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Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

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Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#351

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

the_af wrote: post #342
lovich wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>won't be playing the games of their formative years on their terms Do they care? Lots of these games are like fashion, where the core gameplay loop is pretty similar to exactly the same as previous games, just with a different art direction on top. The fact that its popular is what makes it popular until its not.

> "Do they care?" I guarantee you that they will. They might not think so now, but when in a couple or so of decades they suddenly remember a cherished videogame from their youth (maybe associated with the joy of discovering videogames, maybe with a memory of a friend who's passed away, maybe just because of doing videogame archaeology) and they cannot play it at all because of DRM or unsupported hardware (and the im…

Gamer nostalgia is a niche within a niche. The modern hardcore gamer market has tens of millions of customers - maybe hundreds if you include trivial but addictive phone games.

The nostalgists who want to get Jetpack Willy running again so they can relive a misspent youth number tens of thousands at most.

And in fact there are few/no DRM issues for these vintage games and emulations, because they're distributed as binaries.

If I really want to play Marble Madness on an Amiga emu, I can, even though the original code was never open sourced.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#352

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #237
waplot wrote: post #230

> Now, more free games? It doesn't satisfy an urgent practical need, obviously... But the crucial thing is, free ones might make it easier for some people to say, 'Let's move off this non-free thing, and play a game that is free. So we can have the same pleasure, but without paying freedom as the price.'“ i'm sorry but i just can't read this without laughing. what does stallman think gamers are like? i can only imagi…

Just because it isn't realistic in today's AAA world doesn't mean the man is wrong. As a matter of principle he is right but for practical reasons increasing harder to apply.

Stallman is not right as a matter of principle.

His vision of open computing is self-centred and user hostile. It's basically MIT CS Lab computing at scale.

It's not even a new idea. Open source was a thing before Stallman - see for example DECUS tape sharing - and it will continue to be a thing long after him.

But it's not enough. Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is.

Modern FOSS is the exact opposite of open computing. Computing affordances are trapped inside an inaccessible technical monolith instead of an inaccessible corporate monolith.

To most of the population there is zero difference between the two.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#353

Post by the_af »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #351
the_af wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Do they care?" I guarantee you that they will. They might not think so now, but when in a couple or so of decades they suddenly remember a cherished videogame from their youth (maybe associated with the joy of discovering videogames, maybe with a memory of a friend who's passed away, maybe just because of doing videogame archaeology) and they cannot play it at all because of DRM or unsupported hardware (and the im…

Gamer nostalgia is a niche within a niche. The modern hardcore gamer market has tens of millions of customers - maybe hundreds if you include trivial but addictive phone games. The nostalgists who want to get Jetpack Willy running again so they can relive a misspent youth number tens of thousands at most. And in fact there are few/no DRM issues for these vintage games and emulations, because they're distributed as bi…

The emulators themselves frequently employ some "grey area" techniques in order to reverse engineer or otherwise replicate the systems these games ran on.

The emulator community your beloved games run on is rife with dodgy things. You know, how to get certain firmware, how they cracked this or that protection, and of course the ROMs themselves.

Gamer nostalgia is a niche within a niche? I totally disagree. It feels like a niche until you feel it yourself. Most gamers haven't aged enough yet.

PS "the modern hardcore gamer market": I care little about that short-sighted institution. I want to preserve the cultural digital heritage of mankind, and videogames are a vital part of it. And because they are games, they are meant to be played, so a blog post with some screenshots won't do. If you disagree -- we are not on the same page, and it's not worth continuing this conversation.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#354

Post by car_analogy »

Jarwain wrote: post #295
feanaro wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 'freedom' to inspect the code that runs on your computer is useless without both the freedom to see what happens upstream, and also some level of trust or confidence that the service you're using really isnt doing something nefarious. How is such freedom useless? I keep hearing this argument, yet I still run a significant portion of software locally and have no plans of replacing that with services, given they…

It's not freedom in general that's useless, but specifically freedom when that software relies on an upstream service to do things. Your argument sounds like it is against the use of software that requires such an upstream service in the first place, which is a fair stance to take. The Problem is when that upstream service is Necessary for whatever you are trying to do. Like in circumstances where interaction and col…

> It's not freedom in general that's useless, but specifically freedom when that software relies on an upstream service to do things.

Until that service (such as a bank) decides that your rooted, user-controlled phone is no good, and forces you to use one controlled by the manufacturer, if you want access to your bank account.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#356

Post by PBondurant »

contrast wrote: post #304
tjader wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I made an analogy to another behavior that I hope everyone will agree is unethical. The point is that if you accept Stallman's position that closed source software is unethical his response is not unexpected.

Unless you have a low opinion of Stallman, why would you expect him to be so dismissive of the day-to-day concerns of someone who wants to support a family? Using extreme ethical examples to justify a statement is how Godwin’s Law came about, way back in the 90s. It’s a well known tactic to make one’s own position sound reasonable, by implying that anyone is still arguing with you may as well be saying the Nazis were…

No, this isn't an example of Godwin's law being used as a tactic to end discussion; rather he was using hyperbole - a rhetorical device - to make a point. The slavery reference is not used to suggest that 'non-free software is morally equivalent to slavery/nazism' etc but rather is used as an example of a clear, strongly held moral position in order to emphasise the (possibly more subtle) original point. The point of hyperbole is to further elucidate, not close down.

This misunderstanding tends to be caused by (1) treating the rhetorical device literally rather than as an (intentionally exaggerated) analogy, and (2) - as in this case - by assuming that the argument being made is trying to draw some moral equivalence between the analogy and the original example. It isn't.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#357

Post by blueflow »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #155

Around the 8 and 9 min mark RMS talks about old hardware losing software support, like 32 bit systems. I am a kernel developer and the kernel removes code for a lot of older systems all the time (often lesser known 32bit ARM systems). Phoronix reported that 5.18 removed the Andes NDS32 CPU arch code. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-51... The reason they do this is because a lot of these syst…

I have a ton of devices that are 32 bit x86. I'd love if i was able to continue to use them... i can't stand having to throw away all tech every $x years. I only need like, 1 GB of RAM to work productively! I unironically work on machines that i found in the garbage.

Remove 32-bit x86 support, and it will pin me down to the few 64-bit machines that i have.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#358

Post by car_analogy »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #352
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because it isn't realistic in today's AAA world doesn't mean the man is wrong. As a matter of principle he is right but for practical reasons increasing harder to apply.

Stallman is not right as a matter of principle. His vision of open computing is self-centred and user hostile. It's basically MIT CS Lab computing at scale. It's not even a new idea. Open source was a thing before Stallman - see for example DECUS tape sharing - and it will continue to be a thing long after him. But it's not enough. Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, n…

> Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is.

..you're blaming FOSS for not solving the "programming is hard" problem?

> To most of the population there is zero difference between the two.

Yes, if you ignore all the secondary and ecosystem effects, such as getting to use the resulting free software. I have not once looked at the source of the linux kernel, GNOME, KDE, or Firefox, yet I benefit enormously from the development method and spirit that gave birth to them. That is not zero difference.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#359

Post by einpoklum »

syntheweave wrote: post #266

Stallman has basically served his purpose at this point. The path forward is not further awareness-building of Free Software, because everyone is in the orbit of GPL-licensed software now. It is a problem of creating economic incentives for a commons in computing technologies. Recall that the thing that kicked off the need for Free Software in the first place was the 1970's move to an enclosure of software under IP l…

> The path forward is not further awareness-building of Free Software, because everyone is in the orbit of GPL-licensed software now.

I'm not so certain. There has been a strong pull away from GPL software towards weakly-licensed software, which is difficult to resist. Hell, _I_ have not been able to resist, and my publicly-available software is 3-BSD-licensed.

So, I would say that advocacy for GPL-style licensing and virally-FOSS software is still very much necessary.

The same goes for many of the principles RMS argues for.

> What has made the OSS/free world work historically is a dependency on a few key organizations like the FSF or Red Hat

No. Since the software is free, we are not dependent on an organization maintaining it. Naturally, if the maintainer "drops" a piece of software, that is a problem and a challenge, but still.

> Much of it had huge gaps in function or documentation that gave open source an elitist image

Unlike commercial software, free software is unusable if Joe User can't it figure out themselves. So, without documentation and relative consistence of functionality - it's of very little public use.

> we've see the rise of the Patreon developer,

No, we haven't. What fraction of FOSS developer can use that as a living? I'd be surprised if it's 1 in 5,000.

> who can command some pretty big bucks by being a visible leader in a popular open project.

Again, very few projects are this bug. Most FOSS projects have a small number of users.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#360

Post by pmoriarty »

pjmlp wrote: post #311
pmoriarty wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"abundance of F/OSS has pushed us towards SaaS as one of the few places left to make a living from pure software dev, and the oligopolies arising out of it. What about Linux (Android) being used as the prime spyware vector, and Linux being used for cloud lock-in (k8s et al)?" It's not like closed-source software would have prevented any of this.

People actually pay for closed source software, even if piracy might happen. SaaS is the only way left to force most people to actually pay for the FOSS stuff they leach.

People actually pay for open source software too.

Take a look at Ardour for an example. Red Hat too.

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