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Stallman’s Law

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Re: Stallman’s Law

#31

Post by tbrownaw »

stcredzero wrote: post #10

Here's the thing about Richard Stallman -- he's absolutely correct in all of his principles and all of his underlying thinking. He's as intellectually farsighted as anyone I can think of in tech. However, all of the movement around him and the resulting "outreach" efforts have been rather shortsighted in comparison. Let's use environmentalism as an analogy. There is a place for an absolutist intellectual position, wh…

Here's the thing about Richard Stallman -- he's absolutely correct in all of his principles and all of his underlying thinking.

I disagree with this.

There are things you can (are allowed to) do, things you know you can't do, and things that are inconceivable / impossible.

His position is that #2 is evil (because knowing you could fix that printer driver if only you were allowed to is fucking annoying), and there is a moral duty to minimize it.

I think that #1 is good and should be maximized, and there is very little practical difference between #2 and #3. Minimizing #2 at the expense of also reducing #1 is bad and harmful.

In practice, there is a flow of things from #3 to #2 to #1. Things are moved out of the impossible with funds from paying customers, and then made open by people re-implementing them once the hard exploratory part is done.

There is also a smaller flow of things directly from #3 to #1. Some research is publicly funded or due to individual curiosity, instead of corporate internal. Some kinds of products can be funded from support instead of initial sales.

Destroying category #2 would choke off the first, much larger, flow. The second would not be able to make up the difference. This result would be good according to Stallman's ethics / priorities. I think it would be bad.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#32

Post by JacksonGariety »

stcredzero wrote: post #10

Here's the thing about Richard Stallman -- he's absolutely correct in all of his principles and all of his underlying thinking. He's as intellectually farsighted as anyone I can think of in tech. However, all of the movement around him and the resulting "outreach" efforts have been rather shortsighted in comparison. Let's use environmentalism as an analogy. There is a place for an absolutist intellectual position, wh…

Freedom is not so simple:

“This procedure thus implies a certain logic of exception: every ideological Universal–for example freedom, equality–is 'false’ in so far as it necessarily includes a specific case which breaks its unity, lays open its falsity. Freedom, for example: a universal notion comprising a number of species (freedom of speech and press, freedom of consciousness, freedom of commerce, political freedom, and so on) but also, by means of a structural necessity, a specific freedom (that of the worker to sell freely his own labour on the market) which subverts this universal notion. That is to say, this freedom is the very opposite of effective freedom: by selling his labour 'freely’, the worker loses his freedom–the real content of this free act of sale is the worker’s enslavement to capital. The crucial point is, of course, that it is precisely this paradoxical freedom, the form of its opposite, which closes the circle of 'bourgeois freedoms’. - Slavoj Zizek

Re: Stallman’s Law

#33

Post by bertiewhykovich »

gaur wrote: post #17

No, you can't just take a statement and call it a "law", even in a facetious sense. Murphy's law, Betteridge's law, or other facetious laws are at least roughly formulated as "if X, then Y" (or sometimes "Y happens"), which mimics the structure of actual scientific laws. Stallman's statement is formulated as "if X, then maybe Y" (or "Y could happen").

"If corporations dominate society and write the laws, then each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users."

Also, you definitely can, tongue-in-cheek, call a general statement a "law." It's not meant to be taken in a literal sense; it's meant for humorous or broadly pragmatic effect.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#34

Post by Spivak »

daveguy wrote: post #20
ktRolster wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I found the FSF animosity towards "Open Source" perplexing I think you've misread something somewhere. Here is what the FSF says about "Open Source," and it doesn't seem like animosity: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.htm... "We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects."

"Disagree on the basic principles" is diplomacy 101 fail -- a great way to project animosity. It is the basic principles on which they agree .

Unlike so many political issues, this is a rare case where two groups broadly actually agree on a course of action but disagree on the problem that necessitates it.

* Software freedom is important because it produces quality software.

* Software freedom is important because it protects the user from mistreatment.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#36

Post by oelmekki »

the_af wrote: post #27
oelmekki wrote: post #15

And yet, today's big opensource projects often are driven by big corps. I wonder how rms would reconciliate that. Maybe we can get there the difference between opensource and freesoftwares? In any way, having big companies publishing opensource code tell us how past we are the time when every single company will just publish proprietary software and let you guess the specs.

Stallman and the FSF advocate Libre (or "Free" as in speech) software, not open source. Whether you agree or disagree with them, there are philosophical (ideological, one might say) differences between the two movements: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.en....

That's why I mentioned the distinction in first place.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#37

Post by gaur »

bertiewhykovich wrote: post #33
gaur wrote: post #17

No, you can't just take a statement and call it a "law", even in a facetious sense. Murphy's law, Betteridge's law, or other facetious laws are at least roughly formulated as "if X, then Y" (or sometimes "Y happens"), which mimics the structure of actual scientific laws. Stallman's statement is formulated as "if X, then maybe Y" (or "Y could happen").

"If corporations dominate society and write the laws, then each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users." Also, you definitely can, tongue-in-cheek, call a general statement a "law." It's not meant to be taken in a literal sense; it's meant for humorous or broadly pragmatic effect.

You've explicitly rewritten it as "if X, then maybe Y", exactly as I said.

"If corporations write the laws, then maybe they will restrict or mistreat their users." That's not a law.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#38

Post by bertiewhykovich »

necessity wrote: post #14

`s/corporations/government` and this is still true

While there's a grain of truth to this, to insist on this generalization is to twist Stallman's meaning to suit your own purposes. It's quite clear that Stallman is, here, speaking /quite specifically/ about corporations -- inveighing against them, in fact. I am sure that he would agree that governments can engage in similar behavior, but the target of his criticism here is corporations alone. Forcing governments into the conversation is a way of derailing specific criticism of corporations.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#39

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

I have no idea when this "law" was written or said, but I think this type of thinking--in 2016--is exactly the cause of what it's prophesizing.

Instead of thinking from "corporations vs. us", a better approach would be to think of humanity as a single entity.

I do understand that all this "open software" movement could have an impact because it was very polarizing and moved a lot of people. But in a world where open source is the norm, it should not be about fighting against corporations. The discussion should be on a higher level.

For example, you should think deeper about why it looks like: "While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users".

Only when you look deeper into the corporation's motivations you'll be able to figure out a way to defeat this. Otherwise it just reads like a rant.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#40

Post by Lazare »

imagist wrote: post #24
stcredzero wrote: post #10

Here's the thing about Richard Stallman -- he's absolutely correct in all of his principles and all of his underlying thinking. He's as intellectually farsighted as anyone I can think of in tech. However, all of the movement around him and the resulting "outreach" efforts have been rather shortsighted in comparison. Let's use environmentalism as an analogy. There is a place for an absolutist intellectual position, wh…

Environmentalism is the quintessential example of why compromise doesn't work. Climate change is an existential threat to humanity and has only become more of a threat since the origins of the modern environmental movement. I'm not sure how you can represent a failure of this catastrophic magnitude as "tremendous gains".

There's far more to environmentalism than climate change, however important climate change may be.
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