge as much as it is an R&D/Creative effort.
Consider the basic economics involved: Even reasonably smart corporations with 'good IT' still don't generally deploy Linux to regular userbase. Why not? Because $50 a year to MS is very cheap, and frankly worth every penny in terms of value created. Any 'supported' Linux variation is going to cost 'something' anyhow, so what's the difference between '$20 a year' for some 'supported Linux variation' and '$50 a year' for MW Windows? Basically nothing. In a per capita basis, the true cost of a lot of software is marginal.
> > "The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying."
> Wow, no, this is a fundamental misunderstanding right at the core of the issue.
It is, because it is also a misstatement. The actual rule is "unit price will trend toward the marginal cost of an additional copy", but that elides a couple of caveats; first, this only holds true under conditions of a "perfectly competitive market"[0]; second, over a sufficiently long term ALL costs eventually become marginal costs[1].
[0] Suffice it to say that most businesses try to leverage or introduce imperfections in the market (aka "sustainable competitive advantage").
[1] Instead of thinking about the "sunk cost" of building a factory, consider the (eventual) marginal cost of building the next one.
I agree with all of that, but the very crude issue here is one of sunk/capital outlays vs. unit costs.
Good software requires incredibly investment, even if the 'unit cost' is nothing.
Books aren't sold for $25 because of the cost of paper.
I think we are wired to think in such material terms, which is why maybe why we have an instinct towards the notion of 'free' software as being somehow special, when really it's not that much different than many other things.
> Good software requires incredibly investment, even if the 'unit cost' is nothing.
True. But with open source that investment is of labor (sometimes it is volunteer labor, in part), and is usually incremental, there is often little in the way of large up front capital outlays.
Most of the exceptions would be a commercial company making a "Big Bang" initial release.
This is just to say that the concept of "marginal cost of producing another copy" needs some contextual adjustments.
For F/OSS, it might be better to think instead of "the marginal cost of making a new release", since at the point of making the release the marginal cost of all subsequent copies becomes zero.
And almost all of those, except maybe the router and phones if the users are technically sophisticated enough, will be locked down and refuse to obey the user. When Linux gets Tivoized, well-meaning devs have helped corporations abuse their users and customers.
Yes, of course, but as an 'Application Platform' Linux obviously not ubiquitous.
There are a number of free and commercial substitutes for Linux that could be used at that embedded level and of course, they are perfectly encapsulated and monolithic: your 'fridge' is not a platform wherein there needs to be some degree of OS-level integration with other bits of software. From a systems perspective 'it doesn't matter' what OS is running on your refrigerator.
But it's moot: there is no inherent morality in 'free software'. Software is just another good, with different means to distribute, one of which is FOSS, which is really great, but it's only one piece of the puzzle.
I was too young in the 90's to know about him, but in the early 00's people definitely didn't think him crazy. Linux was doing well and his contributions to its success were recognised, even if he didn't get as much credit as he wanted (should've got?). I feel it's the past ten years that he's become more notorious for his quirks and his gaffes.
For someone who was such a large philosophical influence on our industry he had some basic sociological lessons to learn, which in the past ten years have been a more dominant topic in the industry than software freedom. Both are important topics, and it's unfortunate that software freedom has taken a backseat recently.
Even though we have Linux, I would love to see more dominant GPL projects out there. It is an excellent license when used strategically and I think it's dismissed as too extreme too often.
> Even though we have Linux, I would love to see more dominant GPL projects out there. It is an excellent license when used strategically and I think it's dismissed as too extreme too often.
Unfortunately, the startup/business world has largely taken over most forms of open source development, and they've put a lot of pressure to change the default license for new projects from (A/L)GPL to ASL. That change enables a lot more exploitation of software projects and open source software developers and it's almost embarrassing how often open source projects and commercial open source entities are surprised when it happens.
I wish we could live in a world where the default was to contribute with time and/or money to support each other, but we don't. If we did, I think we wouldn't even need share-alike licenses. But we don't, so we do.
> I wish we could live in a world where the default was to contribute with time and/or money to support each other
But we can. One
Thing that is absolutely evident from the fantastically vibrant open source communities forming around every conceivable niche,
it is exactly how much energy and enthusiasm to do just that is out there.
"I wish we could live in a world where the default was to contribute with time and/or money to support each other"
Hmm, maybe we could 'exchange' our services and creative works for some kind of 'credit system, or currency' - not controlled by a 'central source' - but, you know, acting as 'free acting agents and groups of agents' - freely exchanging our products services for one another, setting our own prices and terms with one another.
Hmmm ... I wonder if there's a term for that kind of system ...
I imagine some form of market economy will always be an important part of organizing human endeavors. The driving force in a market economy is _extrinsinc_ though. Or as some in thread put it, “greed”.
What we are talking about here is carving out a complementary arrangement scaling up _intrinsicly_ motivated production.
A market economy is not based on greed, it's based on the willingness of people to provide services for one another whereupon actor's first motivation may be individual wealth creation, but the side effects of trade, division of labour and especially competition create massive surpluses, usually for the buyers, i.e. consumers.
Most importantly, companies are only successful if they focus really hard on doing things that others (i.e. 'the market') believe is valuable.
Paradoxically - it is 'intrinsically motivated' behaviour that is 'greedy' or purely self-oriented. To think that someone - anyone - deserves some kind of high standard of material living because 'they want to do whatever they want all day' - irrespective of the net utility they create for the community ... is selfish.
'Intrinsically motivated work' already has a name, it's called 'art'. And in that I would lump the vast majority of OSS which was designed to meet the makers view of what is useful, not 'the market's view', which is why most of it is not used.
Nothing could be less healthy on the whole than letting Engineers build 'whatever they want' because most of it will be completely useless, and projects will generally not produce enough material input to be able to do anything at scale.
Another bit of paradox is that if there were more efficient means to fairly license and maintain software - 90% of OSS makers would happily do that. I don't believe they are ideologically tied to OSS - if they could tool away on their favorite bit of software and earn what they though was a 'fair living' by selling it - they would do it in a heartbeat.
Intrinsically motivated initiatives are important, and frankly, nobody would do Engineering if they didn't like it on some level, but it's only one ingredient, and not the primary driver.
And of course, most labour has zero possibility for intrinsic motivation: 40-80% of jobs would instantly be vacated if that were the only motivator as they're just too grinding, boring, difficult for someone to do mostly on that basis.
The market forces people to 'serve others' and that's ironically want people don't want to do ... because it's a grind. What people really 'want to do' is 'whatever they want' which probably won't bode well on the whole for having a broadly high standard of living.
Didn’t really mean to imply that all market behavior is greedy. Should have clarified that. I think we agree pretty much on how markets can, and should, work.
I do think we have some problems in the current incarnation though. Way to much resources are spent on, frankly, destructive behavior. Which I think the word greed perhaps could be used to describe. But I think it’s anthropomorphizing things that are actually structural and institutional deficiencies, not necessarily moral failures of individuals.
I do not agree that intrinsically motivated work is just art though. The public sector can be described as being the kind of scaled up intrinsically motivated production I was thinking of. But thoughts of what is and should belong to the public sector vs the market differ wildly.
On a personal note I might add that I am actually primarily motivated intrinsically. A sufficient income is necessary, but not sufficient.
Now I’m not actually arguing for giving everyone a heap of money and just see what’s built. I do think it would be interesting to study the result though.
What I do argue is that there probably are some interesting, and worthwhile, ways to put more capital in the hands of more organizations that produce things of value for its own sake.
> they've put a lot of pressure to change the default license for new projects from (A/L)GPL to ASL
How have they put pressure?
I've written some libraries personally and licensed them under the Apache or BSD license because I want it to be helpful for anyone who needs it. I'm really not concerned if they make money off it or not or if they contribute back.
If you're talking larger projects, a lot of the big, recent ones have come out of companies--projects like MongoDB, Cassandra, React, Kubernetes. Some like Hadoop were inspired by work at big companies.
> I've written some libraries personally and licensed them under the Apache or BSD license because I want it to be helpful for anyone who needs it. I'm really not concerned if they make money off it or not or if they contribute back.
It's not about getting contributions back, but ensuring that everyone who needs it can use it includes end users.
Google literally can't even use something that's AGPL licensed due to internal policy. Apple has a war on GPL, shipping outdated versions of GNU tools that still have GPLv2, and funding clang development which has a non-copyleft license.
Google refusing to use AGPL software actually makes the license more appealing. The way AGPL wards off corporations like google is almost as though it has a 'do no evil' clause.
I didn’t think he was wearing a tinfoil hat. I agreed with RMS back then insofar as he saw things like TPM coming. However, he did not understand then and still does not understand that by using any device as complex as a computer, the user must trust _somebody_. His free software ideals lead him to think that if the user can read the source and modify it, he can trust it. But this is true of no one, regardless of his technical acumen. The software is too large, too complex for any one user to audit.
So the user must trust someone. Typically this is going to be at a minimum his OS vendor. He might also have to trust other software vendors, and maybe hardware vendors and network operators. That the vendor provides Free Software makes no difference. I have a machine running Debian. I still have to trust Debian.
What TPM does is give the OS vendor another tool so I can be assured that I’m running what the vendor provided. Of course the vendor can abuse this. But if he does, I have bigger problems. I want the vendor to be able to provide me with what I asked for and therefore I welcome technologies like TPM.
I don’t disagree with RMS because he’s paranoid. I disagree with him because he thinks Freedom is an elixir.
Somewhat misleading to claim that 'one user' would be all there is auditing software. It's not 'one user' that audits your Linux distribution. Can something be snuck in that nobody notices into the source? Of course. But it's incredibly disingenuous to claim that because one user cannot audit all the software running on their machine that we should abandon the concept of auditable software in general and accept corporate lockdown. There's a massive difference between 'my operating system's code is open and many people have at least glanced at it' and 'this is a total secret beholden only to one corporate identity and nobody can have a look even if they had all the technical knowledge in the world'.
You're missing the point. How do you verify that the bootloader or OS running on your hardware is the same as what the community verified? Hashes? How do you know the hash checking software is genuine without a TPM?
I don't think Stallman would have an issue with a vendor being the default trusted entity on a system–but it must be possible to replace this with your own root of trust if you so desire. The issue is that companies hear the first part and go "oh boy, TPM time, let's lock out the user!"
Well, the saying goes that democracy is the worst form of government, besides every other form of government we've tried.
Freedom's no elixir, but proprietary isn't either. You have to trust someone, but in a better world, that's a community of experts reviewing freedom respecting software.
Sometimes, the benefits of that centralized control are real, but the concomitant abuse of said centralization appears almost axiomatically inevitable at this point, so you have to ask yourself if the benefits are even worth it. Microsoft's OS itself has nearly turned into spyware. It'll be signed spyware, assured that it's doing what Microsoft wants it to do. If I'm going to get exploited, I can at least get exploited while remaining free. There's a real chance that maybe I'm not getting exploited if I'm free, but just about 0% chance if I'm not even free.
Software freedom isn't about every user being capable of evaluating and modifying software they run by themselves. It may have started this way, back in the times where end users were also competent at working with computers. The point is that end users can delegate trust on their own.
It's the same idea as with Right to Repair - the movement isn't expecting everyone to learn how to use a soldering iron and a chip programmer; is to allow local communities to have their own specialists capable of repairing hardware. Similarly, with free software, my mother isn't going to look or modify the code herself, but she may ask me to help with it. Or a different neighbourhood tech whiz, who may even take payment for the service.
Software freedom is in part enabling local markets to work.
I value free software because it's independent from its author. If author decides to abandon it, someone will continue its work, if that software is worthy for enough people. That's not the case for proprietary software.
And TPM does not allow other people to maintain that software.
It's not that he did something weird that's interesting (everybody does weird stuff) - it's that he did it in public, on camera, while the focus of attention during some sort of exhibit.
It's interesting because it's unique. The only other person I can think of that would do something similar is Danny DeVito.
> I remember in the 90s people all thought Stallman was crazy. And by people I mean developers, Linux users, people on usenet, etc. We all appreciated his contributions but at the end of the day just figured he was wearing a tin foil hat.
Yeah. Pretty much the only people who took him seriously were the folks who wanted to lock down computers, or were being paid to do so.
I remember going to a west coast science fiction convention in the early '90s (most likely a Westercon or LosCon, possibly a BayCon) that had a panel on "computers and copyright" or something similar.
I don't recall the panel itself much, except that it was a fairly small room, but one bit stuck in my mind from the Q&A: An audience member said something to the effect that the necessary restrictions on copying would just be implemented in hardware rather than software. I think a panelist dismissed his statement, but the audience member insisted that it was possible, and that he had X years industry experience to prove it. At which point the conversation started getting very loud with a substantial fraction of the room speaking over him (and each other) saying he was wrong.
And that was it. I'm pretty sure most of the folks in that room came away with the impression that "information wants to be free" and there was little that could be done to oppose that.
It was about a decade before that whole exchange came to mind again, when "Trusted Computing" started gaining traction and criticism.
I've occasionally wondered just who that audience member was, what their "industry experience" was at that point, and what they've worked on since.
By no means all people. He became very well known in the tech community in the 90s because a significant number of people were interested in what he was saying.
People don't want to listen to Stallman because he talks about motivations. The number of times I've had people downvote me for pointing out all organizations will act to maximize profit regardless the cost to others is extraordinary.
It doesn't matter if it's google, mozilla, microsoft or the fsf.
Google. Mozilla. The FSF. Microsoft. IBM springs to mind. These will all have their time in the spotlight as tech darlings or villains.
You aren't using the Stallman Trick here. The fact some organisation or person seems good today is totally meaningless compared to what it is legally allowed to do, and what they have incentive to do.
It is a bit cynical, but assume people are going to do what the incentives push them to do and the world becomes a very simple and predictable place. The time to panic isn't when someone threatens you, it is when they have the means & incentive to threaten you. Run or fight then, not later on.
If the FSF gains power, it will abuse that power. Sooner or later. They will react to money just as much as the rest of us. Look at what happened to Mozilla.
You seem to imply that there are always incentives pushing any organization to do evil things. That's a big presumption.
Organizations are just groups of people. People have varied motivations, and their motivations don't have to change just because they join forces with others.
If what you're saying is correct, then either people's own varied motivations are all evil, or instantly become evil the moment they join a group (whatever that means).
Regardless of the initiative (could have been rural broadband) by expanding into these areas Mozilla's parent company said..
We have enough money for operations. This extra money will go to this good cause.
As someone who might donate I would hold off because they have more than enough. I could use my money directly to support a cause.
Not sure how a charity starts giving to another charity (unless that is what they specialize in). That strikes me as greedy. If you have enough don't ask for more. There are local charities who could use the money.
Indeed. I do not agree with everything he says but he's right about a lot of things. It was only recently that I started to understand the value of computing freedom. To think he's been exploring these ideas since decades ago...
He is crazy. Crazy is a subjective cultural term applied to people who exist on some margin of polite society. Crazy people aren't bad, even if the term is intended to denigrate.
To me, all radical libertarians are crazy. But the fact that he also doesn't have a grasp on what is acceptable social decorum (don't simulate nasal sex at dinner, don't make an apologist argument for pedophilia in public, etc) is probably what makes other people reach for 'crazy'.
To be clear, Richard "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children" Stallman is totally nuts (although I'll give credit where it's due, he finally walked back his stance on pedophilia).
First off, he recanted on that, in particular after actually seeing or meeting people to whom it happened.
One thing I just don't understand is how people can want to shut off their brains when seeing one thing unusual and not go "That seems really odd, maybe I'm just misunderstanding it, and need to investigate a bit more."
If you don't, you miss out on some of the most exquisitely unique samples of the human species. People with life experience so deep as to have limited exposure to some of the more mundane ones we all take for granted. I'd recommend offering a bit more benefit of a doubt, and a wee bit more effort in terms of investigating context before writing someone off.
After all, if they're going to be your enemy, you might as well know them for what they really are that you don't underestimate them.
> First off, he recanted on that, in particular after actually seeing or meeting people to whom it happened.
Yes, I pointed out his backtracking on that.
> After all, if they're going to be your enemy, you might as well know them for what they really are that you don't underestimate them.
I don't think of Stallman as an enemy, just a very creepy guy who happened to make some important contributions. Regardless of his backpedaling, I would have extreme reservations about leaving him unsupervised around children. That doesn't mean his ideas were all bad, just that he shouldn't be put on a pedestal. Lots of great ideas came from very flawed people.
- Fritz Haber is responsible for the Haber process that unlocked atmospheric nitrogen for use in fertilizer, and saved multitudes from starvation. He was also responsible for horrific suffering thanks to his other project, chemical weapons.
- Hans Reiser was a brilliant engineer who created a widely used linux filesystem. He's also a convicted murderer.
- Wernher von Braun was a brilliant rocket maker who was responsible in large part for putting Americans on the moon. He was also a Nazi who made weapons that killed many innocent civilians.
This seems like an instance of "what you can't say". The taboo is so strong that to even question it leads observers to speculate about whether the questioner is insane or evil. I suspect the reality is some manner of neurodivergence, either autism or a thing we don't yet have a good name for.
I even feel the need to add that I don't share his skepticism, lest I raise suspicion about my own position by posting this.
Like all humans he is full of faults has a long track record of unfortunate postures and statements, but as a technologist the best analogy for him would be an atomic clock sent back in time to before we understood relativity.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html
[2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html