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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]

#131

Post by adev_ »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #94
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…

I recently did a Free Software Day event and old timers from FSF showed up. It was great, but the ecosystem is quickly deteriorating and younger people are born in walled gardens. The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security. AI models mostly have crappy licenses that restrict usage. The worst culprit is HuggingFace with Stable Diffusion and OpenRail which is anything but open. It'…

> The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security.

Can you develop a bit on that ?

The EU is one of the rare large public institution on Mastodon currently.

Also one of the rare institution to sue properly the GAFAMs successfully when they on-purpose try to fuck user around with carefully designed locked-in solution (Hello Internet Explorer, Safari and App store).

Like every large political institution, it is an hydra with many yeads. Nothing in the EU is entirely clean. But I would rank then more in favor of OSS than against.

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

#132

Post by erik_seaberg »

usr1106 wrote: post #89
riffraff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNU existed without a kernel for a while, RMS did not stop using computers. If there is no free alternative you use what you can.

For a while? Wasn't GNU Hurd supposed to be the kernel? Just vague memories, didn't read up on it right now. Still not even close to ready. Linux is not a GNU project. But it's free software, so I suppose RMS could use it without major pain. Although he'd probably prefer Linux to use GPLv3.

GNU started with rewriting the Unix userland (especially GCC) years before announcing the Hurd effort. I think they developed and tested on BSD and SunOS, and later Linux (because they had nearly written the first distro, only without a kernel).

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

#133

Post by azangru »

fury999io wrote: post #6
throwaway81523 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The audio is really terrible, but he says that the cancer is being managed and that he will be around for many more years. I am glad to hear that. Before that, he talks about covid and long covid. But I couldn't tell if he says that he has long covid now. I know that he was being pretty careful to avoid covid, to the extent that's possible while travelling on planes as much as he does. I had some discussions with him…

No he don't have beards anymore https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmemes/comments/16ts15z/stallma...

A completely different person. Wow.

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

#134

Post by tjpnz »

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…

And the Four Freedoms are perhaps even more relevant today. I would urge anyone to read them again now.

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

#135

Post by sspiff »

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…

I recommend against the Nexus 7. We used it for some 10 years, mostly with Lineage OS, as a video player for our kids.

We had two, and both batteries are dead. No longer charging at all.

Additionally, even before the batteries went, video playback was far from great at the end.

I used NewPipe for youtube videos and VLC for downloads. And while once playing, it worked fine enough, the UI interactions were frustrating because of lacking responsiveness, and the 7 inch thick bezelled form factor made it hard to watch anything without holding the device in front of you.

We've since switched to a couple of cheap 10" tablets and they provide a much nicer experience.

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

#136

Post by rakoo »

loxdalen wrote: post #69
minebreaker wrote: post #24

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

Does he really turn against SaaS/Cloud? Software that doesn't run on your computer doesn't necessarily need to be in your control, right? As long as the clients are free.

The FSF has created the AGPL 16 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_Lice...), so it's not like they didn't see the turn that software was going into. But it was already a losing battle, because every developer wants to think they might become millionaire and won't use it.

Whether the software runs on my computer or not, if I am the user, I must be in control.

Whether the meal is prepared in my kitchen or not, if I am going to eat it, I must be in control.

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

#137

Post by [deleted] »

nvy wrote: post #88
blueflow wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And gcc and grub and potentially some other 10 libraries that everybody is still using! > Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?

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.

[deleted]

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

#138

Post by nvy »

rakoo wrote: post #127
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…

> 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 b…

Perhaps if the FSF had actual professionals running communications, people who persuade other people for a living, the FSF's message would actually get through to people.

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

#139

Post by mrtksn »

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…

It's just business though. It has nothing to do with the software, the software is just a tool to enforce a business model.

A car that already has the hardware but requires payment to enable that by software is exactly the same thing as paying for a video game: The video game is already created and uploaded on the servers but software requires payment to let you download and play it. There are numerous other examples like game consoles sold at loss, printers sold less than the cost, search engines or mail services provided for free, free hosting etc. - all investing huge sums on creating the product in hope to recoup that and make profit by collecting small fees later and they need their products locked down to be able to do this.

The whole thing revolves around collecting small payments for a the very large capital investment that is required to create the product in first place. Since the small payments are collected post-development, someone has to risk their large capital for this to happen, they also expect compensation and guarantees that the small payments will arrive if the product is developed successfully.

The software is locked down only because they want to enforce that business model. You can refuse to participate in that but ultimately, those who can invest large amount of money end up making the much better products.

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

#140

Post by hutzlibu »

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.

They are also a bunch of geeks terrible at communicating with normal people.

"Knights for hot ladies", "eating skin parts of own feet on video", "..."

And this is about the front face, so what do you expect?

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