RMS resigned!? I can’t believe I missed something like that (I’m even a fsf “member”)
Seems you have some drama to catch up on...
On Recent Controversial Events
21–30 of 151 posts
Re: On Recent Controversial Events
#22Even setting aside RMS's indefensible behavior, his vision of what "free software" means is stuck in the '80s. [1] got flagged for its flame-baity title but it's a valid point. Nobody gives a damn about the firmware for your laptop's wi-fi card. Cloud services and mobile rule the world now, and RMS never came up with a good solution to either besides "don't use them." (There's AGPL but it's never won any victories fo…
> "Cloud services and mobile rule the world now, and RMS never came up with a good solution to either besides "don't use them.""
I generally agree and I think the problem is bigger than SaaS. Consumers are now becoming accustomed to software "running" on low power hardware that simply cannot actually run on that low power hardware, which requires some sort of "SaaS" system, which in turn requires that they either trust somebody else (inevitably a for-profit corporation who very often has incentives misaligned with the user) or become their own system administrator (an unreasonable ask for the typical user.)
A concrete example:
Suppose a user wants a FOSS photograph organization application that supports organizing large numbers of images through tagging. A user coming from the proprietary world might reasonably expect this application to perform face detection and recognition to automatically tag all of their friends in the application. There are FOSS implementations of this kind of ML tech.. but what are the chances any of that heavy duty stuff can run on the users low power smartphone? Snowball's chance in hell. Even if you get it to run, it certainly won't scale as well as the SaaS alternative from Facebook/Google/Apple.
What's the answer though? I don't have a great answer to this, RMS obviously doesn't, I don't think any RMS supporters or critics do. Not that I've heard anyway.
Re: On Recent Controversial Events
#23Re: On Recent Controversial Events
#24Even setting aside RMS's indefensible behavior, his vision of what "free software" means is stuck in the '80s. [1] got flagged for its flame-baity title but it's a valid point. Nobody gives a damn about the firmware for your laptop's wi-fi card. Cloud services and mobile rule the world now, and RMS never came up with a good solution to either besides "don't use them." (There's AGPL but it's never won any victories fo…
> "Cloud services and mobile rule the world now, and RMS never came up with a good solution to either besides "don't use them."" I generally agree and I think the problem is bigger than SaaS. Consumers are now becoming accustomed to software "running" on low power hardware that simply cannot actually run on that low power hardware, which requires some sort of "SaaS" system, which in turn requires that they either tru…
Apple's on-device ML at least proves it's possible even if the FOSS world would take a while to catch up. A bigger problem may getting access to training data.
Re: On Recent Controversial Events
#25>human sexual behavior not a topic on which RMS has adequate expertise Ouch!
Yeah that struck me as a "sick burn" too, or at least potentially could be taken as one, but the rest of the essay makes me think it was unintentional and more about being one of the people who study sexuality.
Kuhn is a pretty level headed person, it is just unfortunate and sloppy wording. He is speaking about scientific or other expert knowledge
Re: On Recent Controversial Events
#26The “Free as in Freedom” podcast, with Sandler and Kuhn, restarted this year. It hasn’t had an episode in a few months however. I wonder if they will do an episode on this
Re: On Recent Controversial Events
#27Even setting aside RMS's indefensible behavior, his vision of what "free software" means is stuck in the '80s. [1] got flagged for its flame-baity title but it's a valid point. Nobody gives a damn about the firmware for your laptop's wi-fi card. Cloud services and mobile rule the world now, and RMS never came up with a good solution to either besides "don't use them." (There's AGPL but it's never won any victories fo…
Cloud services seem like one of the few places where it's easy to make money from AGPL software: you use it, but you charge people because they're using your infrastructure. If your customers don't like something, they're free to set up their own, using their own hardware, running the AGPL software that you are. Many won't, because they don't want to deal with this.
Re: On Recent Controversial Events
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Cloud services and mobile rule the world now, and RMS never came up with a good solution to either besides "don't use them."" I generally agree and I think the problem is bigger than SaaS. Consumers are now becoming accustomed to software "running" on low power hardware that simply cannot actually run on that low power hardware, which requires some sort of "SaaS" system, which in turn requires that they either tru…
Apple's on-device ML at least proves it's possible even if the FOSS world would take a while to catch up. A bigger problem may getting access to training data.
It's only possible to a limited extent. A low power smartphone will simply never be able to do as much ML as a high power server, so there will always be a capability asymmetry here. And that's not even getting into the matter of FOSS drivers for such hardware.
And as you say, training these models is a different matter than merely using them. The data and power requirements involved are a huge problem.
Re: On Recent Controversial Events
#29> The question is whether an organization should have a designated leader who is on a sustained, public campaign advocating about an unrelated issue that many consider controversial. I don't understand this. Are people in prominent positions not allowed to have opinions or interests outside of their job? As long as RMS wasn't actively using his power/influence as head of the FSF to advance his odd-ball views I really…
Are people in prominent positions not allowed to have opinions or interests outside of their job?
That is basically correct.
Re: On Recent Controversial Events
#30What a thoughtful essay. Kuhn clearly pored over those words most carefully. > The question is whether an organization should have a designated leader who is on a sustained, public campaign advocating about an unrelated issue that many consider controversial. It really doesn't matter what your view about the controversial issue is; a leader who refuses to stop talking loudly about unrelated issues eventually creates…
But then Kuhn gives the game away within a couple paragraphs, calling RMS's views 'problematic' and expressing disagreement with several of them. If you're gonna go with that line, stay on-message.
Disagreeing with RMS's views don't seem to be that problematic considering the outcome.