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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

#611

Post by betwixthewires »

okareaman wrote: post #563
betwixthewires wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the reasoning is that the machine is our property, our resources are used to run it, so we should be able to decide what runs on it. We can, of course, waive that right on a per case basis and run proprietary software, but we shouldn't, or at least we should be wary of it and avoid normalizing it. If you decide you will not run any software on your machine who's source is unavailable to you, that is your right.…

Yes and if RMS doesn't like Apple Computers he doesn't have to use them. It's not his business if I decide Apple Computers are acceptable to me.

Okay, but that's not his point. His point is companies that prevent you from running what software you want to run are violating the rights of people.

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

#612

Post by teddyh »

Tao331 wrote: post #585
teddyh wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if he is using open source free software as a replacement, shouldn't he have tested and fixed said software? You can’t put the onus on him to personally write and fix all software he uses. He has written quite large amounts of software, so I’d say he’s done more than his share. He is still, if only tangentially, involved in some software, and you could perhaps reasonably criticize him if he were using, say, Ema…

> you could perhaps reasonably criticize him if he were using, say, Emacs to do his presentation, and there was a bug preventing him. Emacs doesn't have video conferencing yet?

I have seen many presenters using Emacs as their slide deck.

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

#613

Post by sneak »

yesenadam wrote: post #530
sneak wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not his philosophy; that is abundantly clear. I too am completely at a loss for what his actual agenda is.

I never know what that means. People seem to only use it about people they don't like. Seems like Russell conjugation - I have a vision, you have plans, they have an agenda. What's your (actual) agenda? p.s. Thinking more about it, it doesn't seem a question that ever has an answer. Seems like it means something like "I don't like that person, what they believe, what they say or what they do. They're so different fro…

Potential answers to "What is rms's agenda?":

* spread his free software ethics philosophy to as wide an audience as possible

* persuade nonfree software developers to produce free software instead

* persuade software users to abandon use of nonfree software

* persuade software users to use free software instead of nonfree software

Think of it as a to-do list. What does rms want to happen as a result of his speaking? Education? Persuasion? Improved conditions for working software developers? Improved conditions for software end-users? What is he trying to accomplish?

The majority of the things he says seem like compulsive statements based out of his (obviously steadfast and unwavering) belief that nonfree software is unethical. The fact is, though, that inanimate things cannot be unethical. Ethics is a matter of human behavior.

So, does he want some or all of the following:

* employees of companies that make nonfree software to quit?

* owners/managers of companies that make nonfree software to dissolve their organizations?

* owners/managers of companies that make nonfree software to make only free software instead?

* owners/managers of companies that make nonfree software to set policies banning the use of nonfree software in their organizations?

* people not in software to get into software to make more free software to make the world more ethical?

* legislatures to ban companies like Google who exist only on the basis of extensive use of nonfree software?

It's not really clear what he's asking, and of whom. Who's the audience, and what does he want them to do, or cease doing? Why does he want them to do (or stop doing) that? Why should they? If the answer to the last is "because of rms's ethics", then why should they adopt his ethical framework over their current one (where there's nothing wrong with producing, selling, or using nonfree software)?

There are so many unanswered questions with rms.

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

#614

Post by account42 »

jamiek88 wrote: post #590
stjohnswarts wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote is almost useless unless you know its origins. I think it comes across as a bit disrespectful of the people you're aiming it at because most won't know what the hell you're getting at unless they look it up.

I felt stupid for the longest time with this phrase. Even after looking it up. Until I knew the history more I didn’t get it. The confusion comes from the fact that beer generally isn’t, well, free!

There is no implication in the quote that beer is generally free, just that "free" in the context of beer generally means gratis whereas in the context of speech it does not.

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

#615

Post by account42 »

jokoon wrote: post #533
waplot wrote: post #230

> 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…

Shouldn't it be possible to sell a game while making it open source at the same time? I mean that's a bit what quake 3 did, the content kept its copyright. I honestly don't think it's posing a threat to the company who makes the game, because there won't really be anybody forking the game and making it better than the original creator, in a short period of time, while also selling it. It will only bring bad publicity…

The idTech model is to open source the code (after a couple of years) but keep the content non-free so you still need to buy the game from the original creator even once someone else creates a better version of the code.

This does not give you as much (legal) freedom as opening up the whole thing does but gets pretty close and most importantly removes most of the technical challenges for improving and maintaining the game. It's also probably way easier to accomplish since writing, art and music has even less of an open source culture than software.

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

#616

Post by hypertele-Xii »

charcircuit wrote: post #506
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing you said has anything to do with security nor preventing cheating. If that's the sorry state of modern anti-cheat then it makes sense why TF2 is still plagued by incredibly obvious sniper bots. Detecting cheating by window names? Who is getting paid writing this crap?

>Who is getting paid writing this crap? I'm not sure what you are expecting. Either you try and locate cheats on the machine / in memory via some heuristic or look for software that is acting suspicious like trying to write into your game's memory.

No, you analyze behavior on the server. Look at what the player is doing. Track their movements. Graph their performance. Look for hyperconsistencies (inhumanly consistent success).

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

#617

Post by opan »

meragrin_ wrote: post #495
zach_garwood wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's using free as in free speech, not free as in free beer.

If you release a game "free" as in "free speech", how is it not "free" as in "free beer" as well? What would prevent people from redistributing it? Nothing.

It's not really the end of the world if only some people pay for your software. You could charge for binaries but let people build from the source. You are willingly giving people the freedom to redistribute those binaries, such as to their friends. It's just not an issue. It's not a crime that needs to be prevented.

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

#618

Post by randomsearch »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #19

Stallman reminds me of a character in a Greek tragedy. He ends up bringing in the very thing he is fighting against. He makes GPL to give users control over programs. Companies end up using GPL software to power server side software which ends up giving users even less control than proprietary on-device software. He makes GCC to break free of vendors dominating compiler development. IBM(through Redhat) ends up being…

That’s a good point. Relatedly, Jaron Lanier says something quite insightful on the topic that gets to the root (pun) of the problem.

If you think all information should be free, like all software, then the creators of information are not being financially rewarded for creating it. That’s how you end up with cloud data centres making huge profits whilst most OSS projects struggle for cash. It’s also where the business models of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok arise.

Lanier makes a rather odd statement about how web links should be two way to solve this problem. I get his drift, but a better idea is that the web should be built on a more rigorous foundation (see Joe Armstrong’s talk - “the mess we’ve made” - for how it could work). But the general idea is correct - in an information economy either everyone is fairly rewarded for the valuable information they provide, or else you end up with giant companies capturing all the value instead, which leads to gross inequality.

Tbf to Stallman, he is more focused on constraining the worst commercial uses of software, but his fundamental idea that (as per this post) “knitting patterns should be free”, originally something that sounded like an exciting and inspiring idea, has turned out to be absolutely disastrous. He was maybe philosophically correct but in practice, the idea does not serve the best interests of most people.

Information shouldn’t be free (!!! I said that on HN) but rather information should be provided at a cost that is based on both (a) the cost of its provision and (b) the economic value that recipients of that information derive from it. So, for example, OSS authors writing code that underpinned Google’s empire or someone’s SaaS, should get a (small) slice of that pie.

I think once you recognise this, you end up in a really exciting place: like, how could this work in practice? What new concepts do we need to apply to information to do it? Some of the ideas of crypto should come in here: we need to be able to identify information uniquely, for example, so we can track its value. We need to know how many SaaS products are using Bootstrap or whatever. A new type of economy based on fair reward for information is possible. And for once, we do actually need a technical solution to a social problem.

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

#619

Post by simonmic »

crtasm wrote: post #438
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamer nostalgia is a niche within a niche. The modern hardcore gamer market has tens of millions of customers - maybe hundreds if you include trivial but addictive phone games. The nostalgists who want to get Jetpack Willy running again so they can relive a misspent youth number tens of thousands at most. And in fact there are few/no DRM issues for these vintage games and emulations, because they're distributed as bi…

You don't need to be a hardcore fan of anything to want to revisit experiences from your youth and there's a lot more people playing games now than when Jetpack Willy released in the 80s, certainly not a niche market. Think of the situation with today's games 40 years in the future rather than 40 year old games today.

Jet Set Willy, you philistines!

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

#620

Post by tluyben2 »

kiwicopple wrote: post #340
tluyben2 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He sure does but that still would form many issues with compensation as we have seen, many times, with open source companies. Everyone shouts red hat or something but that’s one exception; most other people who make Libre software, die of hunger under a bridge, or, more likely, have a day time job and simply will drop the Libre project when things get too busy. This is why companies now go from Libre to something qua…

supabase ceo here > pattern emerge that are not Libre to pay back I do not see this to be a pattern we will follow. We have a hosted offering which we earn revenue from. The self-hosted offering always being free. All software is MIT, Apache2, or PostgreSQL licensed and we plan to keep it that way. We have the beneficial characteristic that we are a suite of tools, which limits the threat of competition from a cloud…

That is fantastic to hear; you are doing very good work. But history tells a story for most companies. I hope you keep it going; I might apply for a job!
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