I don' disagree with the law itself.
However, each technological advance is also an opportunity to break free from restrictions and mistreatment from the previous status quo.
Stallman’s Law
131–140 of 150 posts
Re: Stallman’s Law
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Maybe not, because that would be infringing on the freedoms of the user (study, modify etc). A line has to be drawn, and we must decide which is worse: me reading the code of the software you distribute, or you preventing me to?
Re: Stallman’s Law
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I wouldn't say open source. But well-defined inter-operation protocols and strong encryption, yep.
The pipe command for services. I can dig that.
Re: Stallman’s Law
#134Here'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…
I'm hesitant to agree that ANYONE is "absolutely correct in all of his principles and all of his underlying thinking."
Re: Stallman’s Law
#135Corporations 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…
Managers don't make a company good or evil. Culture does. Culture bends managers, reward some behaviors and suppresses others...unless you change management en masse, the culture is persistent and strong.
Re: Stallman’s Law
#136I wish Stallman got back to its printer roots. Hardware is where the battle is. Good enough GPU / DSP / NIC and the rest is set. Sane not too hard to write drivers that works fine under open source OSes, enjoy prolongated lifetime for your devices and more interesting uses.
Re: Stallman’s Law
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
Thinking of corporations in terms of its employees means said employees have to take responsibility for their products. I'm all for it. The same can be applied to governments (though I believe it's less of a problem than with corporations): it's not "the government" that's fucking things up, it's the people in it.
I agree. Moreover, we have ‘smart contracts’ technology now to make responsible society real. The problem is that we have too much parasites in human society who fight against progress in this area to protect their status quo. I think that in future responsible people won’t share the same economics/law system as irresponsible one, the same way humans are separated from the animals now. This split will happen once the world bullshit reaches its critical mass to make all reasonable people to unite.
Re: Stallman’s Law
#138Here'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…
> ...but he has no idea what the current state of affairs is outside his freedom bubble. He can't see what direction the state of the art is moving in, and has no first hand experience with any of the various evils he dedicates his life to fighting.
I see misunderstandings and misstatements. Firstly, it's incorrect to say he has no idea of the current state of affairs "outside his freedom bubble" (a term that sounds derogatory and insulting to me). Look up his posts on Uber, AirBnB, Amazon [1] and several others and decide for yourself if he seems as clueless as you believe him to be (but remember he always talks from the premise of freedom). First hand experience is not a necessity in order to criticize something. We all criticize things without first hand experience, based on hearsay, based on what we've read on social media (just because something came from "a friend") and so on.
He does resort to strong absolutist positions in his posts, but do we have anyone else like him in the world? Honestly, I consider myself a "weak person" who succumbs to the pleasures of life taking the easy route when I look at his writings and his stance, and I wish we had more people like him with a lot more money and influence to fight for our freedoms and create things that would make the world and its people free over time (whereas in the last few decades we've been seeing our freedoms taken and controlled by large, fast growing corporations).
Re: Stallman’s Law
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
The objectives, roles, and responsibilities are significantly different.
In theory, yes. The problem is that many government officials act to further corporations' objectives for example by enacting laws enabling or making shady activities easier.
Yup. And that is a problem, isn't it? Because it shouldn't be that way. We should work to limit such influence, not just throw up our hands and say they're the same.
Re: Stallman’s Law
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fa…
At least on the surface that's an extremely fascinating idea. I guess I would want to understand why we created institutional protections for individuals in the first place before forming any opinion about whether removing such protections is a good idea.