181–190 of 841 posts
May he recover well, or at least have long enjoyable years ahead.
He has/had arguable/unacceptable behavior, but I believe we strongly owe him. He has built incredible software, defined important stuff and kicked our asses in the right direction.
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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I don't think Stallman has been unreasonable in pointing out that rape definition is "forcing someone to have sex against their will" but, as per victim's deposition, she was instructed to seduce and have sex with Minsky by Epstein. Is it so unreasonable to not call Minsky a rapist? Even the victim herself points out that Minsky was not aware of her being coerced. I have no real sympathy for Stallman besides his FS m…
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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.
Is this a widely held opinion ? It’s doesn’t seem intuitive that sleep and water have an affect on bone cancer or really any type
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It's not a bad question to ask; the FSF has proven in the past to be rather uninterested and unhelpful in helping developers of medical software get their stuff licensed in a way that's either compliant or as close to as [0] being compliant as possible[1]. Instead they opted to chide those wanting help for not being true believers of the cause and told them they'll never compromise. Basically the usual "FSF is only e…
"Medical devices can't be GPL compliant due to the anti-Tivo clause combined with regulations of the FDA that demand that a medical device will always behave the exact same way in the exact same situation." What is the anti-tivo clause?
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Anyway, TiVo wanted to get onto the GPLv2 train like a lot of companies, but they also wanted people owning their devices to be unable to partially modify their firmware even as they distributed their copies of the firmware onto TiVo boxes. They enforced this by having a digital signature check that only allowed TiVos own software to run if the software stack was entirely TiVo. It would also work if the stack was entirely FOSS because only TiVo checked it.
For the sake of clarity; Bradley Kuhn of the SFC iirc investigated the TiVo boxes at the time, the signature checks only were an issue if you partially replaced TiVos software, not if you went the whole hog on replacing it; excercising GPLv2 rights was completely possible and you could turn a TiVo box into a XBMC (these days that's Kodi) box. You just couldn't run TiVos software ever again if you did that thanks to a hardware check.
The FSF took personal offense to this practice and dubbed it "Tivoization", which is a shorthand for "attempting to restrict the ability to install or link with Free Software via hardware DRM". (Which yes, is a modification of what TiVo actually did but really that part is just par for the course with the FSF.)
As a result, the GPLv3 includes an explicit clause that if your software is distributed in a non-code form, that you also must distribute all the information required to be able to modify that distributed software, if there's parts on the device that prevent you from doing so. (Or in plain terms: on restricted hardware, you must give up the signing keys if you preload the hardware with FOSS software.)
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This clause is usually just called the anti-Tivo(ization) clause and it's... pretty damn controversial. It's the main reason why the Kernel is still GPLv2 and not GPLv3; Linus Torvalds personally considers this clause to be a significant enough alteration of the "deal" that FOSS provides for the kernel, so he didn't upgrade (which to be clear would've also been very difficult since the kernel is 2.0-only, not or-later, so he'd require approval from all significant contributors at that point). It's also often cited as the main reason why the GPLv2 has/had strong corporate backing but software licensed under the GPLv3 has always kinda had issues with that; the v2 was seen as more "fair" in that companies were willing to work with its terms, while the v3 was seen as basically forcing them to give up important parts of their trade secrets and made them antsy of working with the FSF in general.
And as mentioned before, in some fields (medical is the one I know of, but I'm pretty sure there's a few others), regulatory compliance is impossible with v3 while very much possible with v2 because of this clause.
I also know that if he reads this, it will be from an Emacs mail client on his dusty ThinkPad in text mode (no X11 or Wayland) by sending a URL to a service he wrote that will email him the Web page back - a clean process without any using any tainted proprietary software.
He only ever exchanged one sentence with me when we had dinner together with other computer scientists two decades ago in Edinburgh: "I don't do smalltalk." - and he didn't mean the programming language. :)
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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.
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> 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.
> If only to direct people to content hosted elsewhere, but yes. Twitter has been in the news for banning accounts for doing that.
And when the ban time comes, milk that for all it's worth.