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A short critique of Stallmanism

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Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#81

Post by cbdfghh »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #79
cbdfghh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I find people complaining about the GPL's lack of freedom a bit hypocritical. What does the GPL prevent you from doing? As a user, nothing. As far as I (a user) is concerned, Mozilla's MPL/GPL, bash's GPL3 and VSCode MIT licenses are all equally free (I can use them and distribute them). So what problem do programmers have with GPL? You can't make a derivative closed source work. So you want to make a non…

It's not just that they want to make a non-free work, it's that they want my help, offering nothing in return.

That's also true.

Sometimes I suspect the main programmers for Apache2/BSD/MIT licensed works actually hope their works get used by the big guys so they can get employment there.

That's why I've never heard any BSD guys getting upset at MS for ripping off their work, while getting upset at Linux for doing the same.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#82

Post by swhipple »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #74
swhipple wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add on to your point, this is called the 'paradox of freedom' -- that you cannot have both unlimited freedom and ensure freedom for the future. At the end of WWII, Karl Popper defended state interventionism with an argument citing the paradox of tolerance [1], and claimed ensuring a tolerant society in the name of tolerance, even when paradoxically intolerant. A parallel argument can be made in Stallman's case for…

That's a general point, but I think it missed the criticism that the FSF's definition of software freedom fails on its own terms. In practice the "freedom" is exclusive to a highly educated and exclusive technocracy. The same freedoms are not available to the general public. This may seem pedantic, but IMO it undermines the argument about software freedom, because Stallman has never shown the slightest interest in ma…

I agree that freedom and practicality are related, but disagree that it undermines the argument. If they were completely unrelated, source code availability would not be an issue; however the legal and practical freedom to do something is often not zero effort or little work.

I'm wondering what you have in mind by user-modifiable systems. For example, KDE and Firefox are free and allow for quite a bit of user-customization without any programming knowledge. At some level you would naturally have to write code.

I recently came across this interview and thought it was well done. Stallman responded to a similar question: https://youtu.be/NB8mCcLRxlg?t=59m55s

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#83

Post by ommunist »

I fail to recognise how confounding individual virtue and purity with wider social liberation is a mistake? I met RMS at Riga Politech when his group campaigned against EU Software Patents, and his logic in the presentation was flawless. I signed petition because of that. When we talked very shortly after the presentation, I concluded for myself that Stallman is indeed very careful with words and the meaning.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#84

Post by afsina »

Mouq wrote: post #80
quitspamming wrote: post #77

I'm surprised the HN crowd isn't calling this out for what it is, anti capitalist BS. I've seen people talk about tactics, DRM, ethics, but the author's point was Stallman is right expect for one thing: profit. Stallman tries to explain over and over again how free software can be profitable, and the author of this post's whole point is, "nah, it can't be. Want free software? You need socialism." Stupid article pushi…

Don't really see why it needs to be called out as such. It's pretty explicitly radical leftist. Is Hacker News exclusively capitalist now? TBF I tend to avoid this site, so maybe it is. If you think materialist analysis isn't useful, well, maybe it's not useful to you . But geez, the author didn't even get into, e.g., Marxist analysis or anything so controversial :P

Actually IMO majority of hacker news commenters are left leaning, and I try avoiding political news here because their rethoric is tiring (to me).

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#85

Post by ommunist »

BuuQu9hu wrote: post #69
darpa_escapee wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything that is 'copyleft' is inherently copyright. The protections enshrined by copyright protect 'copyleft' works.

The GPL and copyleft are not magic pixie dust. Just as proprietary software is pirated very frequently, so too do companies and individuals ignore copyleft licenses. Like the BSA spends money to enforce proprietary licenses, so to do the FSF, SFC, gplviolations.org and others have to spend money to enforce copyleft. There are also lots of violations of permissive licenses, but generally the authors of permissively li…

Yes, this is because OSS authors do not have union, which could have lawyers, which could do the job.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#87

Post by ommunist »

saghm wrote: post #12

Interesting read! I agree with most of this, but the I'm not sure I agree with the argument that it would be more effective to convince government agencies to switch to free software by appealing to a civic sense rather than a fiscal one; maybe I'm just overly cynical, but I find it more likely that government agencies would be swayed to adopt free software by showing them how much money they'd save.

Government is not interested in saving. The power of individual in the government is associated with the budget he is responsible for. No costs on software - no budget, no power.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#88

Post by WhitneyLand »

Ideologue, idealist, zealot, weird person? All fine with me.

I don't like that he starts with some good ideas, but then slippery slopes his way to see existential threats to our life liberty and happiness. It starts out making sense and takes on an air of paranoia.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#89

Post by Ace17 »

greyman wrote: post #14

> Stallman's rhetoric is filled with this problematic logic on all layers: from trying to correct other people's terminology Yes, this is my main obstacle accepting RMS. In my opinion, he took the word "free", made a term "free software", and described it in accordance with his agenda, while what he advocated only partially conforms to the meaning of the word "free" or "freedom". There are certainly licenses offering…

> There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3.

More freedom to who? Users, distributors, maintainers, vendors, service providers? You can't guarantee complete freedom to each of them simultaneously.

For example, allowing distributors to do everything they want (e.g not providing source code) will prevent users to do everything they want (e.g modifying the program). So it makes no sense to talk about which license "offers more freedom".

So, let's stop saying imprecise things like "GPL code doesn't give me freedom because I can't use such code in my proprietary software". The free software movement is about protecting the freedoms of the end users first.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#90

Post by jancsika »

wanderingjew wrote: post #45
bluejekyll wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this is bad form, though, as the original article is very supportive of the Free Software movement, the author may have assumed a Gratis usage of the image. I could not find on Hackaday any specific information about using their content, or not, but they do explicitly mention their general copyrights in their footer... Edit: what I did not say, is that because there is nothing explicit it can not be assu…

You can't assume gratis usage of anything . The free software movement, creative commons, and anything surrounding copyleft is predicated on the fact that everything is copyrighted at its creation. Copyleft is a 'hack' of sorts of copyright, in that the author or owner of a piece of work gives everyone else explicit permission to use it. You can't have copyleft without copyright, and everything is copyright unless it…

> I could use this as a jumping off point to the actual failures of Stallman, where instead of educating people on these issues for the last thirty years, he's spending his time rhyming Uber with Goober, i.e. https://stallman.org/uber.html, but I digress.

What's the significance of Stallman rhyming "Uber" with "Goober"?

I mean, Doug Crockford has rhymed "Gonads" with "Monads". Would you seriously argue that he failed to educate people on functional programming in Javascript because of the tone-deafness of that pun?

I make the comparison because both authors have a clear, unadorned style and show great attention to detail in their arguments. The only relevant difference I see is that one writes and talks primarily on technical matters, while the other writes and talks on social and political matters. If bad puns are out of scope for the one but in scope for the other then I smell bike-shedding.

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