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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

#411

Post by hypertele-Xii »

Beltalowda wrote: post #24
cmeacham98 wrote: post #8

> “Well, first of all, I don't think there's anything bad about playing a game. Unless the game is non-free — then it's bad for you, if you play it. I get that Stallman's shtick is being as hardline as possible about free software, but it really feels like sometimes this hurts the free software movement. Imagine trying to bring in a normal, non-technical person who plays video games as one of their hobbies (describes…

A few years ago I saw an indie game developer recount his experience with Stallman[1]; he doesn't see how he can release his games as Free Software while making a living, pay his rent, pay for his children's education, etc. So he asked Stallman what to do about that. Stallman's reply? "You should not be making those games, it is unethical." To say that is non-constructive would be an understatement; it's just shuttin…

Sometimes NOT doing a thing IS improving things. History rife with examples.

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

#412

Post by hypertele-Xii »

viktorcode wrote: post #283
stakkur wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is in the question: the game dev wants to know how to reconcile ethics and his desire to make money from making games. Stallman is saying “it’s not my job to help solve your dilemma.” And he’s right. If I ask a doctor ‘how can I eat french fries and still lose weight”, the doctor will say “you can’t, and I can’t help you resolve your dilemma. What you’re doing is unhealthy”.

Only he's wrong. He's supposed to be the top expert behind Free Software movement, nobody else can answer that real-life question better than RMS. An idea that's inapplicable to reality even in principle is worthless.

Maybe reality is worth changing for an important idea with far-reaching consequences.

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

#413

Post by belorn »

lovich wrote: post #327
belorn wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All while he lives comfortably off the income of his own celebrity. For most part of his life he was living in his office at the university, technically homeless. After that period he lived in a home designated by MIT, possible because they got tired of the building code violation of having a professor living in his office.

I would classify being able to live at his office without being tossed out into the streets, and being given a home after that got to be too much for the school, as living off his celebrity. The "technically" in "technically homeless" is a major difference between what Stallman has to deal with vs what non famous computer scientists/software engineers have to deal with. I understand he's forgone the amount of wealth…

Being a celebrity does provide much more benefits than a person actually being homeless.

However your comment above said he lived comfortably off the income of his own celebrity. We would have to twist the word income here for a bit to cover this kind of situation. The comfortably part is also a bit questionable, but I guess living at the office can be comfortable to some people. The description just didn't fit the situation that well, which is why I wrote the above comment.

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

#414

Post by synergy20 »

jasoneckert wrote: post #384

From reading the other comments here, I understand that it's easy to pick something RMS said and say "Yeah, right..." But you have to keep in mind that RMS advocates the free software philosophy - the complete left end of the software spectrum - the white angel on your shoulder (not the red devil on the other). And while I find some of his points too radical to implement practically in my own situation, I believe it'…

You're so correct, can't agree more.

Nobody is perfect, focus on one's strength serves everyone better.

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

#415

Post by roenxi »

mixologic wrote: post #260
orbital-decay wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laughing at RMS had proven shortsighted in the past, and I don't think anything changed, it's still unwise. It's not just about free software either (that's a higher-level target), it's also about the hardware and freedom of running your software on your machine, and owning your computer in general. For example, anticheats in multiplayer games is the major driving factor behind locking PCs down with DRM and chains of…

I feel like free software, and RMS's biggest blind spot is the network, between people, and between computers. Everything is framed and discussed in this old timey way of using computers, where you had a general purpose machine that was personal that you programmed to do things you needed, or installed software on, to also do something valueable. Now it seems like the vast majority of the needs and requirements to ru…

Speaking mildly - it is the Free Software Foundation, not the Free Network Foundation. They aren't trying to tackle all the world's problems at once.

But also the network is profoundly different than the PC to the point where "free software" doesn't mean as much. Picking HN as an example because it is really easy:

1) We don't control the content we create for HN.

2) At some point all that content will disappear.

3) If viewed as an API, there is nothing complicated to it (disregarding dang's daunting fight with comment threading & similar issues). We get a "post" button and a text page.

So there seems to be a freedom problem here but it is about data control rather than software control - far harder to solve and also not so clear cut an issue. Does it, fundamentally, limit my freedom if all my HN posts disappear? Since they are public anyway, does it mean anything for it to be exploited by someone? Things like the piratebay.whichever and youtube-dl have been in the news today as part of ongoing examples that the network is still a very free place for who we can connect to and what API they can offer.

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

#416

Post by tjr »

boneitis wrote: post #149

Half an hour through the ~90min presentation, I was wondering about speech-to-text solutions out there to really skim through it. For anyone else who would similarly like to be able to skim through a transcription: https://pastebin.com/Fgrh68WY Ran it through the Goog's speech to text. It's a quick paste of the raw pass, with no clean-up, although I added a couple of timestamps. Some irony in the choice of transcript…

I was the main author on the manual you linked to. In 2012, Stallman contacted me about his new book, and with that forthcoming, I thought it made no sense for me to spend much more time on mine. So I never got quite finished it, and did only a few minor bug fix releases since then.

I did not know it was going to be ten years until his came out!

In any case, I did help him a bit on the new one, but not very recently. The main text, last I saw it, certainly spoke to the GCC dialect of C, and included some GCC historical footnotes, but the description he gave of the book sounds like he must have added even more GCC-specific content since I last saw a draft.

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

#417

Post by ineedasername »

>Unless the game is non-free — then it's bad for you, if you play it

I'm all for free software and the less-free open source licenses out there, but the above sentiment is a form of fundamentalism that I think alienates people and makes them view FS as represent by RMS as extremist and somewhat irrational. We don't insist that all movies should be released with accompanying raw footage, or that authors should release all their drafts and editors' notes. These are basically the source code if those creative works. I know, the analogy isn't perfect, but I think it gets at some of the problems with taking this to an extreme.

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

#418

Post by thereddaikon »

mixologic wrote: post #260
orbital-decay wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laughing at RMS had proven shortsighted in the past, and I don't think anything changed, it's still unwise. It's not just about free software either (that's a higher-level target), it's also about the hardware and freedom of running your software on your machine, and owning your computer in general. For example, anticheats in multiplayer games is the major driving factor behind locking PCs down with DRM and chains of…

I feel like free software, and RMS's biggest blind spot is the network, between people, and between computers. Everything is framed and discussed in this old timey way of using computers, where you had a general purpose machine that was personal that you programmed to do things you needed, or installed software on, to also do something valueable. Now it seems like the vast majority of the needs and requirements to ru…

>Now it seems like the vast majority of the needs and requirements to run software locally have been replaced with networked services and a browser/thin client interface.

And its almost always done to remove agency from the user and give it back to the corporation. Again, RMS is right. You can only truly have digital freedom if you are running your own software on your own hardware. It only seems old timey because we have been drinking the everything as a service kool aide for so long.

It doesn't have to be this way and it's not necessarily technologically superior. Its due to business forces more than anything else.

>Even RMS's free game example is bad. One of the players can modify their copy to cheat, and the other players dont have any real option in that situation.

Not everything he advocates for is always practical, the game example is one. You have to have some kind of central control in multiplayer games to make sure people aren't cheating. But there is still wisdom in what he says. We have single player only games that are demanding the same kind of access and control that multiplayer ones are. Obviously that isn't to prevent cheating.

And sometimes he is still right about a problem even if he sees every all of them as technological nails to be solved with a FOSS hammer. That's not going to work but he is identifying the problem correctly. Banks and governments are weaponizing the financial system against people they don't like and can't be trusted. How do you prevent them from doing it? I think ultimately its not a technological problem, its a political/societal one. Banks need to be reigned in and politicians need to be more afraid of the people.

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

#419

Post by dwringer »

ineedasername wrote: post #417

>Unless the game is non-free — then it's bad for you, if you play it I'm all for free software and the less-free open source licenses out there, but the above sentiment is a form of fundamentalism that I think alienates people and makes them view FS as represent by RMS as extremist and somewhat irrational. We don't insist that all movies should be released with accompanying raw footage, or that authors should release…

I think in that example the analogy might be more along the lines of studios who come down hard on fan fiction, forbidding it, versus those that allow it or even encourage or draw inspiration from it.

Although my analogy falls short because even studios that don't allow fan fiction can't be as restrictive as most software, since everyone is still free to come up with fan fiction in the privacy of their own home. Not so with closed source software.

Therein lies the fundamental difference with software: Movie intellectual property is all stuff that's right there, and the audience can see it. With software, the algorithms are often totally opaque to the user.

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

#420

Post by bogwog »

raffraffraff wrote: post #407
deknos wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you laugh until you get old and the games of your youth do not work anymore because of missing libraries on linux, if there was a linux port. i am missing my unreal tournament days and would even pay money, if one would build an opensource clone where i could load the original maps of Unreal tournament and UT2004 into the game like with Command & Conquer: Red alert. (UT2004 crashes randomly on linux and it's always a…

I get my Unreal Tournament and Quake Arena kicks from Xonotic. The online community is small, but every day there's at least one DM server with some extremely good players in it. Edit: the maps are different, but yesterday I joined a server that had one of the Quake Arena maps on it.

Xonotic is the shit!
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