I worked for a corporation for 12 years, and I was in a team developing software for CT scanner operations. What's wrong with that? Then I also worked for a very small company, where I coded... games. So according to the RMS, that could be morally less wrong. :-)
Stallman’s Law
101–110 of 150 posts
Re: Stallman’s Law
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Intellectual property is as real as real property. A Native American would make the same argumentyou do, but levy it against the notion of real eatate: owning a plot of the earth is ridiculous. Your argument against "nonrival" would imply that if a manufacturer creates surplus product, its ok to steal the surplus because no one else needa it.. even if they go bankrupt because no one then buys the non surplus. And a M…
> […] "owning a plot of the earth is ridiculous."
I may side with the Native Americans on that one.
There is this idea of a Land Value Tax, where most or all taxes would be taken on naked soil. Such a tax would effectively abolish land ownership, because everyone would effectively rent it from the state. Long story short, it looks like it might work.
Re: Stallman’s Law
#103Here'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…
Stallman's greatest strength - his uncompromising, liberty or death approach to computing - is also his greatest weakness. With all due respect, by refusing to use proprietary software under any circumstances, and taking extreme measures to avoid various forms of tracking, he isolates himself into a sunshine and rainbows bubble of free software. Stallman is very good at predicting what the worst case scenarios may lo…
I'm not a huge free-software advocate but I do broadly agree with rms.
But I went to hear him speak a while back and came away feeling more anti-free-software than before hearing him.
Re: Stallman’s Law
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
#2 and #3 have one huge practical difference: incentive. See, as far as profit-maximising is concerned, expanding the realm of #2 is very good for whoever owns the stuff. See how DRM is doing exactly that. If #2 itself was either forbidden or visibly abhorrent for everyone involved, we'd get more #1 right away. Note that there is some flaw to #3 to #2 even when public funding is involved . Many patents were born that…
> Destroying #2 doesn't have to choke off the flow from the impossible to the possible, if adjust our society around it. I honestly cannot tell exactly what the parent comment is referring to with #1 #2 #3, but a mutual change of societal incentives for writing software enabled by Free Software is what RMS suggested in the GNU Manifesto: "In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the postscarcity world,…
The GNU Manifesto contains such gems as
In response to “Programmers need to make a living somehow.”
> All sorts of development can be funded with a Software Tax:
> Suppose everyone who buys a computer has to pay x percent of the price as a software tax. The government gives this to an agency like the NSF to spend on software development.
Just what software needs. A bunch of politics to decide who gets funded and who doesn't
In response to “Won't everyone stop programming without a monetary incentive?”
We get
> What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other than riches; but if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, they will come to expect and demand it. Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned.
So the GNU solution is to ban making money from software. Hmmm
Re: Stallman’s Law
#105Earlier 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 subscribe to neither of those philosophies you mention and it shows that this point of view is one that has been projected by the FSF.
Open Source is important because it gives both users and developers control. Open Source is the ability to fork.
And the irony of the situation is that these ideals where also embodied in Free Software, however the FSF has forgotten them, at least judging by their current behavior.
For example AGPL should not be considered either an open-source or a free software license, because it redefines what redistribution is, effectively placing limits on usage. Up until GCC version 4.5 it didn't support plugins, being a monolithic thing, out of fear that proprietary tools could make use of it; you can thank LLVM for the positive changes in that area. And here's a recent fuckup of the FSF, that's very close to my heart, because I'm an Emacs user - apparently Emacs must hate MacOS, even though many Emacs contributors and plugins authors are using it: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-25.1/etc/NE...
Re: Stallman’s Law
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/09/culture-is-anti-rivalro... is a nice text about the rival/non-rival nature of things.
Re: Stallman’s Law
#107I 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…
> 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. It's actually pretty simple - money, power. Corporations are amoral machines; if there's something that brings profits and they can get away with legally, some corp will eventually do it (same seems to apply to small companies). > Instead of thinking from "corporations…
The thing I sometimes have trouble with is:
1. Corporations behave like sociopaths.
2. Corporations don't really exist. They're a legal fiction that, in reality, is just a group of people working towards a common goal (maximum profit).
I wonder if it's counter-productive to think and speak of corporations as some sort of separate entity to the people it is composed of. I think the notion that 'corporations are evil sociopaths' is one of those thought-stopping 'mind-killers'. Corporations don't have intent, good or bad; they don't really exist (except in our minds).
As harsh as it may sound, if we want a 'corporation' to behave ethically, then we should assign blame to those that are perpetrating the harm: to the employees, managers and owners of that corporation. It's their collective efforts and actions that have led to unethical outcomes, not the singular effort of some invisible corporate spectre.
I think it's the only possible way to fight this 'diffusion of responsibility' that allows a whole bunch of (mostly) normal people to all do tiny unethical acts that, when viewed in aggregate, are abhorrent. I suspect whatever the best solution is will be similar (or analogous) to how you overcome the 'bystander effect': rather than saying 'someone call 911', say 'you, guy in the red shirt (point at him), call 911'.
tl;dr - It turns out the Ring of Gyges is not a ring at all. It's a multi-story building filled with rows of cubicles.
Re: Stallman’s Law
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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....
Did you perhaps mean "different reasoning behind why software should be open source/free software/free code"?
Re: Stallman’s Law
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only in the case where the government is compromised by, say, regulatory capture [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
What about cases in which the government is compromised by incompetence and/or poor ethics, esp. due to ignorance?
As someone who works in government, you're dead right about incompetence, and I would add 'ignorance'. These are the two things I have seen do the most harm, by an extremely large margin. And I think it's inexcusable.
I'd argue the same thing for corporations as I would for governments: we shouldn't tolerate individuals, occupying some powerful position, who harm others due to their own 'ethical carelessness'. In fact, that seems like a reasonable standard to apply to individuals, full stop. Individuals should be held accountable for their actions; we shouldn't shunt the blame to some incorporeal concept (i.e. 'governments', 'corporations').
Re: Stallman’s Law
#110Earlier 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 .
And yet the basic principle they disagree on is the one fundamental religious tenet of free software - that proprietary licensing is a moral evil which should not be allowed to exist.
Which is ironic, because the one that posits that is also the one that really needs the legal framework that make it possible to make something proprietary.