Ten years ago I thought Stallman was a well meaning, but a bit cranked fanatic. Nowadays, I realize he was right all this time and we been blind.
Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement
141–150 of 623 posts
Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stallman and the FSF see closed source software as unethical. Imagine if someone asked you for help and said "I don't see how to free my slaves while making a living, paying my rent, paying for my children's education". Would you tell them "You shouldn't have slaves, it's unethical" or would you try to help them find a way to run their business with fewer slaves, but still some?
Did you just compare Stallman and the FSF to the Abolitionist movement, and paid software to slavery?
Why is it that people on the modern internet seem unable to grasp the concept of an analogy?
Two things don't have to be exactly as bad as each other to be analogous circumstances.
You are supposed to apply to same chain of logical reasoning to the two situations.
Just expressing faux outrage with a "How dare you compare these two things" isn't actually defeating the argument in any way.
Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement
#143Earlier 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 could make his own platform, but the users matter. With users, there is influence. In old times, you used to buy the news paper company to get influence.
> 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.
I wonder if we find a billionaire from the top 20 wealthiest who hasn’t at some level
Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement
#144I 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…
And I think far too many people are missing why Stallman should be, to use a popular term, cancelled.
Toxic people shouldn't have a voice because then all sorts of people will decide to not get involved in a community where such people can be leaders.
Trust me in this, I should know :(
Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
Free Software will never be palatable to the mainstream, because the mainstream rejects socialist ideas. I think the popularity of Linux has somehow obscured the ideological origins of the movement, which seemed much more overt in the late 90s/early 00's when I first got into it.
>Free Software will never be palatable to the mainstream, because the mainstream rejects socialist ideas.
Then don't frame it as a socialist idea. There's absolutely nothing about Free Software that has a hard requirement on socialist ideology.
Frame it as pragmatism: Governments/schools/etc should run free software because it's more cost-effective and thus a more fiscally-responsible use of taxpayer monies.
Frame it as democratic: Why should a bunch of unelected CEOs have the right to dictate what you, a citizen of $this_great_nation, do with your devices?
Frame it as nationalism: How can American kids grow up to be world-leading innovators if they can't hack their devices? We're losing to Russia and China in the hacking gap!
Frame it as free speech or something: Why does the government get to decide what I do with my devices? My ipad my choice.
Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you just compare Stallman and the FSF to the Abolitionist movement, and paid software to slavery?
Why is it that people on the modern internet seem unable to grasp the concept of an analogy? Two things don't have to be exactly as bad as each other to be analogous circumstances. You are supposed to apply to same chain of logical reasoning to the two situations. Just expressing faux outrage with a "How dare you compare these two things" isn't actually defeating the argument in any way.
[deleted]
Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement
#147Earlier 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…
Elon's work practices are _probably_ legal, or at least signed off by a legal department that thinks they are.
The solution is to make such labor practices NOT legal and force everyone into a good field of play and rules for the game(s).
Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few years ago I saw an indie game developer recount his experience with Stallman[1]; he doesn't see how he can release his games as Free Software while making a living, pay his rent, pay for his children's education, etc. So he asked Stallman what to do about that. Stallman's reply? "You should not be making those games, it is unethical." To say that is non-constructive would be an understatement; it's just shuttin…
Stallman and the FSF see closed source software as unethical. Imagine if someone asked you for help and said "I don't see how to free my slaves while making a living, paying my rent, paying for my children's education". Would you tell them "You shouldn't have slaves, it's unethical" or would you try to help them find a way to run their business with fewer slaves, but still some?
Except there is a difference between software and slavery.
Society has moved on in the decades since Stallman started (for better or for worse), and we need to figure out a way to stay true to their vision around software and bringing new people on board with the free software movement. Having such extremist comments when someone is trying to figure out how to make their game opensource without breaking agreements for other parts they rely on isn't going to get anyone anywhere.
Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement
#149Half an hour through the ~90min presentation, I was wondering about speech-to-text solutions out there to really skim through it. For anyone else who would similarly like to be able to skim through a transcription:
Ran it through the Goog's speech to text. It's a quick paste of the raw pass, with no clean-up, although I added a couple of timestamps. Some irony in the choice of transcription engine, I know.
I was mostly attracted to the OP's coverage of the upcoming "GNU C manual" publishing, and if anyone knows anything more about it, I'd love to hear it.
With the light digging I've done so far, I'm not sure if it's supposed to be the same GNU C manual as listed at https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/ for which the latest revision was published in '16.
Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement
#150Did he say anything about cloud providers/the SaaS loophole? I mean they do anything with GPL licensed software, as distribution does not happen. The AGPL addresses this issue, but it does not seem to be used much.
https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/the-saas-...