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Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

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Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#131

Post by klabb3 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #23
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #7

> But typically these games are not solitaire; you're playing with other people. And using a non-free program together with other people? That's particularly bad. Because it means that those people are pressuring each other to keep running that non-free program. I wonder what Stallman would say about anticheat software. Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable. But…

> Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable. Generally the people who are actually into multiplayer games accept anticheat software as a necessary evil. Yes, they're not exactly enthused about what amounts to game-supporting spyware, but playing a game that's rife with hackers is a miserable experience.

Grifters, trolls, asshats always find their way into communities that are centrally moderated. That includes most online games and social media today. This problem isn't solved with anti cheat and government ID checks. In fact this problem was solved years ago, simply by letting each community create their own spaces with their own rules. This means some spaces are private. Others may be semi-open. And some will be fully open, and yes that will always be chaotic.

The only multi-player games I play are with friends or their friends, ie people I already trust. The only social media i use is group chats with friends. Of course, you can have more open and anonymous spaces like we have here on HN, but you need more moderation and the moderators need to feel some sense of pride/ownership to keep on working for free.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#132

Post by thebigman433 »

orionblastar wrote: post #68
colordrops wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "tying people down, strapping them into their chairs so that they can't do anything that hurts themselves -- makes things worse, not better." Stallman could have been talking about censorship and deplatforming here and it still would have made sense. His (and my) generation seem to care a lot more about idealistic freedoms than we do now as a society.

Censorship and deplatforming are ways of making the competition shut up. If someone has a different opinion than you do, they should have free speech to say it. Within reason of course, nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene. This is why Musk is trying to buy out Twitter, and he is trolling them with his wealth. Don't forget removal from the APP Store or blocked by proxies.…

Elon Musk is buying Twitter to increase his wealth, mindshare, and influence. He does not actually care about free speech, and its naïve to think that he is buying the platform for "altruistic" reasons.

He is also the lead of a company that has seemingly fired an employee for posting about their publicly available features, and is also facing one of the biggest labor lawsuits ever in the state of California.

He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#133

Post by charcircuit »

jrm4 wrote: post #45
charcircuit wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source would still exist without Stallman and the FSF. There is a practical benefit to open source software and calling people / companies evil / unethical for not open sourcing everything is not as helpful as the FSF may think.

Considering Stallman's Free Software predates "Open Source" I'm not sure it actually would, or if it did, it would likely be less free. And again, helpful to whom? Yes. Stallman's no diplomat or ambassador, but that's not the job he's trying to do.

It's not like permissive licenses are a crazy hard concept to figure out. It's not like Fermat's last theorem where there is a large challenge in discovering a proof. Sure it may not be labelled as "Open Source", but there would be something similar. Also I believe there is a good chance that software would be more free due to copyleft licenses potentially not gaining momentum.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#134

Post by mr_johnson22 »

snvzz wrote: post #111
mr_johnson22 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real surprise is that Stallman restrained himself from telling the dev that having children is unethical.

He can actually keep on topic when it comes to free software. Yet GNU and FSF aren't everything RMS is, so he has his own personal website. I would assume you've learned about his views on having children there.

Yes I have. And my quip was not to criticize his views, but his frequent bluntness in expressing them.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#135

Post by IggleSniggle »

laverya wrote: post #85
orionblastar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship and deplatforming are ways of making the competition shut up. If someone has a different opinion than you do, they should have free speech to say it. Within reason of course, nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene. This is why Musk is trying to buy out Twitter, and he is trolling them with his wealth. Don't forget removal from the APP Store or blocked by proxies.…

> nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene. I want both sets of people to expose their views to the public. Disgusting though these views may be, it is safer for society if individuals are able to check and decide that someone else's views are reprehensible. If the people are merely told such by authorities, with the "offending" content immediately removed, then the authoriti…

There’s an argument around growing / shrinking a market here. Have you ever experienced morbid fascination? Some people get addicted to the experience of horror (I don’t mean the genre). This arguably creates a new demand for something that even those demanding it would not otherwise have had any interest in.

I think you’re right about the dangers of giving authority over what does and doesn’t get censored, but there are also very real dangers on the other side of this. You don’t make consuming heroin normative, because you don’t want to make it easy to fall into an addiction by accident for those who are more prone to do so. The more harm the addiction causes to society as a whole, the more prerogative you have to protect people from accidentally becoming addicted.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#136

Post by Gollapalli »

thebigman433 wrote: post #132
orionblastar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship and deplatforming are ways of making the competition shut up. If someone has a different opinion than you do, they should have free speech to say it. Within reason of course, nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene. This is why Musk is trying to buy out Twitter, and he is trolling them with his wealth. Don't forget removal from the APP Store or blocked by proxies.…

Elon Musk is buying Twitter to increase his wealth, mindshare, and influence. He does not actually care about free speech, and its naïve to think that he is buying the platform for "altruistic" reasons. He is also the lead of a company that has seemingly fired an employee for posting about their publicly available features, and is also facing one of the biggest labor lawsuits ever in the state of California. He is a…

He built huge amounts of wealth by building rocket ships and electric cars because he's worried about the earth becoming uninhabitable and thinks we need to be an interplanetary civilization. This is a dude who's dedicated his entire life to (in his mind) save all of humanity from certain doom.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that it's all just exploitation.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#137

Post by Barrin92 »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #8

> “Well, first of all, I don't think there's anything bad about playing a game. Unless the game is non-free — then it's bad for you, if you play it. I get that Stallman's shtick is being as hardline as possible about free software, but it really feels like sometimes this hurts the free software movement. Imagine trying to bring in a normal, non-technical person who plays video games as one of their hobbies (describes…

>and they see this quote. Immediately, it feels bullshit and dumb to them

it literally sounds like a religious cult at this point. When I was growing up I had a friend from an actual cult and the family literally had their own invented board games (which were terrible) purged of all kinds of "immoral" references because they weren't allowed to touch anything out of mainstream culture.

Whenver I see this depluralizing behavior as if non-free software causes some sort of metaphysical corruption I have to think back to this.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#138

Post by datadata »

Gollapalli wrote: post #129
datadata wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that the growing size and complexity of software might be part of the strategy of those profiting from the suppression of free software, rather than a necessity for increased software quality?

Not the poster in question, but I think some of it might just be the "big ball of mud" of long maintained software, and some of it may indeed be the managerial structures around software, which incentivizes managers to grow their teams and find problems for them to solve, regardless of the need of either the growth of team size, or the so-called problems. And we all know bored developers will make up work for themsel…

Framing this as emergent rather than strategic makes a lot of sense.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#139

Post by epgui »

colordrops wrote: post #64
jrm4 wrote: post #36

I really think far too many people are missing why Stallman and the FSF are so valuable. It's not that everyone should behave exactly like them; it's that they provide a useful extreme endpoint such that there can exist a reasonable "Overton Window" of Free/Open Source/ Whatever Software. I 100% support what they do and preach knowing FULL well I will likely never 100% do as they recommend. That's not actually a big…

> "tying people down, strapping them into their chairs so that they can't do anything that hurts themselves -- makes things worse, not better." Stallman could have been talking about censorship and deplatforming here and it still would have made sense. His (and my) generation seem to care a lot more about idealistic freedoms than we do now as a society.

There’s nothing wrong with idealistic freedoms or rights in a vacuum. Of course we don’t live in a vacuum, and most non-trivial and realistic situations are about finding the balance between different freedoms or rights, not about their boolean existence.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#140

Post by malthuswaswrong »

na85 wrote: post #86
jrm4 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly can't conceive of what this "Serious FSF" that you imagine would look like? Meaning, I can't think of any similar "movement" that succeeds by having a camera-friendly diplomatic leader -- unless you're thinking about going "full politics?" There's no "vegan leader person" or "financial literacy leader person" or "animal cruelty leader person," etc. Not even "environment person," though you do get your occa…

>I honestly can't conceive of what this "Serious FSF" that you imagine would look like? Well mostly it would look like an FSF that doesn't eat toejam on camera, and instead of giving the same tired lecture about the 4 freedoms, they actually go out and do productive things like put on workshops for college students to install trisquel or whatever. Instead of wasting countless hours sponsoring dumb stuff like the GNU…

>Are you unaware that the Free Software Movement is a political movement first and foremost?

Bingo. It is a political movement. One rooted in idiotic ideologies that no thinking person takes seriously. Communism was defeated by taking the few valid points of Marx and addressing them. The 98% stupidity was easy to refute and discard when the 2% valid points were accepted and addressed.

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