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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

#221

,, 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.

They're soft...

Had they been looking into definitively getting rid of un happiness, they would have killed everyone ASAP.

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

#222

> 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…

> without [anticheat], there's a client-side arms race against the server code

This exists with anticheat, too.

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

#223

> 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.

It's wild to me that game developers have determined it's easier to write malwate to prevent cheating than just make server side code robust enough to not validate code that could be a cheat...

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Belaboring the point: you should have SOME working understanding of the physics of your homes use of energy. You should be able to fix your home when something’s wrong with it, so long as it’s not something catastrophically wrong that requires professional help (such as the fire brigade).

The point: computers are different from everything else. Pre-writing man is a fundamentally different character to literate, historical man. (I do believe there’s an Egyptian dialogue on the matter.) And in the same manner, computing man is a fundamentally different character from pre-computing man. However, most people, despite their USE of computers, cannot really compute, because they can only get their computers to do what other people have told them to do, and not what they themselves have told their computers to do. In other words, to them the computer is an appliance. Now, not everyone can read Ulysses, or Durants history, and I don’t think it would be fair to expect that of people. But most people can read, and they can read the whole book if they choose. The qualitative shift of computational man finds that what he has read can be made into action, simply by it having been written, yet this does not hold true for a person who is handed Durants history of the world, or Livy’s history of Rome (before having been taught Latin, even!) and being told, you have knowledge, even though you can’t get through it all.

You start people with shorter books. Even picture books. You start them with simpler computers, with simpler software, and then more complex computers which do more complex things. And even in the professional world, of fully literate adults, you only break out the really complicated stuff for the really complicated things.

Software should be comprehensible, because it is meant to be comprehensible, it is not just execution but elocution, and is the explanation of its own intent.

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

#225
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stallman has a vision that you and I should be typing our comments and playing our games from machines that are under our control, i.e., whereby we can inspect and modify all of the code that is running on them. That is not the case, and all Stallman is saying, is that this is bad for us. The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground. I don't think Stallman woul…

> 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…

To most people in France in 1789 it was an extreme position to take power and shortly after put Louis XVI to the guillotine but two-something centuries after most are thankful this happened

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

#226

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.

The 32 bit UEFI actually could be used to boot a 64 bit OS image. Well, you could make it work.

Source: https://liliputing.com/2015/07/install-ubuntu-14-04-lts-on-t...

A friend of mine had one of those laptops and I wanted to install Linux on it. It took me a few weeks for other reasons (those M.2 drives were the worst), but thanks to the work of Ian Morrison, it was possible.

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

#227
post #9

> 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. [[Citation Needed]]. Trying to play a multiplayer game that doesn't implement effective anticheat is miserable. The arms race is unfortunate but 100% understandable, and I wouldn't play any game that doesn't implement some form of it.

This is due to how multiplayer in modern games is orchestrated.

In the old days, you would play multiplayer with your friends and their friends on a private server or some kind of community server where cheaters could quickly be recognized and banned by the admins. Now this communal way of playing online games is largely gone and replaced by match making which makes multiplayer basically the same as playing against cleverer bots.

Match making is more convenient, especially for lone players, and I don't think the change was done out of malice. Still, it feels like something was lost with the disappearance of private or semi-private community servers, easy policing of cheaters being one of those things.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's wild to me that game developers have determined it's easier to write malwate to prevent cheating than just make server side code robust enough to not validate code that could be a cheat...

There are some cheats like wallhacks, trigger bot, fake lag, backtrack, etc that aren't really possible to catch with just server side checks.

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He bought both of those companies. It's a bit disingenuous to say he built them.

I buy a broken down camaro. The windshield is gone. The sheetmetal is rusted. The frame is bent. The motor needs rebuilt. I patch/replace the sheetmetal, and paint it. I straighten the frame. I rebuild the motor, and put a supercharger on it to boot. It’s a pretty nice little hot rod, and it was busted before. But you tell me, did I buy it or build it?

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

#230
> Now, more free games? It doesn't satisfy an urgent practical need, obviously... But the crucial thing is, free ones might make it easier for some people to say, 'Let's move off this non-free thing, and play a game that is free. So we can have the same pleasure, but without paying freedom as the price.'“

i'm sorry but i just can't read this without laughing. what does stallman think gamers are like?

i can only imagine the average teenage gamer trying to get their friends to stop playing virtually every game on the market and instead play some obscure game and trying to teach them how to install gcc and git to get it running

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