I hope he’s able to manage it well (since the prognosis is good) and is around for a lot longer.
We need absolutists like him who go to extremes and are known widely. For a few moments, leave aside his personality and what people have said about his behavior or hygiene. If he hadn’t been there, our world would’ve been a lot different and a lot poorer. A visionary is what he was and is.
While the Free part of FOSS is being substituted by “(just) open source” and “source available”, while DRM goes deeper into our lives, and while everything is becoming a “hosted service”, one can only hope for (and put efforts into) going back to the ideals he proposed and pushing back on the elements that control us and seek to do even more so.
We all don’t have to be absolutists (it comes at the cost of convenience, which most people prefer), but there are enough of such people around the world as far as FOSS is concerned. Whenever I see FOSS meetups and people connecting over it, that’s something I’m grateful for and wholeheartedly support (though I’m not one of them).
I feel similarly. While I absolutely can't and won't operate under the severe restrictions that an ideologically pure stance on software freedom ala Stallman would impose, I'm glad that there are some people, like Stallman himself, who take it to those extremes, tirelessly advocate for improvement and thus move the needle towards a better middle ground for everyone.
> I'm just sad that there's no young people to pass the torch for when the time comes and the founding fathers are no more.
I wish I can be one of those young people who can be a worthy successor to Richard Stallman. I already am to a great extent, preferring FLOSS whenever possible (with an unfortunate exemption for video games, especially many PC and all console games).
My primary issue is now trying to find like people who are also into FLOSS as much as I am, and they're not as common as tech illiterate people are. Maybe someone can advise me on how I can get started (online or local around the Houston, TX area).
I'm also a big FLOSS advocate to the point where I'll use GIMP and kdenlive (which I feel are great software) even though it would be far, far easier for me to use something non-free.
An important thing RMS did was producing good software along with his advocacy. For example, even though it's inferior to vim (joking), it was and is a killer app. What RMS didn't write himself, he helped to drive and organize, and ended up as a force behind some of the most important tools we still use today, like gcc.
For RMS it was pretty obvious where the needs were. Today it's much less so, but if you want to make a big difference and start a name for yourself, I would probably look for areas where there aren't great FLOSS options and try to take on one of those. It will be challenging no doubt.
My best advice (take with a grain of salt as I'm not the next RMS which is where you want to be), keep preaching the gospel of FLOSS! Help people find and use software (and hardware) that respects their freedom! Pay attention to users that you teach, and identify usability issues that hurt adoption and work to fix them. Be "that guy" that people call when they have a problem and need a solution.
Yes, every institution is default dead without constant recruitment of young people to the cause. Most things won’t make it past a generation because everyone fails to focus on how to pass it on.
It’s not too late by any means, but it’s looking very bleak for Free software with most kids’ computing being smartphones and cloud services via chromebooks.
Indeed. The FSF is a very worthy cause. If it is true there is a lack of young people involved I'd look for reasons why amongst things like "is it a pleasant space to cooperate in", "are people accepting of new people"? I never had anything to do with FSF directly, but whenever I dealt with people involved with heavily "politically charged" projects like guix, guile, linux-libre and few others in addition to very nice people I always encountered complete idiots that would try to chastise me for example for having the audacity to report problems running a nVidia gpu. Or one person told me flat out he will not answer any of my questions regarding a programming language syntax because I admitted to be making a non-Libre package for my own use. It is 100% bonkers. You may say so what, it's just one person. Every community has idiots, right? Yes, correct, but in case of these projects I had dealings with the toxicity is rather bad to the point that only very dedicated people stay. This also means the communities are tiny and it's much more difficult to get help when you're just starting out.
I think that's why we don't see many new people flocking to FSF projects.
Honestly this is a sign that times are relatively good. Most people of any stripe have little desire to engage in politics for its own sake, and FSF is fundamentally a political entity. When the only people participating are the radicals and crazies who make it their whole identity/want to play revolutionary, that means all the normal/reasonable people have better things to do. It's when things are so bad that the normal/reasonable people are forced to participate that you get effective political organizations.
Perhaps FSF has solved all the problems the community at large deems as worth solving.
wow, that's wild. I get the appeal of living in the world you want instead of the world that exists, but at the end of the day that approach is self-defeating.
It makes me wonder if a new org isn't what we need. I love the FSF and feel they did a tremendous service to the world, but the religious extremism limits their appeal only to true die-hard believers.
I would not say it's all doom and gloom. I just founded a FOSS/Linux club at my university. There are going to be some kids who are so interested in technology that they go down a rabbit hole of different communities, open source included.
I definitely agree that the general trend towards less advanced technology will harm that though (some 18yo's don't even know how files work because they just use Mac's Finder), but some cohort of the generation will _always_ be interested in digging deeper.
It perhaps doesn't help that the general attitude of someone in FOSS/tech in general could be perceived by the average person as elitist or exclusionary - I try my hardest to challenge these notions.
(Let's see if one of the other founding members of the new club will read this comment)
> some 18yo's don't even know how files work because they just use Mac's Finder
Huh? Finder is the macos equivalent of explorer.exe and it's the GUI for the file system. I assume you're taking about Spotlight which searches the entire file system and the internet much like the Windows start menu.
Anyway people have been making claims like this for as long as computers have been around. Smart people use Spotlight and the start menu because it requires fewer keystrokes than typing full paths or clicking 10 times to navigate a directory tree with Finder. It would be stupid to avoid using the fastest tools available
I mean people who are literally unable to navigate directories because they drop all their folders on the desktop, and use exclusively Spotlight to find these files. Of course it makes sense to use Spotlight - I use the equivalent on Linux - but I still know how to navigate a directory, unzip a zip file, etc when many people simply never learn that.
I refuse to believe that a smaller proportion of people know how to navigate a directory and unzip a zip file today compared to any prior year. A lot of people didn't know how to use computers at all a decade ago because they didn't have any kind of computer at home, not even a smart phone
When I TAed a CS1 course for a handful of years, I'd definitely say easily like 1/4 of the class would also end up needing a general primer of basic computer usage.
Ultimately, some people are just not interested in technology or using it efficiently.
It peaked and is in the decline. The number of households with desktops/laptops is in the decline. Fully native tablet+phone is the way a bunch of kids are growing up. Only computer usage in our local public schools is chromebooks.
The whole "charging for distribution is fine but charging for development is wrong" thing is what keeps me well away from any kind of involvement with FOSS groups.
I don't believe anyone ever said that you can't charge for development. The only issue is that you're not allow allowed to limit people's right to distribute it. Once you already developed it and have given access to one person, it's up to them whether to pass it forward.
It's just like if you tell someone a joke. You can still claim credit for coming up with it, but not to stop its propagation.
In particular, you can still make money as a developer by asking for it upfront, whether from an employer, or patrons, or early access, or whatever model. Similar to how Netflix might pay someone upfront to develop a stand-up comedy special
Exactly. It isn't really possible to discuss this without "copyright" and that is why RMS focused on that topic. Conventional commercial copyright in practice is making a monopoly of redistribution and then burdening the distribution cost with additional cost-recovery and/or profit-taking.
I charge for development of (F)OSS. It's my salary. My employer likewise charges the patrons/funding agencies. But we get paid once for the effort, like any usual labor contract. We don't try to get paid again when our past work products are copied.
In the old days, paying a distribution cost was more common for free software, when it actually took effort such as writing and shipping media. This handled the case where someone asked for a distribution, so that sharing did not become a financial burden. It's a mostly obsolete concept now with pervasive internet and many low cost or free hosting options to put content out there at essentially zero marginal cost to deliver copies.
> I'm just sad that there's no young people to pass the torch for when the time comes and the founding fathers are no more.
yes there are; but also not really.
due to my age cohort I'm see my self as this "next generation" software scientist/engineer who is aware and believes in FOSS and "liberty minded software";
I suppose most of use are millennials but the whole generation-label stuff is not accurate so maybe in the USA this next gen of people are a bit older but in other poorer countries they're younger???
in any case I think a lot of younger engineers got swayed away from the FSF/GNU ideological stuff by means of 'being pragmatic' which is just a consequence of when the open source movement distinguished itself as different from the free software.
I think the impact of this may have something to do with leidenfrost's appraisal that there's no next-gen to pass the torch to.
it seems like us millennials do not rally, we don't come together into any kind of social movement or dunno.
Ironically Drew DeVault shared this thought about Stallman on his blog earlier this year:
> Fuck Richard Stallman and his enablers, his supporters, and the Free Software Foundation’s leadership as a whole. Shame on you. Shame on you.
(He uses the word fuck in that post five times.)
Drew has done some great work in OSS but he has a history of going after people he doesn't like in a very vicious way. You can't really behave like this and be a leader. A leader needs to unite not divide. For all the criticisms leveled against Stallman he saved most of his vitriol for the enemies of OSS. If everything he wrote had been as personal and expletive-laden as what Drew writes the FSF would not have gotten very far.
IMO, a good leader is someone who can set his ego aside and turn the other cheek against such vitriol thrown at them. It seems like Stallman does a good job at this.
It’s commonly said that his inspiration was from wanting to improve a printer driver but couldn’t because it was proprietary.
I feel like back in the day there would have been so many easy wins for modifications. Like how people used to root Android to add screenshot capability.
These days modern software is so extremely sophisticated and refined that I can’t think of anything I could improve for say iOS.
Still love foss, but the idea of “it’s open source, you can improve it yourself any time” has worn off for me.
I think you might not be considering personal bugfixes (X interaction is great for the common denominator, annoying to me), long-term support (I want to use my device securely in 2045), or custom features (I want to be able to do X, but only 0.001% of people care so Apple doesn't). I use Android, so I can't be more specific. I have heard the unverified complaint that Apple sometimes slows down old devices as new ones are released, which would be impossible in FOSS.
Apple is ultimately going to work in their own best interest. Their particular brand aligns that with the consumer fairly well, but there will be disconnects.
I don't really understand this. You plan to single handedly replace the entire OS and security teams to maintain the OS on your phone for a decade? How will you update the kernel when the proprietary driver blobs stop being maintained?
I expect more people than just me are interested in reducing tech turnover or using old tech in the hobbyist space, ie. not single handedly. And yeah, as the sibling says, if we're relying on proprietary drivers, we're not really FOSS- my fantasy world doesn't just apply to Apple.
Yes, it would be very hard. But today it is impossible, so very hard is hardly a complaint you can make in comparison.
No. They want iOS to be open source, because they want to be able to modify a few bits of source code and use their modified OS for their personal use, and then keep pulling updates from upstream forever after that. Like a small fork.
Perhaps the more generous take is that, with FLOSS software, you don't have to go it alone. My Pinephone Pro will not be running security fixes I write myself. But entirely because of its open nature, it doesn't need to - it will continue to recieve updates for years and years. For once, the hardware of a cell phone is likely to die before the software.
If it gets the support of the right people who know how to write such security software and have an interest in maintaining it, sure. But that's the reason many open source initiatives fall short of proprietary. It's either based on the altruistic whims of a few particular talents, or some company is paying to have them maintain it. And we know the latter is fleeting.
The caveat is that sometimes an initiative can be funded by charity or bounty to keep interest, but relying on generosity for 99.99% of projects is a fool's errand.
There are several OS level things I wish I could change/override on iPhone: ability to share screen during a video call, ability to control how certain Bluetooth devices pair automatically, ability to throttle apps that I know are abusing the CPU and costing me battery.
> These days modern software is so extremely sophisticated and refined that I can’t think of anything I could improve for say iOS.
> Still love foss, but the idea of “it’s open source, you can improve it yourself any time” has worn off for me.
If you look at major MacOS or iOS releases, you will often see new features being advertised that were copied from FOSS systems that experimented with them and proved them out often many years beforehand.
That is to say: iOS might have the edge on QA, but if you want to have impact and shape the future of how people use computers, contributing in the community is still a good way to do this. And in fact, commercial development tends to rely on this talent pool for survival, as companies do a comparatively poor job in educating new talent. It's where you get people with "job experience" in doing certain things.
When it comes to large sophisticated software the goal is not so much to improve it one self. Rather it is the knowledge that any anti-patterns will be removed by the community if it ever get added. Most of the time the community will not even need to remove anti-pattern from open source projects, since companies know that adding anti-pattern is just wasted developer time.
All this terminology is muddied and often misused. The whole term is supposed to refer to getting access to the root user, which is definitely an OS-level thing. One thing people often don't remember also is that gaining root on your phone and unlocking the bootloader are not only different things, but entirely separate things. You can gain root in your vendor ROM without being able to unlock the bootloader (common case on Amazon tablets), and you can install LineageOS in your phone after unlocking the bootloader but you still won't have root access in the OS unless you do an extra step, setting up Magisk or similar. You also have to re-set-up Magisk after every LineageOS update, which often means once a week if you do all the OTA updates in a timely manner. Gaining root is usually the easier thing and the less useful thing. It doesn't help much with getting a nearer-to-AOSP experience. You can remove some apps but there are still limits to what can be done without just flashing a different ROM with less crap in it.
When picking a phone I like to see if it's on the LineageOS devices page (you bring up a good point that different variations of the same model aren't equal, definitely watch out for that), as that means both that the bootloader is unlockable and that someone else is already maintaining a ROM for it, and hopefully will for years to come. If I just go after the shiny new hardware, chances are the bootloader is locked and it will never be unlocked, generating e-waste.
You linked to AOSP, not Android. AOSP doesn't have things like the Google Play Store; the shipped image is substantially different and isn't necessarily open-source just because it contains open-source components - Windows contains BSD networking code but that doesn't make Windows open-source.
You know what the "A" in AOSP stands for, right? :-)
All I'm saying is that there's a big difference in jailbreaking an OS when most of the source code of that OS is publicly available for study and experiment. Surely that is not a controversial statement?
Our young people only seem to care about witch hunting for perceived slights without proper evidence. We basically have a mob frothing at the mouth for its next potential target
Human history seems to show that all humans love forming into a single mob to attack some perceived "other." This is a habit which has existed since long before the current "mob" of young people, or the internet, or the Boomers...
The internet makes it really easy to purity test a community into an echo chamber. Many people willingly subject themselves to these purity tests to fit in and be part of the community, which is also why we see negative communities tending toward a downward spiral (like any of the 4chan communities) as people walk step by step to more extremism in their views.
What can we expect when most of the internet is paid for by abusing people's vices. The "whales" of the mobile gaming industry exist in other industries too. The majority of alcohol is purchased by a relatively small percentage of consumers - meaning the alcohol industry's main source of income is people so addicted they drink as much as they can, regardless of consequences.
When your money is made because people can't help themselves, that's blood money. It's not surprising that a society which tolerates (and encourages!) companies to pursue blood money would likewise have other moral failings, including a tendency to separate into tribes and attack different tribes.
Well, RMS tirelessly advocates for his beliefs, but sometimes his beliefs are regressive and outdated. In particular I remember a debate perhaps 8-10 years ago when the gcc team wanted to expose more info from the compiler back end to enable better support for editor integrations and similar tools, because gcc simply couldn't compete with LLVM in that department. IIRC RMS stepped in with a unilateral decision blocking the effort, saying that it wasn't a big deal anyway because editor integration wasn't an important feature. RMS, a guy who (AFAIK) hasn't done any serious coding in 30 years.
Decisions like this have definitely ended up harming the movement more than helped ultimately. Him refusing to have gcc support that ended up pushing a lot of people to other compilers (llvm) and have sidelined gcc in many spaces.
Speaking of stallman, the doom community is still alive and going strong all these years later. Dooms source was released under gpl a long time ago and the modding scene is incredible.
Check out doomworld some time to see what’s been going on. Unbelievably good level design and mods all over the place, custom source ports everywhere, thousands of maps, etc
I just don't understand the severe misunderstanding that results in one thinking that what Stallman advocates would impose severe restrictions. I'd love you to think about what you mean so I can see where you're going wrong. It's honestly that far out from my understanding of reality I can't begin to comprehend what you're thinking.
If you actually tried and really can't see how living by the gospel of Stallman would impose severe restrictions on how you use your computer then I'm afraid I can't help you.
Still, a few examples to illustrate
These are just all-in-all minor examples I could find in a couple of minutes on gnu.org. I remember reading much more radical takes by Stallman and his companions, but would have to spend more time searching for them.
Do you understand there's a difference between advocacy and imposition? Stallman recommends you don't do those things because they all surreptitiously undermine your freedom to use your computer.
During the civil rights movement black people were encouraged to not use the buses while segregation was in place. You'd be the guy complaining about how difficult it would be to get around without the bus.
Sometimes the way forward involves going back to fix the wrongs of the past. People like Stallman see the world from a higher dimension. He isn't living on flatland like you and me. There is no world where proprietary software and computing freedom can coexist. If there was you can bet Stallman would be advocating the shortest path to such a world.
I don't think we are necessarily in disagreement here, so I'm not sure how to respond. I never said that Stallman was exerting power over me to get me to live by his standards, just that I would have to change and restrict the way I use software and which software I use if I (voluntarily) followed all his recommendations. As I've said in my original post I even respect his commitment and perseverance in this regard and think they lead to a better outcome for everyone, but I'm unwilling to follow his example out of laziness and convenience.
I agree, he has been overall a great benefit to society.
He once got irritated with me in an email because I wouldn’t do something (release one of my old Lisp books under a FSF document license), but I happily accepted that irritation because I understand where he was coming from.
None of the criticisms I have of the guy are the sort of thing where him dying could actually improve the world. He's no vicious and influential religious firebrand wishing hurricanes on gay people. I hope he comes though it okay.
The idealists had it right about global warming too. It's our own incapability to be idealists that will inevitably and ultimately bring about the worst case scenario for global warming.
Global warming is one ecological problem out of dozens and we'll economically outscale it even if we don´t do anything special about it. Damage to human health and infrastructure plus spending in adaptation will be a steady drag that will be much slower than our increasing ability to withstand its effects.
In the meantime, we have tons of global and local issues caused by human activity that have next to nothing to do with global warming: destruction of natural habitats; invasive species; overfishing; plastics; toxic and/or long life chemicals/medicines... We have a couple of resource issues coming up: cobalt, helium, rare earths; hydrocarbs; hell even copper might become a problem soon-ish... We are faced with the effects of being able to reliably control our own reproduction, a revolution that we're absolutely not ready for as a species and that requires us to rethink a 100.000 years old societal structure pretty much from scratch. We will soon have the technology to concentrate power and security into the hands of an ever-shrinking minority pretty much to the point that any violent rebellion of any amount of normal people will fail. Again that's a first for any social species.
> We will soon have the technology to concentrate power and security into the hands of an ever-shrinking minority pretty much to the point that any violent rebellion of any amount of normal people will fail.
This isn't new. Read up on the dark ages, and how Gutenberg ended them with the printing press. As technologists, the best thing we can do is figure out how to build technology that scales down enough to be wielded by individuals. That includes education and media distribution technologies.
Also, climate change models that estimate economic damage project annual damage from extreme weather exceeding global GDP in a few decades. Humanity will probably survive, but its unclear that anything resembling the modern economy will.
I'm a bit worried about the health of the GPL ecosystem. GPL 3 is basically an anti-TiVo and (now) anti-Apple license, but it leaves giant loopholes for Google and other service providers.
The whole point of the GPL was to empower users, and it's pretty clearly failing at that. SaaS providers provide access to GPL software, but users can't decide which version to run, or move their data, or even use an old version of the software if the new one comes with unreasonable restrictions, surveillance clauses, or unreasonable price tags. At this point, FOSS isn't even free-as-in-beer for most people.
On top of that, Red Hat has basically said they're not going to abide by the GPL any more. They're taking third party code, modifying it, distributing binaries, and if you exercise your rights under the GPL, then they'll stop giving you access to the code or the binaries.
Ironically, BSD and Apache licenses seem to be better at preserving user freedom at this point. They allow commercial distribution on hardware and as a SaaS. GPL 3 forces *aaS business models in practice.
I hope RMS makes a quick recovery, but I'm pretty bummed about how the GPL has played out at this point.
The solution is simple: don't pay for SaaS products. And that's if you consider it a problem. When email was created, you didn't care what the remote mail server's software was, as long as it conformed to the protocol, you're good.
That's not a solution, and it's certainly not simple.
For one thing, it would mean that I'd have to pull my kids out of school, pull my money out of the bank and cancel all of my utilities.
Heck, I'd need the equivalent of a degree in tax accounting just to avoid being jailed by the IRS, since I wouldn't be able to use tax software. (Not that this would matter, since I have to use *aaS stuff to pay my mortgage and insurance and collect my paychecks, so my taxes would be simpler next year.)
Even if I somehow managed to connect to the Internet without indirectly paying for a SaaS, I wouldn't be able to browse it in practice without agreeing to ToS contracts from companies I haven't even heard of.
Don't agree with the cloudflare, google and aws ToS agreements? Try blocking all their servers (since continuing to use the services implies agreeing to continuously-updated ToS terms). If you succeed, you'll find that the internet doesn't work at all. You can't even use email normally, since it's unclear what addresses get routed through which service providers, and what terms you have to agree with to "use" their SMTP services.
> You definitely should not send your kids to public school; that's crazy.
The private schools, supplementary education and home school resources I know of all operate web sites, including online registration, emails with parents, and so on. The Amish fought this battle in the 1950's and lost badly. The compromise was that Amish kids don't have to go to high school (whether that's private, public, or home-schooling):
> Anyway, as for the rest, you can pay mortgage by check in the US. No software required.
To process the check, my bank has to have an ACH backend. That's a software service. I can't run my own, and it's likely using GPL software.
> You can also file your taxes by paper.
The IRS does not accept cash unless you call them first (requires a phone, which is a service), or pay at a retail partner (likely also requires use of some sort of service or agreement to a ToS. Plus, payments are limited to $1000.): https://web.archive.org/web/20230514105205/https://www.irs.g...
Also, I don't think there's any way to get them to mail you your refund in cash.
How do you suggest downloading and printing IRS forms and reading the directions explaining how to fill them out (and which forms you need) without using their website (and therefore third-party services)?
> As far as connecting to the internet, Stallman somehow manages it, I'm sure you can sort it out.
The last time I checked, he borrowed internet access from universities and strangers. He slept on couches to avoid agreeing to hotel contracts, but I think ultimately ended up compromising his principles by purchasing commercial airline tickets.
Also, I'm not a celebrity, so it would be harder for me to get random people to let me sleep on their couch.
I'm worried about that but also feel like GPL 4 needs an anti-AI clause. I don't want code I'm written fed into a machine that writes code that doesn't respect user freedom.
I'd bet there will be a blockbuster movie about this guy within 10 years of him dying and it'll be in the pop culture, and maybe even stoke a temporary privacy / freedom focus for a while in common consciousness.
Unfortunately the world doesn't know how to really appreciate people as much when they're alive for some personality types.
Agreed, but only because of the word "blockbuster," as there will be approximately zero of those within the 10 years (at least) the GP is proposing.
I don't know for sure what the movie business will look like in 10 years, but one possibility is that everyone is able to create their own movies just by describing them, and a small number will say some variant of, "Give me a biopic of this Richard Stallman guy. Base it on his wikipedia entry and whatever else you know about him. Make it factual but an action neo-noir; you know what I like. Probably starring an amalgam of Bogart and Mitchum, the rest you can just make up."
I would think waaaay more people have heard of Snowden than of RMS. If a movie about RMS will get made, than in the shape of a crowdfunded community project.
Well, yea. Because he metaphorically died in terms of US politics. It's one of the few bipartisan issues that sticks out like a sore thumb to the public eye.
I hope it's far in the future, but we'll see how the media spins it when Stallman dies. They can easily sell him up as some Godfather of computers. Or it can just be a small whimper in the corner of HN. I'd still bet on something closer to the former, but it's not a sure bet.
I think you're vastly over indexing in how many people in our circles know about him.
I'd bet less than 10% of professional developers could say who he is, and that a tiny portion of the population has any clue.
There are probably thousands of similarly important/influential people in various subfields that we have never heard of, because they're not our Subfield, and I highly doubt any of those would get a biopic.
There are phases in which change happens: Stallman's preaching to people who can actually make free software (eg, people you might find on HN) has accomplished a huge amount of capacity building. He's tremendously good at encouraging it, and always has been. That provides the raw material for people who are perhaps a little more adoption focused (and apt) which is work that can't happen if there's no capacity.
Well, I am also good at making software, share the goal of a world where everyone fully controls their devices - yet I am appalled by many things around him.
Mostly the "superior" ethical stance. You do things this (my) way, then it is ethical and you love freedom or you are not ethical and don't want freedom.
Sorry, but I just have some different opinions about some things, but I rather feel not like working together with people who consider me lower. So the result is not cooperation but lot's of fragmentation in the free software/open source world. I do not think that helped the common cause. Otherwise we would not be where we are. Lots of open source and free software for tech people - everything closed down for ordinary people.
The ego of anons who are "also good at making software", try to minimize Stallman, then step back into anonymity is hilarious.
You're comparing yourselves to a guy who has changed the face of software and privacy, probably forever- his license is quoted to be one of the most important decisions in Linux by Torvalds himself.
> Lots of open source and free software for tech people - everything closed down for ordinary people.
It just wouldn't get made. Software would be worse without OSS because there would be no fire under Microsoft's ass
Maybe just look at some data, how often the GPL is used in new projects and how often MIT or alike.
And how often projects gets reimplemented because people and organisations don't want to have to deal with copyleft.
That was my point, not comparing my hacker skills with RMS which I do not recall having done with any word. I just said, I won't work together with people of your attitude. And I know I am not the only one, see above.
No, that's not what it is about. I certainly don't choose permissive licenses based on how RMS behaves (that would be stupid), but I also don't choose them because I think businesses shouldn't give back. I choose permissive licenses because I believe that the GPL is hypocritical in claiming to be about freedom, yet placing limits on the freedom of those who use the code. I believe that freedom must include the freedom to do even those things I disagree with personally.
You probably don't think that's a worthwhile ideal, and fine. I'm not here to convince you of my ideals. But your assertion as to the reason behind the increasing prominence of permissive licenses is overly reductive and not true.
>I believe that freedom must include the freedom to do even those things I disagree with personally.
In an ideal world sure. But I'm guessing Stallman made this license precisely so people can't "do whatever they want", which from a business standpoint is taking that code, modifying it in-house, and closing it off. Prevent a tragedy of the commons, so to speak.
Stallman didn't approach this as some idealist of "we make great code and everyone will share and progress society". Partly because tbf: open source was a lot harder to doiin his time. He came from an angle of trying to combat proprietary software. That's why he didn't make the MIT license (even if it preceded him, I'm not sure).
I realize all that. I disagree with it (or else I would be using the GPL), but that really wasn't my point. My point is that there exist people who use permissive licenses because it fits their ideals better, not because they are corporations trying to capture profit.
Sure, but Stallman was focusing on corporations. A small project isn't going to be modifying much of a GPL library to begin with, so it's less work to document their changes. So GPL wouldn't be as hostile to a small project as a corporation.
> your assertion as to the reason behind the increasing prominence of permissive licenses is overly reductive
Possibly. The push to use MIT/BSD from businesses, however, is very much real. To mention one, Apple methodically purged their OS of pretty much anything GPL. Most businesses involved in opensource insist that everything should be MIT/BSD, and absolutely nothing should even smell of GPL. They certainly don't do it because of philosophical differences.
No, it also is about people wanting their software to be used by everyone, including buisness, without limitations. That can have selfish reasons like wanting money of buisness people, but can also have idealistic reasons.
Not everyone is a fan of enforcing freedom, as that is a contradiction to some.
Like I said, different opinions. Freedom etc. Not accepted by RMS and co I know. Which is why I will continue to stay away from you.
Yes but some companies think they need trade secrets and or licence fees. And GPL companies somehow have not replaced them. So they maybe have a point in todays capitalistic world?
I mean, how many articles and blogs are there about how to make money with foss and how many desperation and frustration is around that topic? How many games exist, that are donation funded?
I mean, please tell me, I want to publish a game, how could I make money with it with the GPL?
Selling it to only one person, who then can publish the code?
Having the code open, but serve ads or ingame purchases, rewarding addictive behavior? Sounds not so ethical either.
That leaves only donations and traditionally people do not value things they get for free. Some do and I hope their number will grow. But as of status quo the majority does not. Some GPL games I know make money, because they sell at steam and the users do not know they could also download it. Is that really ethical? What other GPL buisness modells exists?
A game is not a professional software, people would be willing to buy support contracts for.
I know how you might make money. You build a game. Maybe its fun and ripe for mods like minecraft. Open source it under GPL. Build a community of hackers/gamers who want to learn and collaborate. Have an awesome collection of mods for your game. Once you build a name for yourself, take donations or release a new game or talk at conferences.
Soo, assuming I build something like Minecraft, something that made the developer millions (I think over 100) via the conventional way.
And your proposal for how to make money with such a moneymaker game and the GPL is eventually down the years take on donations and talk at conferences?
Was that irony? Then I missed it. Because the context was someone above claimed that it is only the stupid lawers fault, that companies reject the gpl.
I also hate the "make a name for yourself" angle. I guess even amongst programmers there will be people "working for exposure".
Nah, by that point I may as pitch to some billionaire studio and make a hefty salary that way. Or you know, sell your IP for actual millions if it's that valuable. If "exposure" is the alternate currency I'll happily sell out. I'm not my game IP.
>I mean you're making games. There's not much money in that to begin with.
I know you mentioned Minecraft, but it's not 2010 anymore. That "poor" indie creator sold off the game for 2.5b dollars and it seems like he still got the short end of the stick given how big the game is.
I'm fine with open source games, but the fact of the matter is that mods need a community and community is hard to build. If you're trying to replicate MC's success, note that it also wasn't made with modibility Orr convinent licenses in mind. You gotta make something appealing first and then you can futz about with nodding support if people bite.
This guy made GCC and Emacs. GCC in particular has shaped how most software has been compiled for decades.
His operating system, GNU, is the de-facto UNIX implementation and runs many critical systems around the world.
Anyone who claims that the guy is unlikeable has never truly bothered to hear him speak and isntrad relies on what they've been told by malicious actors. Stallman doesn't attack other people or ideologies.
If anything his biggest mistake was using Linux as a kernel for people decided to call the GNU operating system "Linux" and it eventually took most of the funding and development away from the OS and its ideology.
"If anything his biggest mistake was using Linux as a kernel for people decided to call the GNU operating system "Linux" and it eventually took most of the funding and development away from the OS and its ideology."
Well, what other kernel could he have used instead? Hurd? And linus is writing code till today and activly leading the developement.
What relevant contributions did RMS made, since gcc and emacs? So do you really think it is accurate saying "his" operating system is so much used today?
>What relevant contributions did RMS made, since gcc and emacs?
Let's be fair here: stall man's last technical contributions were when he was Linus's current age. Some people will code to their deathbed but I don't think that is a requirement to properly champion tech. He's more than paid his dues there.
Tech is relatively young and Stallman is one of the oldest living people left. Older than Gates, older than Jobs if he was still alive today. I see Linus less as a comparison so much as a torch Stallman's generation passed on.
Yet there are enormous amounts of cooperation within free software. There are the various organisations like the GNOME foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Debian, and many more beside. Thousands of volunteers keep these things going to produce well integrated, usable software.
Not to mention the common principles in most free software around interoperability and loose coupling. Apple and Microsoft (and the rest) have less to do on this, because they don't have to make their software nearly as generic. Microsoft famously fixed something in SimCity at the OS level. Google and Facebook don't have to worry about interoperability, which undoubtedly removes a lot of complexity for them. In some ways, free software has a greater burden to carry.
The problem with usability in free software is not one of culture or cooperation, it is one of capital. The fact is, Apple and Microsoft have at this point invested hundreds of billions in finding the best engineers and designers around the world and paying them to focus on polishing their operating system. By comparison, Debian's (very impressive) 3500 or so developers, maintainers, and contributors, are almost exclusively volunteers and working at most part time on their chosen packages.
If you want to see better free software, what I'd suggest to you and everyone else is this:
Next time you want to buy a phone, pick something cheaper, and donate the difference to a developer of free software. If you're an iPhone user and you switch to a Fairphone 5, say, you can throw £600 at someone like Joey Hess, or just pick an organisation that makes good stuff and give it to them if you don't want to find a specific author. Let's remind ourselves that if 1000 people did this, it'd be £600k of funding to improve free software.
Personally, I'd recommend a donation to the NLNet foundation: https://nlnet.nl/
So can you install gnu/linux on someones desktop and he can just use it on his own without the terminal? What do they do, when the next update tells them that some pgp keys are invalid?
Free software works for devs and geeks, yes and I happen to be one of them. But for common people? Usually not very good, as they don't know the terminal and don't know config files. I know, because I tried to spread linux. It is hard work.
May I recommend you try Debian and its package `unattended-upgrades`.
Besides, I recommend servicing the device every so often. People create weird failure modes (putting too many files onto the device, clicking at random in menus). I also recommend setting up a backup.
As a figure of speech: Nobody is expected to service a car on his own. You'll get professional help every so often.
"May I recommend you try Debian and its package `unattended-upgrades`"
I will try that.
"As a figure of speech: Nobody is expected to service a car on his own. You'll get professional help every so often."
And also windows computers can have serious problems, but usually they are easier to solve for beginners, compared to when I try fix someones linux computer, that has not been updated in a while ..
Didn't have much of an issue when I installed Ubuntu on my dad's laptop with his limited computer experiences, didn't have many issues. Have you never encountered issues with Windows or MacOS? My experiences with Windows had many very frustrating experiences where I am sure won't be good either for common people.
"Does it matter? His message isn't for non-programmers."
I see. Well then, carry on.
But maybe then do not wonder when the rest of the world does not care about software freedom and also don't donate or support it in any way.
Oh and Plato is well known as a philosopher, but yes, most people do not know that he proposed a very totalitarian state and is rather known for platonic love.
>But maybe then do not wonder when the rest of the world does not care about software freedom and also don't donate or support it in any way.
30+% of my country can't even be damned to vote for their next president. Getting the layman to care is really hard, which is why advertising is a trillion dollar business.
Perfect enemy of good and all that. Lawyers for 99% of their cases don't rely on public sentiment to get their argument through. At least not active public sentiment.
Everyone wants to fully control the devices they own. But more importantly they want their devices to work. So a half working open source lineageOS mobile is less valuable to them (and me), than a closed source, but working blob.
But if you can get them to understand, that open source eventually means consumer friendly, that the device will be fully under their control(no ads, no restrictions) and working if OSS gets more support, they will listen. But since they largely do not know all this, I think it is exactly because most free software preaching evolves only around devs.
True, yet most users don't care about the details in any meaningful way. They just want to be able to use a convenient service like Spotify...who cares that they don't OWN the music anymore? Who cares that they don't pay artists as much as they could?
The only time it's a problem is when an artist doesn't release their music on a certain platform and it's now work to try and go download a second app, make an account, possibly pay a subscription, and THEN listen to the new album. These are the kind of things users actually care about, not whether the app/backend is FOSS or not.
HN is a power user community so it's easy to improperly extrapolate our experiences and what we tolerate to what "normal users" will tolerate.
Sure, and arguably RMS has had a pretty significant indirect impact on the lives of people who don't care about technology but still use free software in their day to day lives (it is everywhere). But those people don't really think about his message anymore than the average person contemplates the impact of neoplatonists on their present cultural context.
[Before anyone gets offended, this is just a metaphor. Obviously plato had a much more significant impact on the world than RMS did]
He doesn't have to be. Tech luminaries who can understand compromise will figure out what will practically work after listening to him rant. The world still needs raving mad prophets like him to help us understand where the poles are.
I'd say he's known for Linux and the building the base of TiVo, then Android, Chromebook, and MacOS (all of those impressions are wrong, but bear with me).
Most people don't know what the kernel is, but they do see user space, and that was largely GPLed for a while. I think IBM ran some super bowl ads about how amazing Linux and open source were, about ten years ago.
Also, stuff like raspberry pi and ssh exploits (yes, BSD, I know) also show up in pop culture. The Matrix and Mr Robot come to mind. During the end of the dot com boom, I think people were largely aware that Apache + Linux were what things ran on.
Even as someone who has been a dev for 5 years I only know him as that gross guy who likes free software. Note that 'gross guy' is the main point here. He has failed to communicate any nuance to his message. Another person might have 80% the same opinion as him but be able to reach 200% of the people as him by way of not having such a bad reputation. If the free software 'movement' wants to move anyone they need to get out of their own way.
He founded the idea of Free software. Him being "gross" is completely orthogonal. "I would have agreed with the guy who fought against slavery if he didn't pick his nose in public."
It's crazy to think how back in the day, software devs were basically hard science engineers, needing to be proficient in hardware and the nitty gritty of CPU architecture to be effective programmers. All so they could be paid $60-80k/yr in today's dollars for 50-60 hour work weeks.
Whereas nowadays you can do a few weeks of a javascript crash course and land a $100k job organizing text windows on a webpage for a few hours a week from your bedroom.
As a devil's advocate: while you had to know the nitty gritty it was legitimately possible to have the entire machine's architecture in your head. Maybe a few heads shared at worst. Microsoft' humble beginnings started with a dozen people who would make what most people type on daily.
No one person knows the entire modern x86 architecture. And ofc those who know a lions share are paid top dollar. Maybe still underpaid for the value they bring to the entire world, but very comfortable.
Don't have much to say about the web dev stuff. Just note that CoL is still kinda crazy in the places with most demand. I'm not gonna say "100k is so hard to live on" like some spoiled CS students but it does cut a lot more into your spending power than you'd expect.
Well, that’s because demand for sales-y engage-y web pages is furious while demand for exquisitely refined self-balancing distributed power grids (for example) is at the “call me back when the tech has become a 0.02 commodity” level
While I agree with most of your comment (and upvoted it), I'm not sure about this:
> While the Free part of FOSS is being substituted by “(just) open source” and “source available”,
Free software and open source are the same category of software and licenses (except for sporadic instances that are at the very edge of that one category, as categories tend to be blurred).
Software that is merely source available, of course, is not FLOSS by default. But I don't actually see free software being replaced by software which is just source available.
There are companies trying to push source available proprietary software as "open source", perhaps hoping for such replacement, and this has had some success in some specific areas, but the open source community is pushing against it. Or, at least, the wise ones in it are.
> Software that is merely source available, of course, is not FLOSS by default. But I don't actually see free software being replaced by software which is just source available.
GP here. I agree. I should’ve worded it better to say that a lot of “*source” terms are used to make it seem as if the publishers are meeting a great ideal (like FLOSS), but are muddling things more and more. I shouldn’t have listed “source available in the very same sentence” without being clear. I don’t have stats, but “open source” and similar terms have been used as buzzwords for marketing while the publishers really want their SaaS to be the one people ultimately pay for and use.
You're right. I guess one difference would be the part where the free software tell us "why".
But in practical terms, it is too complicated (ethics!), so all is down to copyleft or not, which I believe is what the parent comment was referring to.
Perhaps that's what we should be using: copyleft vs open source, instead of free software vs open source.
All copyleft software is free software, but not all free software is copyleft, since some free software may be distributed under permissive licenses that do not require derivative works to maintain the same freedoms or licensing terms.
The MIT License is a permissive free software license that isn't copyleft, as it allows proprietary modifications.
>This is a scan of the “Copyleft (L)” sticker on the back of the envelope mailed from Don Hopkins to Richard Stallman on 1984. The envelope contained a 68000 manual that Don borrowed from Richard, that he was returning. The sticker inspired Richard to use the word “Copyleft” for licensing free software.
>attention:
>READ NOTE BEFORE OPENING!
>Copyleft (L)
>The material contained in this envelope is Copyleft (L) 1984 by an amoeba named “Tom”. Any violation of this stringent pact with person or persons who are to remain un-named will void the warrantee of every small appliance in your kitchen, and furthermore, you will grow a pimple underneath your fingernail. Breaking the seal shows that you agree to abide by Judith Martin's guidelines concerning the choosing of fresh flowers to be put on the dining room table. Failure to break the seal on a weekday is […]
These are good definitions but the original post wasn't referring to people not taking into account the philosophical part of free software, unless it really meant "copyleft".
A permissive licence doesn't really transmit the intent of the author, philosophy or not (it doesn't really matter, the licence is the same).
A copyleft licence, on the other hand, backs the philosophy behind free software via the actual licence.
But you are right, it should be "copyleft vs permissive open source".
Years and years ago he talked at my university lug. I picked him up in my car from the train. The BO smell remained in my car for WEEKS. Dude had a serious aroma.
On the other side, back in college to earn extra money, I was his typist for around 10 hours (3 or so hours at a stint), meaning he sat diagonally behind me, reading the screen I was typing on. The only thing I noticed was his hair was a little wild.
That was a few decades ago, so perhaps things have changed, but he was well within normal odor back in the early 90s.
Everything. He would sit behind me and dictate keystrokes (mostly driving emacs, of course) to do email, edit code, and generally operate the computer. I don't want to talk about someone else's medical situation, but I think it's well-enough-known that rms had a period of RSI so severe that he was barred from using a keyboard to let his wrists/hands recover.
A few hours in a row of hearing and typing C-Space C-u 2 4 M-w C-x C-b <RET> C-y C-x C-s is exhausting. It was also amusing (in retrospect) to get a polite-enough admonishment to "don't think about what the keystrokes are doing; please just type what I say" when he could tell that I was slowing down because I was paying too much attention to what the intent behind the keystrokes was.
I learned a lot, but I wish I could have gutted it out for longer in order to learn more about emacs and gcc internals. (I knew "we" were doing some maintenance on gcc because I remember asking questions about a comment that said "this is a win" and asking rms if we were working on gnu chess and him telling me that it was a compiler optimization. [Yeah, that's how amazingly skilled I was at the time.])
I ended up doing 4 sessions totaling about 10 hours and when I told him I was quitting, I was apologetic that I felt like I'd wasted his time quitting so soon after starting. His response I can remember to this day and it was something like "Don't worry about it; most people quit after the first session. You helped me out and we'll make sure you get your check."
That's amazing, it feels similar to people playing chess in movies (not sure if it happens in real life) without the board, just remembering the positions.
FWIW, there is a rare medical condition some people have, where their body odour is abnormally high. I knew a girl in high school, very attractive and a wonderful person, but she sufferred from this condition, despite her best efforts to manage it. She would be regularly bullied by the girls and rejected by the boys for it.
stallman doesn't have some highly rare medical condition, he's just a lazy hippy programmer type. and it sounds like he's got reasonably decent hygiene.
I agree we need passionate people working tirelessly for software freedom.
The broader free software community agrees we don't need people like him though.
From Wikipedia:
> The FSF board on April 12 [2021] made a statement re-affirming its decision to bring back Richard Stallman.
> Multiple organizations criticized, defunded and/or cut ties with the FSF, including: Red Hat, the Free Software Foundation Europe, the Software Freedom Conservancy, SUSE, the OSI, the Document Foundation, the EFF, and the Tor Project.
For those out of the loop, the Richard Stallman had repeatedly defended adults having sex with children over many years and he most recently said sex slaves aren't raped.
OSS predates GNU, and GNU's influence is waning. I wouldn't say Stallman's impact was that large. OSS was a thing before Stallman and will remain after Stallman.
But has any other license had the same impact as GPL?
Has any other set of OSS tools enabled so much as the GNU command line tools which were (and are) the foundation of Linux?
I put him up for the night once. I'm a BSD guy, ran the local FreeBSD society. He was pleasant enough about BSD we could hang out a bit. I know what my preferences are, but I'm not so arrogant as to believe I'm anywhere near in a majority, and his influence through his work (including GNU), is completely obvious. Without him, we'd all be paying Microsoft, Sun, IBM or HP through the nose for licenses to much worse technology than we have today.
I was not able to attend the GNU40 meeting in Switzerland, but I have
heard rumours that you have announced that you have some form of
cancer.
Can you give me some more information about this? And is the cancer
manageable?
I hope you are around for many more years.
---
tusharhero
Stallman's reply:
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
I'm glad you are concerned about my well being.
At the same time, I am disappointed that people are spreading
incomplete rumors, instead of passing along all of what I said about this.
That is going to waste a lot of people's time and concern, just as it
has done with you.
My prognosis is good. I can expect to live many more years.
Very kind of him to reply to you. Perhaps it is just my culture, but asking someone you don't know personally who has a potentially life-threatening illness what their prognosis is can be perceived as very rude. Stallman is sharing the information he wants to share and rest is none of our business.
I think it would be rude under different circumstances but this is information that he already shared semi-publicly and would've shared with OP had OP been able to make it. Also I get the feeling that Stallman is enough of a pragmatist to not get too offended about that sort of thing though I could be wrong.
I personally think the more appropriate request would be to first research instead of asking him to answer your question, and if incomplete, secondly to kindly show interest in him, at some further point, discussing this more in a public way when he feels ready to do so.
Obv he doesn't seem to mind the question. Just my approach.
Stallman's character is one of the reasons I have repeatedly considered establishing some kind of "Church of Computing", i.e. an organized "religion" solely to secure religious protections and rights as they apply to the modern world.
For example, the right not to have to use some random company's app to interact with a government agency or a public school (and agree to said company's EULA, etc). It only takes a few dozen people to create a church with legal standing in many countries.
The FSF and the EFF are nice, but churches have additional legal protection for their adherents.
It does sort of vaguely border on religious zeal at this point. I've told companies they can either talk to me on Signal (or email), wait til I arrive on site, or find another contractor, but I will not use WhatsApp no matter how much they pay. This also applies to, for example, Microsoft/Google/Amazon products where learning their APIs and products mean my human capital, my skills, can be revoked by someone I never met, made valueless, my income made moot, in a sense.
Imagine having invested substantial time and effort into a proprietary ecosystem that was killed (by the company or its competition) and not being able to quickly leap into a competing esoteric, obtuse product.
Even the pastafarians get to wear strainers on their heads in driver's license photos. Some religions are exempt from paying social security. A group of adamant people is a powerful thing.
"Sainthood in the Church of Emacs requires living a life of purity—but in the Church of Emacs, this does not require celibacy (a sigh of relief is heard). Being holy in our church means exorcizing whatever evil, proprietary operating systems have possessed computers that are under your control, or set up for your regular use; installing a holy (i.e., wholly) free operating system (GNU/Linux is a good choice); and using and installing only free software with and on the system. Note that tablets and mobile phones are computers and this vow includes them.
Join the Church of Emacs, and you too can be a saint!
People sometimes ask if St IGNUcius is wearing an old computer disk platter. That is no computer disk, that is my halo — but it was a disk platter in a former life. No information is available about what kind of computer it came from or what data was stored on it. However, you can rest assured that no non-free software is readable from it today.
In addition to saints, the Church of Emacs also has a hymn—the Free Software Song. (No gods yet, though.) Hear the song sung by Saint IGNUcius himself."
Does this mean that adherents can't actually text or call via carrier? Or have a data plan? I believe every modem-chip used to do this has proprietary code.
what we really need, is for "engineering" as a discipline to rise to the same status as arts and sciences.
computer science is not real. computers are not found in nature. they're not a natural object, hence the methodology of study (from a philosophy of science standpoint) cannot be the same.
similarly to how math is not subjected to experimentation; but to intelligibility (a modern math proof is accepted if mathematical "peers" understand it and agree with it). so can't computer be subjected to experimentation as a matter of studying them. they're not found they're made. so the "experimentation" is really end-to-end testings; a philosophically distinct practice from a physics experiment (which is often just measuring something extremely precisely)
maybe I should ponder on the "philosophy of chemistry" which also blurs this line between "making" and "experimenting"???
you jest about making a religion (which funnily RMS also does); but recall that Academia (and RMS is an academic) was started by religions, which means if there's a faculty of computers, then it already IS a church... an academic church 2.0
Well, realistically we need the world to care about STEM as much as it cares about the Kardashians.
Almost every human being reaps the benefits of our technological and scientific progress in some way, but only a small portion of us contribute to it.
Of course, there are plenty of other important areas of work, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to have a higher percentage of people be interested in this stuff.
It's just so crazy, that using "cutting edge integrated circuit R&D" as an example, there are maybe what, a dozen people in the world who are intensely familiar with that ecosystem? And yet it forms one of the pillars of our entire modern world.
I think people in the medical field are probably the most important, though. Can't do science or write code if you're sick, so I have an intense appreciation for them; they help all of us.
as a person who has wished they could have studied microchip design, I assure you that the fact there are so little people able to do that is no accident.
the less people can do it the more valuable the skill is, or maybe they're really smart people and I just ain't got what it takes.
Maybe I'm reading it wrong but do you believe there's some conspiracy to stop so many people from getting into such a field? I wouldn't think this is the case seeing as the industry is crying out for young blood atm.
I think realistically, the reason I never got into that sort of thing, and probably for the same for you, is that it requires a lot of intelligence (probably more than I have aha), but for the most part some of the most extreme levels of dedication and specialisation of any field.
I like technology _in general_ too much and I don't think I'd have ever had the mental capacity nor willpower to dedicate myself to such a narrow but incredibly deep slice in such fashion as those who are at the forefront of that field.
You refuse to learn something because you are afraid that that thing might change and require you to learn new things? Maybe this isn’t the best industry for you.
He's very much not saying this, he's saying he doesn't want a small number of very large companies to be in control of whether or not his skills are valuable at market. This could broadly be construed as an argument against the entire cloud/SaaS/PaaS/IaaS market, but it is still a very valid criticism. Most IT people are in some way subordinated by massive companies, and free/open source software is an escape hatch on that, because there's not a relationship of exploitation or control between users and community projects.
I refuse to learn anything about any propietary technologies unless you pay me for every minute I spend doing it. and I'll probably get right on to forgetting it if you stop paying me, but won't really cuz my memory and experience are mine and Severance (tv series) is still fiction
I don't think anyone was talking about learning to use whatsapp. Grandfather post directly says they won't bother to learn how to use public clouds as an example, because the APIs might change.
That's their decision, but it's a career limiting one, akin to saying the VAX has everything I need and it won't be changing so I refuse to learn any other system.
I feel like I comprehend, I just disagree. It's fine to be an absolutist about these sorts of things but I have to put dinner on the table and my customers run the kit they run and I don't get to declare if it's "free enough" for me to interface with.
̛If you check the surroundings, you will see the mess we are in. Virtually (?) there are 0 options for a viable IoT platform, mobile/desktop OS that doesn't annoy us. It could be privacy, locking, you name it, ...
Only recently, I happen to realise, we could have listened to this man little more. Too late then, we are sold already.
The Linux desktop is better than ever (in fact, I am switching to it the first time in a few days! I just need to setup some things first)
Sadly, the enshittification has also taken over parts of the Linux desktop as well though. For example, the mobile-first, flat-everything user-hostile design. (like gnome)
Dark themes were not common while skeuomorphism was mainstream, they are only in demand right now because viewing an extremely low-contrast white flat theme is an eyesore.
Luckily, KDE and the similar still exists and you can theme it:)
This is the 2nd time this word has been used to describe the Linux desktop in this thread, and it's disingenuous. FOSS doesn't do any of the things described with enshitification article: it doesn't sit between buyers and sellers and screw each of them in turn. That's not what's been happening. Maybe the software goes shit, but it is not "enshitification". At every turn there's been alternatives (GNOME3 -> Unity/Xfce, KDE4 -> Trinity, Pulseaudio -> Pulsewire, systemd -> upstart, Debian -> Devuian, etc)
Stop misusing the word, you're discrediting the good work of FOSS.
I am not misusing the word. I don't know what their incentives are, but they are just progressively making things worse and more locked down in the name of "progress".
Bland, corporate, utterly inoffensive and lifeless "design"? Check.
Trying to remove theming from users? Check.
etc....
The only reason why they haven't succeeded like other OSes is because it's FOSS. But they really want to take away the user's choice, shift the Overton window, and pretend like things were always bad.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
>shift the Overton window
You're all over the place. This has nothing to do with enshitification.
It is enshittification because they are making the software worse in opposition to the users. They don't care that the users hate the changes, they still do it anyway, deliberately.
Have you considered that many users do like the changes, and you just aren't one of them?
I first used desktop Linux in 1996 and liked it well enough. I remember using GNOME 2 and Xfce around 2010ish and liking both of them well enough, too. And they're still around if I want to use them.
But honestly? I don't use them because I like modern GNOME better. I use it every day, everything just works, and I like it more than the alternatives.
> But honestly? I don't use them because I like modern GNOME better. I use it every day, everything just works, and I like it more than the alternatives
Same here, but with KDE - and I'm a former XFCE user, and before that I was a Gnome user...
Yes, I have, but fundamentally, using old stuff is usually quite hard. If I could revert to it, it would be great, but those are usually not too compatible with today's technology.
I use those despite their horrible UI, not because of their horrible UI.
I respect that, and I hope my question didn't seem like criticism.
I suppose we're fortunate that options like Xfce and MATE are around, but I can relate re: compatibility. Truthfully I'd be just as happy with MATE as with GNOME 3.x, but last time I tried I ran into issues with high DPI and mixed DPI and didn't want to invest time trying to get it all working to my satisfaction.
Thank you very much, and you are amazing! Personally, I am just happy KDE exists and they actually listen to users. There is not much out there in terms of desktop environments like this, sadly:)
I disagree, use the word more to complain about GNOME and what they did to their UI. Even my 512GHz Windows XP Laptop runs more smoothly, and that without SSD.
I also think enshittification is a strong word, and a wrong one.
Because praise the shit. Praise the choice of shit. You like your shit. I like my shit. I enjoy my Gnome shit, I enjoyed Gnome 2 shit but I love Gnome 3 shit. I don't like KDE shit. I can't remember how to spell XKFG shit because it's not big enough to fit in my memory.
It's all choice. And praise choice. I do like Gnome. If you want to keep running Gnome 1 like it's 1999, I'm sure there's a way to do that too.
Well, I am open to changing my mind. What do you think, what's the reason then? From an outsider perspective, 10 years ago I've seen all those beautiful, perfectly usable UIs, and they have almost all disappeared by today. What happened? Why do you think GNOME does that?
I believe its maintainers truly believe they are taking the right decisions that are good for the project.
They limit the feature set so they can stabilize on a smaller basis.
They take UI/UX decisions they think are right.
That's what I think.
I also think they managed to build a beautiful UI that works quite well and that pleases many people.
I also think they removed useful features, lagged on important features (thumbnails in the file picker, which I always found bad anyway, including in the Gnome 2 days). I also think they believe they know better than their users on what they need when they really don't, that they should be more understanding of users trying to work around the flaws instead of despising them, and that they shouldn't both reduce the feature set to a minimum and break extensions in each release. And I do indeed think they made UI like it would be used on tablets, degrading the experience desktop, way too early when they didn't work well on tablet anyway for many reasons and KDE was the only bearable option on tablets at the time.
So I really believe they truly do what they think is best, but I also like the KDE approach way better: listening to the users, trying to polish things while not removing too many features, being humble in their decision, and acknowledging their users might have different needs / taste. (for instance, in Plasma 6, they are reverting to double click by default - many KDE devs prefer simple click and think it's objectively better, but they recognize many users are disturbed by this default.)
KDE is reall pretty good in listening to the users. They announced the removal of workspaces a while ago but then realized some people are actually using it. They reverted their decision on this. Of course people also stepped up to keep maintaining it. That's key in open source projects.
> I also think they believe they know better than their users on what they need when they really don't
This. They have this kind of Apple syndrome of belittling use feedback, minus the part of being a billion dollar megacorporation
Also, things would have gone differently if they forked gnome 2 into a new project and left the original sources intact, instead of dragging all the userbase and distros with them.
To me, this was the shittiest move. Instead of saying "hey, we want to remake gnome into a very opinionated DE so we will make a new project for it", they said "we will use the same gnome2 sources so we will not listen to you but you are forced to listen to us!"
It's possible that your subjective opinion of what makes a good UI differs from the subjective opinion of the people doing the work on Gnome.
I'd need some strong evidence that they are selling you to some other party in order to enrich their investors. Who are these investors? How do they even get profits from Gnome? What choices have been made that let 3rd party companies get better access to you/your data from Gnome itself?
Differences of opinion aren't evidence of intentionally screwing over users in order to get more money for investors.
Your opinion of what a good UI looks like is 10+ years old, GNOME is constantly trying to look like a modern relevant UI. I also hate it, that's why I don't use GNOME and instead use a desktop environment committed to looking like what was popular 20 years ago. I seem to be in the minority, I encounter many people that love GNOME
> the enshittification has also taken over parts of the Linux desktop as well though. For example, the mobile-first, flat-everything user-hostile design. (like gnome)
My first successful experiment with Linux was in 2003 (having flopped in the late 1990s, when Linux could be found on the shelf in stores everywhere). The desktop I used then was Gnome 2. My current desktop is Gnome 2, with more or less the exact same look and functionality, though it's called Mate. It's only enshittification if you have a way to force it on people against their will.
I love Gnome, so not everyone agrees on the "enshittification" claim. It's the most visually consistent DE for Linux, in my experience, and has an aesthetic that I appreciate. It mostly just stays out of my way, but has affordances for the things I need. Fortunately, there's plenty of choice in the Linux world, and we can hopefully coexist without too much hostility.
One big advantage of Linux is that if you don't like gnome, you can use (and contribute to) something else.
And the great thing about e.g. a window manager is that there is no lock-in effect. I must use GitHub because everyone is using GitHub (even thought I like the git e-mail workflow better), I must use WhatsApp because everyone is using WhatsApp, and I must use the Slack and their damn Electron app because my company chose Slack and I don't have a choice.
Gnome does nothing like that: I don't use it, and I don't even know how many people use it. I don't see why there would be a reason to complain about it; if you don't like it, don't use it.
I find the criticism of GNOME a bit weird - personally, I love its user interface because it virtually isn't there. It gets out of the way and when I do see it, it feels clean and well organised. I'm old enough to remember the windows-esque start menu type setups (which I know many DEs still use) and am a bit of a convert to the convergence mindset of GNOME.
To be honest, the only thing that bothers me about Linux desktop environments is that there isn't a simple way of getting a 4G dongle and using my laptop as a phone (calls, SMS, etc).
I agree completely! I ditched Ubuntu for this very fact. GNOME and snaps are deal breakers for me. I switched to Fedora KDE a year ago and I use it every day. And not just for coding. It's a real treat and stuff just works and gets out of my way.
I use KDE because Gnome's multimonitor is always problematic in my environment but I spent a few days on it trying to use it the way they intended it to be used and now have a lot of sympathy for it. It's a really nice simple workflow. This is mostly applicable to work though. I don't know that it would work so well for general purpose home use or even non-technical work for that matter.
you know, I hear this sentiment a lot (linux desktop is now awesome!).
And it may even be true this time around (I love me some KDE).
But for me, it doesn't matter. Once I discovered i3 I just never went back, there is just no desktop that can compare to it.
Obviously I'm not your typical user, so this is an aside from a "nerd", but it's sometimes interesting not having a horse in that race anymore (I've been using i3 for 10-15 years I think at this point?)
Other then in most stuff migrating to the browser how so?
Browser + terminal has been a good combo for a long time, the desktop enviornment only have suffered enshittification due to a push to touch screen oriented UI conventions.
PipeWire made sound finally work flawlessly for me on Linux, Proton made it possible to play a ton of games, graphics drivers being stable, especially for Vulcan and Firefox enabling hardware acceleration.
Some things are worse as you note, but there have been som important improvements.
ASUS - ROG Zephyrus M16 16" 240Hz Gaming Laptop runs Ubuntu 22.04 very well in my opinion: CUDA, Vulkan, Wifi, bluetooth, sleep etc. I installed Linux on a second SSD next to Windows on the original SSD. The version with NVIDIA RTX 4070 costs 1700 USD at Best Buy (the one with RTX 4090 may exceed your budget)
The Linux support for ThinkPads is pretty good I think. I've been using a T14 AMD Gen 1 for three years now with Ubuntu. The hardware is supported by the LVFS too. I'm upgrading to a T14 AMD Gen 4 shortly and will be running Linux (Ubuntu) again.
Any recent Thinkpad will do fine. The Apple Silicon laptops can't run Windows, but can run linux, so there's that, too. Also, Dell XPS laptops do very well with linux.
- wide HW support. 10 years ago it was not guaranteed that suspend will work on a random machine, 15 years ago we were struggling with ndiswrapper to get wifi working.
- professional domain-specific software now available, both free (such as KiCad) and commercial (such as DaVinci Resolve) and supported by vendors on Linux.
Since 1997 here -- still my OS of choice, for desktops, laptops, and servers. I enjoy FreeBSD and NetBSD too, but Debian feels like "home". No surprises, no gotchas, no telemetry, no nonsense.
Every time I have to use my Windows 10 corporate laptop, I become even more bewildered that people actually tolerate such a farce as their daily computing environment.
I used to keep a Windows installation to hand on a disk, but after I realised that I hadn't booted into it for over two years I started using FLOSS operating systems exclusively.
Re. photography, do any specific features of Photoshop come to mind that you miss in free alternatives?
Most of my games don't really work with Proton very well. Also nvidia gpu which is very weird to fix. On this particular computer I run windows with an MX VM where I do most of my work. On other computers I run Debian or MX.
Yet many software developers have personally benefited a lot from FOSS and are aware of the principles behind it.
But when someone is willing to pay us a lot of money, many of us will willingly become deaf to the free software ideals and submit to the corporations in exchange for stable employment.
> many of us will willingly become deaf to the free software ideals
Genuine question: what proportion of developers actually understand the free software ideals? Have you ever tried to go to your colleagues and ask what [choose your open source license] implies?
My experience is that most people think that GPL means that you need to publicly distribute all the code and that BSD means that you can just use it without any attribution.
Well Linux is usable as a desktop operating system. For IoT there are multiple open source project, Home Assistant, ESP Home, just to name a few.
The real problem are mobile operating system. Android phones are nowadays even more and more locked down, and using ROMs without Google Services is nearly impossible.
There's SailfishOS. It still uses Android kernel+drivers, but above that it's a "real" GNU/Linux system (glibc, systemd, bash, Qt, connman+ofono, zypp/packagekit, Gecko). It's not completely FOSS, but it is usable as a daily driver, and has been for at least 10 years (based on personal experience).
> and using ROMs without Google Services is nearly impossible.
Ever hear of GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, /e/ OS, LineageOS, divestOS? I have been using one of those for 2 years now, just like a "normal" Android. I bought my phone with it pre-installed, I didn't have to do anything.
Of course I can't use the apps that require the Google Services, but in my experience that's mostly just stuff like Google Maps (there are great alternatives) and YouTube (there are apps like NewPipe that work really well).
I think it's deeper than that; I think the problem is mobile devices. The OS has to somehow paper-over the fact that there's no mouse, and that everything has to be done with finger-stabs on a 3"x5" screen. That doesn't work with the traditional desktop widgets, so a variety of OS-level widgets and Javascripty plugins is layered on top. But (a) they're not consistent with one-another, and (b) they're not consistent with the desktop metaphor (which isn't going to go away).
Basically, I don't think a phone is suitable for user-input of any complexity. It's a device for selecting content that you then consume passively. It can't be used as a replacement for a desktop. "Mobile first" sounds all very well, but nearly all mobile-first projects have the desktop portion permanently stubbed.
> I think it's deeper than that; I think the problem is mobile devices.
I think it's deeper than that; I think the problem is app ecosystem. More and more apps that you need to use (e.g. the only way to perform 2FA with your bank) are dependent on Google/Apple services, use anti-root, anti-tampering and remote attestation techniques, making them impossible to run on free (libre) mobile OS alternatives.
I just want an IoT plug so I can switch things off and on. It should expose a tcp port and allow me to send packets to it via wifi with some level of authentication. I don't want any cloud shit with it. Just a simple (okay, it's not actually that simple) device that connects to wifi and lets me throw packets at it to control it.
Without GNU, that's just a fever dream.
Many cancers are survivable these days. I hope he has one of those.
You get an ESP8266 micro with wifi plus a power supply, relay, momentary button, current and voltage sense, and a couple LEDs all for about $8. Serial debug and flash headers are broken out for easy access on the PCB.
They ship with chinese firmware but the headers and standard hardware make them dead simple to flash with your own firmware, or ESPhome or Tasmota if you prefer.
> I just want an IoT plug so I can switch things off and on. It should expose a tcp port and allow me to send packets to it via wifi with some level of authentication. I don't want any cloud shit with it. Just a simple (okay, it's not actually that simple) device that connects to wifi and lets me throw packets at it to control it.
Shelly devices offer a firmware that can be controlled trough a REST API locally. Unfortunately it's still proprietary and not open, but it doesn't require a cloud connection.
Otherwise you can buy a device and replace the firmware, there are number of open alternatives, such as ESP Home, Tasmota, etc.
Or... you can build it yourself. Building a smart plug is an easy task, if you have some practice on electrics. You will likely build a better product in terms of safety and capabilities that one you can buy.
All the tools exist to build your own. For example with a esp32-s3 and a custom pcb at one of the low priced fab houses in China. Sure you have to do it yourself.
The primary reason off the shelve products are cloud etc. is because these companies spent the time and money to do the above and since no on wants to pay 100+ for an iot switch they add cloud garbage etc. These products are now sold to the masses and if you have to support them you need control over them or your costs go through the roof.
I am working on a hardware iot product (no cloud) and I have to tape off the USB service port not because there is anything that could go wrong but because people don't read instructions and think the thing will power over USB when there is a power supply included with a barrel plug...
This is so sad to hear! I wish him all the best and hope he can recover.
I think he is one of the most influential persons in the last decades, not only regarding GNU or FreeSoftware but also about technology overall. While sadly at the same time lots of people underestimate his works and foreseeing.
He has really been and still is an inspiration for me. Really all the best to him!!
Here he is, 70, under chemo, giving a speech. He keeps being a force of nature.
May he recover well, or at least have long enjoyable years ahead.
He has/had arguable/unacceptable behavior, but I believe we strongly owe him. He has built incredible software, defined important stuff and kicked our asses in the right direction.
Having cancer myself, I can tell you that there are a lot of misconceptions about what life “under chemo” is like. I’m in a clinical trial for pills now, but when I was doing infusions, the worst of them had me out of commission for about 4 days - chemo day (which was about schedule, not side effects), then days 4, 5, and sometimes 6 after chemo day. The rest were completely manageable, in fact I looked forward to working.
This is not to belittle his experience or cast him in a negative light; I wish him well and I know that overall it leaves you feeling less than normal, and I can completely relate. But “under chemo” is not always as debilitating as you might think.
> the worst of them had me out of commission for about 4 days - chemo day (which was about schedule, not side effects), then days 4, 5, and sometimes 6 after chemo day
Isn't chemo tolerated differently in different patients? It's still anecdotes, but I've heard many stories of people, some usually very dynamic, being strongly weakened by it. To the point some even decide it's not worth it and stop the treatment altogether. I personally know someone currently under chemo too.
Anyway, it's good you tolerate it well and I wish you a good recovery!
> Isn't chemo tolerated differently in different patients?
Chemo subsumes a large number of different medications. What they have in common is that they are basically poison, and you hope that the cancer cells die faster than you. The effects differ wildly between different treatments and patients.
It's also true that chemo treatment has gotten better over the years. Chemo 20 years ago was much harsher and it's not the same anymore. Advancements in pharmacology.
"under chemo" though, isn't some single shared experience. Everyone in that infusion room with you is getting some different sort of poison cocktail in a different strength. And most of the drugs are, quite literally, poison. There's at least 7 broad, very different types of chemo drugs, and subcategories under that. Also, very different total duration and frequencies of infusion. And they all may have other things going on in terms of cancer progression, other unpleasant treatments (radiation, surgical procedures, etc) going on at the same time, and so on.
Doxorubicin might be a good example. It has nicknames like "red death" and "red devil", and many unpleasant secondary side effects. Side effects that are different from other chemo drugs, including an unusually high rate of congestive heart failure.
No, you're right, but the fact that Stallman is 70, and "under chemo," and still giving talks would suggest that whatever chemo he's under is relatively easy on his body.
Most chemo nowadays will make you feel sick for a day or two, but they also usually give you something to manage the symptoms. If it had been a few days since his last dosage, he was probably feeling decent all other things considered. Radiation therapy, on the other hand, is still being burned alive from the inside out, and even opioids are insufficient most of the time. My dad tried to ration my mom's painkillers during her treatments below what was prescribed for her. I told him I was going to quit my job and drive down there to keep him away from her if he wasn't going to be supportive.
even radiation is different for different people - I have had a couple of treatments for brain metastases and due to my proximity to Boston I am lucky to get the most up-to-date treatments available. There's something called Proton Beam Stereotactic Radiosurgery which is a single session, they are somehow able to curve the beam so it enters in three different places and the place where the beam(s) meet is the place that gets the treatment. It's a single session and I don't have any side effects at all.
But yes, when I spoke to radiation oncologist when I was diagnosed 2.5 years ago (and before they had a full picture of what my cancer looked like), he told me to expect to be hospitalized multiple times because the lymph nodes they'd treat were so close to my esophagus and the treatments would burn my espohagus. "Thankfully" the cancer was spread too far and the field was too large for radiation, so the only radiation treatments I've had have been the ones described above.
Modern management of side effects can help a lot, but it's not a surefire thing for any given patient on any given chemo.
When I did chemo, I had cycles with 5 days on - and I couldn't do anything useful during that week, or most of the next week. It was, truly, an awful experience. I completely understand and respect how some people can decide treatment isn't worth it and surrender to the disease.
I have a friend who has been suffering from blood cancer for about 7 years now. Her father died around the time she was diagnosed and she was a 25 year post office employee, so she was able to retire with an inheritance and live her life. She's spent more time on ships on vacation this year than the total vacation time I've taken in my 40+ years on this planet including childhood trips.
> He has/had arguable/unacceptable behavior, but I believe we strongly owe him.
Arguably that describes most people ever considered heroes. Just look at the controversy of anyone who ever had a statue made of them
I think to change the world you have to be somewhat not of it - you have to rebel against social norms. The people who rebel against social norms don't just rebel against the right ones but also are wrong sometimes too.
> However, you don't need to make women uneasy (among other things) to promote free software.
Plenty of people with physical disabilities make people "uneasy" -- who's wrong here? The burn victim or the person taking offence to it? Stallman didn't do anything towards women that warrants the criticism he received. The claims have been debunked and it just comes down to him coming across as a 'creep' -- aka considered unattractive. Yeah, okay.
> I remember being walked around campus by an upperclassman getting advice during my freshman year at MIT. "Look at all the plants in her office," referring to a professor. "All the women CSAIL professors keep massive amounts of foliage" s/he said. "Stallman really hates plants."
If this is true, he must have been doing something to women that goes beyond being unattractive, no?
You really really should avoid making people build such workarounds to avoid you. And the fact that it's women specifically is suspicious.
Now, I'd really like to be proven wrong, that'd be pretty great. It saddens me that RMS was like this.
People are complex and rarely just pure good or bad.
I agree its incredibly dangerous to accept bs just because someone is famous, but i also worry that if we throw out all the sinners we'll have no heroes left.
Its a hard question how to square all that and i don't have the answer.
I think we can recognize heroes as such, without idealizing them and still accept to hear about and recognize their worse sides. I would not want to throw RMS away.
And I think we should also stop considering huge assholes as heroes / models, like Picasso.
Hmm I'm curious. He's been basically running non profits all his life. In the US. How can he afford the treatment? Is the FSF big enough to be able to get medical insurance for their employees?
>Hmm I'm curious. He's been basically running non profits all his life. In the US. How can he afford the treatment? Is the FSF big enough to be able to get medical insurance for their employees?
Since he's 70, he's eligible for Medicare[0]. And likely has access to other insurance through his professional affiliation(s) as well.
If you are poor, medical care is essentially free in the US. I know a few people that had excellent cancer care at some of the best oncology clinics in the country all paid for by the US government.
In that comment, just like in this one, you avoid mentioning anything specific. It appears that you are doing that because you can't defend any implied claims; that doing X, Y, and Z is unacceptable. It's a whispering game where the claims are prefixed with "according to some" or "perceived by many" because it's all smoke and mirrors and no substance. E.g you don't even specify whether it is some behaviour or opinions that are what are unacceptable.
I don't find any opinion of RMS unacceptable. I actually happen to find him very reasonable on most things.
I've read he has had inappropriate behavior with women. I can't know for sure to which extent it is true or false. I find this plausible but have no proof and it could be wrong. The best I can find is this tweet from 2018 I cited in another comment about women at MIT trying to avoid him by putting plants in their offices. I find this quite bad but would agree it's weak.
I also had in mind his harsh email answering this guy announcing his baby on some mailing list, or the numerous times he harshly dismissed questions at his presentations that were not perfectly phrased (that I actually saw it first hand).
There's also this great talk from Keith Packard [1] were he states they didn't use the GPL for X (mostly) because RMS was so annoying.
But the unacceptable status of any of these things is arguable and I fundamentally don't want to witch hunt him. In the end I still admire him and spending time on this is just annoying.
So let's just say that I indeed have no strong evidence of him having unacceptable behavior, so let me clean things up and retract this claim until some strong evidence shows up.
He's also been the victim of some pretty vile smear campaigns and is still going on. I know if I was the target of the crap he got, I wouldn't want to continue doing anything anymore.
I know someone personally that he behaved unprofessionally and inappropriately towards. This was before allegations of his MIT went public. So I was not shocked when that happened.
I guess that's why fake, phony, status-oriented people can't stop themselves criticizing him for all his superficial shortcomings. It's as if his genuineness is a trigger for them and they need to attack him to feel better about how phony they are in comparison.
- the MIT mailing list discussion of a few years ago where he got a lot of flakes for what I indeed believe was a lot of misunderstanding. He seemed reasonable to me, but you really need subtle and careful reading to notice this. It was easy to misread and understand the contrary of was he thinks. I think he should have refrained from participating in this discussion though. While I don't know if it was intentionally driven by opponents, I do think he was defamed a lot, regardless one's opinion on this story.
- his inappropriate behavior with women, who mostly had to (find tricks to) avoid him, from was I read there and there. I don't think he is misogynistic (many examples on stallman.org supports the opposite) but I believe there's no excuse for this inappropriate behavior if true. He should have shown more respect and learned to avoid making people and women in particular uncomfortable. He is incredibly clever, I can't imagine he would be unable to learn what patterns to avoid, he should have bothered more. I know it's difficult in particular for some autistic people (which he might be) to take hints, but I also know some who became incredibly good at it after learning (better than non-autistic people even, precisely because it was a conscious process - not saying it's easy; it is exhausting for some people). And it does not require being able to take subtle hints to avoid obvious sexist behavior. I was thinking of this and the many times he was mean to someone when I mentioned "unacceptable" in my first comment.
> He is very clever, I can't imagine he would be unable to learn what patterns to avoid
I've worked with some very clever people in the past, and many of them are indeed no longer around (in the industry) because of their flabbergasting capacity to not pick up on 'patterns' that would save them from social assassination.
But autistic people are not doomed. They can learn to avoid problematic behavior. Pretty well.
As well as the rest of the population can learn about the difficulties autistic people can encounter in a mostly non-autistic setting and be more understanding / show some empathy.
Probably in the case of Stallman, he grew up in an era before better understanding of the condition and how to deal with it properly. I'd also assume from his general attitude that he wouldn't take too well to being told how to behave.
> I don't think he is misogynistic (many examples on stallman.org supports the opposite)
Intent, outcome and self-image can drift apart quite substantially. Few misogynists would consider themselves as such. Usually because misogynist behavior is still considered normal by quite a few people and pushback against the status quo comes at a social cost.
When I hear stuff like "you need really subtle and careful reading"... it's just an excuse to discount the actual content of the message and invent the meaning you wanted all along. Like, how could I be so stupid to not pick up on this totally opposite point from what RMS was saying?
This point was discussed at length over the years. You have your opinion on it. Likely different from mine. At this point I don't think any of us can change their mind, we both have been forming our respective opinion for a long time now.
Let me precise my phrasing: you might have read this thing with "really subtle and careful reading" and reached a different opinion from mine. I believe it. It's fine. But I do maintain that, in any case, you need really subtle and careful reading to avoid jumping to widely wrong conclusions. I think it was easy to understand horrible things from his wording by skipping a word or two or thinking too fast. The thing with Stallman in particular is that he is particularly very careful with his wording, and I think this whole MIT discussion was no counterexample to this. It's up to us to understand the right thing and it is clear that strongly different interpretations emerged this time, for some reason. And what's worse is that his clarifications might have strengthened both interpretations.
Anyway, that's why I said "Regardless on one's opinion" on the matter. It's easy to find inappropriate comments on RMS that defame him.
That's a long way to say "I gave every statement the maximum benefit of doubt".
A lot of people need to learn that culturally engrained bad behaviors aren't the same as intentionally being a bad person. But neither does it free you from responsibility for your behavior.
What one thinks / what one's ideals are is different from how one actually behaves. Especially when speaking about sexism. Apart from obviously bad behavior, there are many things we do that are sexist without even us noticing and it's important to be aware of this so it can be fixed.
[*] With a difference: I understand a "misogynist" as someone who actively dislike women. See [1]. Sexism ≠ misogyny.
Knew him a long time ago. It's a very different thing not understanding what other people are, compared to bearing them ill will. Definitely interactively incompetent, but doesn't carry ill will.
> From what I gather the big thing is that he's basically very misogynistic.
> And I've seen very little that can disclaim that.
Hang on, no. It's those that claim that someone is misogynistic (let alone very misogynistic) that has the burden of showing that the accused has hatred or prejudice against women, not on others to disclaim it.
If, to that, we add the absolute vilification against anyone trying to defend the accuse, then the allegations can't be evaluated properly in such an environment and deserve nothing but dismissal.
Really? Should OP just bask in Stallman's glory and not notice things that were bad etiquette even in the Victorian era?
Stallman's done some amazing somethings, some average things and some repugnant things (including the field of software engineering/Free Software; see the Emacs and GCC forks, his maintanership of Emacs in the latter part of his time as main maintainer, etc).
Like clockwork, women in tech continue to beg for our community to hold a reasonable standard for how half the humans on earth should be treated when they choose to work in this industry.
Woohoo RS and thank you for your contributions. But one of those contributions is being a living example of how brilliant and highly valuable people in this field can still need to learn the basics on how to treat other people with respect. For the women he's mistreated, it's very unfortunate they had to play a role in that collective lesson. The least we can do is not ignore it or rationalize it away.
On that note, I just don't appreciate or frankly understand the repeated insistence from some people that this is some kind of scheme, there is some kind of conspiracy to complain about successful contributors for mistreating the people around them. This take especially makes no sense to me when the mistreatment is well known and documented. Like, some of us don't want to be treated like shit! So we bring it up when the community lauds praise around someone who does! I don't think this is related to some personality complex held by RS' inferiors with a compulsion to tear down his achievements. Most of the time when I see these criticisms voiced, they are actually wrapped in a highly-polite package that includes heaps of praise besides.
It's exhausting, isn't it? Moralizers will come for anyone and everything.
Tearing down the world, one individual at a time, until finally, after enough characters have been destroyed and enough personalities beaten down, we'll all happily exist in a world where no one's behavior will ever offend. We can all rest easy knowing that we won, that the _____ists of the world have been banished, and finally egalitarianism will prevail.
For those in this thread chomping at the bit to attack a dying 70yo's character, did I do your cause justice?
I talked with him briefly some 20+ years ago and he showed me his laptop with Free software. As I was younger back then I found it quaint but as I sit here and realize I'm doing something in the same vein, doing things thanks to a mountain of Free software.
As I am prone to do when I'm brought back to that moment where I was just chatting with the RMS, I smile and wonder how many other dumb college compsci kids were exposed to a different kind of way of doing things that basically changed their lives.
Here's what another great free software project leader Ton Roosendaal said about his experience with cancer, the lessons he learned, and the implications on leadership continuity of free software projects, in his 2020 BlenderCon closing address.
Richard Stallman has certainly been successful inspiring Ton and others to do great work and carry the flame! I hope he has access to excellent healthcare, and is as lucky as Ton.
Can we just take a moment to appreciate Ton Roosendaal:
DonHopkins on Oct 31, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Can we just take a moment to appreciate Ton Roosen...
It's well worth watching and discussing the entire video, including Ton's introduction and close, bracketing all the amazing contributions by blender artists and developers:
I think he saved the important personal news to discuss at the end, so it didn't distract from the virtual conference's focus on Blender itself, its community, and developers.
Ton is an unstoppable lucky force of nature: First he survived a vicious ceiling attack, now he survived leukemia!
In the introduction, Ton says that it has been a year of introspection and renewal, and describes how the Blender organization has been restructured.
That's followed by a series of mind blowing videos by a diverse worldwide bunch of talented Blender artists and developers.
In his closing statement, Ton tells what has happened to him in the past months, explains his change of perspective, and the implication and changes at the Blender Foundation.
Ton Roosendaal's BCON2020 Blender Conference closing address transcript:
Imagine, you are standing in the middle of a waterfall.
It is noisy, it is messy, it is colorful, it is wet.
You see everything is falling down.
Suddenly stops, the jets are coming down.
You see a bit of splashes.
You are standing there in the darkness.
On a black mirror.
That's how it feels when the doctor tells you that you have leukemia.
On February 24th, this year I was urgently hospitalized because I was developing bruises all over my body.
I started to bleed on my mouth.
The doctor said go to the hospital. Ton, we have to examine you.
At midnight I got the infamous bad news delivery by the doctor that I have acute leukemia of the quite rare kind.
It is called APL, which is not very common, but it is very lethal.
So usually you don't survive two weeks with this, unless, of course, the treatment works.
So that's what happened.
They immediately gave me blood transfusions and chemotherapy, and luckily after a few days I was recovering.
So I quickly moved from the critical phase to the phase of that you may get cured.
Four weeks later I was released from the hospital.
I was strong enough to join the rest of the world in the ... lockdown, staying at home.
After five weeks I had my first bone marrow test, which was extremely good.
And cancer was in remission, the doctor said. We are going to take you to the next phase, to cure you fully.
And that's called the maintenance phase.
Maintenance, right?
Then he said, well ... actually it is 7 months of treatments in which you have to be four months in hospital.
Not full time. But imagine in the afternoon you go to the hospital, they hook you up with the bag of poison, you wait three hours, you get sick, you go home, go to bed, in the morning you feel a little bit better.
And in the afternoon you go back to the hospital.
They hook you up, and you get sick again.
That's for 4 weeks, and then you get 4 weeks to recover, another 4 weeks getting sick, and 4 weeks to recover, another 4 weeks to get sick, another 4 weeks to recover, another 4 weeks to get sick!
It was last Friday, the last of the chemotherapy.
And this morning I went to the doctor again to discuss the tests I had.
And luckily my blood is fantastic, the bone marrow is looking really good, I could be declared cured.
But there was one little test they are still waiting, is the DNA test, which will take another 2 weeks to get.
But the doctor said I shouldn't worry about that.
I'm recovering extremely well.
So basically I've got my life back
So ...
And oh, how much I would have loved to sit together, today, at the conference with everyone because there would have been a conference and we would have thrown an enormous party not this year.
So I'm telling you this because this whole experience has had a profound impact on me, on my personality, on my life of course, plus I had time to think.
And I learned a couple of lessons.
First, getting cancer and surviving it it is not a fight. It is not something you win, something you lose.
You only need one thing. A little bit of discipline of course, to take care of yourself, eat well, do some exercises.
But what you need is luck.
And I was lucky.
I was lucky that science found the right treatment for me.
This is only 15 years old. This treatment for people with this kind of leukemia.
I was lucky to have family, friends around me to stand by.
I was lucky to have a team here in the company to stand by and to have.
Francesco Siddi to replace me for 8 months, doing fantastic job on it.
So I was lucky to live in the Netherlands, where there is a universal health care for everyone.
So there was not a moment that I had to worry about what would the treatment cost, and the doctors didn't have a moment to think other than what can we do for Ton, to help him, to cure him, and to make it as good and easy as possible for him.
So next time if you see people having cancer, don't wish them strength, or in Dutch "sterkte", just say good luck, and I wish you well, or a good day, a good evening.
Other things that I learned was that I want to start taking better care of myself, and I want to, I have a feeling that I was sacrificing myself too much.
So I want to put myself more forward, and also take care better of myself in a way that I can pay myself a little bit better. So I can afford a little house outside of Amsterdam with a garden.
I also mentioned last year that at some moment I have to step aside from Blender, for the future, to allow other people to come in.
And the process is been sped up, but not so much that I want to step down, but to get very strong people around me to help making Blender strong, and keep it strong, and move on, and step forward.
Because the main thing I learned was that I was really really not ready to let that go.
I couldn't let go of Blender, because that' s my life' s work.
Blender is life, right.
Blender is a community.
It is a team of people here.
It is everybody who is contributing.
It's the developers.
The bug fixers.
It is the people that make add-ons.
It is even the people who complain, or the people use Maya and don't like Blender.
It is the forum trolls.
And even the people who want to have the game engine back.
So all of them are the people I love.
And all of them I feel like is my family.
And I would never let go of that family.
So, enough drama, right?
I want to end with a little more happy note.
As you all know 2020 is not very nice.
It is a year that we are going to forget.
But the happy message is that 2020 didn't get me down, and I want to spread that positive vibe with everyone.
So please take care of yourself, take care of each other, and a little bit of Blender.
And I see you next year in Amsterdam, or somewhere else.
> This is only 15 years old. This treatment for people with this kind of leukemia.
Hank Green, the YouTuber, said that the thing he didn't appreciate until he had cancer was, how much you want the 40-year-old treatment and not the cutting edge treatment, because the 40-year-old treatment means that you have a cancer which is well understood and very treatable.
Father God in Heaven,
Please heal Richard Stallman of the cancer afflicting his
body, and give him a strong will to endure all of this to the end.
Let him keep his health through this period of his life here on Earth, LORD.
And let both him and his legacy continue shine the light of freedom and
transparency and human decency in this world, which is getting so dark.
And keep him healthy through his chemo, please God. And give him the joy of Your
salvation through Jesus Christ, and the hope of life eternal.
Save his soul, please God. And if it is Your will, even make him a saint in the
church of Jesus Christ, Your Son. Heaven wont be the same without him.
In Jesus Christ's name I ask,
Amen.
The audio is really terrible, but he says that the cancer is being managed and that he will be around for many more years. I am glad to hear that.
Before that, he talks about covid and long covid. But I couldn't tell if he says that he has long covid now. I know that he was being pretty careful to avoid covid, to the extent that's possible while travelling on planes as much as he does. I had some discussions with him about N95 mask fitting and testing.
Can anyone tell from the video if he still has the big beard? That interferes badly with mask seals. I never had such a bushy beard myself, but before the pandemic I was lax about shaving and often had some beard growth. I keep it clean now so that masks will work better,
Anyway, I hope he beats the cancer and stays healthy and active.
I use a a chrome extension for it. Otherwise when I hit their wall on another device or browser, I just skip it. Reddit seems fine with killing themselves off, I'm not going to any great length to mitigate their mistakes.
You can run your own DNS server locally. I run an unbound server on my router but you can also run dnsmasq on a raspberry pi or something. Pihole uses that. Then you can do whatever you want with local DNS (doesn't help with devices like Chromecast that ignore your local configs, for that you need your own router, which I also recommend. I use pfsense).
You'll need a local webserver running to serve the redirect, but that's a simple nginx config. Maybe I'll write a blog post for this stuff...
You don’t have to login either iirc. If you don’t want to use old Reddit, there is an option to open in the browser anyway. At least for me on iOS + Firefox.
Does he travel on planes a lot? His speaking rider used to explicitly say that you should NOT book a plane for him, because he wasn't comfortable with the level of personal information required. In fact, he said you should book trains under a false name.
His point about long covid is that it's a small but nontrivial chance of having brain fog for life and it would impede his work, and he suggests others make the same consideration for themselves. I think this implies that he doesn't have it.
On the topic of (long) covid, luckily he apparently is fully vaccinated (judging from the many times he wrote about the vaccine and mandates in his blog), so he likely won’t catch the new strands in the process of recovery or be in any danger of long covid.
This is what's on his personal page, stallman.org:
`Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphona, so he will probably live many more years nonetheless. But he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19.`
I am almost recovered from slow-growing lymphoma myself. (not sure if the same subgroup, but both are B-cell lymphoma)
I had my last doctor's appointment about it earlier today, in fact.
The problem is that it is chronic. It can reoccur. And it can mutate into malign lymphoma.
But some people go twenty or more years without it reoccurring.
BTW. I got Covid-19 while having lymphoma. I recovered from that normally.
But if I had also been under chemo, it would have been a different matter.
Yes, indeed. My father had it in '06 and lived for 16 years more (a different kind of cancer ultimately got him). After receiving a stem cell transplant in '09 he was cancer free for over a decade. The marvels of modern medicine.
I wish RMS all the best for his health, a long and happy life.
I also know that if he reads this, it will be from an Emacs mail client on his dusty ThinkPad in text mode (no X11 or Wayland) by sending a URL to a service he wrote that will email him the Web page back - a clean process without any using any tainted proprietary software.
He only ever exchanged one sentence with me when we had dinner together with other computer scientists two decades ago in Edinburgh: "I don't do smalltalk." - and he didn't mean the programming language. :)
I think that's a valid and reasonable position of him to take, though. If I ever became a celebrity or public figure I'd be sure to take a course on public-relations and media-training - it's easy to (intentionally or otherwise) turn something innocuous into something worse - Che Guevara is currently a popular figure and a positive inspiration for many, but for many other people he represents a depostic regime that routinely violates human rights - world opinion could very quickly turn against the Che T-shirt meme and I wouldn't want any stories of how I signed something I'd later regret.
(Yes, I know about RMS' history too (yes, that history) and I'm not defending that at all - but so far, of what I've seen, he seems to be wanting to avoid being misinterpreted by others, which is something I deeply empathise with, such is life-on-the-spectrum)
Miami has a large community of people who risked their lives and abandoned everything to flee Cuba to go hang out with the capitalist pigdogs in the USA. Their hospitality toward communist revolutionaries would be somewhat chillier than what you'd receive on a northeastern college campus. It's unlikely this would extend to violence, but you might get some remarks.
The rabid anti-communism of Cuban diaspora in FL is so extreme it's driven them right into the GOP's arms for their votes; the amazing thing is how they've done it despite the racism just-below-the-surface there.
I don't know why leftists act confused about why they are so hated throughout the world. They are blatant about it in so much of their behavior and pretend like they're proverbially morally and intellectually superior in every single way. It's like they're never falsifiable, and if they are its because everyone else in the world is stupid in comparison.
Then there comes the persecution complex. The horror.
I think you should perhaps consider this as a data point that indicates either a) the racism you think is there isn't actually, or b) it's not as strong as you seem to believe.
Well, here in Brazil I met once a Cuban which was traveling and was a undergraduated student who wanted to vecame a filmmaker. Here we do not have the same incentives that attract dissidents nor we offer incentives in the form of citizenship for people who risk their lives in improvised boats (if US offered the same incentive for other latin american countries, lots of people in other countries would also build improvised boats and risk their lives like the Cubans do). We talked a lot about movies.Regarding Cuba and its government, his oppinion was mostly positive, with only some criticisms. And, oh, he was an alive person.
It's possible a lot of people would like to leave but can't. Also, some people would like to return, missing the cultural aspects of the country they left behind or their families, but can't because they're unable to sustain themselves there, they need to continue helping their families economically and depend on the higher wages of where they're residing, or they're afraid because it's dangerous.
Any number of things may be true. But one cannot sensibly infer those things from this sample of people that is very far from being a random sample, but is actually a heavily selected sample. If you're really interested in the state of things "back home", don't seek out a group of people who are very likely to be slanted toward having a particular view (whether that view be positive or negative), and when they express that view conclude that all must have that view. All may have that view, but to conclude that it is actually the case, based on such terrible evidence, is totally absurd!
I'll grant you that it's not a random sample and that there will be some skewness in opinions. But ignoring the wider context of the journey that these people must have made, and considering the nature of totalitarian governments, it seems to me that you're taking an obtuse position.
It seems that you have come to agree with me, but haven't realised it yet! You're saying that we must look at more than just the skewed sample, and that's exactly my point.
I don't think that's correct. The point is you can't just dismiss based on selection bias.
You could say that the survivors of the Titanic didn't want to drown, sure, but you're selecting for the people who survived. The people who all drowned might have wanted to!
I.e. there's a balance. People basically always migrating in one direction must tell you something other than "those exact people just wanted to".
I'm a different person. But the previous person said "yes it is a skewed sample, but the sample is still useful information" and you said "exactly - we should look outside the sample for information".
> One should also be aware of the massive selection bias in views you're going to hear.
And I presume that you feel the ones who died trying to escape would have a different opinion of communism than the ones who lived to produce your selection bias?
> "for many other people he represents a depostic regime that routinely violates human rights"
"The Democratic People's Republic of Murderistan is a human rights violating hellhole, so that's what you want whenever you say you support Democracy. There is no selection bias from people from there because they should know what Democracy is if anyone does".
> "The Democratic People's Republic of Murderistan is a human rights violating hellhole, so that's what you want whenever you say you support Democracy. There is no selection bias from people from there because they should know what Democracy is if anyone does".
I think the difference is that we have more than one example of masses of people fleeing to democracies, even if they have to do so illegally, while there are no examples of masses of people fleeing to communist countries.
It's pretty obvious what the non-armchair citizens of various governing styles prefer, and what they don't.
Show me the countries (ok, even one country) in the world where people are happy that they are/were under communism. In other words, it's not selection bias when everybody holds more or less the same opinion.
Anyway, you're being illogical. A flawed argument will remain just as flawed when it is used to reach a true conclusion as when it is used to reach a false conclusion.
If you want to prove me wrong, show that it is sensible to infer from the fact that an extremely selected-for sample has some property that the entire population has that same property - and do so without appealing to a bigger picture. Because if you were to claim that appealing to a bigger picture is necessary, you would be making the selfsame claim that I am making.
You seem to be focusing on something quite beside the point. Anyway.
Under communism, China went from being "the sick man of Asia" to the most economically successful and politically powerful country in Asia, no?
It's the greatest single power on Earth other than the USA, no?
But perhaps under a capitalist regime China might have had even greater success?
Well, let us see:
How does one compare the stumbles of early Communist China to the consistent failure of capitalist India? Which path would you have preferred for your country?
China only started to succeed once Deng Xiaoping abandoned Marxist/Maoist theories of planned economy and embraced globalism in the 80's. The Chinese discovered they could game the globalist "free market" with low cost of labor, a weak currency, state-directed manipulation (dumping, etc.), and widespread IP theft. China's success in recent decades proves nothing about the virtue of Communism; the success would have not have happened without an pre-existing global capitalist order to parasitize. China's behavior has more in common with monopolist companies like Amazon than it does with Marx.
Didn't they start to succeed immediately with Mao (mass education, elimination of war-lords, expelling of foreign powers, etc.), and aren't the further successes you mention only possible due to Mao's achievements?
"Expelling of foreign powers" (i.e. Japan) happened due to WWII ending and China being allied with the winning side.
As for the others, these are modernization/consolidation of power which don't require Marxism to happen. Whether the KMT or someone else could have achieved these without a "Great Leap Forward" (30~45 million dead) is another question, but I think the answer is "probably".
> Under communism, China went from being "the sick man of Asia" to the most economically successful and politically powerful country in Asia, no?
I don't believe that's true, no. China does have a lot of natural resources, and a large population, and also it's true that any very authoritarian regime, fascist Italy under Mussolini being another good example, can do things like create good infrastructure, because it can have long-term bets. That is an accelerator for long-term economic growth. But the actual economic growth has come from China allowing capitalist economic systems to develop, where the people doing the work or risking the cash make decisions. Of course, Communism dies hard, and so if you say the wrong thing you can be "reminded" that the Party is all-powerful[0], but China has done well to allow individual people create value, evidenced by its economic growth.
OK, so, by Communist China you meant China after Mao took power but before capitalist economic systems developed.
Everything that has happened in China is possible only because of the victories of communism. From a non-existent school system (Mao managed to attend school because his father was the wealthiest in his village, but the schooling was nothing but rote memorisation of poems) to a well-educated population. From a nation controlled by war-lords to a nation controlled by the CCP. From a nation occupied by various foreign powers to a nation controlled by its own people, capable of controlling its borders. These were not the achievements of capitalism.
China had authoritarians before communism. Many countries has authoritarian leaders contemporaneous to Mao but achieved nothing. Mao's successes were not what "any" authoritarian could have achieved. It needed to be an authority with faith in the masses of its people, and an authority altruistic enough to put aside its own immediate interests for the good of the people. Fascism shares some of these qualities, but the fascists were expansionist, impatient, etc. Fascism lost, Mao won.
> Fascism shares some of these qualities, but the fascists were expansionist, impatient, etc
Well; fascism (or Nazism, maybe?) was socialistic ideas but on national boundaries rather than class boundaries. Hitler (mostly) wanted to kill non-Germans. Communist uprisings tend to kill their own citizens, and nonsensical edicts from hyper-powerful beaurocrats tend to starve same.
I don't want to defend Mao/Stalin, fuck em both, but: If you're counting deaths by starvation under a communist regime as "death by communism", then you have to count deaths by starvation under capitalism as "death by capitalism". Poverty kills a whooooole lot of people, and the current system is broken specifically because the billionaires who benefit are specifically blocking any attempts to fix the system - like oil lobbyists who prevent climate action. We could have ended world poverty in the 1980s, we had the resources and it would have been overall profitable for the world economy. We can't afford to not end world poverty.
Of course, communism is a system where the workers have control over their workplace, and by "the workers" I mean "random government bureaucrats that supposedly represent the workers", and by "have control" I mean "they have their choice of vote in the single-party election for the government that appoints said bureaucrats".
> If you're counting deaths by starvation under a communist regime as "death by communism", then you have to count deaths by starvation under capitalism as "death by capitalism".
No you don't. It's not all starvation deaths. Mao deliberately - through the insane power Communism bestows on the state - told farmers what to farm and how to farm, and punshed harshly those who disobeyed. And because they obeyed, and only a child who still thinks their parents know everything would think the state (parent-surrogate to many Communists) knows more about farming than farmers, millions starved. Even worse in some ways (while it's stupid to trust the state with farming techniques, it was at least trying to make farming better) - the Soviet Union imposed harsh quotas on Ukraine, causing the death of 3.5-5m people in the Holodomor.
This is what you should expect when you give your "bureaucrats that supposedly represent the workers" all the power, trusting that they can do all the hard and expert work in allocating resources both extremely well, and without any human failings such as corruption or violence.
Markets aren't perfect at resource allocation, but they are very very good at it. Replacing the experts at it whose livelihoods depend on doing it very well, with bureaucrats who know nothing about it, and whose livelihoods are guaranteed either way, and who might get disappeared if they displease their superiors' whims, seems impossibly naive on the face of it.
So you agree to put the bigger death toll of Chinese famine from 1850 to 1873 in "death by capitalism"? It was the capitalist powers that caused this destroying the country infrastructure after a war because such powers wanted to open markets in the country and were even sponsoring drug trafficking for this end.
Yes, they were byproducts of capitalism development: England wanted to expand markets and profits. China was a barrier. This caused a war and the devastation of that country. The rebellions were a byproduct.
To be fair, China always had great famines, at least twice each century. This changed only recently, which in fact is a good argument pro-revolution: after one last famine, it never happened again. The same cannot be said for other countries that were colonized or invaded by capitalist powers; and the famine and problems caused by them during XIX century in China were much worst than the famine after the revolution.
You may be confusing the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864, 20-30M dead) with the Boxer Rebellion (1899, 100,000 dead)?
The Taiping Rebellion was a civil war between the Taiping (ethnic Hakka, Han subgroup) and Qing dynasty (ethnic Manchu). While yes British opium was a destabilizing factor, so was rampant Qing corruption, religious/ethnic zealotry, etc. China had constant wars for millennia, and this war coincided with the invention of modern guns and artillery while still using pre-modern tactics, which (like the American Civil War) made it especially deadly. Its disingenuous to pin an internal and ill-timed conflict on "capitalism".
I'm glad you added that parenthetical postscript at the end lol.
After reading your first two sentences, I was nearly salivating over the reply button. "OH MAN, WAIT TILL THIS GUY LEARNS ABOUT /~THIS~/ CLASSIC STALLMAN SNAFU FROM YESTERYEAR!!!".
A) A picture of che Guevara is always an association with communism
B) RMS is very well known as someone who is, amongst other things, not a communist.
Frankly I fail to see how this could be taken as anything other than a provocation. Why would you have a picture of RMS as Che and then ask him to sign it? The only other explanation I can think of is you're too stupid to not see A or B.
Wow, to add insult to injury, that t-shirt calls RMS an "OS Liberator" as in "Open Source Liberator", not "FS Liberator" as "Free Software Liberator". That would really piss RMS off: he HATES it when you refer to Free Software as Open Source!
On the other (left) hand, I'd definitely buy an ironic t-shirt of ESR as Che labeled "Free Software Liberator" and ask ESR to sign it, just to piss him off and provoke him to threaten to shoot me, like he did to Bruce Perens.
The irony of Eric S Raymond threatening someone else for behaving "like that kind of disruptive asshole in public" is rich -- very rich.
Of course the person with T-shirt is sympathetic to communism and RMS, but their sympathy to RMS is very superficial. Otherwise they would know that RMS wouldn't approve. So it's option 2 I guess.
Intent matters. It's only a provocation if it's meant to be a provocation.
Otherwise it's mere faux-pas, at worst.
What's more, you don't necessarily know everything about a person. I would not know anything about RMS's political opinions if I had not read his website a bit, I would only know him for his stance on free software.
Well first of all I was 15 or 16 at the time, so I guess I didn't give it as much though as you currently do, and besides, Che Guevara is (to me at least) not a symbol of communism first and foremost, but a symbol of a man fighting for his ideas (not saying that's my opinion of him especially nowadays, I'm talking about the symbolic power, especially of the famous photograph we all know).
So... no.
Besides, it was in Europe. Us Europeans do not have the same epidermic reaction to communism that Americans have.
The parts of Europe that lived under communism (so from East Germany eastward) have a much more negative view of communism than Americans for whom it was a theoretical, faraway geopolitical issue, which they never experienced.
Still, around 20 years ago when I was a teen, some edgy kids did wear Che and Marx t-shirts and it was considered cool in some circles. I'd say it is an imitation of the West. As paradoxical as it sounds, since communism is seen as edgy and cool in Western Europe, the kids in Eastern Europe who want to seem in-the-know and up-to-date had to copy it. But it was indirect in this way, it didn't grow out of the Eastern European experience.
I do not think it's true. It's wishful thinking at best, but sadly (or not, depending on your views), Eastern Europe is going through an identity crisis right now, and at least in Romania/Ukraine/Russia pré invasion (don't know about other countries), you could see a lot of misery and a lot of people yearning for the 'good old days', even people who weren't alive back then. I'd say it's half 50+, half young people, mostly poor people.
I'm Hungarian BTW. And you seem to misunderstand me. I'm not saying that teens yearn for Kádár or much less Rákosi. I'm saying that the Che t shirt and the rest of the "Western teen rebel starter pack" are parts of a cool identity, it's not associated in their minds with historical Hungarian communism that actually happened.
It is a continuation of a historic West-imitation that's as old as taking on Roman Catholicism or adopting the Renaissance in Matthias Corvinus' court.
Hungarians in the 80s didn't long for some different philosophical organization of society. They wanted the cool Western things, good home appliances, higher salaries, vacations abroad, jeans, shoes, porn magazines, Western pop rock punk music, Coca Cola, McDonald's etc.
So shortly after the change of system in 1989 edgier kids also started to adopt the teen rebel fashion including Che. Just like there were a few goths and emo kids in every class later on. And today it's kpop and whatever is trending on tiktok.
Western Kids larp communism so eastern kids larp the larp. Its not unlike importing Buddhism and mindfulness from California. People adopt it because it is cool in the West and adopt the western interpretation of it.
Imagine if a hip Indian tech worker in Bangalore adopts Californian Buddhism. It would not be because of the local history of Buddhism, but the coolness factor put on it by Silicon Valley. It's like when pizza was backimported to all of Italy, after it got popular in America, even though it was a much more local thing in a small part of Italy before.
Ouch, yeah in Hungary I can understand pro-communist people should be rare. That said, communist occupation depending on the local party, could be just that, an occupation. My mother hosted multiple georgian/Kazakh asylum seekers over the years, and Georgian in particular were rather sad of the status quo change for obvious reasons. Also, I've met unironical pro-Stalin Russians/Romanian (Ceaușescu rather than Stalin, but you know...). It's like seeing pro-hitler guys, weird and fascinating. Each ex-ussr country had its own communist government, quota and laws, and sentiment about it varies. In Hungary, Ukraine and Poland, I guess rural area should be very anti-communist. In rural areas with less agriculture, it seems to me it's the opposite (places I hike through in the Caucasus kept the image, and sometimes titles and names).
Not saying it was good or anything, it was a terribly autocratic regime without self-determination and liberty, and i'm sure 99% are better without it, whatever their feelings are. I'm just saying that the sentiments about it are more complex than you seem to say. Anecdata is only worth that much, and in topics so close to personal feelings, it's worth even less. And you seems to essentialize your opponents too much.
The Communist Party had 2-digits percentage of votes in France until the 90s. We had coalition governments with communist (and green) ministers last time in 2002 I think? And one of the main newspapers, when people still read them, was l'Humanité, clearly further left than the mainstream left (parti socialiste, then).
Hate of communism was just never as rabid 'round here. In 1993 we had one of the mainstream pop songwriters write a love song to it (Rouge) and it had the Red Army Choir singing there and sold a million discs on this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_(Fredericks_Goldman_Jo....
We still have 'revolutionary' communist (troskists, and other variations) like Lutte Ouvrière, la Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire at each presidential election, gathering between 3 and 6% of votes...
It is true that some did not oppose communism, but they were fortunately always a minority. They had a very naive and romantic view, which is easier when you don't get to suffer the oppression personally.
Sentiment about communism changes a lot. We, as western Europeans, haven't been brainwashed with decades of anti-communist propaganda, at least not to the level reached in the US, neither we lived under a communist regime, so we didn't develop extreme views until recent years.
A couple decades ago one could find here a good number of right militants among immigrants from the former communist countries. As much as I'm left leaning and heavily hostile to any form of right wing ideology, I honestly can't blame who suffered for example the Ceausescu dictatorship for leaning the other way; it's pretty normal to me.
Nowadays however the right wing nationalist ideology is developing support also among citizens of countries who never saw communism in all their existence, but that is the result of a subtle propaganda which I would date back in the early to mid 90s.
On one hand, you have "propaganda" (your words). On the other hand, you have those that lived under it. If the views of those align, there may be more truth to the anti-communist sentiment than plain "propaganda".
I bet if you broke down what they were specifically repulsed by, you'd get a response that aligned more with "we were affected by western sanctions and embargos that crippled our economies and made trade impossible" than "we didn't like communism." The US specifically hated communism because it's harder to extract resources from communists than it is to get it from oligarchs and kleptocrats. Hell, we spent a good part of the 20th century overthrowing democratically elected governments to put those people in charge while our leaders proclaimed how much they loved "freedom" back home.
> Besides, it was in Europe. Us Europeans do not have the same epidermic reaction to communism that Americans have.
You're just making it worse and worse. I'm also European. I'm guessing you're Western European though? I'm also guessing your country wasn't under soviet occupation for 50 years? Eastern Europeans very much do have a bad allergic reaction to communism, just like Americans, and just like everyone else who came in contact with it. Che was at best a useful idiot.
Communism refers to at least two separate things, though (in Western Europe).
- a theoretical economic model that is opposed to capitalism
- the atrocious regimes of the 20th century calling themselves communism you are referring to that have vanishingly few things to do with the first.
Vanishingly few people in Western Europe support these atrocious regimes. And therefore, communism the way you are using it. What's more, there's not much propaganda for communism here (I believe there was propaganda in the past, though). The confusion is usually here and people mostly don't see communism with a good eye because of the confusion (or because they are knowledgeable and oppose the theory - which is a better reason to be against it). Now, it's true that we have weaker feelings about it than in the US (and, I guess, the parts of the words that suffered from the atrocious regimes).
(The usual response to this is that theoretical communism invariably leads to these atrocious regimes, but I believe we don't know this - invariably, it seems they've been set up by possibly sadist assholes with huge egos and thirsts for power, we haven't tried without - as well as we don't know if it would work. I don't have any further useful point to make in this discussion so I probably won't engage in it.)
These eastern european regimes implemented alternative economic model opposed to capitalism. Even if we look away from the atrocities / human rights violations and just consider economic reality of communist countries, then the economic model of communist countries caused lower GDP growth rate, falling behind comparable western countries. E.g. in Czechia, after 40 years of communism, we ended with about half of GDP/capita than neighboring Austria, which has comparable GDP/capita before.
But I'd say we don't have any example neither: regimes from your history books weren't "communism" we find in your philosophy books. You can see it if you read both carefully enough.
(and again, I'm not stating communism can work, because we don't know that).
But even if we assume both "communisms" are the same: you are saying "Communism has failed N times, therefore it will always fail". You don't know that (though I would admit it's quite solid evidence in this case)
We don't know. And I'm not arguing for or against communism here neither.
So would you agree with the statement that all attempts failed?
You see, you're mockingly presenting me as simply going "never happened therefore can't happen". I would say that you're the extreme opposite where you're going "what happened doesn't matter, we learned nothing from it".
You know, we can reason about the future past the data...? There's a reason why communism failed all attempts. That reason is something which apparently you're missing, but I'm using to support my prediction that it can't work.
> So would you agree with the statement that all attempts failed?
Yes, to the extent there were none, really. And if we consider all the regimes calling themselves communism, yes, sure, failed in every possible ways too, of course.
> you're mockingly
No no no, I wouldn't dare making fun of you / mocking you. I have no interest doing so and I would not find this funny. I'm sorry I made you feel I'm mocking you, in any case that was not my intent.
> There's a reason why communism failed all attempts.
You didn't address the hypothesis I exposed in my first comment and that I will restate: any regime calling themselves "communism" were set up by huge assholes using the noble name to call their totalitarian views and misusing the concepts to make it look more legit. Maybe they even liked the idea but still wanted the power.
I feel like I won't convince you and that's fine.
On my side, I haven't discarded the hypothesis that communism can't actually work. We don't know either way.
> You didn't address the hypothesis I exposed in my first comment and that I will restate: any regime calling themselves "communism" were set up by huge assholes using the noble name to call their totalitarian views.
Ok lets break it apart.
> any regime calling themselves "communism" were set up by huge assholes ( ... )
Agreed.
> ( ... ) using the noble name to call their totalitarian views.
Wrong. Research into the inner circle writing of Stalin show that he and the top people in the party believed themselves to be communists and doing the right thing for the ultimate goal of making the world communist. He wasn't just "using the noble name" (lol?). He behaved like a communist even when no one was looking as per the decisions he made even after attaining absolute power. I'd suggest you read Steven Kotkin's book "Stalin". Of course, if you dispute the expert take I'd have to ask for your credentials.
EDIT: bit frustrating to talk to someone whose starting point is "it's unknown if X" when X has been known for a long time. It's like, do your homework before coming in here. I'm out, good luck.
Taking a shortcut. I meant using a name that possibly had good reputation back then.
For the rest, I'm no expert on the topic, you seem to know better than me, continuing to argue would be pointless.
edit: (to answer your edit) Okay, but then why didn't you counter me right away with solid arguments if you had them from the start? Happy to learn from an actual expert! Like, you could have just written: "Actually, there's strong evidence that both are the same. Here are some references: ..."
It is fine in certain circles only.
We are many that think it is completely insane, but we acknowledge that we live in a democracy with freedom of opinion.
> However, in Eastern Europe it's an absolute no, wearing such shirts is worse than the nazi symbols
As a Hungarian, this is just not true. The Western view of communism has been imported and the more time goes on, the more the younger generations base their views on what's cool in the West vs what their old and uncool grandparents blabber on about.
With the Internet and media and travel options and exchange semesters etc. the Western European attitude is diffusing into the east as well. It was already cool to wear Che t shirts 20 years ago in Budapest. Though of course Budapest has always been a West oriented cosmopolitan liberal city, so copying the west in this is not so surprising.
Sure, because 1956 is quite Hungary-specific. The more our media globalizes (eg TikTok trends in sync all over the world, not even a week delay in the newest fad), the less people relate these things to their local history. People use international cultural references and only see the Hungary-specific local view in school where they are bored anyway.
1956 is also interesting as it became relevant politically again with the war in Ukraine. And it is my impression that many people in Hungary look at this not as something happening in a bordering country but as if trying to see it through Western European/North American eyes. A bit like vampire Transylvania, which might as well be a totally different entity than Erdély. So is "Ukraine whose flag the celebs put on their profile pics" a separate entity from Ukraine, east from Nyíregyháza and Mátészalka, where the cheap cigarettes come from etc. A very different set of connotations.
Similarly, the communism that's cool is mentally compartmentalized away from historic reality like 1956, Rákosi, Kádár etc.
Che Guevara was responsible for the murder of an awful lot of innocent human beings. That fact is lost on the edge lords who want to worship him as a saviour of mankind. He was far, far from that.
Gonna go out on a limb here and say that Che almost certainly did not kill anywhere near the same number of 'innocent people' as the overtly fascist south american heads of state from the 1950s-1990s did, namely Bautista, Barrientos, Pinochet, Videla, Stroessner.
14,000 people executed without trial makes Che a mass murderer, whether you like it or not.
Worship of this mass murderer is repugnant:
“We don’t need proof to execute a man. We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.”
“We executed many people by firing squad without knowing if they were fully guilty. At times, the Revolution cannot stop to conduct much investigation.”
“My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood…I’d like to confess, Papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing.”
“We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press.”
“We send to Guanahacabibes [i.e., Cuban labor camp] people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals…it is hard labor…the working conditions are harsh…”
It's funny, I read those Che t-shirts completely differently to the way you do.
What could be more capitalist than remixing a photo of a communist revolutionary and selling it for profit? I see them as ironic, not endorsing, especially in their remixed state.
I guess this just underlines the fact RMS shouldn't have signed the t-shirt - it's just a graphic, so you could make out it means anything.
How can this be viewed as a provocation, unless your views align with the regimes who people like Che faught against?
Regardless of your views on 'communism' (and I say that as someone who will quickly detest any of those governments at that time in history), they faught against overtly fascist regimes that trampled on all personal freedoms and routinely rounded up dissidents to be summarily executed. RMS 'not endorsing' fighting for personal freedom is an endorsement of the status quo of that era, where governments like Pinochets would literally kidnap dissidents, sedate them, throw them into the cargo holds of 747s and dump them out over the ocean from tens of thousands of feet in the air.
I asked him if besides fighting for free (open source) software, we should also discuss freeing our data from corporate control; that in 2004 (I can now say
exactly because he also gave an interview then [1]), so that topic was not much of a thing back then.
He uses X11 sometimes! I couldn't quite tell what the DE was, but it might have been XFCE. He found it easier to show us comics in X11 than in textmode emacs, so he swapped to the desktop to do that.
This was close to midnight in London when I was helping him get his stuff back to his accommodations (his bag is frikkin HEAVY). He needed to rest for a minute, and he whipped out his laptop to laugh at comics he'd written.
As far as I've seen X11 has always been considered Free without-strong-copyleft by rms/GNU.
They were /not/ in favor of the proprietary Motif desktop environment, nor the (at the time, non-FLOSS Qt library dependent) KDE (C++) environment, hence the FSF creating the GNOME (C) environment. "...GNOME and KDE
will remain two rival desktops, unless some day they can be merged
in some way. Until then, the GNU Project is going to support its
own team vigorously. Go get ’em, gnomes!"
> ...a quote directly from Bostic himself. I asked him about it, after reading this FSF page: "People sometimes ask whether BSD too is a version of GNU, like GNU/Linux. The BSD developers were inspired to make their code free software by the example of the GNU Project, and explicit appeals from GNU activists helped persuade them..."
Is there a reason to think a trusty Thinkpad from the times before would ever break down? The man clearly had chosen a worflow for life, which... Good for him. The biggest currency of the 21st century thinkers seems to be attention...
He's eccentric, and most people would say that his social skills are subpar. But if you spend more than a few minutes reading his emails or watching him talk you'll realize that he is most definitely /not/ an asshole.
> I've spent more time with him than I ever neeeded to as his "escort" when he talked to my university's LUG. Dude wouldn't stop staring at women's chests and left my car smelling like a barnyard. We lost female members because of him.
If you're going to make an accusation against without any evidence, I figured I might link this website with a compilation of accusations that came up during the cruel smear campaign against him, and their debunkings.
I'm not saying that you're lying, just offering both sides of the story to whoever else is reading. Most of the accusations against him have been shown to be misrepresented, greatly exaggerated, or straight-up false.
> "I don't do smalltalk" means "You are not worthy to communicate to me"
Isn’t that pure assumption on your part? It could mean ‘I am unable to do small talk’, which is true for many people, especially people on the spectrum, it could have been situationally specific with details the top comment left out, it could be because he prefers to discuss computing, or because (like many people) he truly dislikes empty conversation and has a lot of people trying to talk to him. That little quote taken out of context does not imply or communicate anything about worthiness. Why is your assumption jumping to the most negative possible interpretation of the extremely short detail-free story, when there are simple, likely, and plausible alternatives?
I am wondering how many times you feel the need to make effectively slanderous comments about RMS throughout a comment section that is about his dealing with cancer?
> "I don't do smalltalk" means "You are not worthy to communicate to me"
Many people like smalltalk, but for many other people, smalltalk with people they do not know is very uncomfortable. Why should people from the second group feel obliged to do smalltalk just to satisfy feelings of the first group?
We are in dire need of succession. Can memories of his reasoning alone withstand the erosion of time in the mindshare of public discussion? I know FSF will codify stuffs and preserve things that are ideologically important. But without someone as strong-headed as him we will have a hard time defending freedom of software.
RMS and the FSF have honestly and I guess unfortunately made their bed here. I think a lack of succession and to be frank the ageing population of people that care for the FSF are in large part a result of these folks conflating “fostering the development / use of free software” with “do things the way we did them 40 years ago, because that’s what we like”. I am not sure how many young people successfully penetrate these sorts of greybeard cultures, even if they want to.
> But without someone as strong-headed as him we will have a hard time defending freedom of software.
Anyone who is not as strong-headed as he is will have no hope of defending software freedom. The only thing I wish is that he would learn how to be more persuasive, i.e. improve his rhetoric skills. His reasoning and logical skills are exceptional, but winning over the public is not always about being right.
Stallman, though not someone I’d want to deal with on a daily basis, is, I believe, a force for good in this world. We need terriers and geese honking and nipping the ankles of power.
A divisive character and not the easiest to deal with and rather cranky and very set in his ways (his web browsing via an email - eish) but without his early efforts there would have not been the FSF and GNU and later Linux.
Right person at the right time - live long and prosper RMS.
Once you start reading some more accurate history of famous people in the past you will find out that pretty much everybody did things that today would get you canceled.
Nobody is perfect. World is moved forward by imperfect people that are able to do something productive for the society.
The word "cancelled" is often used by plenty of people who "cancel" people, by happily claiming that someone is "cancelled".
The issue isn't just being "called out for being a jerk". It's one thing to call someone a jerk. It's another thing to be entirely unwilling to look at facts objectively, to reason about them, to listen to those defending the person and yet throw wild allegations, as well as vilifying anything an anyone that is in any way close to that person.
Nobody is actually concerned about "cancelling" just because people call each other "jerks". You can call me a jerk if you want. I won't feel cancelled.
Perhaps, but we all know not to make other people uncomfortable by staring at their secondary sex characterists. RMS is an adult, he should know better than to treat women like objects like I saw him do at my university.
Aren't there countless examples of people who have been cancelled in this way to various degrees? People accused of sexual crimes, racist beliefs, fringe moral views, heretical religious/theological beliefs, etc. have been cancelled countless times both recently and all throughout recorded history.
Examples:
* Norman Finkelstein (blacklisted from Academia for his work relating to the Israel/Palestine conflict)
* Richard Stallman (made to resign from his positions at MIT and FSF due to comments relating to Marvin Minsky and Jeffrey Epstein)
* James Watson (ostracized from the scientific community due to his comments about race)
* Justin Roiland (forced out of Rick and Morty due to alleged crimes)
> Norman Finkelstein (blacklisted from Academia for his work relating to the Israel/Palestine conflict)
He wasn't "cancelled" for being "woke", that's straight up political fallout for going up against Israeli interests.
> Richard Stallman (made to resign from his positions at MIT and FSF due to comments relating to Marvin Minsky and Jeffrey Epstein)
He's back at FSF. Clearly not "cancelled" as evidenced by this entire thread. He received relatively mild repercussions for supporting a known sexual predator combined with his own list of accusations of sexual predation.
> James Watson
This is the only one that is possibly a "cancelation" and that's a stretch. Being repeatedly and openly racist and then getting kicked out of your cushy chancellor emeritus position because of it, again, doesn't feel like "cancellation".
> Justin Roiland (forced out of Rick and Morty due to alleged crimes)
Ah yes, the "guilty until proven innocent" version of "cancellation" ... not associating with people with multiple credible accusations of crimes is not "cancelling" them.
Stallman was cancelled. If the repercussions he faced were just, he was nonetheless cancelled. If the repercussions have turned out to be only temporary, he was nonetheless cancelled.
In general, you seem to think that because these people deserved the punishment they faced, that they were not really cancelled. This is a wrongheaded way to think about the matter. A person is cancelled when he faces certain punishments for having done (of being thought to have done) certain actions. Whether these punishments were just does not play into whether they constitute cancellation. Justified or unjustified, it's cancellation the same.
Now, it is true that people who are the most vocal about cancellation tend to be against it as a rule. Or, to be against it when it is seen as going against freedom of speech - Justin Roiland and others who are seen as having been credibly accused of having committed a crime may be seen as fair game.
P.S. I never said Finkelstein was cancelled for being woke (you likely misread the word "work"), in fact he is very much against woke culture - see his latest book, "I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!"
Your definition of "cancelled" seems to be pretty different than the current usage, in particular people who are against "cancel-culture" as a threat to legitimate freedom and/or as a dangerous unfair ideology. (in both cases, it requires the cancellation to be unfair. If it is not unfair, then it cannot be considered as a danger)
I don't really see the point of the term "cancelled" if it is what you describe: what you describe is just the normal usual consequences of living in society, and it existed since millenia without the need of using a specific term like "cancel".
It is also not really good because it muddies the water. We have people who are saying that the cancel-culture is a big danger. What they have in mind as "cancellation" is mainly a fantasy, and it is true that what they have in mind practically never happens in real life. But then, if you come and say "yeah, there is the list of people cancelled", these people will just start to believe these people went under the way more extreme definition of "cancellation" they have in mind.
> P.S. I never said Finkelstein as cancelled for being woke (you likely misread the word "work"), in fact he is very much against woke culture - see his latest book, "I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!"
Oh. When I saw that, I was thinking "Good, this list contains some people that would have been cancelled for not conforming to right-wing ideal. Then I guess it is already more believable". But if it is not the case, I find it problematic. There is absolutely no intrinsic reason that only people would be cancelled for "not conforming with a left-wing ideal". If "cancellation" is a real thing, it should happen to right-wing or left-wing.
Can you state which parts of the popular conception of cancellation are fantasy? What is it that people have in mind? that thing which practically never happens in real life.
Norman Finkelstein is as left-wing as it gets. He views wokism as a right-wing ideology (correctly).
The popular conception of cancellation is that cancellation is an unfair imposition of an ideology on people who don't deserve to be judged, and that it is destroying their life.
But on this discussion you've provided a list, and some people have highlighted that there is legitimate ground for their "cancellation" and that their lives are not destroyed. Therefore it does not correspond to this idea that we have a kind of crazy inquisition randomly punishing perfectly innocent people.
Sure, those "cancellation" can be criticized and discussed, but they are not more a big danger than any other decision about rule of society.
My comment here is rather: "I was told that cancel culture was bad, life-destroying and unfair. Then, someone asked for a list. Someone else provided a list. But then, others have noticed that this list does not correspond to what I have been told: it's way milder than bad, life-destroying and unfair."
It is possible that what I have been told is not the "popular conception of cancellation", but it would be surprising: it is still very much how it is depicted in mass media (from "official newpapers" to "twitter feed of politicians").
About Finkelstein: it is not really what I mean. I'm not saying Finkelstein is right-wing or left-wing. I'm saying I'm interested to see example of cancel culture of someone who wanted to do something left-wing and was canceled by people who defend right-wing ideals. Was Finkelstein canceled because he was too left-wing to the taste of people who liked right-wing?
It's a honest question, the answer can be "yes". The situation is just that I first saw "Finkelstein was canceled for being too woke", which seems to be a description that correspond to that. When you said that it was not the case, I thought "oh, ok, maybe it's not the case, then".
As for "wokism is a right-wing ideology", I would be more convinced by argument saying things like "wokism shares aspect with authoritarianism" or things like that. Something "right-wing" is first and foremost "something that is loved and adopted in the right-wing community". At the end of the day, it fails against to reach my argument. My argument is not really that "a good list will have people who are blue and people who are red in it", my argument is rather "a good list will have people who are canceled by the group A and the group B is outraged by the cancellation, and people who are canceled by the group B and the group A is outraged by the cancellation". So, in fact, it does not matter if wokism is theoretically right-wing or left-wing: if the cancellation is done by the left-wing community acting like the right-wing community, and that the right-wing community is upset about the cancelation, it still has the problem I've raised: why are all the cancellation examples always done by the left-wing community?
One possibility is that one includes ideological orientation in the definition. But even so, if cancel culture is bad, it would be because it's unfair or arbitrary, and "being unfair" or "being arbitrary" is possible whatever ideology you have. So it feels strange that "cancel culture" is a danger while something that is as unfair and arbitrary is not considered as a danger.
Finkelstein was cancelled by the right. Most prominently by Alan Deshowitz, lawyer for Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, etc.
As a result, he was denied tenure and was never able to get a job as a professor, other than occasionally working as an adjunct. Really, I'm not sure how much more severe it could be without being something other than cancellation.
He was cancelled long before his work on wokism - that topic was only brought up because someone misread one of my previous comments.
Another example of someone on the left-wing being cancelled by those on the right is Paul Robeson, who was perhaps the most famous American alive at one point, but lost everything due to his left-wing beliefs.
I do think you're confused about the popular conception of cancellation. Stallman lost his position at the FSF and MIT. His speaking engagements were cancelled. Article after article came out about how terrible he supposedly was. Almost all of it was unfair, almost all the claims against him were inaccurate. If these things don't constitute cancellation, nothing does.
> If these things don't constitute cancellation, nothing does.
I think that is exactly my point: what you describe constitute the usual social interactions that always existed, and for which we don't need to invent a new word. And for which we certainly don't need to pretend it's a new "culture" and a new "danger".
So, yeah, what you describe is real, but it is not "cancellation" because this concept does not correspond to any new phenomena.
This is demonstrated by your example of Robeson, that happens decades ago and nobody never mentioned "cancel culture" to talk about that at the time.
So, yes, nowadays, we have people who claim there is this new phenomena, super dangerous or getting worst than before, and they call it "cancellation". This new phenomena does not correspond to anything real, because there is no new phenomena. There is and there always will be people who will choose to not work with people they don't like and who will share and defend their opinions on this subject.
> Stallman lost his position at the FSF and MIT.
The way I understand it, Stallman lost his positions for demonstrating he did not had the skills required for these positions. For instance, his lost position at the FSF was as a spokesperson, which is a public relationship role. The blunders he has repetitively done demonstrate he is not competent for this role. Same way a driver that keeps have car accident will end up being fired.
> almost all the claims against him were inaccurate
I agree with that, and that is regrettable.
But one have to understand that it is not only inevitable, the pro-Stallman were as bad as the anti ones. Almost all the claims in defense of Stallman were also unfair and inaccurate, accusing people of hidden agenda or dishonesty because they were just jumping to conclusion. While we should give the benefice of the doubt and while it is unfair to have article after article coming out about how terrible he supposedly was, it is exactly the same crime to not give the benefice of the doubt to the panel who decided that Stallman should step down and writing, without any more proofs, how innocent he supposedly was. I was disappointed to see no reaction (or really really few) defending Stallman saying "I understand the honest mistake of incorrectly thinking that ...", they were all trying to "cancel the cancellers", applying exactly the same method. For example, as I've just said, it looks to me that Stallman's position as PR was revoked because he acted in a way that shows he is not the best person for this position. Yet, the very very large majority of articles in defense of Stallman choose to lie about this situation, dishonestly presenting it as if his position was totally disconnected to any social skill.
And one needs to understand the following basic bias: if you think Stallman was unfairly treated, for sure you are going to particularly notice all the articles against him, and it will looks like it's a lot. And the article defending him will just sound "normal" to you and therefore as good measure. You will end up thinking the wave was dominated by article against him, ignoring that Stallman was also very well supported. In fact, in the past, there have been situations where Stallman would normally have been asked to step down, but he was spared because the pro-Stallman prevailed (some of the element that the MIT considered were reported at the time they happened and the decision was taken in favor of Stallman). In other words: "we never talk about the trains that arrive on time, and end up thinking there are more late trains than trains on time, even if it is not true".
Cancelled is probably the wrong word. I think what the other commenter meant was that the moral reputation of individuals tends to decline with time since what is considered moral is relative to a given society and a given period of time.
It's very hard to name a historical figure who lived prior to the 1900s who didn't express something racist, sexist or homophobic for example. Similarly, even people who were in the public spotlight 4-5 decades ago have often said things considered morally objectionable today. Even people who are obviously anti-racist like Justin Trudeau used to believe black face was acceptable until very recently, for example.
I don't know if Stallman has been "cancelled". I'm not even sure what that means. But his reputation has been harmed like almost anyone who's been in the public spotlight for long enough.
Maybe it is happening in America, which is very puritanical, but my feeling is that when people highlight elements that would not be accepted today in historical people, the goal is not to paint them as the devil, but to understand that nothing is all white and all black, and help learning to have a smarter approach to history than those lazy "heroes vs bad guys" depiction.
> But his reputation has been harmed like almost anyone who's been in the public spotlight for long enough.
These kinds of affirmation are really easily the result of the bias. You see a lot of public figure in the spotlight having their reputation harmed, but you don't notice the ton of people who are just "normal" or "not unlucky" that are not and will never be harmed.
For example, it is true that when Trudeau dressed in black-face, it was not such a big deal. But then, the probability of dressing in black-face was still very small. How many innocent people just dressed in black-face just for an innocent joke at the time? So, people who are "unlucky" are statistically a minority.
As another example, behavior like Stallman or Roiland are not "normal". "normal" people are just not that abusive or inconsiderate. So, people who are "not normal" are also a minority and to some extend even deserve it a little bit (they should have known better than being jerks, having their reputation harmed for being a jerk is not a bad thing, it is a normal consequence).
> Cancelled is probably the wrong word. I think what the other commenter meant was that the moral reputation of individuals tends to decline with time since what is considered moral is relative to a given society and a given period of time.
My personal view is ... did this person move society ahead? I will give someone who fought against slavery 200 years ago, a pass for being what would be considered misogynistic now or a racist who fought for suffrage at the turn of last century. If the person was just all around "a product of their times" or specifically evil, cancel away!
> Even people who are obviously anti-racist like Justin Trudeau used to believe black face was acceptable until very recently, for example.
This is an interesting case. When I first saw the picture, I was immediately struck by the fact that Trudeau was dressed up as a Djinn which were historically often (mostly?) displayed as black skinned in Islamic art. I totally understand why he didn't try to explain that and just took the hit (when I dressed as a Djinn, I went with green rather than black for the obvious reason that Trudeau also should have gone with red, green or blue).
> Even people who are obviously anti-racist like Justin Trudeau used to believe black face was acceptable until very recently, for example.
To the extent to which "black face" just means for a white person to play a black character, they were entirely right in thinking so. All actors play things they are not.
From what I understand, Stallman had several role at FSF. One of them was spokesperson, which is basically Public Relationship. Then, he made several actions showing that he does not understand the basis or does not have the skills to work in PR. So, we was asked to step down from this position.
If you hire a front-end developer and later discover that they are not able to do the basis of programming, are you "canceling" the developer if you decide to not continue to work with them because they are not what you need for the job?
(As for MIT, apparently, it's based on a series of incidents. Again, his work requirement included skills that would imply he would not have done those mistakes. Positions a universities obviously includes as requirement basic skills in knowledge communication and ability to work with pairs, that's what universities are supposed to do.)
The guy who just gave a well attended speech to loud applause and is getting gushing well wishes in this very conversation? The guy who is back at the FSF? That guy?
I think it's impressive how he saw a danger, a possibility some 20 years before it was even a feasible technical reality
referring to his story of "right to read" or something like that about books being able to get deleted of your bookshelf... and then Amazon making this a reality some decades later
Computing world will be a darker place without him. I wish HN crowd and tech enthusiasts stop worshiping latest Apple and Google products and teach others to use free software.
One day I got a call from RMS’s assistant asking if I could help sell books for FSF at a conference. Not even bothering to ask what kind of conference it was, I said “For Richard Stallman, anything!”
Two days later I found myself selling books alongside a self-described nomad and was approached by the leader of the communist party of Great Britain who shook my hand and said “I’m a big fan of your work.”
While we joke that he's been an oddball at times, he is one of the most influential people in all of modern computing. GNU's impact on this industry can't be understated. I wish him the best.
It seems that we will have an Open Stallman finally, improved with all the non GPL code removed. I wish him the best and a good recovery. Richard, you can do this.
The more the tech world develops and the more I learn, the more I start to like free & open source tech.
I do think there will always be a a large and growing amount of space for paid software work, but the variety and quality of free software seems to go up and to the right over time.
I have many disagreements with Richard Stallman. And I think he has many flaws.
But I think the world is better with him than without him and that he's worked hard to further his mission. Not everyone should be like him, but it's great that he is.
This is so unfortunate. Cancer used to be something I would just hear other people getting until my Dad got it. The I understood that it was very real and that I can also be a victim.
Do you guys know of any ways to reduce your risks of getting cancer? I know not smoking tobacco works.
What foods, bad habits should one avoid. What other habits can reduce cancer risks?
We definitely know obvious bad behaviors can cause cancer, probably the ones you've heard of.
But I think some big part of it is genetics and/or luck. I see what happened to Jobs, and people like him - reasonably healthy people. Then I see men in my family who've routinely drank a ton and chewed tobacco, overweight, spent all day in the sun to the point of looking like leather, and live well into their 80s. Yes everyone has some anecdote that doesn't mean much, but it's hard to reconcile.
Re: Jobs specifically, if one has cancer it's best to accept it immediately and to get chemo and other treatments that work, as opposed to colon cleanses, acupuncture etc.. Had he done this his odds of survival. He reportedly expressed regret about this towards the end, per [0].
I think about this kind of thing lot, like how I think about TotalBiscuit's cancer and his regret regarding not getting seen to earlier. The profound level of regret these people must have felt during their final days must have been frustrating and saddening, but I appreciate their efforts to warn others as they have been responsible for me personally making sure I get serious signs and symptoms seen to rather than ignoring a bloody stool as though it's normal, or thinking I can treat something myself without professional advice.
Ever since I had a sometimes-cancerous soft issue tumor so rare, information on it mostly exists in academic writing to then find out it was not cancerous yet at the time it got cut out (probably, but get screened for the next few years anyway) I gave up on looking at numbers to console myself with statistics.
Not to say you shouldn't minimize your risk, but it can still hit you regardless.
Nope not just that. Diet, not smoking not drinking will go a long way to reduce your risks too. And also keeping good vitamin D levels (highly correlated with lower cancer risk)
Remember, though. You can still get it, even if you do all that. Having cancer is not a moral failure. Even kids may get it.
Realizing, not in a philosophical way, one way way or another, that we will die, is something that changes you. Fewer reasons to accumulate fame and money. More reasons to make yourself happy in this life.
It is a widely held opinion, that sleep and water have good influences on your overal health and good overal health is linked to less cancer and some other benefits.
Sadly, the English language is not precise enough for me to express what I wanted in a compact way. Recently I have been learning Ukrainian and there is a language where it is easy to precisely express this kind of thought due to the many different forms of "and", word terminations indicating expected noun context, and different rules about punctuation.
In most part - don't live old. It also helps when you don't poison yourself (indeed tobacco, polluted air, alcohol, you name it, are poisons even when tolerable in small quantities) and exercise enough.
Don't smoke, don't drink alcohol, avoid smoked food, avoid processed red meat, avoid plastic food containers/beverage containers, buy bio food or food which has grown with minimal amount of pesticide
Exercise, that'll help not being overweight/obese/diabetic
Get vaccinated against hpv (you're probably too old for that one)
Don't live in a polluted area/city center, avoid owning furniture's that release toxic gases (a lot of things treated to be fireproof or fire resistant are awful)
Wear sunscreen or long clothes, get your weird moles checked
At the end of the day we all know it deep down, you can easily prevent a lot os health issues by not being overweight/obese and avoiding alcohol/cigarettes
Only ~40% of cancers are actually preventable and even if people followed all guidelines, we'd still see around 1 in 4 people developing cancer. For most people, the second line of defense is early detection, which is important to mention so people don't say "I have such a healthy lifestyle, it's very unlikely that I'll get cancer". Millions of extremely healthy people out there develop cancer every year.
Your recommendations are good, the easiest one being the HPV vaccine when under 30s.
The main cause of cancer at the end of the day is aging. The longer you live the more likely you are to get cancer. That is why most people who get cancer are above 70. Having a better lifestyle will help reduce your risks but ultimately aging is increasing your risks no matter what
It's not evolving in a good way though, lifestyle is definitely a huge contributor, and doing all these things improves your healthy lifespan anyways, no reasons not to do them in the first place.
> Results Global incidence of early-onset cancer increased by 79.1% and the number of early-onset cancer deaths increased by 27.7% between 1990 and 2019
They contain less pesticides on average and pesticides are directly linked to cancers but you do you
Also several studies mention they have higher level of nutrients, vitamin &co
Eating bio veggies won't make you cancer proof, but the again smoking a cigarette a day won't guarantee you a cancer either. It's a game of luck but some things help while other things are detrimental, I personally see no reason to buy pesticides riddled veggies when I have access to cleaner ones
RMS has been such an inspiration for me, he's the reason I decided to contribute all my work to FOSS. I hope he can get better and continue with his life as usual!
Ye should check Valter Longo and the Fast Mimicking Diet, it's been tried for accompanying chemo and it helps both against side effects and with better outcomes.
i hope he navigates this well and i hope he doesnt experience any pain but if people here are allowed to talk about his contribution then i should be able to do the same. i cant think of anyone who did more damage to software than him. his political zealotry, which didnt belong in a technical field, was very destructive.
because of the poisonous vitriol that responses will undoubtedly have, i wont be reading responses. dont even bother.
The largest discussion in this thread is about politics;
The biggest tension at the GNU 40 years event was when an old Mr. was speaking about social economics and his attempts to make a local money in Basel (ch). Two american protagonists interrupted the speach telling it is too political.
Later i talked to the one of them, a Chinese girl studiying in Harvard USA, she started telling me things about her big rich buisiness family and personal crypto projects she had in liberal finance field in Switzerland, she proposed me a job as a Solidity develloper. And I UNDERSTOOD why the previous speech was "TOO POLITICAL" for her.
For me, FSF and GNU are not enought political;
I was always disappointed of the FSF and GNU political positioning, while their fight is about freeing the world of proprietary licences (property right) they don't consider to support anticapitalists movements who are fighting for that to.
Stallman was the only to publicly support the French left social-reformist party "La France Insoumise" with the candidat Jean Luc Mélenchon, and for me it means a lot.
Now, let's say it; OF course I understand why this is strategic for them, but i don't stand for it because it is irresponsible and dangerous.
There’s nothing to think more; the FSF should use YouTube or similar services as mirrors so people can watch the videos even when their website is hammered down by the HN crowd. You can hardly argue that the current situation where nobody can watch the video is a good idea.
The FSF is ideologically opposed to youtube and other proprietary services. They don't want to use it and will not use it. It's their work and they have no obligation to you - it's like going to a vegan party, complaining they have no food you like and demanding they order some hamburgers for you. There's nothing to think more, the FSF shouldn't use YouTube or similar services.
> The FSF is ideologically opposed to youtube and other proprietary services. They don't want to use it and will not use it. It's their work and they have no obligation to you - it's like going to a vegan party, complaining they have no food you like and demanding they order some hamburgers for you. There's nothing to think more, the FSF shouldn't use YouTube or similar services.
It definitely should, but it doesn’t want to. That’s two different things. The goal of the FSF is to promote free software; that they don’t want to do it through proprietary mediums is obviously a legitimate choice, but that doesn’t make it intelligent.
What's cool about RMS is that he perfectly foresaw many decades ago the world that we live in today: your car or smart fridge refusing actions because its software says so. And you cannot change the bloody software! I cringe every time I see encrypted firmware running in trusted execution environment, DRM, DLCs for fucking physical products, websites or apps that scam you into signing up or giving up some other freedoms, or some other corpo garbage made in this era. Tesla literally sells car speed upgrade as an over the air update. My phone makes it hard or impossible to install the software that I want, unless some corpo bureaucrat from Google or Apple decided they like this software.
This very morning, my wife performed reset of cache/cookies from our family’s perfectly fine iPad 3 (yeah, the one from 2012, 11 years old). The iPad is our kitchen TV, it shows either some content from VLC (works perfectly fine, kudos to the devs) or some YouTube from Safari (the AppStore’s app support is long gone, web app still works quite well, even considering it was updated recently). Today I spent my morning trying to login our kitchen account. Didn’t work. The account is perfectly fine, but Google refuses to login, as — I’m pretty sure — we use our obsolete software. Well, we do, we do. But even YouTube itself works relatively fine, and as many of you may understand, the iPad is great and much beyond what we need for kitchen, it has a loud speaker and great display, we don’t need anything else for that use-case. On top of that that’s separate device is nothing to worry about, as you may imagine controlling the iPad with dirty fingers, all the oils of the kitchen, etc. Not a place for a modern iPad that we also have, imo.
For me that’s a great example. I personally know many old (even obsolete iPads) lying here and there collecting dust, as their software (and hardware) vendor decided they are all in for nature and ecology (sarcasm), so let millions of perfectly capable devices would be thrown away as a trash.
Eyeing some Android tablet for that, the one I can flash with Lineage OS and be happy with. Maybe Google’s Pixel C or even Nexus 7.
Meanwhile we continue using the iPad unlogginned till it stop working.
I refuse to buy hardware when it comes out, and I only buy used hardware from private sellers on ebay. And only hardware that I know there's a possibility of me (read as: my clumsy hands) repairing it without having equipment worth 10k$. The reason I am doing this is because I had several Macbooks and Ultrabooks when they were cool and shiny, and all of them died within less than 2 years. So I kinda learned my lesson.
This sadly limits the options to less than let's say 10 devices. For now I am still using my 10 years old T440p because it's the last generation laptop that can both run coreboot and is still repairable (and it survived all the Ultrabooks I mentioned before. WTF?). But it's too old for Vulkan because there is no Haswell support. It was the perfect laptop until around 2020 when Vulkan was rolled out. Can forget games that ran before that now, because of mesa dropping support for it.
The framework will very likely be my next laptop if the current one dies, but only time will tell if the promise is worth the price.
Fairphone 2/3 are kinda useless as an ideology if there are no replacement parts available 12 months after the phone came out...so yeah, I got also two broken Fairphones I cannot repair for the moment because the bottom module isn't available anywhere.
I kinda refuse to buy a full phone just for spare parts because I can do that with literally every other cheap Chinese Android phone.
With the T440p there's no working new mint condition batteries available and only used ones that have less than 60% capacity when you buy them, so I am currently trying to design a battery case that can use 18650 cells directly without soldering. Takes a lot of time to iterate, and very hard to print with a cheap 3d printer.
I think I am way too stubborn for this world, given the amount of time I spend on fixing my old hardware.
> For me that’s a great example. I personally know many old (even obsolete iPads) lying here and there collecting dust, as their software (and hardware) vendor decided they are all in for nature and ecology (sarcasm), so let millions of perfectly capable devices would be thrown away as a trash.
This really infuriates me because we (iOS developers) were all forced to see how it was happening. If you want to stay in the game, you have to develop for the newest devices, In order to do so, you need to upgrade your Xcode. In order to do so, you have to periodically upgrade your mac. And this is more or less fine. But at the same time newer xcode drops support for older yet perfectly functioning devices.
What can you do? Keep older macs with older xcode versions and at least be able to develop solutions for your own devices. But this is not a solution, it doesn't solve anything really, and it wouldn't help much in your kitchen example.
> If you want to stay in the game, you have to develop for the newest devices
Even if you don't care, you have to upgrade to the latest Xcode to build against the latest iOS version with the cascade of consequences you described so well.
See, even when people get rid of their old tech because they get a newer replacement or whatever, the old stuff is often not broken; with repairs like a replacement battery, or the option to use it without one, it can easily last over a decade. This is why right to repair laws and standardization are so important, to reduce the amount of discarded electronics, and to allow a "trickle down" kind of economics, to the point where people can get access to technology for free.
I wish I could install an up to date version of (real) Firefox on the iPad 2 I inherited and for which updates stopped in 2016. This alone would make it massively more useful. Today it mostly serves displaying music sheets, it's fine as a PDF viewer (although there's nothing to prevent the screen from going off too soon, which is incredibly dumb and annoying).
Even better, I would very much like installing some Linux mobile distro on it.
It's limited but perfectly fine hardware with a good screen and impressive battery time. If only the software were any good.
Also:
- Yes, I know there's no sim card in it.
- no, I won't log in to iBooks, this is a freaking PDF viewer for me.
Every restart.
Linux mobile software is flawed by accident. iOS is flawed by decision and I can't rebuild and fix it.
Yes, yes, yes! A million times yes! Our iPad 3 may have a bit of ‘kids device’ time, but after that it’s useless. Its battery life is over any laptop I have in my household (except just one with M2, obviously).
My wife is Ukrainian and we do live in Ukraine. And hadn’t left, as our city is relatively safe from missile and drones attacks. But the winter was harsh and we had extreme blackouts last winter. We could have from days (at worst) to hours (at best) without any electricity and internet connection. I bought top of the line MacBook Pro 16 with M2, just to do my work, which involves heavy renders quite often. Also we have a generator and a huge battery pack that can power some critical devices up to a day.
Still, given all that, the iPad saved our winter, as we could download offline most of the various content and almost never its battery was depleted during those blackouts. This tablet ($30 on a used market) and a $4K laptop were two devices that held its battery basically without need to be recharged either from generator or the battery pack.
Now Apple and Google tell me I have to retire the tablet just because. Also, I have an obsolete 10” Intel Atom netbook somewhat 5 years older than this iPad (ca. 2007–2008), and it runs fresh Arch Linux with the latest Firefox. Its battery is dead, but I know I can replace the cells, when needed. It can run many of my tasks, has an HDMI port and 4 GB of RAM. And is perfectly usable in many cases. But the iPad that could run rounds across the netbook, if allowed to remove all the bloat and update what’s needed— well, you know. You better buy a new one to watch YouTube and your precious local content.
The YouTube iOS app stopped working a while ago, I suppose the backend API changed.
But YouTube still works via Safari on the iPad 4.
I generally keep JavaScript turned off in Safari on that old tablet; I think it's a RAM limitation but it could simply be that the JavaScript version is too old. Many sites just don't work. But with JavaScript enabled, YouTube still does fine.
I recommend against the Nexus 7. We used it for some 10 years, mostly with Lineage OS, as a video player for our kids.
We had two, and both batteries are dead. No longer charging at all.
Additionally, even before the batteries went, video playback was far from great at the end.
I used NewPipe for youtube videos and VLC for downloads. And while once playing, it worked fine enough, the UI interactions were frustrating because of lacking responsiveness, and the 7 inch thick bezelled form factor made it hard to watch anything without holding the device in front of you.
We've since switched to a couple of cheap 10" tablets and they provide a much nicer experience.
Oh, thanks for your feedback! I was worried about the N7, as the iPad is very snappy in that regard (playing video). I see almost no difference with any newer models, with the exception of super new HDR/Spatial Audio ones. (Not needed for YouTube anyways, as even if there’s content, we don’t truly watch the iPad, but listen to it.)
And it plays local H264 720p very well, usually. However, for us 480p is plenty most of the time.
Same here - my iPad 3 was used by me and then 2 children growing up. It's still working perfectly fine and has even decent battery life. But the app store shows a blank page, and even if it wasn't, all recent apps have a higher minimum iOS version (edit: because recent versions of Xcode will only build against recent iOS versions). And Apple is actively removing apps from the app store that haven't been updated in a while. So the hardware is still fine, but there is no software available anymore and no way to sideload.
This doesn't happen much to me and my wife since we don't buy much electronics without discretion. However, my wife has a specific Fossil/Kate Spade hybrid watch (analog but can be controlled remotely) that had an app with it. One day, she was cleaning out her phone and accidentally deleted the app to control it. She tries to go back and the app is gone from the store. The watch can probably controlled with the generic software they have, but that's not the purpose (despite the fact that watch/app has/had novelty features.)
It's really annoying though. The watch ticks, but it was built with features that the developer decides it can't support anymore after a few years. I found the Android version outside the google play store and I decompiled it to find the problem she described, which is a seemingly frivolous login feature (to WeChat login service! why?!? I think all Fossil watches in the past few years do this) to control the watch. I might make it a project to fix it one day.
I almost went down the path of buying a panel heater with an app - but, as a rule, no source (free to view, free to modify), no buy.
Talking about iPads, we have one, an iPad mini, that is just an alarm clock now. It's useless otherwise.
I have a couple Samsung Galaxy A8 (2022) tablets set up as control panels around my apartment for Home Assistant. They cost a little more than $100 on eBay in very good condition. I don't think LineageOS supports this particular model, though, but I didn't bother since all it does is display a webpage.
One of the things I like about Samsung tablets is that they have a "Battery saver" feature where you can restrict it from charging the battery past 85%, which is a generally good move if your tablet is going to be permanently plugged into power and used as some sort of fixed display.
I've had MANY brand name devices with lithium batteries bulge when left constantly plugged in at 100% battery for months and don't want to risk an explosion.
I do this with an old samsung phone I have, but I can't do updates on it, because on that model samsung included an overlay with ads along with the updates.
So I see ads (even videos!) instead of my simple html page, or on top of it. It's terrible!
This wall switch to tap USB power out of a wall switch box so there would be no visible dangling wires. This will only work if your apartment has neutral wires in the switch boxes. Older apartments often don't have them
Don't buy Nexus 7. Or if you do, find a new one and don't update. Google virtually bricked them with an update to a newer android version. Maybe you can still find posts of people complaining and trying to fix it. I know I won't ever buy hardware from Google after that.
The pity is that while he was remarkably prescient, he seems to have stopped adapting decades ago.
GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Pretty much none of that is done under the GPL.
The FSF is clearly not reaching the people it needs to reach. Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? As far as I know, they have neither. I barely hear anything about the FSF on Linux sites. Their reach elsewhere has to be essentially nonexistent.
And with the FSF it appears that RMS has no viable successor. That doesn't bode well either.
The sad outcome is that we keep rehashing things like Right to Read -- a fine thing from 1997, but what has happened since?
> The FSF is clearly not reaching the people it needs to reach.
The FSF has been talking to users and to devs for decades, but unfortunately devs went from being users that had no problem sharing their progress to business people who thought that restricting access for personal, individual gain at the expense of the entire society of today and tomorrow is somehow "better", "more free", because who knows, maybe I'll be the next Bill Gates ?
I see the catastrophic state we are in today as the result of non-copyleft, of "Open Source" as opposed to "Libre Software", of the depolitization of what it means to take from the commons and give back to the commons, of what society means whether we see it as a sum of perfectly rational individuals with no money problems or as a group of interdependent agents. The only reason Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and other big platforms could start up and be where they are today is because they could take a bunch of existing tools in the commons and not share back, to build their own fortune and control prison.
The FSF has known this for decades, and has talked about it at large, but no, developers don't want to listen. How do you fight greediness and individualism ? The issue runs deeper than software licenses, or even software.
> The FSF has known this for decades, and has talked about it at large, but no, developers don't want to listen. How do you fight greediness and individualism ?
Yeah, the greed and individualism of earning a living wage. Not everyone can have a sheltered position at MIT or as head of a foundation.
Please, let's not pretend developers who build MIT- or BSD- licensed software on their free time after their day of work at BigTech are struggling for money. Let's not pretend React is done out of pure goodwill for the developers community by one of the richest companies in the history of mankind, and developers who work on it are evaluating whether they're going to have food on the table.
There is a distinction between "I need money to live" and "I want money because I want more", and the distinction should be clear enough. Yes, many projects are in the first case, but that's not the subject.
If you want to commit to a new project, make a living off of it, what does non-copyleft bring you compared to copyleft ?
> what does non-copyleft bring you compared to copyleft?
This is not a statement of my values; simply providing plausible answers to that question.
Usually non-copyleft free software is written in a variant of these scenarios:
1. Paid for by a company whose business model is distinct from selling software (e.g. ads) and prefers to not have to worry about copyleft licensing issues in small contributions they get back from the community and be free to integrate it in proprietary products.
2a. An individual author who will indirectly benefit (in both ego and monetary ways) by writing a popular piece of software. Copyleft in fact limits the spread of the software. Think Tanenbaum being excited and proud when the news that MINIX is used in Intel Management Engine came out.
2b. Result of a academic research that benefits from maximum spread. Lots of consuming companies prefer Apache to GPL and are more likely to use the non-copyleft software.
Let's also not pretend that the solution to this specific issue is to expect all the devs of the world to respect some sort of honor code.
Had the US done its job properly and antitrusted the offending companies a decade ago, as it should have, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.
Perhaps if the FSF had actual professionals running communications, people who persuade other people for a living, the FSF's message would actually get through to people.
I don't think PR is the real issue. IMHO, the fundamental principle behind FSF philosophy is the license is primarily written to secure the long-term interest of the _user_, not the community of the authors. The reason authors were okay with that in the first place is, early on in computing, users and authors largely overlapped, if not exactly the same. Over time, the authors and users diverged widely, thus their interests diverged. FSF philosophy has failed to appeal to the authors of the software because it is economically a bad deal for them. Users who do not pay are by-and-large leeches. Also, some of the freedoms are not considered as valuable by the users as they are for fellow authors, perhaps sensibly so because they are never going to utilize such freedoms.
That's of course an element, but there can be more than one problem at once. That the FSF holds position that's economically tricky makes it harder to "sell" it, which only reinforces the need for better communication.
Plus, the GPL has long been used for commercial purposes as well.
The FSF has had actual professionals running communications.
I don't think the issue is in the form but in the content: developers don't want to hear they are favoring greedy private interests (sometimes including themselves, sometimes at their expense) instead of the common goods, because the freedom to restrict a good from everyone for personal profit is more important than the freedom to access said good and build upon it.
> You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?
Yes?
This is sort of the opposite of the "yet you participate in society, interesting" comic.
You can non-hypocritically call for people to move away from something you also use. It's especially important when it comes to communication because how on earth are you supposed to tell people to change behaviour if they never hear you? Running an ad on fox news calling for people to listen to say NPR instead isn't hypocritical.
An absolutist approach diminishes itself, as it's saying "hey don't use twitter, then just like us you'll have no reach".
I think you've fundamentally missed the point. You can call for more open platforms on a closed platform, there's nothing hypocritical or problematic about that. It's just accepting the reality of where people are.
Like it or not, YouTube and twitter are enormous with huge audiences.
I mean, most of what GRUB provides is completely unnecessary under EFI.
You can even boot Linux from EFI directly, I think, you just need to hardcode the kernel parameters, which is not ideal. So a very minimal loader is still useful, but way simpler than GRUB.
But you have to implement GPT with its mixed-endian UUID's (standard-nonconformance copied from Win 3.1), link the kernel into a windows executable (Which is hacked on top of a MS-DOS MZ .exe) and write that to the ESP, which is a floppy file system from the 80ies. And of course its relying on the VFAT extensions from windows 95.
I don't know how Microsoft managed to design a boot scheme that is conceptually better than boot sector booting while including a similar painful amount of legacy in it.
And then there are the people who celebrate that 'advance' of modern software while their kernel now has a 16-bit real mode "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" stub.
I think that FSF in a very romantic sense, is fighting a lost battle.
The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that.
>The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that.
Perhaps if the FSF wasn't so abysmal at advocacy, more people would care about software freedom. It's very easy to throw one's hands up and say "nobody cares!" but I think the FSF, and many Free Software enthusiasts, are not ready for the required level of introspection to really examine their approach and why it's not working.
FSF is not abysmal at advocacy. There was a fork in the road; the easy path was to jump in with the Open Source movement and abandon the core principles. Had RMS done that, he would have been the darling of Corporate Open Source by now, invited to Davos and speaking at TED every year, and not been cancelled by some rando college student who had never heard of or known him really. But then it would not have mattered one bit. There are hundreds of foundations doing that stuff, providing a lot of good things, but strictly speaking undermining Free Software.
It actually is painfully obvious now that what Stallman/FSF did was correct for their mission, in the sense that they knew what they actually wanted, and that Open Source definitely was not it. Thus they alienated their closest would-be allies. FSF narrative was hijacked as Corporate Open Source is a much easier sell comparatively, especially when the primary business models of "tech" companies has become less about selling software over time. When people suggest FSF is bad at advocacy, what they really imagine usually is they could have been nicer and said some of the things that everyone else in Corporate Open Source world say. If they had done it, by now they would have had no originality, added a big banner in support of Ukraine to the top of their home page, had a big DEI statement, and five random flags like every other corporate non-profit.
> When people suggest FSF is bad at advocacy, what they really imagine usually is they could have been nicer and said some of the things that everyone else in Corporate Open Source world say.
This is a straw man entirely of your own construction.
Please elaborate in a couple examples how you think one could have done better if suggesting it is straw man. It feels like an effective logical conclusion of what the critiques usually say.
As someone else posted in the thread earlier, FSF has professional staff that work on PR etc. Please note that it is a small non-profit and they cannot afford a big marketing department, partially because their ideals hinder growth to a huge degree (e.g. even Linus is on record suggesting you should donate to EFF not FSF.) It is not surprising that big corporate donors will also avoid donating when they have pages undermining Netflix, Spotify, Google, FB, even Canonical/Ubuntu and pretty much everyone with deep pockets.
There's no need for any corporate conspiracy. RMS does a good job of looking bad on his own, and the FSF barely shows up on Linux sites. I don't think the likes of Netflix even know the FSF exists at this point, let alone bother allocating any effort towards fighting back.
All FAANGs have lawyers thinking about GPL, copyleft, AGPL, and have policies what to use by default for their own code, so you can be damn sure they are fully aware of FSF and what they are doing when they invest in LLVM and change the default shell to zsh and encourage Apache 2.0. The "Open Source" movement is explicitly a conspiracy to avoid using the term Free Software.
LLVM by the way happened in a good deal because Stallman refused to have GCC dump the AST. This created an area where LLVM could provide extremely valuable functionality which GCC just refused to offer at all.
And with that sort of maneuver, GNU lost exactly what made their stuff popular in the first place: that they provided better tools than what commercial Unix used to come with.
Because they invariably prioritize ideological purity over coming up with solutions that meet people's practical needs/wants. Which is commendable in some sense - I respect sticking to principles. But good or bad, the reality is that most users (even technically savvy ones) don't care about the ideological principles of RMS. They just want shit to get done.
The purity inherent in insisting on using only free software is laudable, but evangelizing is only effective when there's reach. (It's also much more compelling when it demonstrably makes folks' lives materially better, but reasonable people will disagree on the particulars there.)
You can't change today's world if you're not a bit pragmatic. FSF may make some correct objections but if you're not properly present on some of these platforms your reach will remain limited.
To effect change you need to be part of the world of today -- warts and all. Only then you can you change it. Rejecting the world by putting your head into the ground is a strategy that will often fail. Only when you become extremely big and influential can you help determine the rules of the game.
"*Note: The custom script allows us to interact with the Twitter API while circumventing the nonfree JS that is sent to the Web browser. For viewing replies and retweeting posts, we use Choqok."
So funny and so sad. Nonfree JS? They're in their own cloud of whatever. Yes, there is nonfree stuff. But nonfree stuff also can get things done.
That's exactly what I think about RMS, FSF and GNU.
I'm mostly working with younger people (like 20-30 years old) and well, they don't really know what GNU or the FSF is.
As a Linux user I'm using GNU software all day but for most people it's just "linux command line tools". It's fine and if they do the job, well done!
But this doesn't help the FSF or the GNU project.
A lot of these tools have pretty good documentation but when you visit one of the GNU websites you feel like it's 1995 again. It's more like man pages in HTML. Actually same for Apache Software Foundation.
And this is not getting better...
A start would be a modern representation of the tools and the ideas behind free software, maybe with a bit less philosophy. GNU needs to get a bit "cooler".
> but for most people it's just "linux command line tools"
the complaint that stallman had for the name `linux` instead of his preferred `GNU/Linux` had this consequence because the people who own linux chose not to adopt his preferred branding.
Branding and marketing is really important, no matter what the field is. Especially for consumers who tend to be clueless most of the time about the underlying technologies. It's why Intel's genius is not only in processor design, but the fact that they foresaw the issue, and started marketing the "Intel Inside"(tm) branding, which put them on the table from a consumer perspective.
speaking as someone who quite enjoys the GNU website [0], I would rather they not start gunking everything up with "a CoOl LoOkInG JaVaScRiPt CaRoUsEl" like every other SaaS website out there.
I understand your sentiment and I agree with you, but at the same time if we, as a community and as a society, are incapable of caring about the principles and philosophy behind free software because the websites aren't cool enough, then we (as a community or society) will ultimately deserve whatever dystopian fate awaits us.
Nothing is wrong with 1995 and I really liked the time when content was king.
But younger people looking at Times New Roman websites is like telling them 'use man pages'.
I think GNU is not doing themselves a favor in being so old school. I'm not saying they should use (nonfree scnr) JavaScript bloated websites but a more modern look is not that complicate and achievable with free HTML and CSS standards.
It's always been my opinion that the FSF screwed the pooch when it came to spreading their message. This starts right from their very name - the "Free" Software Foundation. Anyone of didn't know their message would understand them to be a group arguing that all software should be free of charge. This is completely orthogonal to their actual message of software having the ability to be easily understood and customized as needed by a tech-savvy user who has fairly compensated the original authors. They aimed for and missed badly the sweet spot message that all software should make simple things simple and complex things possible.
This expectation that users should not have to pay for the apps/software they use has partly lead to the dystopian landscape that is our ad-supported modern software experience. Users today think they're entitled to the same standard for all software they use. They expect LibreOffice Calc to be having the same feature set as MS Excel while at the same time paying nothing for it.
Yes, and I recall my XML geek co-worker back in 2004 saying how the friend-of-a-friend co-linking XML schema was going to win over this new social network stuff... what did you call it? Linked-In?
The FSF is a tiny organization with little funding; you can't lay the responsibility for "reaching out" on them. It's a question of what other cultural, educational and commercial organizations and groups have been doing; whether enough of them have taken these messages to heart; and what they have been promoting.
Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying how you reject their principles. Those platforms are the opposite of free: Closed source, secret manipulation of content, censorship (and never mind the motivation), spying on users for the government, etc. The FSF would be hypocritical to endorse them. But of course, it does have "social network" videos - on PeerTube and MediaGoblin:
so ask yourself, why have we not been promoting those platforms, and why have everyone seemingly yielded to ever-widening control of our digital lives by these large corporations?
> The FSF is a tiny organization with little funding; you can't lay the responsibility for "reaching out" on them.
Sure can, that's the very purpose of their existence. "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom." -- how is that going to happen if nobody hears what they want?
> Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying how you reject their principles.
And how else are people on those platforms going to hear anything? The only way I can imagine is either by people who don't agree with the FSF repeating their message (do you trust them to be accurate?), or people who do agree, but more willing to compromise.
> so ask yourself, why have we not been promoting those platforms, and why have everyone seemingly yielded to ever-widening control of our digital lives by these large corporations?
And you think posting in tiny platforms that almost nobody knows even exist is going to fix anything?
There’s a conundrum though: the inescapable fact is that outside of a couple proprietary/closed networks such as YouTube, there is virtually no audience to speak to. So you can either stick to your principles and reach no one, or you can compromise and expose many more people to your discourse.
Sure, some of this situation is on us, not on the FSF. But I’m discussing what the FSF can do here. And I’m afraid they don’t have much choice.
Their goal should be encouraging people to demand open software and hardware, not being principled. Youtube and Twitter have power, not acknowledging that is dumb.
I get what you're saying, but open soft- and hardware IS a principle, and using nonfree software themselves would come across as hypocritical, undermining their own message.
The technology is there to make their own website and platforms; I'd argue that the problem isn't that they're not active on the big social media platforms, but that they don't produce media in the first place.
They can chuck videos onto their own website, license it under a free license and allow others to repost them onto social media for exposure, for example.
I don’t see how to interpret your comment in a way that doesn’t say “their goal should be encouraging people to be principled, not being being principled themselves.”
You can use a tool of a system you disagree with to raise concerns against that very system. There is no contradiction here, only pragmatism.
GNU tools such as gcc were originally developed using proprietary software until the GNU fabric was dense enough to allow bootstrapping. How else can you achieve anything at all, really?
The GPL is a great license. It protects the author and the rights of the users. But a younger generation has gotten used to thinking of open source as "a free thing I can use for work", rather than as the blood-sweat-and-tears of someone else who has contributed hundreds of their own hours. So they bristle at copyleft.
If I switch my project to GPL I immediately will lose most potential contributors and a lot of users, who will start complaining about my license choice or will be forbidden by their employer from contributing to it or using it.
Corporate entities are (maybe rightly) scared of the GPL. And the rise of open source work by/in FAANG companies, etc. has meant the undermining of that license.
I recently did a Free Software Day event and old timers from FSF showed up.
It was great, but the ecosystem is quickly deteriorating and younger people are born in walled gardens.
The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security.
AI models mostly have crappy licenses that restrict usage. The worst culprit is HuggingFace with Stable Diffusion and OpenRail which is anything but open.
It's a "don't be evil license", where evil is defined by HuggingFace but it opens the door to BS like "you're emitting too much CO2, you can't use this".
I'm sure most people at Huggingface are not doing it maliciously, they probably are all 20-something socialists making half a mill a year and they don't care about freedom.
At the same time they're also releasing a bunch of real OSS software under Apache 2.0 (often to go with OpenRail licensed models).
So yeah, we're screwed.
At the same time, I think governments are removing even more freedom that what's happening in software, so I'm kind of busy country hopping and more concerned about not becoming even more of a slave I am right now.
> The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security.
Can you develop a bit on that ?
The EU is one of the rare large public institution on Mastodon currently.
Also one of the rare institution to sue properly the GAFAMs successfully when they on-purpose try to fuck user around with carefully designed locked-in solution (Hello Internet Explorer, Safari and App store).
Like every large political institution, it is an hydra with many yeads. Nothing in the EU is entirely clean. But I would rank then more in favor of OSS than against.
The EU (technically, the European Commission and the European Council) is a large organization, so naturally there are many positions inside.
However, my impression is it has been a force for good overall, giving us cross-country mobility, getting rid of cellphone roaming charges, and avoiding waste by trying to standardize plugs. They notably introduced GDPR to protect citizen's data and they provide a court of human rights, and there is a push for "data sovereignty".
> GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Pretty much none of that is done under the GPL.
We need these "content" people who maintain reliable tools with stable interfaces/behaviours. These people and tools are at the core of what modern infrastructure run on. Fly by night tools, languages and frameworks do not allow us to progress like we have. It's very easy for us "users" of these tools to forget that there is something maintaining something we take for granted.
You seem to be forgetting you're standing on the shoulders of giants.
I actually attribute success of free software & linux to RMS. IMO he deserves a lot more credit than he gets for his work on gcc/egcs. it is foundational that we have access to a compiler that can produce user created executable otherwise entire software industry would look very different. the likes of MS & Apple would have us wrapped up in licencing agreements & TOSes to stifle innovation at a basic choke-point. if anyone has any doubts you only need to look at the ecosystem for opensource h/w design.
I think he's credited with it fine, he's always mentioned as one of the if not the founding father of open source (albeit with less emphasis on the license debacles).
Yeah. I profoundly disagree with RMS on many things. But as much as it pains me to say it, year after year I find myself saying "fuck, Stallman was right."
It's just business though. It has nothing to do with the software, the software is just a tool to enforce a business model.
A car that already has the hardware but requires payment to enable that by software is exactly the same thing as paying for a video game: The video game is already created and uploaded on the servers but software requires payment to let you download and play it. There are numerous other examples like game consoles sold at loss, printers sold less than the cost, search engines or mail services provided for free, free hosting etc. - all investing huge sums on creating the product in hope to recoup that and make profit by collecting small fees later and they need their products locked down to be able to do this.
The whole thing revolves around collecting small payments for a the very large capital investment that is required to create the product in first place. Since the small payments are collected post-development, someone has to risk their large capital for this to happen, they also expect compensation and guarantees that the small payments will arrive if the product is developed successfully.
The software is locked down only because they want to enforce that business model. You can refuse to participate in that but ultimately, those who can invest large amount of money end up making the much better products.
This is very much not true. I'd argue that most successful and useful software has indeed NOT been made by "those who collect the most money". Linux is a wonderful operating system, it lets you do whatever you want, and it collect NO money. The web, created by scientists and popularized by cheap and libre software, hasn't collected even a fraction of a promille of the value it has generated. The browser market, dominated by chrome, still has mozilla as the only currently feature complete alternative. Even the king of collecting value, Microsoft, aren't bothering to develop their own browser.
Most software worth a damn was made by a few people who cared. The business around it usually just gets in the way. This year you'll see hundreds of startups trying to "collect money" for some asinine idea. Most of those startups wont create anything of value. Even the successful ones will be gone or irrelevant in 5 years.
Who paid those who created Linux? They are probably humans who have to eat 3 times a day and have a shelter. It was paid by governmental institutions, loved ones of those who write the code and ideologues who made money some other ways(like working at Microsoft or Palantir) and chipped in for the cause.
Linux just has a different business model. If you can do all your things like that, cool.
Many other business models are possible too, use that to create better products than the "invest huge sums now and develop the thing, collect small payments down the road".
It's strange to expect that other business models shouldn't exist so yours can work.
If you don't like locked down cars, just make cars the way you see fit.
What's more ethical about receiving payments immediately for the job done at this very moment than investing your time and money to build something and receive payments for it later?
That's a strawman, because neither I nor RMS make arguments about the timing of payments in relation to work done.
The restrictions on business models (imposed by software licenses as a tool) is necessary to preserve the Four Freedoms, which, at least in his view are required to use software ethically. RMS predicted, and accurately as we see, that forgoing these essential Freedoms will create a world where software is used (on us) in an unethical way.
Fair enough but how are people compensated when you adhere to the ideology?
You can’t advocate an ideology without a solution to the problems at hand. Someone needs to write that software, and that someone needs to be fed and sheltered. It’s also not shameful to want more than staying alive.
> when you demand that other business models should not exist, so yours can work.
Aside from the fact that in democracies we regularly oust business models which we believe have dimetral effects on society, this is not what happens here. Free software exists as a choice. And is often chosen freely, because of it's transparency, quality, and continuity, not because of it's price. In fact, when you base your work on a foundation so large that it's infeasible to recreate it, the Four Freedoms actually work in _your_ favor as a business.
Why do you need? Or have the right? To modify the software. That same Tesla is cast with a proprietary alloy that not only they won’t tell you what it is, but it’s patent anyway. Same is true of the rubber in the tyres.
Open source is a great thing. But it’s not better (morally) than closed source. Open is just a feature. Like Lego vs a solid plastic toy.
The first principle, is when I have a thing (computer, car, toaster), I have the thing. It’s mine. I control it, I can have it repaired wherever, I can resell it, and if I have the skill, maybe even tweak it. But most importantly the thing serves me, not the corporation that sold it to me.
If the thing is a general purpose computer that can run arbitrary software (and I’d be tempted to include anything that can be remotely updated as "software", so this would include Tesla’s firmware), then I should be able to run my software instead. That’s the true test of whether I truly own my computing device.
Before we even get to Free Software, we need documented hardware architectures.
That is why I made the point about the metal in a Tesla. It’s hardware, it’s yours, you have no reasonable capability to modify it, yet that is uncontroversial. So why is the software?
Software is malleable, and Tesla (or hackers) can change it under your feet. You should be able to inspect it and have a say in what it does or whether to accept the next update.
See the recent Philips Hue debacle for an example of when software that's been running well for years suddenly turns on the user.
Right, I worded that poorly. The point is that Tesla cannot remotely change the metal in your car, whereas they can with the software.
We as users should demand insight into the software running on hardware we own. Otherwise we only partially own it, and if the device is connected to the internet, we can lose ownership any time.
They can, it’s called a recall. If you do not respond to a recall the value of you car basically hits 0. Which was literally my point.
When you buy a house do you enquire into the grade of concrete used in the foundations? Should “we home owners demand insight into the concrete ratios used”.
I wonder if on electrician forums there are folks saying: “wiring should be open source”? Like because you understand something you want more insight, but you’re happy to be in ignorant bliss on every other aspect of a product.
That doesn't make sense. I can sell the metal, I can shape it to my will, I can rip it apart and use it for other things. Can I do that with the software?
You can ruin it sure. You don’t know the specific alloy. So you couldn’t reasonably modify for anything useful, what’s its melting point? How should you cool it? You don’t know. You’d have to reverse engineer it, just like the software
Same with the software, there is a pc and an FSD chip in there. You could definitely muck with it. You just don’t have any details. Is it because you’re a software engineer and not a metallurgist that you think like this?
I always thought the advocacy was fundamentally correct, but way too distanced from achievable and realistic compromises within a system that wants profit over everything. The only real path would've been through legislation, and now we're back to setting your expectations to realistic.
Although I never find myself agreeing fully with them, ideological absolutists who refuse compromise are actually useful as some kind of anchors to the Overton window. They are not the ones ending up negotiating the actual realistic solutions but their activism helps shifting the equilibrium.
If your side of the argument is all compromise-makers trying to meet people halfway you often end up giving up more than you’re comfortable with. Both types of people play a useful part.
This is usually known as a radical flank, particularly useful in discussions about climate activism these days.
The FSF/GNU seems a bit too fringe and not too great at explaining the problem to everyday people instead just offering entirely uncompromising solutions that don't work for most people. More isolationist than activist. What would the less radical organization benefiting from the existence of FSF/GNU even be? The EFF?
Not when the power balance is this big. Against big tech who has the resources to wear any conciliating opposition down, you think you're just compromising like a "mature adult", until the next time, where you're forced to compromise on your compromise and so on.
Give them an inch and they'll take (or more precisely, they took) a mile.
You can’t really negotiate with corporations on what they do.
On this kind of topic negotiations are at the political level and whether you like it or not they will take the unsavory position of large corporations into account. A total refusal to compromise can end up leaving your side out of the discussion and end up with worse regulation. Uncompromising idealists just don’t have the leverage to make impactful threats of leaving the negotiation table.
That doesn’t mean you should not draw lines and do your best to hold them. But if the line is already crossed you can still do good negotiating, as unpleasant as it is.
If there are no “soft mature adults” there to be heard, no one is heard. But your point that giving an inch ends up losing you a mile absolutely stands: this is what I was saying about absolutists being anchors, they allow the soft negotiators to start from a stricter position before the negotiation starts. A group made up entirely of “reasonable compromising people”, however, is terrible because they start from a weakened position that they view as a reasonable compromise.
However, there will be negotiations and you will end up giving away some inches unless you have a lot of power. I absolutely value your un-negotiable position, but don’t underestimate what moderates can do representing it in a politically-acceptable, watered-down way.
I mean, he succeeded in at least giving everyone the choice. I happily run entirely free software on my computers. But yes, it needs legislation to switch off copyright for software and make computing a human right.
> I happily run entirely free software on my computers
You do? No graphics card? No (good) games? No firmware? And if so, how much of a premium did you pay for the lack of scale from your hardware vendor alone?
Intel graphics. Drivers in the kernel. I don't play games. Firmware, probably, but my computer is a computer.
I prefer to look at the positives in life. Literally the biggest companies in the world don't want people to have free software, yet we still do. It's been a hard battle at times. I was there in early 00s when running GNU/Linux sucked in many ways. Now it's an absolute joy.
Your point being? I don't see how it's relevant that Google uses free software. RMS is probably happy that they do. Of course, they should stop spying on people, but I don't see how that's related to their use of free software.
Does he really turn against SaaS/Cloud? Software that doesn't run on your computer doesn't necessarily need to be in your control, right? As long as the clients are free.
It's gotten to the point where most cloud services are no longer managed instances of open source or even compatible software.
You could take a managed cloud PostgreSQL instance and migrate to something self-hosted if the prices were to hike up or something else happened that would necessitate it.
But how many of the cloud services in your stack does that apply to? Geocoding or routing? Push notifications and messaging? Payment gateways? Authentication and authorization solutions? File storage solutions? Web Application Firewalls?
Thank you, that was an enlightening text, made me understand better GNUs view of SaaS.
There are many cases where running a self hosted version is not feasible, which are also mentioned in the text. Social media and other services where the information is an important part of the service or software that can not be run on my own machine due to limits in my hardware. But outsourcing simple calculations that can be done locally is a bad thing I agree.
> Social media and other services where the information is an important part of the service or software that can not be run on my own machine due to limits in my hardware.
I mean, fediverse sites like Mastodon or Lemmy, or even something like PeerTube show that it's possible to at least run instances of a larger federated service, albeit the user experience could be better (the average person asking "What do you mean, I have to pick a server to join?").
Admittedly, video hosting is the hardest due to space and bandwidth requirements, though perhaps the real reason why none of these platforms see real widespread success is the network effect - most people already are pretty comfortably in popular walled gardens and don't feel like they want to switch to anything else.
The FSF has created the AGPL 16 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_Lice...), so it's not like they didn't see the turn that software was going into. But it was already a losing battle, because every developer wants to think they might become millionaire and won't use it.
Whether the software runs on my computer or not, if I am the user, I must be in control.
Whether the meal is prepared in my kitchen or not, if I am going to eat it, I must be in control.
AGPL is also the license you should use if you don't want big corporations to use your software. Big Tech even avoids GPL-3 and stick to GPL-2 from what I have noticed.
Note that AGPL does not actually protect your software from big companies (or small companies) running your software as a service. It requires them to contribute back or make source available when they make changes, and IIRC thats to the user (who could be an enterprise customer under some other agreement even, but none of this is tested in court).
If you want that sort of protection, BSL, SSPL, Elastic license, etc are what you want.
If you want to make Free Software, make it. Know that people you don’t like may use your software, even criminals may. That is what Free Software is. OSS is slightly different but similar.
If you want to make shareware, make shareware — no judgements on people who want to make money with their software and believe thats the best path.
I'm fine with big corporations use my software: the deal is that whatever they do with it, they must give it back to the users with the same license. Make it live beyond the company's existence and control. It's still better than my software being non-copyleft and being used by a company.
I wish they would give back all the profit as well but that's another topic and the AGPL doesn't touch that.
Just like you aren't in control of your software if you didn't write your compiler yourself, if you didn't build your compiler yourself, all the way down to the minerals.
You're never 100% in control, but that doesn't mean you should try and maximize it.
I do hope he gets better, but no, not at all do we “need” him. His accomplishments are way overblown and due to his shitty personality he probably alienated more contributors than whatever actual positives he has ever made.
Say what you will about his personality, you don't have to like him but saying that his accomplishments are way overblown is a terrible take. His work flows through every part of the GNU land and it's used by almost every tech person on the planet to some extent.
Asking out of curiosity, not to be cruel: I wonder if he's willing to use medical equipment that uses non-Free software? To my knowledge, his stated position against using non-Free software is pretty much absolute; but given that medical equipment's software is almost universally non-Free, taking that stance here would seriously endanger his ability to receive necessary medical care.
I remember Stallman claiming he would use non-free software if there was no alternative, providing an example of software use without alternative at some conference. His position isn't "absolute" to reject everything non-free, in his example he'd use Windows as long as there were no alternatives and usage had to be performed.
Unfortunately, I can't find a link with this claim to share.
I will answer this assuming good faith, but this line of reasoning is very irritating since the answer (to me) is obvious.
If RMS made a choice to use proprietary software, with the only alternative being his dead, there is absolutely no moral conflict, or even anything against his principle. The only issue could only ever arises if he claimed "Free Software is more important than human lives", which I am pretty sure not a claim he, or anyone, has ever made.
It's basically the same principle as if you point a gun to my head and tell me to kill a puppy or get shot (and I'm certain you would shoot me). It's obvious which choice I would make, and I hardly see that as an evidence of my hatred for puppy.
It's not a bad question to ask; the FSF has proven in the past to be rather uninterested and unhelpful in helping developers of medical software get their stuff licensed in a way that's either compliant or as close to as[0] being compliant as possible[1]. Instead they opted to chide those wanting help for not being true believers of the cause and told them they'll never compromise. Basically the usual "FSF is only ever willing to do FOSS in it's own Ivory Tower even though its mission is to spread it beyond an Ivory Tower."
That said - RMS has iirc said in the past that for medical emergencies he's willing to make a personal exception on this stance.
[0]: Medical devices can't be GPL compliant due to the anti-Tivo clause combined with regulations of the FDA that demand that a medical device will always behave the exact same way in the exact same situation. This is also extended to the software, meaning that not being allowed to reflash the software if you're not the manufacturer is a requirement.
This is wrong, the GPLv3 only requires installation information for "User Products" (as defined in the license) which the manufacturer can update even if the user can't. Most medical equipment isn't User Products and can't simply be updated by the manufacturer for regulatory reasons.
That article was written before the finished GPLv3 was published, they had only published a stricter draft.
User Products would I'm pretty sure still target things like pacemakers and other daily technological appliances some people need to get around and I'm fairly sure those require the same FDA approval process.
"Medical devices can't be GPL compliant due to the anti-Tivo clause combined with regulations of the FDA that demand that a medical device will always behave the exact same way in the exact same situation."
Ok so that requires a bit of history. There's this company that makes video recorders (for your TV) called TiVo; it's not an abbreviation for anything, that's just the name.
--
Anyway, TiVo wanted to get onto the GPLv2 train like a lot of companies, but they also wanted people owning their devices to be unable to partially modify their firmware even as they distributed their copies of the firmware onto TiVo boxes. They enforced this by having a digital signature check that only allowed TiVos own software to run if the software stack was entirely TiVo. It would also work if the stack was entirely FOSS because only TiVo checked it.
For the sake of clarity; Bradley Kuhn of the SFC iirc investigated the TiVo boxes at the time, the signature checks only were an issue if you partially replaced TiVos software, not if you went the whole hog on replacing it; excercising GPLv2 rights was completely possible and you could turn a TiVo box into a XBMC (these days that's Kodi) box. You just couldn't run TiVos software ever again if you did that thanks to a hardware check.
The FSF took personal offense to this practice and dubbed it "Tivoization", which is a shorthand for "attempting to restrict the ability to install or link with Free Software via hardware DRM". (Which yes, is a modification of what TiVo actually did but really that part is just par for the course with the FSF.)
As a result, the GPLv3 includes an explicit clause that if your software is distributed in a non-code form, that you also must distribute all the information required to be able to modify that distributed software, if there's parts on the device that prevent you from doing so. (Or in plain terms: on restricted hardware, you must give up the signing keys if you preload the hardware with FOSS software.)
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This clause is usually just called the anti-Tivo(ization) clause and it's... pretty damn controversial.
It's the main reason why the Kernel is still GPLv2 and not GPLv3; Linus Torvalds personally considers this clause to be a significant enough alteration of the "deal" that FOSS provides for the kernel, so he didn't upgrade (which to be clear would've also been very difficult since the kernel is 2.0-only, not or-later, so he'd require approval from all significant contributors at that point). It's also often cited as the main reason why the GPLv2 has/had strong corporate backing but software licensed under the GPLv3 has always kinda had issues with that; the v2 was seen as more "fair" in that companies were willing to work with its terms, while the v3 was seen as basically forcing them to give up important parts of their trade secrets and made them antsy of working with the FSF in general.
And as mentioned before, in some fields (medical is the one I know of, but I'm pretty sure there's a few others), regulatory compliance is impossible with v3 while very much possible with v2 because of this clause.
Thanks for the detailed explanation and ugh, it is so frustrating. I get and share the goal of being able to fully control your devices - but you have to work with what you have. And I think this fanatism and uncompromising attitude is really not helpful in getting there.
> The only issue could only ever arises if he claimed "Free Software is more important than human lives", which I am pretty sure not a claim he, or anyone, has ever made.
Valuing freedom (even in limited spheres) more than human lives is a pretty familiar American idea. For example, recall Patrick Henry's "give me liberty or give me death" and consider that he was talking about the prospect of being taxed without his consent, not enslavement. Also, recall Private Eightball from Full Metal Jacket:
"Personally, I think, uh... they don't really want to be involved in this war. You know, I mean... they sort of took away our freedom and gave it to the, to the gookers, you know. But they don't want it. They'd rather be alive than free, I guess. Poor dumb bastards."
Can modified firmware be used with human patients, or would somebody go to prison or lose his license to practice? Would hackers have to collaborate with a manufacturer before a device goes into certification?
Arguably there should be laws mandating that medical equipment MUST be open for everyone to inspect, contribute, and share.
That does not answer your question though. It goes both ways: if the doctor recognises that a firmware tweak may save your life, then she should be able to do so.
The answer is obvious based on your own personal principles, or based on RMS's stated principles?
>The only issue could only ever arises if he claimed "Free Software is more important than human lives"
He claimed that it is categorically not good to use non-Free software, with one exception for using non-Free software to develop a replacement for that software; and that "we must resist stretching [that exception] any further": https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/is-ever-good-use-nonfree-prog...
There are two common misunderstandings about free software:
+ the opposition against proprietary software does not mean that using proprietary software is immoral on its own. (Although you'll find plenty of people who will make this some sort of purity contest, rms is not one of them.) The moral evil that the free software movement address is to be forced or coerced to use proprietary software. The mere use of proprietary software only becomes a moral issue when it results in drowning out free software. Much like the widespread acceptance of proprietary mobile phone apps leads to cultural shifts that essentially force everyone to use said apps to participate in life. (See wechat in China.)
As others have pointed out, there is no moral dilemma here. The demand for computational autonomy is not a dogmatic, religious belief that conflicts with medical treatment of a disease.
This topic was discussed a while back on HN since its a topic that comes up a few times. Karen Sandler, executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, has a pacemaker with wireless communication that runs non-free software with undisclosed source code. When it was discussed on HN a developer for such company also gave his views, including the tight regulations that covers medical devices.
"Richard Stallman, President of the FSF, presented Sandler with the award during a ceremony. Stallman highlighted Sandler's dedication to software freedom. Stallman told the crowd that Sandler's “vivid warning about backdoored nonfree software in implanted medical devices has brought the issue home to people who never wrote a line of code. Her efforts, usually not in the public eye, to provide pro bono legal advice to free software organizations and [with Software Freedom Conservancy] to organize infrastructure for free software projects and copyleft defense, have been equally helpful.”."
For a while? Wasn't GNU Hurd supposed to be the kernel? Just vague memories, didn't read up on it right now. Still not even close to ready.
Linux is not a GNU project. But it's free software, so I suppose RMS could use it without major pain. Although he'd probably prefer Linux to use GPLv3.
GNU started with rewriting the Unix userland (especially GCC) years before announcing the Hurd effort. I think they developed and tested on BSD and SunOS, and later Linux (because they had nearly written the first distro, only without a kernel).
Do people really think RMS is like a Jehovah's Witness or something? The man is about practically bringing the change he wants to see. He started his own damn Unix clone that we still rely on to this day and you liken him to religious nutters?
All this stuff is constantly moving, but I bet things in the future will be RT Linux plus some RTOS-drive microcontrollers for specific hardware and safety stuff. That's where everyone is heading to.
Stallman and the FSF has fairly arbitrary views on this stuff. Non free firmware running on microcontrollers is fine because it's part of the hardware. But if there is a firmware blob that gets copied over by the OS on boot, then it's not ok for unclear reasons.
Results in a lot of stuff getting rejected for FSF certification despite being just as open practically as the certified stuff.
A car probably just isn't seen as software to him if it's just the internal control systems. Maybe the entertainment system these days would be.
To my knowledge the FSF doesn't consider firmware blobs with no way to flash "part of certification" because it would be inoractical to do so. By definition "software you can't change" isn't "free"(as in speech, not beer), so I don't think it's an ideological line.
So they either have to consider any device with unmodifiable software to be non-free(basically removing entire device classes), or be realistic and draw the line somewhere. "Can you modify the software on the device from the rest of the gnu software" is a line that matches up with their ideals fairly well IMO.
Basically, Richard Stallman is well aware that cars are bundles of non-free software(see: https://jalopnik.com/richard-stallman-weighs-in-on-the-check...). He has voiced opinions that software controlling the brakes in your car should be FSF and not binary blobs that come pre-installed with no visibility.
I don't believe that Stallman would give up his principles. I suppose one could investigate whether has ever been to an ER. My guess is that he would rather stand firm and die.
Not sure how people interpreted this, but it wasn't criticism or celebration of his misfortune. I intended to note that he is extraordinarily firm in standing by his beliefs and principles.
There was a note on stallman.org in which he said he was made aware of the mental implications that pedophilia, even with supposed consent, would have on the development of the person, and apologized for his previous stance.
> "Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it," Stallman wrote. "Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per [sic] psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why."
Having a look at the Richard Stallman entry in Wikipedia[0] it menions this quote you're referring to, which links to this Engadget article[1] that links to rms's blog with that specific entry[2]
I don't think Stallman has been unreasonable in pointing out that rape definition is "forcing someone to have sex against their will" but, as per victim's deposition, she was instructed to seduce and have sex with Minsky by Epstein. Is it so unreasonable to not call Minsky a rapist? Even the victim herself points out that Minsky was not aware of her being coerced.
I have no real sympathy for Stallman besides his FS movement, I find the man disgusting for many reasons, last but not least his hygiene, and his statements about pedophilia were another part of this disgust (albeit he later condemned his own words and apologized). But taking his words out of context to say that he is a rape apologists is no more than Twitter-level witchunting.
I wanted to say exactly this (the first part, I don't care enough about Stallman to have any kind of opinion about him). In plenty of countries in the world (including UK) the age of consent in 16 (which personally I find problematic but there's nothing I can do about it). So the objection Stallman raised is not irrational. Not only was it not "forcing someone to have sex against their will" but if it happened in a different country it would have been completely legal. Of course it did not happen in another country, it happened in a country where it was illegal, so it should be investigated and prosecuted but as sleeping with an underage person not as rape.
Just because you can marry a child in some parts of the world doesn't mean I'm not gonna consider sex with a 12 years old anything but rape just because it doesn't break local law.
Doesn't this contradict your previous statement where you defined rape as "forcing someone to have sex against their will"?
Is having sex with a 12 years old despicable and morally unexcusable? Yes. Is it rape? Unless you're willing to say a 12 years old doesn't have a will at all, calling it rape contradicts your own definition.
Having had these thoughts in relation to this one case where the victim was 17 does nothing to hide the idea that he held these beliefs and what did that mean for other cases when it came up in other contexts?
We need absolutists like him who go to extremes and are known widely. For a few moments, leave aside his personality and what people have said about his behavior or hygiene. If he hadn’t been there, our world would’ve been a lot different and a lot poorer. A visionary is what he was and is.
While the Free part of FOSS is being substituted by “(just) open source” and “source available”, while DRM goes deeper into our lives, and while everything is becoming a “hosted service”, one can only hope for (and put efforts into) going back to the ideals he proposed and pushing back on the elements that control us and seek to do even more so.
We all don’t have to be absolutists (it comes at the cost of convenience, which most people prefer), but there are enough of such people around the world as far as FOSS is concerned. Whenever I see FOSS meetups and people connecting over it, that’s something I’m grateful for and wholeheartedly support (though I’m not one of them).