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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]

#141

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…

> but for most people it's just "linux command line tools"

the complaint that stallman had for the name `linux` instead of his preferred `GNU/Linux` had this consequence because the people who own linux chose not to adopt his preferred branding.

Branding and marketing is really important, no matter what the field is. Especially for consumers who tend to be clueless most of the time about the underlying technologies. It's why Intel's genius is not only in processor design, but the fact that they foresaw the issue, and started marketing the "Intel Inside"(tm) branding, which put them on the table from a consumer perspective.

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

#142
post #119
post #108

This is so unfortunate. Cancer used to be something I would just hear other people getting until my Dad got it. The I understood that it was very real and that I can also be a victim. Do you guys know of any ways to reduce your risks of getting cancer? I know not smoking tobacco works. What foods, bad habits should one avoid. What other habits can reduce cancer risks? Are there any prophylactic techniques?

Avoid sugar, alcohol, bacon, and exercise daily?

This is great advice.

Remember, though. You can still get it, even if you do all that. Having cancer is not a moral failure. Even kids may get it.

Realizing, not in a philosophical way, one way way or another, that we will die, is something that changes you. Fewer reasons to accumulate fame and money. More reasons to make yourself happy in this life.

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

#143
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…

I actually attribute success of free software & linux to RMS. IMO he deserves a lot more credit than he gets for his work on gcc/egcs. it is foundational that we have access to a compiler that can produce user created executable otherwise entire software industry would look very different. the likes of MS & Apple would have us wrapped up in licencing agreements & TOSes to stifle innovation at a basic choke-point. if…

I think he's credited with it fine, he's always mentioned as one of the if not the founding father of open source (albeit with less emphasis on the license debacles).

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

#144
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prepa…

AGPL is also the license you should use if you don't want big corporations to use your software. Big Tech even avoids GPL-3 and stick to GPL-2 from what I have noticed.

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

#145

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?

> And gcc and grub and potentially some other 10 libraries that everybody is still using! Stallman almost screwed up gcc, I think multiple times. GRUB at this point can be safely declared obsolete in the age of EFI. But yes, GCC is very nice. > You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform? If only to direct people to content hosted elsewhere, but yes.

> GRUB at this point can be safely declared obsolete in the age of EFI.

Normally you have GRUB being launched from EFI to avoid dealing with the legacy parts of EFI directly.

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

#146
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…

Don't buy Nexus 7. Or if you do, find a new one and don't update. Google virtually bricked them with an update to a newer android version. Maybe you can still find posts of people complaining and trying to fix it. I know I won't ever buy hardware from Google after that.

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

#147
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 wish I could install an up to date version of (real) Firefox on the iPad 2 I inherited and for which updates stopped in 2016. This alone would make it massively more useful. Today it mostly serves displaying music sheets, it's fine as a PDF viewer (although there's nothing to prevent the screen from going off too soon, which is incredibly dumb and annoying).

Even better, I would very much like installing some Linux mobile distro on it.

It's limited but perfectly fine hardware with a good screen and impressive battery time. If only the software were any good.

Also:

- Yes, I know there's no sim card in it.

- no, I won't log in to iBooks, this is a freaking PDF viewer for me.

Every restart.

Linux mobile software is flawed by accident. iOS is flawed by decision and I can't rebuild and fix it.

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

#148
post #119
post #108

This is so unfortunate. Cancer used to be something I would just hear other people getting until my Dad got it. The I understood that it was very real and that I can also be a victim. Do you guys know of any ways to reduce your risks of getting cancer? I know not smoking tobacco works. What foods, bad habits should one avoid. What other habits can reduce cancer risks? Are there any prophylactic techniques?

Avoid sugar, alcohol, bacon, and exercise daily?

Sleep well and drink lots of water. Avoid the summer sun at noon, but do get some sun on your body, .. in general, get out of your basement sometimes.

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

#149
post #139
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…

> the software is just a tool to enforce a business model.

And that's what RMS understood better than many others: His software (and by proxy it's license) is just a tool to enforce an ethical business model.

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

#150
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…

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