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Stallman’s Law

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Re: Stallman’s Law

#61

Post by stcredzero »

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".

I'm not sure how you can represent a failure of this catastrophic magnitude as "tremendous gains".

Ozone.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#62

Post by zdw »

makecheck wrote: post #47

Corporations need to be treated as if they could have radically different managers at any moment (because they can). The Best Company Ever of today could be bought by Worst Corporation In Existence tomorrow. It essentially doesn’t matter what a company is currently doing or “promises” to do or not do, if those behaviors are not legally binding. And even then, if you have to read a hundred-page document to figure out…

If anyone needs an example of the first point, look to what happened to Sun's free/open projects and firmware downloads after it's acquisition by Oracle.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#63

Post by api »

The opposite happened when mainframes and minis transitioned to PCs, but he's right from the 2000s onward.

Something changed, and I'm not 100% sure what. Tech is reflecting the larger political trends of the world where strong man rule and other forms of authoritarianism are ascendant.

I do think the driver is democratic to an extent. People seem to be demanding less freedom in exchange for convenience, security, simplicity, etc... in tech and in life.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#64

Post by vonklaus »

This is tangential, but isn't http://www.root-servers.org/ still the authoritative source for DNS. I was browsing DNS options (switched to open-DNS) but the main http://www.root-servers.org/ site is down. It appears to be cached as recently as this month with a map, but is not responsive. A few other "detector" sites have it down. Is this important, or does it not show up because it is a resolver?

Re: Stallman’s Law

#65

Post by JurgenJugglar »

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".

Environmentalism failed, primarily, because it burdened cognitive units with an unrealistic appreciation and simulation of global disaster.

How can we trust influencers and leaders to not use "Climate Change" as a pretext to impose onerous regulations? There are a lot of people who don't understand the coordination problem and want a "solution" without thinking through the multidimensional consequences.

Not to mention that it was used as a masturbatory megaphone for shitheads to be holier than thou. Whatever campaign was organized failed because it failed to understand humans. Are you going to explain how and why all this data is correct and how the models are correct? Are you sure?

While this is happening, most people suffer from cognitive taxation of a retarded society and a retarded mediaverse. This is a society that prompts and elicits emotional response to an immense number of things, without the understanding or foresight we might expect.

Boil a frog slowly, etc. By the way, how can we reverse the irreversible? The planet has no "right" climatic system other than that which is convenient for humans.

IMO, the bigger danger is from a mediaverse which elicits the simulation of emotional scenes, and addiction to those scenes and emotions, and which impairs human cognition with wrong information and terrible moral burdens. How can you sensibly model a world when your neural networks are waiting to find out if Ape A is going to cheat on Ape B with Ape C?

Re: Stallman’s Law

#66

Post by JurgenJugglar »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #51
edblarney wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That some corporations can abuse IP is obvious, but that doesn't remotely imply that the concept of IP itself is either dysfunctional or immoral. Stallman is completely wrong in all these statements. He's very shortsighted in fact, his views are 19th century if anything, and they're not even very intellectually founded, or well expressed.

I just DuckDuckWent "richard stallman predictions", and found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3418340 It enumerates a number of predictions Richard Stallman made, that turned out to be true. Do not dismiss him too quickly. By the way, the concept of IP is obviously dysfunctional: ideas and expressions are non rival goods . They are not moved, borrowed, nor stolen; they are only copied from substrate to sub…

Thank you for your post. I've never thought of the concept of "non rival goods" nor how the notions of property and monopoly can be abused by people (in the way you describe).

Re: Stallman’s Law

#67

Post by cyphar »

ghaff wrote: post #58
cyphar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the basic principles of "open source"? Because as far as I'm aware, they don't include "user freedom". It's all about practical benefits which are not the primary benefits of free software (the primary benefit of free software is freedom).

>Because as far as I'm aware, they don't include "user freedom". I'd largely disagree with that. I see "Open source" described (and describe it myself) as something that has many advantages as a way of developing software and developing communities (users and developers) around that software. But, at the same time, it's absolutely about letting users maintain control and being able to directly influence the direction…

The "open source definition"[1] does not agree with your reading. In fact, that annotations appear to entirely skirt around the issue of freedom. For example, their claimed reasoning for freedom 1 (freedom to modify) is:

> The mere ability to read source isn't enough to support independent peer review and rapid evolutionary selection. For rapid evolution to happen, people need to be able to experiment with and redistribute modifications.

No mention of user freedoms or why this is important to users, just some nebulous claim that this is related to "evolution" and "experimentation".

The entire OSD is written like this, with claims that the 10 completely-arbitrary-with-no-real-logic-behind-them tennants of "open source" will somehow make your software better. How? They don't say. The four software freedoms make sense if you discuss them from the context of freedom, but the 10 "open source" rights don't make sense outside the context of freedom.

[1]: https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

Re: Stallman’s Law

#68

Post by jackmott »

cyphar wrote: post #22
daveguy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What are the basic principles of "open source"? Because as far as I'm aware, they don't include "user freedom". It's all about practical benefits which are not the primary benefits of free software (the primary benefit of free software is freedom).

Well, the source being open means that you are free, if only because any mistreatment occurring, you can open up VIM and delete it.

You can be sure I would have done that with MS Office and OneDrive in the File menu, or reboots without permission on Windows 10 if I could.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#69

Post by cyphar »

jackmott wrote: post #68
cyphar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the basic principles of "open source"? Because as far as I'm aware, they don't include "user freedom". It's all about practical benefits which are not the primary benefits of free software (the primary benefit of free software is freedom).

Well, the source being open means that you are free, if only because any mistreatment occurring, you can open up VIM and delete it. You can be sure I would have done that with MS Office and OneDrive in the File menu, or reboots without permission on Windows 10 if I could.

While Free Software and "Open Source" usually refer to the same software, they have different ethical views and have different reasoning behind why software should be free software[1].

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

Re: Stallman’s Law

#70

Post by misrepresent »

Spivak wrote: post #34
daveguy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I can believe there are some open source advocates who claim your first bullet, and there are a few cherry examples (i.e. Linux), but I'm guessing a lot of us are better represented by, "I appreciate when other developers share their work with me, so I'll share my work with other developers." From this point of view, it's easy to see how the GPL is an impediment to professional (proprietary) developers, and why we'd choose a license better suited to sharing with ourselves.
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