21–30 of 71 posts
This could lead somewhere, but I think he's shooting himself in the foot by dissing vi and emacs. That's like telling a developer his girlfriend is ugly and then trying to sell him something.
As a programmer and a technophile, computing is the first tool I use for anything. New pin? Just `tr -cd '[:digit:]' I personally value the ability to freely compute. That's why I love my CLI and my text editor.
You can't easily compute on the web because the web was designed for documents (data), not computation. Maybe that's the real problem here.
Not sure if this is satire? Am I understanding correctly that he's advocating moving everything to 'web applications' because somehow it'll be more 'free'?
This article seems terrible and confused and thinks it makes a point about terms by clearly not understanding the point of any of them. I'm pretty sure the author has never read a word Richard Stallman wrote.
If my understanding of history is correct, the GNU utilities were better than the proprietary UNIX ones: they had sensible defaults, or better features, or DWIMmmy behaviour (`find` instead of `find .`, anyone?). GNU basically pulled an embrace, extend, extinguish on proprietary UNIX tools.
If Free Software "fights for the users", then it needs to go to where the users are, and that's the web. It needs to be better in a tangible way, and show how the freedoms it provides can help the users. Avoiding DRM and other user-hostile behaviour is a start, but beyond that I don't know what it should look like with today's web stacks, but I do believe that's the sort of thing we have to deliver.
What he's trying to say is: Look at all the people who are almost exclusively on the web? All the people who will grow up going to the web first. A web built by those who like free software. They will want web solutions, but they won't become free software contributors if they don't have the chance. If we don't build the projects/solutions. So he's asking you to experience how they view the web so you can develop the…
There is a paradox about free software users: Free software users are often talented at making privacy-limiting closed source /(web)?/ applications, thus limiting the freedom of the other users. Example: Zuckerberg & facebook. This makes me wonder: How to lead a successful programming career without limiting other users' freedom?
Work for a free software company. SUSE and RedHat are the classic examples, though many others exist. [ Full Disclosure: I work as a free software developer at SUSE.]