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Richard Stallman on The Setup

richard.stallman.usesthis.com

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Re: Richard Stallman on The Setup

#41

Post by cschwarm »

rbanffy wrote: post #28
cschwarm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what you call principles, I call dogmata.

Why?

Because that's what they are.

From Wikipedia: "Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization: it is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted or diverged from."

Some examples:

* 4 rights constitute Free Software, not 3 or 2 or 1 but 4.

* Free Software is equivalent to Civil Freedom and Human Rights.

* Distributing software without any of these 4 rights makes the act unethical, immoral and evil.

* All software should be Free Software.

Doubt any of these and you are no true believer of the Free Software Movement.

Re: Richard Stallman on The Setup

#42

Post by mitko »

I don't believe he uses only his netbook. I think he also uses the public CSAIL computers at Stata Center in MIT. They have a KDE Linux on them.

I have used them from time to time, and as before logging in, at the username prompt usually you can see the last user that was on the computer. Many times it was "rms".

Re: Richard Stallman on The Setup

#43

Post by bitdiddle »

rsheridan6 wrote: post #39
bitdiddle wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh don't be silly, "real people"? Richard Stallman is as real as it gets. He's a decent programmer from what I can tell from emacs. Note that there is a distinction between open source and free software. I think it's important to not conflate the two, which I see a lot these days (in the real world :) I predict 500 years from now people will remember him. They won't remember Bill Gates. Without googling try to recall…

Crassus?

well done. Admittedly I've read parts of Gibbon and still don't recall this.

Re: Richard Stallman on The Setup

#44

Post by bitdiddle »

axod wrote: post #38
bitdiddle wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh don't be silly, "real people"? Richard Stallman is as real as it gets. He's a decent programmer from what I can tell from emacs. Note that there is a distinction between open source and free software. I think it's important to not conflate the two, which I see a lot these days (in the real world :) I predict 500 years from now people will remember him. They won't remember Bill Gates. Without googling try to recall…

We see 2 very different futures then. I see a future where people just access 'the web', via whatever small thin client web browser device they like. The vast majority of software will be running on servers, and end users won't really care if it's open source as long as it does what they want it to. Real people use web browsers.

we've been to this future before, when mainframes ruled. We called them dumb terminals. Not as sexy as small thin web clients using comet and ajax and other cleansers but they worked.

kidding aside, I don't buy it. P2P with local datastores will have a place. There's no way my tax returns will reside on google docs.

Re: Richard Stallman on The Setup

#45

Post by idiopathic »

axod wrote: post #27
Jach wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling it's only going to get more relevant, because now the software is moving toward the web, it is insanely convenient and easy to lock-in users and restrict freedoms. There are of course a freaking huge number of problems with the idea of open-sourcing the entirety of many website backends. I think there can be great discussion though on various models. GitHub offering web hosting instead of just repo h…

>> "it is insanely convenient and easy to lock-in users and restrict freedoms." I agree, but is that really a bad thing? We all have to make money somehow. I'd rather website owners had real incentive to please their users, and being able to make money is a good incentive. I don't see how open source can really be relevant on the web. If facebook want to do something to drive users away, or ristrict users freedom, th…

With the (welcome) move to web architecture, free software is not as important as free data, i.e. the freedom to move your data to another provider. We may all be slaves, but we should have the freedom to choose our master.

Like you, I would also rather that website owners had real incentives to please their users. I disagree on the solution: data lock-in _removes_ the website owner's incentive, instead they can just rely on the fact that you are stuck with them, rather than pleased with them.

Re: Richard Stallman on The Setup

#46

Post by nfnaaron »

bitdiddle wrote: post #35
axod wrote: post #19

I don't understand the god like status given to this guy. He's clearly crazy and from a whole other world than the one real people live in. Who really cares if their BIOS is open source or not? Why does it matter? Are the designs used to make his laptop case open source as well? I doubt it.

Oh don't be silly, "real people"? Richard Stallman is as real as it gets. He's a decent programmer from what I can tell from emacs. Note that there is a distinction between open source and free software. I think it's important to not conflate the two, which I see a lot these days (in the real world :) I predict 500 years from now people will remember him. They won't remember Bill Gates. Without googling try to recall…

"I predict 500 years from now people will remember him. They won't remember Bill Gates."

That future is going to spring from this present, where N people use Windows and Word and know who Bill Gates is, but M people use emacs and know who Richard Stallman is?

Re: Richard Stallman on The Setup

#48

Post by notauser »

axod wrote: post #32
weavejester wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often it's the people that refuse to compromise that make the world a better place. Do you think Martin Luther King should have compromised on his vision of racial equality? Whilst the civil rights movement is obviously far more important than the free software movement, the idea that ideals should not be compromised is at the core of both. Unlike, say, the BSD license, the GPL is a license that allows for no comprom…

How is Richard Stallman refusing to use a webbrowser making the world a better place? :/ It's just taking ideals to extremes for the sake of it.

Because there are (a lot of) people on the close-everything side of the debate it's essential to have at least a few people arguing that everything is opened so that the eventual compromise is somewhere in the middle.

Re: Richard Stallman on The Setup

#49

Post by weavejester »

axod wrote: post #32
weavejester wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often it's the people that refuse to compromise that make the world a better place. Do you think Martin Luther King should have compromised on his vision of racial equality? Whilst the civil rights movement is obviously far more important than the free software movement, the idea that ideals should not be compromised is at the core of both. Unlike, say, the BSD license, the GPL is a license that allows for no comprom…

How is Richard Stallman refusing to use a webbrowser making the world a better place? :/ It's just taking ideals to extremes for the sake of it.

As far as I'm aware, Stallman isn't refusing to use a web browser for ideological reasons. It's because: "Most of the time I do not have an Internet connection."

Besides, I seem to recall he uses Emacs/W3 for viewing web pages (offline, downloaded via wget).

Re: Richard Stallman on The Setup

#50

Post by axod »

bitdiddle wrote: post #44
axod wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We see 2 very different futures then. I see a future where people just access 'the web', via whatever small thin client web browser device they like. The vast majority of software will be running on servers, and end users won't really care if it's open source as long as it does what they want it to. Real people use web browsers.

we've been to this future before, when mainframes ruled. We called them dumb terminals. Not as sexy as small thin web clients using comet and ajax and other cleansers but they worked. kidding aside, I don't buy it. P2P with local datastores will have a place. There's no way my tax returns will reside on google docs.

Your tax returns will reside on the governments web interface :/

In the UK practically nothing tax related is done via paper forms any more, it's all done via their website. Works pretty well.

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