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A short critique of Stallmanism

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Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#111

Post by sprafa »

cbdfghh wrote: post #76
sprafa wrote: post #4

essentially brilliant. I've been thinking more and more about how Stallman has blocked perhaps the only effective way to make companies make more open-source software: allow DRM to work properly with open-source code. That is, the main issue with making open-source software is that anyone can copy it, thus placing the value of your software at 0. But if DRM effectively put a a stop to this, by not allowing you to run…

>I've been thinking more and more about how Stallman has blocked perhaps the only effective way to make companies make more open-source software: allow DRM to work properly with open-source code. That's a feature, not a bug. He's not interested in creating a "commons" for companies. He's interested in having his code help users, and create an incentive for companies to create code which will help users. If you look a…

No it wouldn't fit their definition. Take into account that this is a legislative or a policy position Id like to see. I'm not defending this as a way of helping closed source; I'm thinking of it as a way to put an end to the open-source debate.

That idea is you would by law be forced to to distribute open-source software that's modifiable by the user. To accommodate for profit, DRM would be allowed

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#112

Post by loup-vaillant »

Frondo wrote: post #105
tedks wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

""" 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…

Eben Moglen sounds like a formidable advocate. Maybe a bit old too, but right now, he is a synthesis monster. While Stallman may have vision, Moglen has crystal clarity of expression.

I don't pay much attention to Stallman for a while now, because I sense I feel I have got enough from his Free Software, Free Society essays —which I recommend to any who aren't familiar with Free Software.

Moglen however still manages to surprise me with new stuff —the last one being, it is now too late to build the [free] network we want. We can only fight the [centralised, spying] network we don't want, and we have less than 10 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T4bZ5R-MH8

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#113

Post by librexpr »

fryguy wrote: post #100
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…

> You can't make a derivative closed source work. That's not it. Your license has to be GPL in order to use any GPL code. I try to make the stuff I do on my personal time under the MIT license, which means I can't use GPL code, but GPL code can incorporate my code. Tell me which license is more free now. Also, it completely disregards the scope of things. If I incorporate a GPL library into my software for say JSON p…

> That's not it. Your license has to be GPL in order to use any GPL code. I try to make the stuff I do on my personal time under the MIT license, which means I can't use GPL code, but GPL code can incorporate my code. Tell me which license is more free now.

That's not how the GPL works. The GPL requires that you release the entire work under the GPL, but it does not forbid you from additionally releasing the parts you wrote under other licenses. So you can release the parts of the code you own under the MIT, as long as you also release the whole work under the GPL. [0]

> The other thing is that you can't use proprietary libraries in your own code that has been infected with GPL. If you want to develop your own software that incorporates GPL code and even release it to your users, it's impossible to link against proprietary libraries.

This is exactly the point of the GPL, and what, in my opinion, makes it more free than permissive licenses: GPL code will never restrict the user's freedom. Software that uses proprietary libraries is not free software, and so it is perfectly reasonable for it to be GPL-incompatible.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLModuleLicense

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#114

Post by keithpeter »

zekevermillion wrote: post #71
vivekd wrote: post #66

I don't agree with everything in this article but I think a part of it really put into words something I had been feeling for some time. I had always found it easy to agree with Stallman's view of free software. I think most reasonable people who didn't have a stake in proprietary software would agree with him. But, something about Stallman that made it hard for me to really take his movement seriously enough to want…

Stallman has compromised in some ways, even when it comes to using proprietary software. For example, before there was grub I believe he made an exception and used non-free bios. Ultiamtely, even RMS seems to suggest a convenience standard. If the tradeoff is too harsh, at some point it is permissible to use proprietary software. And this is even leaving aside the various non-relative exceptions he has made, such as…

The freed bios is libreboot derived from coreboot I believe (not sure about the derivation).

https://libreboot.org/

https://www.coreboot.org/

I'm posting this off an old Thinkpad X61s variant which happened to be manufactured with an atheros wifi card and I'm running gNewSense 4.0. All my major use cases covered.

http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/gNewSense.html

At some point in the future I may purchase a ministry of freedom modified Thinkpad simply because I'm pretty bourgeois and can afford it.

https://minifree.org/

I take the OAs criticism but I despair of the organised left in the UK for other reasons that are outside of the scope of HN.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#115

Post by Chinjut »

wanderingjew wrote: post #51
angry-hacker wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know it was taken without permission? Are you the artist?

Author of the Hackaday post. I would know if this were taken with permission. The artist (joe kim) can be found here: http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/ In case anyone's wondering, we (hackaday) probably would have allowed the author to use this art, provided we get a link back to the post or some credit to Joe. In the absence of that, we're just going to point and laugh at this guy for clearly demonstrating he doesn'…

It's not clear that conclusion follows. Perhaps he understands copyright but chooses not to respect it?

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#116

Post by vacri »

fryguy wrote: post #95
Ace17 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 abou…

There is absolutely no possible way that you can defend GPL as being more free than licenses like BSD/MIT. Copyright is about being able to copy the software. GPL places restrictions on who is able to copy your software. BSD/MIT place less restrictions. It's black and white; there is no argument. When a project includes code from another project (be it GPL or MIT), it is creating a new work under copyright. What GPL…

> It just means that code under GPL is orders of magnitude less valuable to the world than code under less restrictive licenses.

The most-installed kernel in the world is GPL-licensed. I'm not sure how it could possibly be orders of magnitude more valuable.

> What GPL does is hold the developer ransom with a lighter over the GPL code

It's not a 'ransom' when the ticket price is clearly displayed for all to see. If you don't want to play, that's cool, find another sandpit to play in.

Like it or not, the GPL moved the needle back towards end-user friendliness, and without it and it's knock-on effects elsewhere, being a developer today would be a much more frustrating experience.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#117

Post by int_19h »

spangry wrote: post #107
smsm42 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

Thing is, a very common model along these lines is to dual-license under copyleft for free, and proprietary commercial license for those who don't like copyleft "virality" (e.g. the way Qt used to do it until switching to LGPL).

This works great; but the proprietary part is completely antithetical to the whole "free software" concept.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#118

Post by vacri »

afsina wrote: post #84
Mouq wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I think it's quite the opposite. There's a lot of people living in the high-paid tech bubble here. Actual lefties seem thin on the ground, and less numerous than libertarians.

If HN is seen as left-leaning, then the political diversity spectrum in the US is in truly dire shape.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#119

Post by gkya »

labster wrote: post #103
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, want it or not GNU/ is a big part of Linux distros, at least until a distro with an alternative userland and c library makes it to the top. And even then most of open source has some GNU somewhere in the foundation.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#120

Post by throwaway212122 »

Frondo wrote: post #105
tedks wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

""" 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…

> The last few years, everything he's written seems goofy and childish.

What people don't seem to realize (also in Torvalds discussions) is that people simply wrote like that on the Internet up to around 2005-2008.

These people also produced most of the software that the millenials are now churning around or write middleware for.

What I find disturbing is the trend that millenials spend more time learning how to write glibly, appear mature on the Internet and in general sell themselves instead of writing truly new software.

[None of this is directed at you, I just used your comment for context.]

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