"Hey, I'm a geek; it's my job to make things difficult for myself."
Richard Stallman's Computer Setup
31–40 of 262 posts
Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup
#32The Lemote link was broken when I was reading the article. This may be the updated link?
http://www.lemote.com/en/products/Notebook/2010/0310/112.htm...
Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup
#33Well, not the best way to expand your horizon. When he would use things like the iPad from time to time, he would understand that convenience is the biggest threat to open source. Nobody cares how free Stallman's device really is. When he would speak for better open source devices, he would actually make progress. Right now is Shuttleworth advancing the free software movement to be accessible for everyone. Reminds me…
Open source software and free software are two different things, and Stallman is an advocate for the latter (as well as the former). I think that's an important point, and one which people tend to miss.
Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup
#34Well, not the best way to expand your horizon. When he would use things like the iPad from time to time, he would understand that convenience is the biggest threat to open source. Nobody cares how free Stallman's device really is. When he would speak for better open source devices, he would actually make progress. Right now is Shuttleworth advancing the free software movement to be accessible for everyone. Reminds me…
Google and Facebook would never exist the way they do today without the free software movement. Both of them rely on a huge stack of open-source technology. Stallman's ideas are what makes it possible for a college kid to run a web startup today essentially for free.
But... (open source != FSF)
Stallman's ideas are what makes it possible for a college kid to run a web
startup today essentially for free.
I submitted this link a while back that has a great discussion about what people think of GPS's limitations: 'Why you should use a BSD style license for your Open Source Project' http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3402346
Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup
#35I am curious to know what cloud services he uses if any. I'm researching alternatives to proprietary/hosted software for some of my important data so I can avoid the privacy and security issues. Some of the services I would like to replace are GMail/Calendar/Contacts, Lastpass, RescueTime. Any suggestions?
Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup
#36Well, not the best way to expand your horizon. When he would use things like the iPad from time to time, he would understand that convenience is the biggest threat to open source. Nobody cares how free Stallman's device really is. When he would speak for better open source devices, he would actually make progress. Right now is Shuttleworth advancing the free software movement to be accessible for everyone. Reminds me…
Google and Facebook would never exist the way they do today without the free software movement. Both of them rely on a huge stack of open-source technology. Stallman's ideas are what makes it possible for a college kid to run a web startup today essentially for free.
As the FSF would point out, the free software movement is different from open source. If there was no free software movement, or a prohibition on GPL'ed software, then Google could have used other open source tools (eg, *BSD) instead.
One serious concern in the FSF seems to be that a large, programmer-centric company like Google could rewrite most free software, should the license not be compatible with the business model. Eg, the recent brouhaha on a non-GPL replacement for BusyBox and a comment about Google's goal of "reducing the amount of GPL software in user-space for Android devices."
Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google and Facebook would never exist the way they do today without the free software movement. Both of them rely on a huge stack of open-source technology. Stallman's ideas are what makes it possible for a college kid to run a web startup today essentially for free.
But... (open source != FSF) Stallman's ideas are what makes it possible for a college kid to run a web startup today essentially for free. With lots and lots of limitations the GPL license imposes on him... I think the world would be a better place with less GPL and more BSD/Apache/... - He did great things, but many of his ideas are old and frankly, ridiculous. I submitted this link a while back that has a great dis…
What limitations does the GPL license place on a web startup? AGPL, yes, but GPL?
Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup
#38I am curious to know what cloud services he uses if any. I'm researching alternatives to proprietary/hosted software for some of my important data so I can avoid the privacy and security issues. Some of the services I would like to replace are GMail/Calendar/Contacts, Lastpass, RescueTime. Any suggestions?
I don't think he uses any, particularly since he is only connected to the internet 2-3 times a day.
He uses Emacs for all his mail and, presumably, contact management. Last I knew, he was still using RMail, not even something newer like Gnus.
Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup
#39Hey! That might be the set up I was looking for in order to hack on my clojure project during a 14 hours flight I will be taking in couple of months.
At least it's not gonna take battery.
Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Practically? No. From the ultra-geek perspective? Yes.
What sort of ultra-geek uses that sort of setup? The current generation of that notebook has a processor that runs at less than 1GHz! The only reason he gets away with it is that he mostly does mail on emacs from console. It's too minimalist for any present day software development work
If by "any present day work" you mean "web development," then maybe I buy your point.
I know plenty of climate science and financial programmers who spend 100% of their development time SSHed somewhere else, or who write reporting code using a minimal test case set of data that runs in 1s on their (slow, old) machine. For these people a slow, old machine is often totally acceptable - it doesn't take much horsepower to SSH (or even to run emacs and perl locally).