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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

#201

Post by Karrot_Kream »

Gollapalli wrote: post #122
ivan_gammel wrote: post #56

It won’t be major exaggeration to say that FSF and Stallman are irrelevant in 2022 and not much different from any other radical left group, struggling even to make sense for majority of people. The idea of completely free software where user could control the source code is an obsolete ideal. Not because it’s unviable economically, but because the size and complexity of modern software is far beyond the ability of i…

>because the size and complexity of modern software is far beyond the ability of individual users to reason about it based just on the source code and without any augmentation I feel this. You should be able to understand your computer.

Cool. I think we should understand the physics of our homes' use of energy. The world is full of complexity and no single person can understand everything. I don't think software is what everyone needs to understand.

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

#202

Post by ece »

kmeisthax wrote: post #177
_-david-_ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think right to repair is easier for the average person to understand. You can just go to a repair shop and they can fix your device. Easy to understand. When you have a computer it can just work regardless if you are using free software or not. For the average person they won't see any visible / tangible benefit to free software. I don't think FSF communication really has that much of an impact on the success. Even…

The average person also buys into the standard copyright argument of "you should own your creativity"; accepting software freedom requires, at a minimum, rejecting software copyright categorically[0]. This is a left-of-Marx view: even the extreme left does not touch copyright beyond anticapitalist generalities. In contrast, right to repair does not require abandoning the entire framework of copyright. In fact, it bar…

Software as individual expression, or as IP to be defended do not need to be in your face opposite extremes. They aren't in most cases. Open source is one middle ground, open hardware or documented hardware can be another.

I do think copyright reform has favored individual expression recently, and I don't see this changing.

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

#203

Post by Gigachad »

danamit wrote: post #13
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…

It is possible to have free anticheat software. I do not hate anticheat as a gamer, but I do hate DRMs.

No it isn’t. Anti cheat is basically DRM/malware. If you could fully understand how it works you could just modify it / work your cheats around it.

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

#204

Post by thebigman433 »

Gollapalli wrote: post #136
thebigman433 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those goals are cool and all, but that doesnt change his poor worker treatment or his massive wealth hoarding, while still trying to change rules so he can have more.

Great goals, but in my opinion, a terrible ambassador for tech/engineering, and a completely ingenuine person. I do not believe he is buying Twitter to "restore free speech" at all, and I dont even think that itself is a particularly good goal without having laid out plans of what it means.

Him being in charge of companies that produce cool products does not make him a good person at all.

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

#205

Post by Gigachad »

Beltalowda wrote: post #158
tjader wrote: post #90

Earlier 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?

What am I supposed to say to that? Proprietary software is not slavery, or even anywhere close to it, even if we accept the argument that it is unethical. I find this entire analogy unhelpful.

Stallman and the game developer are completely incompatible. To Stallman and the FSF, writing proprietary software may as well be slavery.

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

#206

Post by User23 »

skissane wrote: post #41
TulliusCicero wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is not the case, and all Stallman is saying, is that this is bad for us. Right, but to most people, that's still an extreme position. Because again, like 99.99% of games are non-free, and especially the way he phrased it is gonna come across as a crank. Stallman strikes me very much as the kind of person who communicates poorly, in an inflammatory way, and gives zero shits how much this bothers anyone else. Wh…

Aren't most activist movements led – to a great extent – by people who take rather maximalist positions? This is true in areas which have nothing to do with free software. In a way, it is a form of society-wide bargaining. Ask for everything, get something. Ask for something, get nothing. Start big, end up small; start small, end up nowhere.

Yes. See Taleb’s concept of the most intolerant minority getting their way.

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

#207

Post by betwixthewires »

okareaman wrote: post #169

From what I can tell, RMS asserts we have the right to inspect the source code of the software that runs on our machines. What is the source of this right? Is it a universal human right? A self-evident inalienable right? Did RMS want to hack a printer one day and found he couldn't so he made up a right for us? Why are people who ship closed software evil? For someone who goes around moralizing and judging others, RMS…

Well, the reasoning is that the machine is our property, our resources are used to run it, so we should be able to decide what runs on it. We can, of course, waive that right on a per case basis and run proprietary software, but we shouldn't, or at least we should be wary of it and avoid normalizing it.

If you decide you will not run any software on your machine who's source is unavailable to you, that is your right. It's your property.

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

#208

Post by GoblinSlayer »

xiphias2 wrote: post #59

,, Macintoshes are moving towards being jails, like the iMonsters. It's getting harder for users to install even their own programs to run them.'' I feel this all the time, especially on my iPad Pro: I'm buying much more idevices than before, because I don't like the direction Windows has taken, and Apple gets always the newest TSMC slots (I buy the newest products from TSMC, they just happen to be made together with…

Reminds me of "I, robot": to provide public safety, just throw everyone in jail.

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

#209

Post by krick »

phs318u wrote: post #176
malthuswaswrong wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Within reason of course, nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene. Who decides what's reasonable? Who decides what constitutes a "Nazi" or a "Pedophile"? If someone tries to suggest that convicting a 14 year old girl as a sex offender for having nude photos of herself on her phone is preposterous that person can be effectively silenced by labeling them as a pedophile. "But t…

> The only logical course of action is to allow all speech and let the reader discern for themselves. The assumption being that most readers are discerning. Kind of reminds of the adage about markets working based on rational actors. In both situations, reality would like a word.

No, there's no such assumption. In fact, by virtue of ignoring the main point of his, your post is an example "of the adage about markets working based on rational actors", which doesn't go well with reality.

And the point is: "Who decides what's reasonable?" You? Well, yeah, I hope you do for yourself. But I don't want you to dare to even try to decide that for me. Nothing personal, of course: there's no single person on the planet I would trust to do that for me.

In other words, it's not about assuming anything about the most readers (it is rather about NOT assuming anything about them). And, in fact, I don't even expect any good outcome "for the most of readers". I am pretty positive most people will find a way to fuck themselves no matter what you do. The only assertion here is that it will be worse for everyone if you TRY to do something about it. I mean, it should be pretty obvious thing to say, as much as people like to tell stories about "how terrible it was when Stalin was in charge" — it is best for everyone if there's no individual or group of people who can enforce their ideas of what is right on the others.

(BTW, I don't believe that this is really avoidable too. It happes one way or the other. The only thing that makes me say anything about this, is that this is just scary that half of the society today doesn't even understand that they SHOULD TRY to prevent anyone from being able to control what they say or think. They WANT to be controlled. They WANT to fuck themselves and everyone around them.)

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

#210

Post by assttoasstmgr »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #155

Around the 8 and 9 min mark RMS talks about old hardware losing software support, like 32 bit systems. I am a kernel developer and the kernel removes code for a lot of older systems all the time (often lesser known 32bit ARM systems). Phoronix reported that 5.18 removed the Andes NDS32 CPU arch code. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-51... The reason they do this is because a lot of these syst…

There were a large number of Intel Atom tablets and laptops manufactured less than a decade ago that were hobbled with I think a 32-bit UEFI which could only boot a 32-bit OS. I own two of these devices myself so they are not uncommon.
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