How Stallman changed the world:
" I decided that rather than spend my time trying to pursue funds, I ought to spend it writing code."
BYTE Interview With Richard Stallman (1986)
21–30 of 41 posts
Re: BYTE Interview With Richard Stallman (1986)
#22I sometimes feel like the world is moving away from the FSF principals more then it is moving towards it. Nobody seems to be in control of their own devices, software and data anymore. Data is stored in the cloud, applications are remotely removed from you're IPhone, you have to log in to play offline games, phones send all sorts off personal data to third parties. This is all happening in a time where free software…
> Nobody seems to be in control of their own devices,
> software and data anymore.
Re: BYTE Interview With Richard Stallman (1986)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sort of technology you're talking about is in its very, very early infancy. We've no idea how the landscape is going to look 20 years from now. I don't think there's any reason to be pessimistic about the future. We have rapidly improving, free, desktop, tablet and phone operating systems and an open web. I can't wait to see the impact that Mozillas new mobile OS they're releasing in the first quarter of next yea…
The reason for not being optimistic is that lots of people are touting UEFI locked bootloaders as a step in the right direction (under the excuse of security) while most of the rest will look at those crippled subsidized Win8 ARM tablets and say "look! shiny!". Sadly, "Idiocracy" is a prophetic movie...
I see idiocracy only in failure to understand, that "common people" have different priorities form you, nerds. And for them security is priority. "UEFI locked bootloaders" for them is just meaningless phrase and they couldn't care less about that.
How stupid is to think, that if you are computer nerd the whole world should be to? Have you seen doctors moaning about world becoming idiocracy just because not everyone knows latin names for every part of their body?
Re: BYTE Interview With Richard Stallman (1986)
#24BYTE: What are you going to do when you are done with the GNU system? Stallman: I'm not sure. Sometimes I think that what I'll go on to do is the same thing in other areas of software. He's 60 this year. He was crying on a staircase this year in Spain. Someone stole his laptop.
whoa. I wasn't, uhm, jeez. Why do you assume I was trying to insult him.
Re: BYTE Interview With Richard Stallman (1986)
#25BYTE: What are you going to do when you are done with the GNU system? Stallman: I'm not sure. Sometimes I think that what I'll go on to do is the same thing in other areas of software. He's 60 this year. He was crying on a staircase this year in Spain. Someone stole his laptop.
Is this an attempt at mockery? Please, let me be the next 60-year-old with my code powering half of the planet, a philosophy thirty years ahead of its time, touring the world, with my laptop stolen en route to my next talk.
You say "philosophy thirty years ahead of its time" I say philosophy founded on wrong assumptions.
Re: BYTE Interview With Richard Stallman (1986)
#26There were all kinds of interesting articles in BYTE. I remember finding a whole box of them when I was still in grade school - tossed out by the public library - and I spent the summer reading and memorizing them. Somehow I missed this interview until now. Cheers, Stallman!
I spent summers with my dad who was an instructor at a large techincal college. The hot Texas afternoons were spent reading Byte and designing computers looked very much like Steve Ciarcia's.
Re: BYTE Interview With Richard Stallman (1986)
#27People forget this too: Stallman: "I have nearly finished the optimizing C compiler and all the other software that is needed for running C programs. This includes a source-level debugger that has many features that the other source-level debuggers on Unix don't have." He refers to gcc and gdb: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman "Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, inclu…
Who forgets that? This is pretty well known.
Re: BYTE Interview With Richard Stallman (1986)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sort of technology you're talking about is in its very, very early infancy. We've no idea how the landscape is going to look 20 years from now. I don't think there's any reason to be pessimistic about the future. We have rapidly improving, free, desktop, tablet and phone operating systems and an open web. I can't wait to see the impact that Mozillas new mobile OS they're releasing in the first quarter of next yea…
The reason for not being optimistic is that lots of people are touting UEFI locked bootloaders as a step in the right direction (under the excuse of security) while most of the rest will look at those crippled subsidized Win8 ARM tablets and say "look! shiny!". Sadly, "Idiocracy" is a prophetic movie...
Locked down devices will always exist in some form. Once you accept that fact, the next best thing would be for there to be plenty of open alternatives. I'm optimistic that the number and quality of free alternatives is improving and will continue to improve.
Re: BYTE Interview With Richard Stallman (1986)
#29Wow. I was one year old when this was published. Stallman's combination of sort-of-maddeningly-precise nerdspeak and revolutionary zeal has always made me cock my head and listen--if not to every word, then at least to some of his more apt analogies: "I think it is important to say that information is different from material objects like cars and loaves of bread because people can copy it and share it on their own an…
I was in the military and at university when this was published. In '86 I had been using computers for several years, since I had relatives (father and two uncles) that had jobs that exposed me to almost all the computing platforms of the day. The very small sub-set of geeks that I hung around with "knew" then that there was great opportunity for open source, even though there was no such term for it then. We shared all software, both the commercial and the public domain. We built computers from kits and home-etched circuit boards. Nobody cared what computer you had, having one and sharing it with like minds was the norm. When the internet and OSS came along, we were already there.
Re: BYTE Interview With Richard Stallman (1986)
#30I sometimes feel like the world is moving away from the FSF principals more then it is moving towards it. Nobody seems to be in control of their own devices, software and data anymore. Data is stored in the cloud, applications are remotely removed from you're IPhone, you have to log in to play offline games, phones send all sorts off personal data to third parties. This is all happening in a time where free software…
> Nobody seems to be in control of their own devices, > software and data anymore. Because not many want this kind of control? Many just want to have stuff that they can just take and use instead of controlling every aspect of it.
Until they can't use it anymore, because the provider suddenly decided you lost the rights[1].
[1]: http://boingboing.net/2009/07/17/amazon-zaps-purchase.html