451–460 of 623 posts
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Did you just compare Stallman and the FSF to the Abolitionist movement, and paid software to slavery?
Would it help if they had rephrased it more generically? What is something that you find unethical? How does the example feel if you slot that in, instead of slavery?
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The point is not to compare proprietary software to slavery. The point is that Stallman does not find proprietary software bad for the user, he finds it morally wrong . That means in this case it doesn't make sense to complain and argue about his answer to the developer, as his answer makes perfect sense given his premises. If you want to disagree with his advice, you have to disagree with his moral position on propr…
> The point is not to compare proprietary software to slavery. You did exactly that. > The point is that Stallman does not find proprietary software bad for the user, he finds it morally wrong. I truly hope that you are wrong and Stallman does not believe proprietary software to be an evil on par with slavery.
You may want to reread my original post carefully.
> I truly hope that you are wrong and Stallman does not believe proprietary software to be an evil on par with slavery.
I can't claim to know the internal ranking of evil things in Stallman's mind, but nonfree software is very clearly beyond the line of unjustifiable evil for him.
"While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.", from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
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'…
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I wasn't comparing proprietary software to slavery. I was making the point that for Stallman proprietary software is as unethical as slavery is to most people. Maybe I picked the wrong thing to make the analogy, it could have worked just as well with theft, murder, or any other unethical behavior. I wasn't making any point about whether Stallman is right or wrong on that, I was just pointing out that people are attac…
> I wasn't comparing proprietary software to slavery. I was making the point that for Stallman proprietary software is as unethical as slavery is to most people. Maybe I picked the wrong thing to make the analogy, it could have worked just as well with theft, murder, or any other unethical behavior. Wow. There is a continuum from good behaviour to unethical behaviour to evil. To conflate and compare and equivalate un…
I'm not saying those behaviors are all equally bad. I'm saying they are all bad, with an unspecified amount of evilness. I wouldn't help anyone do any of them. I won't help someone steal, even if I think murder is more wrong than it, because stealing is already wrong.
For Stallman, nonfree software is also wrong. You can argue with that, but you can't expect him to help someone write nonfree software and still hold that view.
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By framing playing virtually all video games in existence as being "bad for you".
I read that more to mean that by playing games that are non-free, you are fueling the existence of more non-free games, and thus doing damage to yourself in the sense of "freedom" since you are perpetuating non-free software. The game itself is not causing harm to you.
If it has to be interpreted, it is poorly communicated.
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> "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…
And then I try one and wonder this looks really ugly. This mechanic is rather annoying, yeah maybe it isn't worth the nostalgia. Thankfully, I am PC gamer so most things work, outside certain set of DRM...
and I'm sure someone actually into the scene could pump out a long list of much better links than these.
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> I compare it do "how garbage would desktops be if Linux wasn't around to provide useful pressure?" In what world does Linux on the desktop provide "useful pressure" to anyone? The only Linux "desktop" that has provided any pressure on the desktop to Microsoft and Apple is ChromeOS. ChromeOS is decidedly not a "Linux desktop". If Google flipped ChromeOS to Fuchsia tomorrow it would provide the same pressure with zer…
I mean, there's an argument to be made that Android / ChromeOS / Fuchsia wouldn't exist without Linux either (i.e. not exist as they are or in some similar open source variation). They don't stand quite as independently as you suggest here.
Third parties don't care about the Linux desktop either. If Linux is even considered it's a distant third place. If Electron dropped Linux support tomorrow a good number of applications would drop Linux support the next day.
Even the likes of Valve supporting Linux is more of a hedge against Microsoft than anything compelling about desktop environments on Linux.
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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…
I wasn't comparing proprietary software to slavery. I was making the point that for Stallman proprietary software is as unethical as slavery is to most people. Maybe I picked the wrong thing to make the analogy, it could have worked just as well with theft, murder, or any other unethical behavior. I wasn't making any point about whether Stallman is right or wrong on that, I was just pointing out that people are attac…
> When have you ever seen Stallman be pragmatic instead of idealist
Pragmatism vs idealism isn’t the point. My question was why would you expect someone you haven’t met to be an asshole, if you didn’t already think they were an asshole?
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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…
So the direct utility of open-source in being able to fix your own itches is in fact extremely rare, even for people for whom programming isn't hard.
There is a better point about FLOSS creating an ecosystem of usable utilities for getting stuff done, one I have availed myself of on innumerable occasions. However, I will also point out that the Stallman stance on software has impeded this goal on several occasions, since GPL or even LGPL [1] licensing can prevent reuse of code. This leaves me wondering how necessary the FSF/GNU stuff was in bootstrapping the open-source ecosystem.
[1] LGPL requires you to link software in a particular way to avoid the license spreading to your code.
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No. A game does not cost hundreds of millions of dollars to create. Some games choose to burn hundreds of millions of dollars, for very little return. Some of the best games were a lot cheaper to produce. License costs are elective: Noone forces you to plaster Football players names and team logos on your Football game (and some of the best (and creative) Football games choose not to) The main problem is that RMS liv…
> The main problem is that RMS lives in a world in which people care about freedom, when they only care about brand recognition - and that is in fact related to marketing and thus "millions of dollars". There are other reasons than licensing and marketing that makes games cost hundreds of millions too. People expect games to be on the scale that they are, so the cost of developing these games will be astronomical. It…