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Stallman’s Law

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Re: Stallman’s Law

#111

Post by noufalibrahim »

uabstraction wrote: post #88
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…

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 consider RMS like the highest speed on my speedometer. I'm probably never going to drive that fast but that gives me a sense of perspective about how fast I can go and what's safe.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#112

Post by h1d »

uabstraction wrote: post #88
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…

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…

Not sure why one wants to criticize him as academic space needs extremist for broader opinions and we should learn from them than try to keep everyone nice and adapted to what we had on that day. If he didn't paint the world with the term GPL, maybe we didn't have services like github yet.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#113

Post by bjelkeman-again »

bad_user wrote: post #105
Spivak wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The way I think of it is that GPL (and the precursor the GNU emacs license) was created when distribution was primarily via magnetic media or downloads and hardly anyone ran software which wasn't local (BBS software excluded?).

Which meant that as soon as you distributed GPL licensed software you also had to adhere to the license of sharing your improvements in source code.

Then when the internet through the web became popular you could use GPL software without distributing it and many use cases which didn't exist previously for the distribution options in GPL just didn't create the intended effect where users who changed the software and distributed it should also share their changes.

I would argue that AGPL didn't redefine what distribution is, but the capabilities and the use of the web redefined what distribution is, through software as a service. AGPL was an attempt to align the license with the original intent of GPL, which was to say that if you redistributed the software and change it, share your changes.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#114

Post by Fice »

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…

But it works. Somehow the free software movement survives and still makes influence in the modern IT world where it seems everyone holds convenience above ethics (how many people believe that privacy is good and mass surveillance is evil and yet use things like Facebook, it's absurd).

Re: Stallman’s Law

#115

Post by scalio »

hvidgaard wrote: post #91
omphalos wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's because of the common assumption that the system that controls your data must also house the application that interacts with this data. When decentralized applications finally arrive (the inklings are already here) users won't be forced into this false choice. In that sense, companies like Google and Facebook are behind the curve, and don't really represent technological "advancement", but rather a socia…

You just touched upon one of my idealistic geek wet dreams: Truly decentralized applications. Let's use ondemand music streaming as an example. I dream of a network where I pay whatever vendor I want, to deliver streams of music. I also pay whatever vendor I want to save my data (think playlists and play data). And I pay whatever vendor I want (could be free software as well) to play those streams. Each component doe…

That's some idyllic thinking, but I agree such interoperability would be awesome. However, I don't see how it could be realized with current closed ecosystems. Seems like this would almost require open software...

Re: Stallman’s Law

#116

Post by cantagi »

greggman wrote: post #104
sedachv wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The first one makes sense in an ideal world though. If the government exists to ensure your freedom, then it should fund the development of free software.

WRT the second one, shouldn't we be free to write closed source software?

Re: Stallman’s Law

#117

Post by discreditable »

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…

There's also the StallmanWasRight subreddit. It can be tongue-in-cheek a lot of the time, but a lot of the topics are relevant.

https://reddit.com/r/stallmanwasright

Re: Stallman’s Law

#118

Post by AimHere »

greggman wrote: post #104
sedachv wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> So the GNU solution is to ban making money from software. Hmmm

No. That's a misreading, and you're taking it out of context. The GNU solution there is to ban proprietary software companies doing their thing (those companies happen to be high-paying as a consequence of doing what Stallman thinks should be banned).

It's a reasonable point, if your ethics are such that what the high-paying software companies do is, on the face of it, unethical. Sure, the ethical software producers might make less money, but that's not the same thing. Mind you, after banning the unethical ones, they might make more than they did before.

For the analagous argument, everyone agrees that pre-1860, the highest-paying cotton producers in the USA should have been banned - not because they were the richest, but because of what they did to become the richest.

Re: Stallman’s Law

#120

Post by egh5oon »

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…

Stallman keeps being right about everything yet people want to call him an extremist.

Stallman is flexible enough to accept using closed hardware, closed firmware shipped with a device, non-GPL licenses.

On the other hand, patent and copyright laws...

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