461–470 of 623 posts
> 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…
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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…
“Murder” is a curious choice of analogy, too. Seems to me this thread is very firmly subject to Godwin’s Law. > 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?
I would expect the same if I asked any particularly idealistic vegan how to eat meat with less impact. The idealistic vegan will just tell me to not eat any meat.
Also, in no way is any of what I said contingent on Stallman being an asshole, but it also surprises me that someone thinks finding Stallman to be an asshole at all surprising. He is a man of strong convictions that won't budge, and it's easy to find many anecdotes where people paint him as assholish.
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> If you want access from an app on your phone yes, not just to have access. Ah, you mean in the case where you have a different computer available to you, that has not (yet) been locked against its user like your phone has. But we are so certain that this locking of compute won't spread, that we treat all other computers (that are locked), as an exotic exception, and the only remaining class of devices not yet locke…
There are a few online only banks, but beyond those you don’t have to have access to any computer at all to get access to your bank account at most banks. > Having an interest does not imply exercising that interest is legitimate. Whether that interest is legitimate and acceptable is a decision for the user. If I decide to accept the terms for my banking app, what’s that got to do with you? > one cannot in good faith…
Whether you accept those terms has nothing to do with me. What has something to do with me is that there is no bank that allows me to access my account with my phone, without requiring me to relinquish control of that phone to its manufacturer.
But you're right, I can always use my PC for access, and, when that option too is removed, go to the bank in person, to one of their increasingly scarce physical offices, and slowly get locked out of more and more modern society. Alternatively, I can try to proselytize free software, to be met with "Sorry I can't install that, if I unlock my PC I won't be able to use my bank".
> I refer you to the market share enjoyed by the iPhone relative to Android (when it was moderately ‘free’). Clearly a lot of people, myself included, are in fact making that choice.
Sorry, I expressed myself poorly - what I meant was that one cannot argue almost all consumers are making that choice. As you point out, many people chose the moderately free Android. That freedom is growing more moderated by the day.
> How valuable can a fundamental, essential freedom actually be when hardly anyone understand what it is or cares a fig about it, and most of those who do understand it still don’t care?
Extremely:
Apple Removes App That Helps Hong Kong Protesters Track the Police - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/technology/apple-hong-kon...
Of 3,200 apps missing from the China App Store, almost a third relate to hot button human rights topics targeted by China’s censors, such as privacy tools, Tibetan Buddhism, Hong Kong protests and LGBTQ issues. Porn and gambling apps made up less than 5 percent. - https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/apple-censo...
Apple orders Telegram to block some Belarus protest channels [..] Among all the things that the Telegram CEO revealed, here is what’s most concerning: Apple apparently restricts app developers from informing their users that some content from their app has been hidden on request by Apple. - https://reclaimthenet.org/apple-orders-telegram-to-block-som...
Cattle that waits until the day of slaughter to attempt escape does not fare well.
(I don't mean to single out Apple - they get the most coverage, but I'm not sure if/how much better the situation is with Google's Play store. Which locked phones cannot escape.)
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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?
Like a completely different argument. People choose to equivalate bad things to evils like slavery or the holocaust for a reason and all of those reasons are bad.
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'…
The stereotypical angel, though, is usually encouraging you to make the incrementally best decision in any situation. That's not really the message RMS sends. If a proprietary software developer says "hey, RMS has inspired me, I'm going to make sure users have lots of control over this new feature I'm developing", have they done a praiseworthy thing? I think so, and it sounds like you might too, but I don't get the s…
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> Laughing at RMS had proven shortsighted in the past, and I don't think anything changed, it's still unwise. I don’t know, I’ve been laughing at him for 20 years and nothing bad ever happened because of that. How is it unwise? > For example, anticheats in multiplayer games is the major driving factor behind locking PCs down with DRM and chains of trust. The driving force was (and still largely is) protecting copyrig…
> I don’t know, I’ve been laughing at him for 20 years and nothing bad ever happened because of that. How is it unwise? [anecdotal] luck has nothing to do with being wise. anyway, I think unwise in this context means that RMS has been right more times than he's been wrong. And very few of those laughing at him have ever asked for forgiveness for laughing at him or recognize that we owe to him some of the benefits of…
But whereas a lot of others think the problems are structural to how society operates, and that fixing it would require rebuilding under a new economic framework, Stallman's only insight is that software you can't modify is the devil. DRM is bad not because it upholds a capitalist supply-and-demand system by restricting theoretically infinite supply, but because you can't modify the .c files yourself or send them to a friend.
It's an extremely limited way of thinking that ignores any external structural or economic motivations, and focuses on an unreasonably small niche subset with a black-and-white moral answer. It sometimes makes good points, mostly accidentally, but it still has a lot of misses, e.g. the religious persistence on "software" leads to programs like the FSF's Respect Your Freedoms with incoherent policies around hardware, firmware, and ROMs, mostly from a place of ignorance.
The free software movement was quickly co-opted by corporations as the "open-source movement" by executives looking to offload their labor costs onto unpaid workers, leading to a lot of under-funded core software infrastructure as corporations rank in the cash. Stallman's "Open Source Misses the Point" essay doesn't talk at all about this, it doesn't talk about the ways that open-source is about externalizing costs, nor about the way that it's leading to maintainer burn-out, it just points out that it's kinda bad that they're releasing stuff under the MIT license instead of the GPL, and would really much prefer if people didn't do that, while not realizing that was the goal all along.
The FSF has very little force in accomplishing their goals; it's a wet paper towel tossed vaguely in the direction of actual change.
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> What about Linux (Android) being used as the prime spyware vector To deal with that, consider using GNU/Linux phone Librem 5 recommended by the FSF: https://www.fsf.org/givingguide . > and Linux being used for cloud lock-in What do you want to discuss here? There is always a possibility to use tools for the evil. Non-free software is used for that, too (much more).
I've been waiting for my Librem 5 (that I paid for) for four years...
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>From there since Free Software has only lost ground That's not true, it gained ground for a long time after that. "Free" as in freedom software, by Stallman's definition, probably peaked in the early 2000s. And I would say that the losses mostly started happening when the FSF stopped producing software that people wanted to use. They effectively ignored the entire internet revolution.
Not even close. We have Linux-libre backed distros today.
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'…
I wouldn't describe the most extremist viewpoint on most matters as a white angel. Extremism tends to turn off some people from the cause when it looks somewhat irrational. Telling people they're bad and shouldn't play non-free videogames certainly isn't going to help things much. If you make someone who would otherwise be on your side feel guilty everytime they pick up a controller to unwind at the end of the day, t…
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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…
* Microsoft is apparently pushing to make it impossible to install Windows 11 without a Microsoft online account. [0] I know of no FOSS with the nerve to try something like that.
* Non-Free games that charge real money for in-game cheats, and are of course designed to prevent you from manipulating your own game-state
* Mobile apps that request clearly unnecessary permissions, for reasons never revealed
* Mobile apps that sell your location data, and anything other data they can get their hands on, with minimal regard for how this might impact your physical security
* Lies of omission about fixes to security flaws, and their specifics
* Intrusive telemetry that can't be disabled (although FOSS doesn't offer a total guarantee against this, see Firefox)
* edit Lies about security properties that are hard to verify without access to source code, such as falsely claiming proper end-to-end encryption
* For more see [1]
If you only run Free Software, you get many benefits even if you're unable to modify the software yourself.
> Genuinely open computing would make customisation and sharing available to everyone, not just tinkerers who know what a command line is.
This cannot be done. You can't make a car that anyone can repair, either. Software development is a skilled craft. That doesn't mean there's nothing to gain in Free Software.