A short critique of Stallmanism • Hacker News Board

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#101

Post by smsm42 » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 8:53 AM UTC

A_COMPUTER wrote: post #68

schoen wrote: post #55

(Here I'm focusing on part 2 and the conclusion of the article, not part 1.) This article suggests that RMS ought to make his own leftist beliefs an explicit part of the free software movement. As the author is aware, RMS has generally tried not to do this, recognizing that free software advocates can have a wide range of beliefs about other issues, even if a plurality of people in the movement are hold leftist views…

I think they're working out how they're going to justify what they're going to do with his movement after he's no longer in charge of it. In the last year about three different times I have seen people making the same argument, that free software needs to be understood as part of a broader left wing ideology. It's bullshit and I hope those people lose hard.

I've been contributing to open-source software projects for more a decade now. I've never seen any connection with left-wing ideology, and no incompatibility with any ideology I can think of. I've seen all kinds of people participating, from communists to objectivists. I think that's why it worked so well. If something can seriously hurt the idea, it's trying to make an narrow political-ideological cause out of it. You may gain some partisan support and budgets on that, but the losses in goodwill would be enormous.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#102

Post by jprzybyl » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 8:54 AM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #15

trav4225 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely agree. I just wanted to point out that, even though it often seems otherwise, there are indeed people in the technological community who have deep problems with the FSF philosophies.

Are there? I would believe that there are many who don't care, or many who are dismissive at a rather shallow level. But I'm not aware of having seen a good, intellectual critique of "free" software.

I personally like free software. (My personal stance lines up the most with the Debian Social Contract.)

However, OpenBSD (my second choice of system) does not, and they've been vocal in the past.

https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#43

It's pretty simple - freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. That includes in a proprietary environment. That includes whatever you want it to include. The other three freedoms then tell you "except in some ways we personally don't like."

They also don't like the FSF much. They have done some things that are a little controversial, like require devs to cede ownership of code so that the FSF can relicense when they want to (mostly to new versions of the GPL).

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#103

Post by labster » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 9:02 AM UTC

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #91

gumby wrote: post #16

Here's a sympathetic perspective on some of these issues (note: I've known and worked with RMS since the late 1970s, e.g before he grew his hair long and decided to start the FSF). From the article: > ...crucial mistake: confounding individual virtue and purity with wider social liberation. > ...the familiar liberal ideological mistake of lifestylism: the belief that changes in one's own personal preferences are the…

They're not all from the Bronx. Some of them are from Brooklyn ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders

Heh, I get it, they're both socialists and all. But Bernie is the opposite of what OP describes. Stallman is a purist, Sanders is a realist. Stallman fights to keep "GNU/" attached to "Linux", while Sanders talks about the fake news coming to people on Facebook's closed platform.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#104

Post by threatofrain » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 9:07 AM UTC

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #65

pksadiq wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3. It's up to you what 'freedom' really is. For me, I wish my smartband had more features than it does now. I wish my non-smart phone vibrate when the opponent attends the call. Lots of my wish (and many others) won't be fulfilled as long as there isn't an easy way to modify the underlying software/firmware. I call that 'freedom'. Most of these limitations…

You're arguing for features that would be genuinely challenging for companies to implement and support. I'd love to have the freedom to modify the software in every gadget I own. But the $40 digital toaster oven with absolute crap firmware coded by idiots doesn't even have a USB port or any way to attach it to a computer; it's probably got its code permanently burned into ROM and isn't even software upgradable even w…

There's a difference between the financial aspects versus the legal aspects of software freedom.

You can make the argument that it's too financially expensive for most companies to make their devices more modifiable, but that same argument cannot explain why people are banned, by risk of government punishment, from decrypting their programs, which would be the first step to investigation.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#105

Post by Frondo » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 9:11 AM UTC

tedks wrote: post #96

cbdfghh wrote: post #72

IMHO, Stallman made two mistakes: 1. He moved into politics (which is in my HO, one of the failure points of a lot of tech people. Everyone has a right to an opinion, but certain people have more talent at politics than others, and certain people have more talents at code than others). He's a great programmer, and could have pushed the FSF community directly by committing and improving code. And even if he can't code…

""" 2. He doesn't let the FSF be larger than him. Who's their 2nd in command? Who'll take over after he passes on? What will the FSF look like in 30 years? """ I don't actually know who the second-in-command (if there is such a position, the FSF seems very flat) is. But the first-in-command is John Sullivan and has been for like, ten years? A long time at least. I don't think anyone will ever replace rms. You can't n…

The thing is, the world 30 years from now doesn't need RMS.

(I realize that sounds callous, but my long-term partner split from me today and I'm a little drunk, so spare me :p )

What the world in the short-term and 30 years from now needs is someone new to think about and develop philosophies around today's software freedom concerns.

What's that look like? I dunno, I'm not that thinker.

What RMS did was profound and important for that time in history. The last few years, everything he's written seems goofy and childish. What we need is an RMS for the modern era, i.e. a significant thinker who can speak to the next 20 years of people.

Sad to say, like most nonprofits, there's no succession plan.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#106

Post by rekado » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 9:25 AM UTC

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…

> It seems that in Stallman's world the public are supposed to become MIT-grade hackers before they can earn their freedom.

This is not true. In his Emacs paper he specifically mentioned that people who were told that they could not possibly be programmers were in fact programming by modifying Emacs. He also pushed for Emacs to gain word processing features and was ridiculed for that.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#107

Post by spangry » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 9:26 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #94

petertodd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, as an independent consultant I'm far more inclined to use LGPL/AGPL/GPL licences for work that I think I could sell commercially precisely because I see those licenses and private property/capitalism as very compatible. Quite simply, I'm happy if you either pay me money or code for the right to use my code; the users who contribute neither are more often than not still benefiting me via a wider userbase - aka…

I've seen a lot of companies using GPL/AGPL for exactly the same purpose - to prevent other commercial companies from reusing their code. It is especially common in areas where added-value customizations are valuable - i.e., if you have GPL (or, usually, dual-licensed commercial/GPL) core for, say, document handling system, you can market it as open-source, take contributions, and build add-on business on it, but if…

I would have thought the FSF/Stallman would be perfectly fine with this. Their main objective is to maximise the freedom of users by advocating for software that can be inspected, modified, shared etc. As far as I know, they are not opposed to someone making a private income off this kind of software.

However, it's probably true to say that a number of possible methods of extracting an income would be closed off to you under these conditions. They're closed off not because the copyright(left) is anti private income, but because they're probably user oppressive practices (ones that would be very quickly ripped out of the codebase e.g. sending user private information back to home-base for subsequent sale to advertisers etc.)

That's my layman's understanding of the situation anyhow (happy to be corrected if wrong).

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#108

Post by mbrock » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 9:32 AM UTC

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…

"Stallman has never shown the slightest interest in making software that the general public can modify, or in designing, promoting, or doing anything at all to encourage the existence of such software."

That's unfair.

Let's say we're talking about vehicles rather than software.

The liberty to share information, to modify one's own vehicles, and so on is valuable even without a research program to educate every commuter about engineering or make motors modifiable by someone with no special knowledge.

The benefits of software (or vehicle) freedom extend to every user even if they aren't directly involved with software engineering. As a non-programming user, you can find someone who can help you modify programs. You can also begin to learn yourself, as I and many others have done.

Free software is itself an enormous library of learning resources simply because you can study its source code and reuse its components.

To talk about a "highly educated and exclusive technocracy" in this context seems pretty overblown to me. Yes, efforts to make programming more accessible are very cool. But any motivated kid with a computer can get into coding right now. With the availability of free software, they can study working software packages written by experts, for free.

The GNU project was a pragmatic initiative to ensure the existence of a free operating system mostly conforming to the typical Unix-like environment. Call it old-fashioned, but even iOS is built on such a foundation.

I agree that eliminating barriers to entry for newbies is important, but basically I think it's long-term future work and that the FSF is right to focus on the fundamental freedoms for hackers.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#109

Post by jwildeboer » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 9:39 AM UTC

And I hoped this article would be a critique of http://stallmanism.com the religion we created a few years ago. :-(

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#110

Post by spangry » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 9:57 AM UTC

throwaway729 wrote: post #23

matthewmacleod wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there? I would believe that there are many who don't care, or many who are dismissive at a rather shallow level. But I'm not aware of having seen a good, intellectual critique of "free" software.

There are many criticisms of the various freedoms embodied by Stallmanism's notion of free software (to borrow a term from the article). A thorough rebuttal of the entire viewpoint requires, IMO: 1. An ardent defense of capitalism and private property. 2. A critique of open source as a superior software development methodology. You'll find shades of (1) in various defenses of competing open source licenses (e.g. BSD)…

Why would (1) be necessary? GPL software is not consigned to the public domain or ownership automatically transferred to the FSF. It is still the property of the original developer, who are simply distributing and licensing its use only to those who comply with a certain set of conditions.

Proprietary licences will sometimes prohibit resale or modification, for instance. Licences like the GPL do the exact opposite: they allow modification and resale under the condition that these subsequent derivative works are licensed under the same terms (if distributed).

I would have thought being able to decide the conditions under which others can use your private property is an idea the most ardent capitalist would support.