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Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

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Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#121

Post by miramba »

walteweiss wrote: post #51
H8crilA wrote: post #33

What's cool about RMS is that he perfectly foresaw many decades ago the world that we live in today: your car or smart fridge refusing actions because its software says so. And you cannot change the bloody software! I cringe every time I see encrypted firmware running in trusted execution environment, DRM, DLCs for fucking physical products, websites or apps that scam you into signing up or giving up some other freed…

This very morning, my wife performed reset of cache/cookies from our family’s perfectly fine iPad 3 (yeah, the one from 2012, 11 years old). The iPad is our kitchen TV, it shows either some content from VLC (works perfectly fine, kudos to the devs) or some YouTube from Safari (the AppStore’s app support is long gone, web app still works quite well, even considering it was updated recently). Today I spent my morning t…

Same here - my iPad 3 was used by me and then 2 children growing up. It's still working perfectly fine and has even decent battery life. But the app store shows a blank page, and even if it wasn't, all recent apps have a higher minimum iOS version (edit: because recent versions of Xcode will only build against recent iOS versions). And Apple is actively removing apps from the app store that haven't been updated in a while. So the hardware is still fine, but there is no software available anymore and no way to sideload.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#122

Post by a-french-anon »

missingET wrote: post #66
_cenw wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought the advocacy was fundamentally correct, but way too distanced from achievable and realistic compromises within a system that wants profit over everything. The only real path would've been through legislation, and now we're back to setting your expectations to realistic.

Although I never find myself agreeing fully with them, ideological absolutists who refuse compromise are actually useful as some kind of anchors to the Overton window. They are not the ones ending up negotiating the actual realistic solutions but their activism helps shifting the equilibrium. If your side of the argument is all compromise-makers trying to meet people halfway you often end up giving up more than you’r…

Not when the power balance is this big. Against big tech who has the resources to wear any conciliating opposition down, you think you're just compromising like a "mature adult", until the next time, where you're forced to compromise on your compromise and so on.

Give them an inch and they'll take (or more precisely, they took) a mile.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#123

Post by dnh44 »

maurice2k wrote: post #101
dale_glass wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pity is that while he was remarkably prescient, he seems to have stopped adapting decades ago. GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Prett…

That's exactly what I think about RMS, FSF and GNU. I'm mostly working with younger people (like 20-30 years old) and well, they don't really know what GNU or the FSF is. As a Linux user I'm using GNU software all day but for most people it's just "linux command line tools". It's fine and if they do the job, well done! But this doesn't help the FSF or the GNU project. A lot of these tools have pretty good documentati…

I understand your sentiment and I agree with you, but at the same time if we, as a community and as a society, are incapable of caring about the principles and philosophy behind free software because the websites aren't cool enough, then we (as a community or society) will ultimately deserve whatever dystopian fate awaits us.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#124

Post by loup-vaillant »

kaba0 wrote: post #61
minebreaker wrote: post #24

He is the one who we need now , in the era of saas/cloud run by big tech. So sad.

I do hope he gets better, but no, not at all do we “need” him. His accomplishments are way overblown and due to his shitty personality he probably alienated more contributors than whatever actual positives he has ever made.

There’s the man, and there’s the symbol and ideas. We need the symbol and ideas.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#126

Post by a-french-anon »

HYTjfZKV96gUpz wrote: post #60
globular-toast wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, he succeeded in at least giving everyone the choice. I happily run entirely free software on my computers. But yes, it needs legislation to switch off copyright for software and make computing a human right.

> I happily run entirely free software on my computers You do? No graphics card? No (good) games? No firmware? And if so, how much of a premium did you pay for the lack of scale from your hardware vendor alone?

>No (good) games

Quake 3 is still free, you know.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#127

Post by rakoo »

dale_glass wrote: post #52
H8crilA wrote: post #33

What's cool about RMS is that he perfectly foresaw many decades ago the world that we live in today: your car or smart fridge refusing actions because its software says so. And you cannot change the bloody software! I cringe every time I see encrypted firmware running in trusted execution environment, DRM, DLCs for fucking physical products, websites or apps that scam you into signing up or giving up some other freed…

The pity is that while he was remarkably prescient, he seems to have stopped adapting decades ago. GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Prett…

> The FSF is clearly not reaching the people it needs to reach.

The FSF has been talking to users and to devs for decades, but unfortunately devs went from being users that had no problem sharing their progress to business people who thought that restricting access for personal, individual gain at the expense of the entire society of today and tomorrow is somehow "better", "more free", because who knows, maybe I'll be the next Bill Gates ?

I see the catastrophic state we are in today as the result of non-copyleft, of "Open Source" as opposed to "Libre Software", of the depolitization of what it means to take from the commons and give back to the commons, of what society means whether we see it as a sum of perfectly rational individuals with no money problems or as a group of interdependent agents. The only reason Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and other big platforms could start up and be where they are today is because they could take a bunch of existing tools in the commons and not share back, to build their own fortune and control prison.

The FSF has known this for decades, and has talked about it at large, but no, developers don't want to listen. How do you fight greediness and individualism ? The issue runs deeper than software licenses, or even software.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#128

Post by nvy »

gitanovic wrote: post #98
nvy wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's obvious that the implicit question is: Why is the FSF so bad at spreading their gospel? They're terrible at it, Youtube or not.

I think that FSF in a very romantic sense, is fighting a lost battle. The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that.

>The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that.

Perhaps if the FSF wasn't so abysmal at advocacy, more people would care about software freedom. It's very easy to throw one's hands up and say "nobody cares!" but I think the FSF, and many Free Software enthusiasts, are not ready for the required level of introspection to really examine their approach and why it's not working.

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