Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman [pdf]

#41

Post by mikekchar » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 6:47 AM UTC

rileymat2 wrote: post #32

jrauser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A followup: The GNU project was born while I was in junior high, gcc started when I was a senior in high school. Linux was started when I was in college. Stallman, in a very real sense, made my entire career possible. Likely yours too.

That is a jump, software may have eaten the world without free software and been more lucrative. It is impossible to know.

I agree with you that it's a jump. I was around early enough to see what the world was like before the FSF. While my professional career started after that, for much of it I worked with $5000k per seat compilers, libraries and frameworks that didn't include source code and I even accepted jobs (out of need) that forbid me from using anything without a restrictive (to the point of abusive) license.

I've seen both worlds. You don't want to be in that other one, trust me. What I will say is not that free software has made my career possible, more that it has made it possible for me to do my job without going crazy. No more reverse engineering bizarre bugs in my tools. No more building everything from scratch because I can't possibly trust anybody else's code. Not as much struggling to deal with boneheaded vendor lock-in that some executive in the nose-bleed seats commits me to (OK... it still happens... but it's a lot better).

I'll be honest, though. I didn't actually believe that the reality we have today, as flawed as it still is, would come. I'm incredibly grateful.

Re: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman [pdf]

#42

Post by weinzierl » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 7:01 AM UTC

jrauser wrote: post #26

Wow, the close of Lessig's introduction is powerful. We have indeed not earned that freedom yet. > I don’t know Stallman well. I know him well enough to know he is a hard man to like. He is driven, often impatient. His anger can flare at friend as easily as foe. > He is uncompromising and persistent; patient in both. Yet when our world finally comes to understand the power and danger of code — when it finally sees th…

A lot of what makes Stallman hard to like is that what he says are inconvenient truths.

It took me a while to realize that.

Re: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman [pdf]

#43

Post by bb88 » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 7:07 AM UTC

zrobotics wrote: post #24

bb88 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kicad is great, but suffers from the library system. There really needs to be a standard file format for a part in the electronics industry that has the symbol, pinout diagram, footprint, and 3d model in one file, to make it easy to integrate with existing products. So much time is wasted making your own symbols, pinouts, and footprints.

Does kicad really suffer though? Even with an altium license, I spent just as much time on footprints, there are too many variations for anything else. For instance, the last board of designed had a msp430 that was almost, bit not quite a standard SOIC-16 (wider pads needed). Personally, I wouldn't trust any library footprints at all. My major gripe is how slow the footprint editor is to pull up on stock formats, con…

Yeah, it really does. It will get better with KiCad 5.0 though which should be released soon.

Re: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman [pdf]

#44

Post by adrianN » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 7:24 AM UTC

sincerely wrote: post #36

thecatspaw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who turned out to be not such a cool guy all I could find was allegations of sexual assault which could not be proven? Or was that comment about something else?

Without talking about this specific case (I've never heard of that guy) sexual assault is basically impossible to "prove" without clear video recordings. :/

So guilty until proven innocent?

Re: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman [pdf]

#45

Post by midasz » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 7:29 AM UTC

sincerely wrote: post #36

thecatspaw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who turned out to be not such a cool guy all I could find was allegations of sexual assault which could not be proven? Or was that comment about something else?

Without talking about this specific case (I've never heard of that guy) sexual assault is basically impossible to "prove" without clear video recordings. :/

I don't want to get involved in this, but none of his 'victims' have ever reported it to any authorities. It's basically a social media smear campaign. They even registered a website under his name with fanfic stories.

Re: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman [pdf]

#46

Post by wiz21c » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 7:31 AM UTC

Stallman has been my man for more than twenty years (the first time I heard him). I still 100% agree with his core values. But a while ago, he explained that mobile phones were closed/proprietary/spying and, in the very same talk, explained that if he had to give a call, then he'd use someone else's phone. That sounded wrong to me. I told it to him but the answer was not clear... So to me, he's mostly perfect, but that makes him a bit more of a human being, which I like too :-)

Re: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman [pdf]

#47

Post by OskarS » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 8:10 AM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #11

Greedy question, is this available (for purchase or otherwise) as an epub? The FSF only seems to carry it physically. Essay collections are great to carry around on an e-reader and bust out whenever I have a tiny bit of free time, but my device really doesn't handle PDFs very well. Edit: I'm going to assume that the source is available online in some kind of pure-text format, although I'm having trouble locating it.…

I hope you're not reading this on a Kindle (or any other proprietary e-reader)! That would be some kind of insult to the great man, to read his selected papers on the most locked down and proprietary device imaginable!

Buy a physical copy, support the FSF and then buy another copy for a library!

Re: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman [pdf]

#48

Post by flowless » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 9:08 AM UTC

bb88 wrote: post #43

zrobotics wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does kicad really suffer though? Even with an altium license, I spent just as much time on footprints, there are too many variations for anything else. For instance, the last board of designed had a msp430 that was almost, bit not quite a standard SOIC-16 (wider pads needed). Personally, I wouldn't trust any library footprints at all. My major gripe is how slow the footprint editor is to pull up on stock formats, con…

Yeah, it really does. It will get better with KiCad 5.0 though which should be released soon.

Care to explain what's new in 5.0 regarding library management?

I'm considering rolling out a standalone library (package) management for Kicad re-using infrastructure from Haskell (stripped down Hackage + Stackage servers). This way there would be a versioned repository people could upload their libraries to and from your own project you can depend on these libraries. Stackage would then create a snapshots of these so even stuff built years ago can still find correct version of Kicad and libraries.

Re: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman [pdf]

#49

Post by davidgould » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 9:36 AM UTC

jrauser wrote: post #26

Wow, the close of Lessig's introduction is powerful. We have indeed not earned that freedom yet. > I don’t know Stallman well. I know him well enough to know he is a hard man to like. He is driven, often impatient. His anger can flare at friend as easily as foe. > He is uncompromising and persistent; patient in both. Yet when our world finally comes to understand the power and danger of code — when it finally sees th…

I am not religious, but I think that Richard Stallman is as close as we can get to an actual literal saint. He has changed the world through his works, will and vision in ways that are still unfolding and that will not be fully understood for a long time. There has been a lot of criticism of the GPL and the principles behind it often by people who do not wish to abide by the licence. This has led to some bitter and unkind criticism of RMS personally. Yet historical saints have always been difficult and determined people and often misunderstood in their own time. It is not an easy avocation.

Re: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman [pdf]

#50

Post by rbanffy » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 9:50 AM UTC

hoistbypetard wrote: post #9

It's got _The Right to Read_. I think that does a better job explaining why we should care about the freedoms he's spent his life trying to advance than perhaps the entire collection of his other writings. I just re-read it, and for some reason it made me think of this old science fiction story from some 1950s pulp zine that I only learned about because of a Neil Gaiman essay: _Business As Usual, During Alterations_[…

Someone should adapt it for TV. It'd be a great episode for a Black Mirror or something similar (and, at least, it'd have a happy ending, which is rare in BM)