Stallman is becoming quite increasingly peculiar. Not really interested in his talks. His software was great but his ideology (and generally that of FSF) is probably a kind of out of touch with the reality.
Reasons not to use Facebook
361–370 of 376 posts
Re: Reasons not to use Facebook
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Without DRM e-readers e-books would never exists That is a strawman. Three are certsinly booksellers who never went near DRM and argue strongly against DRM. Exempel: http://www.baenebooks.com
No, singling out one sentence from my answer and attacking it is a strawman. But ok, to correct myself: without DRM ebooks would never exists at this scale and people would never buy ebooks readers at this scale and read ebooks at this scale . Ten years ago ebook reader was a niche, used only by geeks. Today, thanks to aggressive Amazon pricing and (DRM-ed) ebooks, it's a common item. And popularity of ebook readers…
Agree, that is a better argument. But I think devices such as the iPad would have been released regardless of whether it contained iBooks with DRM or not. Answering your question, I think that Stallman is partially right, but not always, but then who is?
Re: Reasons not to use Facebook
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
You said that your editor is free software, meaning that no one made money on you using it. I'm not sure how this refutes the point about a "_viable_ company." (Given that viable necessarily includes making money.)
RedHat is a very _viable_ company that uses and writes free software for example.
I wasn't claiming that viable companies can't use or produce free software. I was just claiming that the fact that one can use a free editor to write some code has nothing to do with whether the company producing the editor is viable.
Re: Reasons not to use Facebook
#364If you haven't watched it yet, I can highly recommend the documentary 'citizenfour', which is about the meetings between Snowden and Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen MacAskill.
Free to watch here:
Re: Reasons not to use Facebook
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not a valid way of judging RMS or his claims. He isn't complaining about the concept of a technology that allows people to talk while on the go. Rather, he is complaining about the specific implementation of mobile tech with which we're currently saddled. To answer seriously, however, the largest effect of reduced cell phone use would be that automobiles would be much safer, for their passengers and for every…
More to the point, if people - en masse - refused to use cellphones that tracked you, someone would be selling cellphones that don't. And then RMS would presumably carry a cellphone.
Someone did(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30...). He ended up in jail on trumped up charges.
Re: Reasons not to use Facebook
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another great example would be the example of stallman "In the future, debuggers will be illegal to use" and a recent court case where a person was sent to jail for accessing a website with a spoofed user agent using wget.
If you're talking about weev, I can not think of a more disingenuous way of describing what he was sent to jail for. Otherwise, I can't find what you're talking about with a simple search. I am completely unsure how you went from a prediction that hasn't come true to an unrelated computer crime.
There was a court case, where the argument was that "as spoofing a useragent is not a common use case that a normal computer user could do, it has to be considered criminal activity in itself". This is what I was referring to.
Re: Reasons not to use Facebook
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entire open source movement is a disproof of stallman's position from that period. Open Source movement did not happen in vacuum. It was a direct followup to 'Free Software' movement. He has repeatedly claimed that companies won't contribute to open source, and so you have to force them to with the GNU license, and yet history has disproven this one. You do know that the Linux Kernel, among the most important sof…
> Open Source movement did not happen in vacuum. It was a direct followup to 'Free Software' movement. I was there, buddy. The Open Source movement existed before GNU. The homebrew computer club and magazines and BBSes of the day all involved people sharing their source code with each other without a license in most cases, or explicitly in the public domain. The FSF GNU license was a reaction to this, to try and shut…
I was there too, and what you're saying is false almost from beginning to end, with only a few tidbits of truth mixed in to make it plausible.
Yes, of course lots of people were sharing their code before GNU. I mean, that's why SHARE was founded, and why it was called SHARE, back in 1955. The novelty was the proprietary software movement, with moves like IBM ceasing to ship source code, Micro-Soft claiming a copyright on their BASIC implementation, and James Gosling implicitly threatening to sue Stallman for using code from Gosmacs ("the great Emacs copyright debate"), which he'd previously shared without any explicit license.
That's what the FSF was a reaction to and an attempt to shut down — not people sharing software without a license, but the attempts of pirates like Gosling and Gates to privatize it. Richard totally deserves credit for starting a movement to preserve what had previously just been the normal way that people did things, once it came under attack.
But none of this was "Open Source", which is a marketing term for free software that Chris Peterson suggested at a meeting on February 3, 1998. (I wasn't there, but I know a bunch of people who were.) In a non-public but widely Cced email within the next few days, Eric Raymond tried to recruit all the prominent free software developers to the new campaign; Stallman and Deutsch, as I recall, refused in fairly strong terms.
Re: Reasons not to use Facebook
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entire open source movement is a disproof of stallman's position from that period. Open Source movement did not happen in vacuum. It was a direct followup to 'Free Software' movement. He has repeatedly claimed that companies won't contribute to open source, and so you have to force them to with the GNU license, and yet history has disproven this one. You do know that the Linux Kernel, among the most important sof…
BSD doesn't owe any of its origination to GNU, and it is impossible to say what it would look like if GNU never happened. (The point being, capital letter Open Source as a movement owes something to Free Software, the notion of sharing liberally licensed source code does not)
Actually, Keith Bostic has gone on record saying that the reason he started trying to strip out the AT&T bits from the BSD kernel was because he was inspired by GNU, and wanted to see if the BSD kernel could work as a kernel for GNU. Maybe in Open Sources, I don't remember.
Re: Reasons not to use Facebook
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
BSD doesn't owe any of its origination to GNU, and it is impossible to say what it would look like if GNU never happened. (The point being, capital letter Open Source as a movement owes something to Free Software, the notion of sharing liberally licensed source code does not)
Actually, Keith Bostic has gone on record saying that the reason he started trying to strip out the AT&T bits from the BSD kernel was because he was inspired by GNU, and wanted to see if the BSD kernel could work as a kernel for GNU. Maybe in Open Sources , I don't remember.
I wrote the comment thinking that the BSD releases in the early 1980s had been released under the 'BSD License', I even did some amount of checking (I can't remember what evidence in particular made me decide to post). I see from looking more carefully this time around that the ~1980 license from Berkeley was not the same thing as the later one.
Re: Reasons not to use Facebook
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Of course phones were used to track people 10 years ago. And it wasn't even a secret. Location-based services were the hot shit back then for mobile carriers (at least in Europe). Bullshit; I remember trying to instill the same point to techies 7 years ago and a majority of technically competent people would say that, while possible, is not certain . Hindsight is 20-20.
It is a radio that ids itself with local towers. How would you build a cellphone that you could not track easily?
It could use an ephemeral device ID and make its paging-channel connection back to its home network via a Tor-like mix network. I know that sounds like goofy sci-fi talk, but you can actually do this today with free software on Wi-Fi: run TCP-only Mumble over Tor to connect to your Mumble server, and periodically generate a new random MAC address (like Apple’s new phones do) and set up a new Tor circuit.
What’s left is how to pay for the Wi-Fi access anonymously, if people aren’t willing to share it with you for free. If your wireless network access is all done through a centralized company, like a cellphone carrier, you could easily use one of the Chaumian centralized-issuer digital cash schemes from the 1990s: the “bank” is your cellphone company, and they sign a “blinded” form of a bunch of “coins”, which you later sign over to wireless base stations in exchange for bandwidth. The protocol assures that the base station can confirm that the coin hasn’t been double-spent and that it’s properly signed by the bank, but the base station and bank together cannot figure out which coin it was.