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Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

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Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#91

Post by l33t7332273 »

Kinrany wrote: post #78
einpoklum wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FSF is a tiny organization with little funding; you can't lay the responsibility for "reaching out" on them. It's a question of what other cultural, educational and commercial organizations and groups have been doing; whether enough of them have taken these messages to heart; and what they have been promoting. Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying how you reject their princip…

Their goal should be encouraging people to demand open software and hardware, not being principled. Youtube and Twitter have power, not acknowledging that is dumb.

I don’t see how to interpret your comment in a way that doesn’t say “their goal should be encouraging people to be principled, not being being principled themselves.”

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#92

Post by loup-vaillant »

einpoklum wrote: post #65
dale_glass wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pity is that while he was remarkably prescient, he seems to have stopped adapting decades ago. GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Prett…

The FSF is a tiny organization with little funding; you can't lay the responsibility for "reaching out" on them. It's a question of what other cultural, educational and commercial organizations and groups have been doing; whether enough of them have taken these messages to heart; and what they have been promoting. Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying how you reject their princip…

There’s a conundrum though: the inescapable fact is that outside of a couple proprietary/closed networks such as YouTube, there is virtually no audience to speak to. So you can either stick to your principles and reach no one, or you can compromise and expose many more people to your discourse.

Sure, some of this situation is on us, not on the FSF. But I’m discussing what the FSF can do here. And I’m afraid they don’t have much choice.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#93

Post by DesiLurker »

H8crilA wrote: post #33

What's cool about RMS is that he perfectly foresaw many decades ago the world that we live in today: your car or smart fridge refusing actions because its software says so. And you cannot change the bloody software! I cringe every time I see encrypted firmware running in trusted execution environment, DRM, DLCs for fucking physical products, websites or apps that scam you into signing up or giving up some other freed…

I actually attribute success of free software & linux to RMS. IMO he deserves a lot more credit than he gets for his work on gcc/egcs. it is foundational that we have access to a compiler that can produce user created executable otherwise entire software industry would look very different. the likes of MS & Apple would have us wrapped up in licencing agreements & TOSes to stifle innovation at a basic choke-point. if anyone has any doubts you only need to look at the ecosystem for opensource h/w design.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#94

Post by jokethrowaway »

dale_glass wrote: post #52
H8crilA wrote: post #33

What's cool about RMS is that he perfectly foresaw many decades ago the world that we live in today: your car or smart fridge refusing actions because its software says so. And you cannot change the bloody software! I cringe every time I see encrypted firmware running in trusted execution environment, DRM, DLCs for fucking physical products, websites or apps that scam you into signing up or giving up some other freed…

The pity is that while he was remarkably prescient, he seems to have stopped adapting decades ago. GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Prett…

I recently did a Free Software Day event and old timers from FSF showed up.

It was great, but the ecosystem is quickly deteriorating and younger people are born in walled gardens.

The EU is destroying open source in Europe thanks to CRA in the name of security.

AI models mostly have crappy licenses that restrict usage. The worst culprit is HuggingFace with Stable Diffusion and OpenRail which is anything but open. It's a "don't be evil license", where evil is defined by HuggingFace but it opens the door to BS like "you're emitting too much CO2, you can't use this".

I'm sure most people at Huggingface are not doing it maliciously, they probably are all 20-something socialists making half a mill a year and they don't care about freedom.

At the same time they're also releasing a bunch of real OSS software under Apache 2.0 (often to go with OpenRail licensed models).

So yeah, we're screwed.

At the same time, I think governments are removing even more freedom that what's happening in software, so I'm kind of busy country hopping and more concerned about not becoming even more of a slave I am right now.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#95

Post by IanCal »

blueflow wrote: post #77
dale_glass wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pity is that while he was remarkably prescient, he seems to have stopped adapting decades ago. GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Prett…

And gcc and grub and potentially some other 10 libraries that everybody is still using! > Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?

> You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?

Yes?

This is sort of the opposite of the "yet you participate in society, interesting" comic.

You can non-hypocritically call for people to move away from something you also use. It's especially important when it comes to communication because how on earth are you supposed to tell people to change behaviour if they never hear you? Running an ad on fox news calling for people to listen to say NPR instead isn't hypocritical.

An absolutist approach diminishes itself, as it's saying "hey don't use twitter, then just like us you'll have no reach".

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#96

Post by dale_glass »

blueflow wrote: post #77
dale_glass wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pity is that while he was remarkably prescient, he seems to have stopped adapting decades ago. GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Prett…

And gcc and grub and potentially some other 10 libraries that everybody is still using! > Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?

> And gcc and grub and potentially some other 10 libraries that everybody is still using!

Stallman almost screwed up gcc, I think multiple times. GRUB at this point can be safely declared obsolete in the age of EFI.

But yes, GCC is very nice.

> You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?

If only to direct people to content hosted elsewhere, but yes.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#97

Post by Timshel »

dale_glass wrote: post #82
einpoklum wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FSF is a tiny organization with little funding; you can't lay the responsibility for "reaching out" on them. It's a question of what other cultural, educational and commercial organizations and groups have been doing; whether enough of them have taken these messages to heart; and what they have been promoting. Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying how you reject their princip…

> The FSF is a tiny organization with little funding; you can't lay the responsibility for "reaching out" on them. Sure can, that's the very purpose of their existence. "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom." -- how is that going to happen if nobody hears what they want? > Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying…

> And you think posting in tiny platforms that almost nobody knows even exist is going to fix anything?

Nobody is preventing you to post to multiple platform .., and you might have way more engagement in smaller platform.

The recent Mastodon growth allowed me to leave Twitter, I'm missing some content would be nice if more people cross-posted but well I'll do without.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#98

Post by gitanovic »

nvy wrote: post #88
blueflow wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And gcc and grub and potentially some other 10 libraries that everybody is still using! > Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?

I think it's obvious that the implicit question is: Why is the FSF so bad at spreading their gospel? They're terrible at it, Youtube or not.

I think that FSF in a very romantic sense, is fighting a lost battle. The vast majority of people don't care much about their freedom and easily trade it away for convenience, that's just that.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#99

Post by sidkshatriya »

dale_glass wrote: post #52
H8crilA wrote: post #33

What's cool about RMS is that he perfectly foresaw many decades ago the world that we live in today: your car or smart fridge refusing actions because its software says so. And you cannot change the bloody software! I cringe every time I see encrypted firmware running in trusted execution environment, DRM, DLCs for fucking physical products, websites or apps that scam you into signing up or giving up some other freed…

The pity is that while he was remarkably prescient, he seems to have stopped adapting decades ago. GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Prett…

> The FSF is clearly not reaching the people it needs to reach. Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? As far as I know, they have neither.

Sadly they seemed to have tied themselves in all kinds of self imposed knots when it comes to spreading their reach via social networking sites.

See * https://www.fsf.org/twitter * https://www.fsf.org/facebook

You can't change today's world if you're not a bit pragmatic. FSF may make some correct objections but if you're not properly present on some of these platforms your reach will remain limited.

To effect change you need to be part of the world of today -- warts and all. Only then you can you change it. Rejecting the world by putting your head into the ground is a strategy that will often fail. Only when you become extremely big and influential can you help determine the rules of the game.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#100

Post by rakoo »

onethought wrote: post #79
H8crilA wrote: post #33

What's cool about RMS is that he perfectly foresaw many decades ago the world that we live in today: your car or smart fridge refusing actions because its software says so. And you cannot change the bloody software! I cringe every time I see encrypted firmware running in trusted execution environment, DRM, DLCs for fucking physical products, websites or apps that scam you into signing up or giving up some other freed…

Why do you need? Or have the right? To modify the software. That same Tesla is cast with a proprietary alloy that not only they won’t tell you what it is, but it’s patent anyway. Same is true of the rubber in the tyres. Open source is a great thing. But it’s not better (morally) than closed source. Open is just a feature. Like Lego vs a solid plastic toy.

> But it’s not better (morally) than closed source.

That's a highly subjective opinion, and yours is not more valid than others'

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