Indeed. The web is sick of JavaScript, and I mean it. JavaScript is used 70% of the time for totally unnecessary stuff, than makes the web slower and full of cruft.
Just because it's right, doesn't make it practical.
It can be occupy protesters who own iPhones to coordinate or open source purists who use Slack to join projects they love or environmentalists filling their gas tank. In the end, there has to be a more practical strategy that enables a person to fight for the world they want while living in the world that exists.
You misunderstand. It was not the open source purist that chose Slack, it was the wave of popular projects all on Slack the open source purist could no longer resist joining. The alternative to Slack in their case isn't IRC, it's doing another line of work as all the projects within their chosen area of expertise are on Slack. Same is true of my other examples, there's a tipping point where your principled stance forces you to be an outlier, completely irrelevant to the world.
edit- In this case, the open source purist has to join Slack if only to beg people to go to IRC, a move that is at that point more energy than the community will think worth the purists principled gain.
But just because a minority does it, doesn't make it right (correct english?).
I don't share his definition of freedom applied to software, simple as that. I also don't think most of the society shares his values, i often get the idea that he lives in a bubble. Like somebody preaching abstinence instead of birth-control.
I get that "free software" has advantages, but for me it also has disadvantages and therefore can and should not replace all the "unfree software".
Nothing inherently wrong in companies, profit, or even proprietary software. It is abuse and misuse of their power and capacity that we should raises of voices (and choices against). For example I consciously avoid Google Chrome because I object to how it is bundled with literally every Android phone, bundled with a lot of unrelated software and you cannot browse through any Google web property without being nagged to use/install Chrome from time to time, even after I dismiss those prompts. I see this as incipient abuse of power that could grow a lot worse if we keep turning a blind eye. But not all Google products/effors need to be tarred with a broad brush. Everything depends...
People can hardly choose use / don't use Google anymore. If there should be a protest against Google and other big companies, I expect it to be lead by governments and regulations.
I don't mind companies use non-free software, but I do mind if they do whatever they want with their users on a legal basis.
Not to mention government services, built with .NET, which yeah - you are obliged to use.
There are reasons for avoiding Google, but I found Stallman's list a bit odd. Why do I care if the javascript I use to sign up on Google+ is not free?
Now if you don't like being tracked at all time 1: enable privacy options for your Google account 2: avoid using Google Play and 3: start using duckduckgo
Ultimately all RMS's issues come down to "who do you trust?"
If you enable all your Google account privacy options - can you be sure that they do what they say they are doing? How do you know that? Can you be sure your information isn't being intercepted along the way?
If you trust Google then fine.
But if there is even the slightest amount of doubt then someone you trust (preferably you yourself) needs to audit the code and every pathway the data travels along before you can be absolutely sure.
I rather find youtube is the only google site it would hurt to go without as a user. Google's search quality is not that different compared to competitors, and mail and maps are totally replaceable.
Obvious privacy issues aside, Stallman has always come off - to me - as someone who doesn't really see the bigger picture. I thank him for taking a stance against corruption, but there is a line between practical and impractical.
I don't know him personally, but his being top wheel of the FSF has skewed his reality. I cannot remember where I heard it, but I believe he is quoted (heavily paraphrasing here) along the lines of, "I may be fighting a losing fight, but it's all I can do, and I won't stop until I'm dead."
Practicality is the ultimate deciding factor at its core. Practicality decides whether you use a GPL-based license or the Apache license. Practicality decides whether you choose to avoid a website because of non-free Javascript. Practicality decides whether you can eat that muffin and switch gears on the road, and so on. It is a bit like using secure services and utilizing OpSec. Where do you draw the line between convenience and security? Where does it stop being practical and where does it matter to stick to a principle?
Maybe he is just aging, and his brain is in an infinite loop. As I said, I do not know the man myself. But not having a clear focus of how life is for a majority of people can be a huge factor.
No need to be polite. Extremist weirdos are behind essentially all important, groundbreaking, awesome things.
A well mannered "normal" person would have never written the GPL and would have tolerated software that didn't match their politics.
The fringe provides a mandatory function in steering the cultural ship.
Early advocates for things like minimum wages or child labor laws were Molotov cocktail throwing anarchists. Early women suffragists were equally way out there - even by quite permissive modern standards.
Subversives are necessary in order to subvert and often make the world a better place.
Henri Tolain, George Odger, Keir Hardie, Robert Owen, George Loveless, Giuseppe Mazzini, Benoît Malon or Lloyd Jones and basically most of the early labour right activists were respected members of the society. Even the anarchists of the time like Paul Brousse, Élisée Reclus, César De Paepe, Peter Kropotkin or Tito Zanardelli led relatively normal life, they weren't really "extremist weirdos" apart from having progressive ideas.
You have to go back to the 1800s. The Haymarket riot, Thibodaux massacre, Homestead strike, Great railroad strike, Pullman strike, Colorado labor wars, West Virginia coal wars were about wages and labor.
The era of nonviolent Ghandi-style protest hadn't begun so violent worker insurrection was a common element. The railroad strike, for instance, had over 100 workers killed and people feared a bloody worker-run revolution like the Paris Commune of 1871.
The Civil War, which was largely about labor, was recent so the idea of a 2nd labor war wasn't implausible.
A president was assassinated by a unionist steel worker. Wall Street and the LA Times, an anti-union paper at the time, was bombed. Clandestine bombs were sent to dozens of industrialists and anti labor congresspeople.
The modern equivalent would be if Obama was killed, Fox News and 740 Park Avenue was bombed, and the Koch brothers had to dodge constant assassination plots by various "fight for $15" people. The 1900-era version of that actually happened.
So the struggle for the minimum wage wasn't just the whim of a supreme court justice or the musings of armchair intellectuals, it was a bloody multi generational insurrection by syndicalists, unionists, anarchists, and marxists.
Even leading up to the 1938 ruling you had the memorial day massacre, hilo massacre, martial law being declared during teamster strikes, and machine gun companies being called to fight with the national guard, all within 2 years of the Wagner Act.
"The reasonable man adapts to the world, while the unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
really, do reasonable people do absolutely nothing to adapt the world to themselves? The reasonable person isn't able to think well that is messed up and I would like it to change, or hmm, I think this could be improved a bit. The history of small innovations in things (as opposed to the more impressive big and rare innovations) would indicate that yes, reasonable people do try to adapt the world to themselves to some extent. Because to never attempt to adapt the world to oneself would mean not just that one was unreasonable, but maybe also that one was not even human.
Judging by the experiments in both far-left and far-right governments in the 20th Century, we can be quite grateful that for the most part we have had leaders who are grateful to tinker at the edges.
He's a reasonable man trying to change the world though. He's more a Mandela, King or Chomsky than a Trump or a Hitler. Sometimes people try to change the world to be a better place. It's unreasonable not to.
THANK YOU! I keep having to tell people I don't even enjoy my views, I radicalize to mediate all to the center. It unnerves people. Haha.
I think a fundamental portion of civil society is owning the notion that you must strive for the rights of those you like and love least. One day you might be on their side of the railroad tracks and finally get their angst.
In a way, "practicality" is the place you arrive at only after considering more extreme, principled points of view. So if his role is to present one philosophical approach to technology, and you decide it's too extreme, at least it was there to make wherever you arrived informed and well-considered.
And certainly for many-- even if they don't embrace his positions with full-throated absolutism, maybe they'll be floating a little more in the direction of his idealisim than it would have without him having him there. And if so, and clearly his principled influence has been influential (and considerably so) for decades, that's a good thing, right?
What would the would look like without his constant "impractical" point of view...? Very different, and more scary, I think.
Obvious privacy issues aside, Stallman has always come off - to me - as someone who doesn't really see the bigger picture.
That depends heavily on the definition of "bigger picture". You seem to think practicality is most important, while for someone like rms, the bigger picture is in the realm of ethics and human rights.
That said, everyone's entitled to their own opinion.
In the context of Stallman's views, I mean. FOSS is important, but if writing a successful proprietary program keeps someone out of debt then it is a necessary evil.
There are many other variables that would have to apply, I know. But for the sake of argument it is just focusing on the conventional problem of (paying for) everyday living.
I believe that you technically have your definition of "seeing the bigger picture" backwards. The ones that are driven like water around only practicalities do not see the larger landscape of issues. Richard Stallman does, he is constantly considering many more factors than a typical person with each decision that he makes.
It sounds like you're assuming that people who choose practicality do not see other issues. I can assure you that I constantly see lots of issues: technical, social, economic, etc. And mostly I'm choosing a practical way through, picking specifically what to oppose and when. We all have filters on what we'll actively fight for. But it would be wrong to assume only people fighting for/against X see issues related to X.
Now what exactly you see as the "bigger picture" mat depend on your opinions about the subject...
No, that is not the case. I specifically said "The ones that are driven like water around only practicalities do not see the larger landscape of issues." That does not include folks like you that inform themselves of the issues and then make a decision that balances practicalities with principles. Well I ultimately agree with your comment - "We all have filters on what we'll actively fight for", I don't believe that many people are properly informed.
I would like to add that I think Richard Stallman is doing the following:
1: Setting an idealistic example by living what he preaches
2: Dedicating his life to making a world where choosing Free Software is as practical as choosing Proprietary software via the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation.
The problem with relying on "pure practicality" is that one may come dangerously close to opportunism and psychopathy. There are ideas which may be super-practical, yet plainly evil. At risk of being rage-downvoted: it's chilling to think of, but many of Hitler's methods and ideas were quite practical. For some, narrow part of population.
It's already been brought up in this thread, but I'm concerned that RMS is undermining his own points by distancing himself from reality, allowing him to exaggerate them to the point where nobody takes him seriously anymore.
Nobody on Earth* will restrict themselves to using only websites, operating systems, and software and hardware packages which are fully free and open source. That would be insanely restrictive, and generally speaking -- at the risk of being blunt -- you'd be resorting to consistently using lower-quality, less-supported software a lot of the time†.
I'm sure he's got some valid points, but his approach to modern technology based on them essentially involves reverting back to the days of the extremely early internet, where the actual person-to-person networking was restricted to mailing lists and IRC; two formats which the majority of internet users today likely wouldn't be crazy about compared to the alternatives.
* who wants to be a normal and productive member of modern society
† not that there isn't great F/OSS software out there -- Linux and BSD are absolute wonders compared to Windows, but a lot of the time it's like comparing the GIMP to Photoshop -- there's just more refinement in a piece of software developed by thousands of paid, dedicated, full-time developers over two or so decades.
Many worthwile causes require effort and sacrifice. A world of free software would most certainly be better, but to get there, some of us may have to suffer extreme inconveniences, such as using lower-quality, less-supported software just to boycott the proprietary stuff.
It's actually not that ridiculous or difficult to reduce your proprietary software usage. I also think it's a fallacy to say that free software is generally low-quality -- let's not forget that there is plenty of shoddy, badly-supported proprietary software out there too. The worst of it also tends to include spying and malware.
Granted it was much easier to avoid proprietary software around 10 years ago before SaaS and smartphones took off. I think the community has been slow to adapt to these changes, but that isn't a reason to give up hope.
To be precise, op said "lowER-quality" (relative comparison) and not "low-quality" (absolute judgement that something is garbage).
I think the OP's GIMP-vs-Photoshop example made that distinction clear. One can simultaneously consider GIMP to be "high quality software" and also "lowER-quality" than Photoshop.
If you ask me, the GIMP-vs-Photoshop debate has become so much of a dead-horse-beating exercise, to the point where I no longer believe that it is fair to compare those two programs as being anything similar. The only comparison I can draw is this: As with any large and old programs, they both will suffer irrelevance in the coming years anyway, and hopefully become displaced by newer and better products. Disclaimer to make me not sound like a complete idiot: I haven't used Photoshop in many years, but I use GIMP infrequently for mundane image editing tasks.
Even when RMS started the GNU project his approach to (then) modern technology was at an extreme. There were no free compilers, editors, or even trivial userland tools like grep. Instead of being pragmatic, he (and others) worked to create what was missing.
I wouldn't be surprised to find a decades old USENET post that hits all the same points about RMS that you (and others in this thread) bring up. RMS's distance from reality and staunch commitment to principles has been a feature, not a bug.
Don't get me wrong, I also believe that the idealized free-software world is a utopia that we're very unlikely to see. However, RMS's efforts have resulted in (and will continue to produce) a tremendously positive impact for humanity.
i don't even believe a free-software world is desirable without a new way to structure our society. I don't know if i want that. I am also very critical of RMS and his "propaganda"-style of writing.
But this doesn't mean that what he is doing is bad for society or not important. I respect his work and what he has achieved, i just don't share the vision. It's often important to be somewhat crazy to achieve greatness.
It's not an all-or-nothing decision. You can think Stallman is correct, but only heed parts of his advice. I use a lot of open-source software in part thanks to the inspiration I found in the free software movement. But I haven't became a 100% purist. For example, I use some open-source things that probably aren't perfect (and hence wouldn't merit RMS's unconditional approval) such as Ubuntu, Chromium, etc. And I'm also willing to use a proprietary piece of software if is significantly better than the FOSS alternatives.
I think that there is value in the points that he is making. Even if the lifestyle that he advocates is impractical, the mere fact that there is one advocate discussing about it, we are informed of its pros and cons, and are able to better evaluate the freeness of other softwares. That is, even if it is of merely theoretical interest, its presence gives us better situational awareness of the IP situation, and that leads us to making better decisions.
You have similar examples in other social movements; second-wave feminism, for example, borrowed not lightly from radical feminists who wondered to what extent the female condition was determined by biology (and especially as their means of reproductive production), and to what extent cultural; though impractical then and impractical now to take some of the extreme measures some were advocating, they open a possibility and frame discussions.
The goals of RMS is much more ambitious then to make you stop using Google. RMS tries to move you to create world where freedom is normal and accessible for all. Or at least he tries to make you to dream about such a world. If there would be enough people who wants freedom, maybe there would be more freedom?
The one great thing, which RMS tries to make clear to everyone, that you can be free only if you are able to restrict youself. The world works such a way that you have a choice: either to have self discipline and free or to be disciplined by world. The more self disciplined people are in the world, the more freedom would be in the world.
Not everyone is ready to restrict herself to make world more free. But someone do it. RMS is the ideological leader for such a people. Like Dalay Lama or some priests of other religions. At least we can look at them and compare they life with ours. Compare and choose consiously.
Ah, and there is more then two possible choices. You are free to choose some tradeoff between sides which is acceptable to you personally.
I prefer DuckDuckGo. Privacy issues aside they just strive to be the better search engine for software developers. And they have an open source platform for displaying a selected tool or result to a software request query called DuckDuckHack.
I've been using DDG exclusively for almost two years now. I honestly forget that I'm using it most of the time. I can "Google" things and I always get what I'm after. It perfectly replaces Google 100% for me.
I think that it's far worse than google. Don't get me wrong, it's still my main search engine, but I find I have to revert to google to find what I want between 30% and 50% of the time.
Agree. I'm in the same position. I find it particularly poor and combining multiple search terms, where it seems to favour the most popular of the terms and ignore the important narrowing keywords important to the search.
I'm legitimately interested in what things you have been unable to find. Back when I was still working as an SE there were a few minor things that I'd have to revert back to Google for but for 95% of my "professional Googling" DDG worked for me.
About the duckduckhack platform, I was writing a client for it so that I could make searches without opening a browser[0]. But their api is limited. The searches supported by that platform are limited to short and common keywords, and their main site is not open source at all. Kind of disappointing to me that the only way to get all the search results is with a web scraper right now. I still prefer it over Google for at least trying...
At some point I realized I have more than enough local disk space to maintain and run my own local search engine.
So I have been saving and indexing every page of my browsing history and bookmarks for the past 3-4 years. I have a local copy of wikipedia/stackoverflow and offline docs via Zeal. The only time I need google these days is for casual map location/distance queries. I am too lazy to type out the details of my setup but it works quite well.
Initially the only thing that I missed out on and struggled with was news (cause at the time google news had been my default homepage for a while). After trying all kinds of url/keyword blocking at various levels (browser/host file/router) I am finally down to 2 hours of internet a day.
Why am I doing all this - cause the web today (including hacker news) is just wasting my time. Tim Wu makes the case much better than I could here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Xm-1CoAuw8
Is there a chance you could reconsider and try sharing some of the details of your setup? I never imagined one could try doing something like that, and even now that you triggered my imagination (and after reading the link), I have hard time picturing how to even start building such a setup, not to mention a practically usable one???
What do you do when you want to find information about a topic that is not mentioned in any sites you've browsed before or bookmarked, and is not covered in Wikipedia or Stackoverflow?
Why is it a problem for him that Google serves you non-GPL Javascript, but not that they host all your files and can remove them at will? Or that they can remove all the backend services whenever they please? I find it really hard to follow his line of thoughts at times, but he's usually some sort of internally consistent, so what am I missing?
I'm using google less and less, and it's not because of any of this. I find the results just not as relevant as before. The web viewed through google's lens seem to be just about content marketing and outdated stuff.
But, practicality aside, and sometimes childish tone aside (e.g. derogatory names for companies) here's what really bothers me: the framing of this as a moral issue.
I can get behind the idea that non-free code might be a problem, sometimes. I can get behind the idea that we should, in some situations, strive to have non-free code. But why is this a moral issue at all? Why can't reasonable people get together and decide that proprietary code makes sense for some situations, and that doesn't make them or the people using the code morally wrong?
I have a hard time with people whose shtick is mostly "appeal to emotions".
Because it is a moral question: Should you be able to control all data about you, and how it moves? Should ownership mean the ability to entirely modify something?
If you agree that these two are automatically derived from basic moral principles – control over yourself, and the right to ownership – then you also have to agree that closed source products, and SaaS, are morally problematic.
>Because it is a moral question: Should you be able to control all data about you, and how it moves?
That's not the argument Stallman actually makes here though. Note that he doesn't list 'propriety software running on Google's servers' as a reason not to use Google, even though that has far more of an an impact on your ability to control information about you (or to modify the software that you are using) then the comparatively small amount of client side javascript that runs when you use Google.
The general FSF/Stallman position is that non-free software is fine as long as you access it over a network. So clearly control over your own data isn't why RMS is morally opposed to non-free software.
Perhaps those reasonable people are making a moral judgement when they decide to use proprietary code in a certain circumstance: they're deciding it's morally acceptable.
And maybe it isn't morally acceptable in some circumstances. Like when transparency is required in order to facilitate accountability and peace of mind.
It's immoral to have closed-source voting machines. But is it immoral to rely on closed-source search algorithms? The answer to that is less obvious. Either way, moral issues affect code all the time.
I don't see how there is anything fundamentally different between voting machines and search engines as far as the morality of closed-source goes.
For a voting machine, I'd say it is immoral to have voting systems that are unreliable or unverifiable. The problem of making a reliable and verifiable voting system is mostly orthogonal to the open/closed nature of the software in voting machines.
For open-source voting machines, how does the voter know that the binary code running on the machine they are using is actually compiled, unmodified, from the right source? Even if they can somehow determine that, there is still the possibility of bugs.
To get reliable and verifiable voting system, what you need to do is design the system so that if the voting machine software does not count votes correctly that will be detected elsewhere in the system and can be corrected.
An example of how to do this is David Chaum's "Punchscan" system, or it's successor, Chaum and Ron Rivest's "Scantegrity II" system.
> It's immoral to have closed-source voting machines.
Bullshit. The problem is voting machines in general. They are too complex and you cannot observe how they work. This opens up elections to get manipulated regardless if open source is used or not. This is also not a moral problem, but a technological problem. The moral problem is in setting the requirements, the technological problem is in solving them.
What I do not understand in regards to voting computers, is why you need the computer part anyway. If you want fast counting, punch cards suffice.
In this particular case it could be argued that Google's unofficial "don't be evil" motto explicitly framed this as a moral issue. Tongue-in-cheek, to be sure, but certainly an appeal to happy squishy emotions.
That said, RMS's stuff is showing up in a few posts today, and framing as a moral issue is certainly a large part of his standard toolkit. Considering any situation from an ethical viewpoint tends to make my eyes roll and skin crawl (ooh, the moral dimensions of public hygiene? yes please!), but appealing to hearts and minds is pretty basic old-school rhetorical technique.
If nothing else, coming from a technical background, it's occasionally useful to come at the problems from a different, squishier, direction.
One sentence sums this up perfectly - Stallman writes: "A nonfree program submits the users to the power of the program's developer."
This is almost always patently false ... A user chooses to submit themselves to the power of the program's developer in exchange for the utility provided by the program. We do similar things all the time in society:
- If I want to drive a car, I submit myself to the "programmer" who decided that the "Enter" key (gas pedal) would be operated by my foot and be on the floor.
- If I want to drive a car, I also submit myself to a myriad of driving conventions and laws that I can't change: I should probably drive on the correct side of the road for the country I'm in and if I don't stop at red-lights I'll quickly be t-boned.
These are in no way moral decisions and since many of his warnings have to do with privacy and security issues, I applaud him for raising the warning. I don't however think that he helps himself by being so black and white on issues. It's far too easy to point out hypocrisies, especially in non-software areas.
Stallman is right. However, people, myself included, use Google services (search/email/groups/docs/maps/youtube/etc.) because it is easy, cheap, and good.
> Google supports the TPP because of three mostly-evil provisions that would benefit Google
According to the link he gave to Google's statement on TPP, here are the three provisions as described by Google:
#1> The Internet has revolutionized how people can share and access information, and the TPP promotes the free flow of information in ways that are unprecedented for a binding international agreement. The TPP requires the 12 participating countries to allow cross-border transfers of information and prohibits them from requiring local storage of data. These provisions will support the Internet’s open architecture and make it more difficult for TPP countries to block Internet sites -- so that users have access to a web that is global, not just local.
#2> The TPP provides strong copyright protections, while also requiring fair and reasonable copyright exceptions and limitations that protect the Internet. It balances the interests of copyright holders with the public’s interest in the wider distribution and use of creative works -- enabling innovations like search engines, social networks, video recording, the iPod, cloud computing, and machine learning. The endorsement of balanced copyright is unprecedented for a trade agreement. The TPP similarly requires the kinds of copyright safe harbors that have been critical to the Internet’s success, with allowances for some variation to account for different legal systems.
#3> The TPP advances other important Internet policy goals. It prohibits discrimination against foreign Internet services, limits governments’ ability to demand access to encryption keys or other cryptographic methods, requires pro-innovation telecom access policies, prohibits customs duties on digital products, requires proportionality in intellectual property remedies, and advances other key digital goals.
#1 and #3 sound like things that Stallman would like. Anyone happen to know what he dislikes about them?
I believe it doesn't sound so bad because that's Google interpretation of why the TPP is good for Google. But the TPP is a huge deal and there are many different aspects to it. I think the point Stallman is making here, is they're lobbying for something that would be harmful for the future of mankind, out of self-interest.
I believed in Google because I believe in "don't be evil", but we're passed that now, regrettably.
I agree with Stallman, he sounds like radical but he always has been.
We should consider that maybe the Internet really has become a mass surveillance tool, a privacy issue, a billboard and maybe even a distraction from the real issues humans face today.
We might have to except the fact that Google is now, just another major corporation trying to grow infinitely and is less concerned about what it takes to stay at the top, they're walking an ethical tight rope of their own making, especially with regards to supporting the TPP.
I use alternatives frequently now and I feel better for it. DuckDuckGo, TOR, Diconnect.me etc.
We as tech focused people could be doing more to protect users online privacy and I applaud Stallman for having the courage to speak out about these issues, they are important.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadOkay, thanks for your opinion RMS.
I always value Stallman's commitment, but it's often impractical to maintain while being a productive member of society.
Keeps me considering the possibility of freer alternatives though, and I find it valuable for that reason alone.
It can be occupy protesters who own iPhones to coordinate or open source purists who use Slack to join projects they love or environmentalists filling their gas tank. In the end, there has to be a more practical strategy that enables a person to fight for the world they want while living in the world that exists.
That is inexcusable, though.
There are more alternatives than you can count, if you use Matrix, Mattermost, some webirc system with included bouncer, or whatever.
edit- In this case, the open source purist has to join Slack if only to beg people to go to IRC, a move that is at that point more energy than the community will think worth the purists principled gain.
I don't share his definition of freedom applied to software, simple as that. I also don't think most of the society shares his values, i often get the idea that he lives in a bubble. Like somebody preaching abstinence instead of birth-control.
I get that "free software" has advantages, but for me it also has disadvantages and therefore can and should not replace all the "unfree software".
I don't mind companies use non-free software, but I do mind if they do whatever they want with their users on a legal basis.
Not to mention government services, built with .NET, which yeah - you are obliged to use.
Now if you don't like being tracked at all time 1: enable privacy options for your Google account 2: avoid using Google Play and 3: start using duckduckgo
If you enable all your Google account privacy options - can you be sure that they do what they say they are doing? How do you know that? Can you be sure your information isn't being intercepted along the way?
If you trust Google then fine.
But if there is even the slightest amount of doubt then someone you trust (preferably you yourself) needs to audit the code and every pathway the data travels along before you can be absolutely sure.
Sure you may 100% trust someones open code, but if you don't have any insight in their backend once again it comes down to who you trust the most.
And why RMS only uses computers with free software firmware.
That has always been the goal for a mass surveillance machine like that which is very close to government.
And that tells you that it's time to fight back even harder.
I don't know him personally, but his being top wheel of the FSF has skewed his reality. I cannot remember where I heard it, but I believe he is quoted (heavily paraphrasing here) along the lines of, "I may be fighting a losing fight, but it's all I can do, and I won't stop until I'm dead."
Practicality is the ultimate deciding factor at its core. Practicality decides whether you use a GPL-based license or the Apache license. Practicality decides whether you choose to avoid a website because of non-free Javascript. Practicality decides whether you can eat that muffin and switch gears on the road, and so on. It is a bit like using secure services and utilizing OpSec. Where do you draw the line between convenience and security? Where does it stop being practical and where does it matter to stick to a principle?
Maybe he is just aging, and his brain is in an infinite loop. As I said, I do not know the man myself. But not having a clear focus of how life is for a majority of people can be a huge factor.
A well mannered "normal" person would have never written the GPL and would have tolerated software that didn't match their politics.
The fringe provides a mandatory function in steering the cultural ship.
Early advocates for things like minimum wages or child labor laws were Molotov cocktail throwing anarchists. Early women suffragists were equally way out there - even by quite permissive modern standards.
Subversives are necessary in order to subvert and often make the world a better place.
The era of nonviolent Ghandi-style protest hadn't begun so violent worker insurrection was a common element. The railroad strike, for instance, had over 100 workers killed and people feared a bloody worker-run revolution like the Paris Commune of 1871.
The Civil War, which was largely about labor, was recent so the idea of a 2nd labor war wasn't implausible.
A president was assassinated by a unionist steel worker. Wall Street and the LA Times, an anti-union paper at the time, was bombed. Clandestine bombs were sent to dozens of industrialists and anti labor congresspeople.
The modern equivalent would be if Obama was killed, Fox News and 740 Park Avenue was bombed, and the Koch brothers had to dodge constant assassination plots by various "fight for $15" people. The 1900-era version of that actually happened.
So the struggle for the minimum wage wasn't just the whim of a supreme court justice or the musings of armchair intellectuals, it was a bloody multi generational insurrection by syndicalists, unionists, anarchists, and marxists.
Even leading up to the 1938 ruling you had the memorial day massacre, hilo massacre, martial law being declared during teamster strikes, and machine gun companies being called to fight with the national guard, all within 2 years of the Wagner Act.
I think a fundamental portion of civil society is owning the notion that you must strive for the rights of those you like and love least. One day you might be on their side of the railroad tracks and finally get their angst.
And certainly for many-- even if they don't embrace his positions with full-throated absolutism, maybe they'll be floating a little more in the direction of his idealisim than it would have without him having him there. And if so, and clearly his principled influence has been influential (and considerably so) for decades, that's a good thing, right?
What would the would look like without his constant "impractical" point of view...? Very different, and more scary, I think.
That depends heavily on the definition of "bigger picture". You seem to think practicality is most important, while for someone like rms, the bigger picture is in the realm of ethics and human rights.
That said, everyone's entitled to their own opinion.
There are many other variables that would have to apply, I know. But for the sake of argument it is just focusing on the conventional problem of (paying for) everyday living.
Now what exactly you see as the "bigger picture" mat depend on your opinions about the subject...
I would like to add that I think Richard Stallman is doing the following:
1: Setting an idealistic example by living what he preaches 2: Dedicating his life to making a world where choosing Free Software is as practical as choosing Proprietary software via the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation.
This is pretty clearly a completely incorrect statement. Everything Stallman says is bigger picture. All your arguments are about the details.
Nobody on Earth* will restrict themselves to using only websites, operating systems, and software and hardware packages which are fully free and open source. That would be insanely restrictive, and generally speaking -- at the risk of being blunt -- you'd be resorting to consistently using lower-quality, less-supported software a lot of the time†.
I'm sure he's got some valid points, but his approach to modern technology based on them essentially involves reverting back to the days of the extremely early internet, where the actual person-to-person networking was restricted to mailing lists and IRC; two formats which the majority of internet users today likely wouldn't be crazy about compared to the alternatives.
Maybe it's just me, but being a "normal" member of any society isn't very appealing.
It's a political choice.
Granted it was much easier to avoid proprietary software around 10 years ago before SaaS and smartphones took off. I think the community has been slow to adapt to these changes, but that isn't a reason to give up hope.
I think the OP's GIMP-vs-Photoshop example made that distinction clear. One can simultaneously consider GIMP to be "high quality software" and also "lowER-quality" than Photoshop.
I wouldn't be surprised to find a decades old USENET post that hits all the same points about RMS that you (and others in this thread) bring up. RMS's distance from reality and staunch commitment to principles has been a feature, not a bug.
Don't get me wrong, I also believe that the idealized free-software world is a utopia that we're very unlikely to see. However, RMS's efforts have resulted in (and will continue to produce) a tremendously positive impact for humanity.
But this doesn't mean that what he is doing is bad for society or not important. I respect his work and what he has achieved, i just don't share the vision. It's often important to be somewhat crazy to achieve greatness.
You have similar examples in other social movements; second-wave feminism, for example, borrowed not lightly from radical feminists who wondered to what extent the female condition was determined by biology (and especially as their means of reproductive production), and to what extent cultural; though impractical then and impractical now to take some of the extreme measures some were advocating, they open a possibility and frame discussions.
The one great thing, which RMS tries to make clear to everyone, that you can be free only if you are able to restrict youself. The world works such a way that you have a choice: either to have self discipline and free or to be disciplined by world. The more self disciplined people are in the world, the more freedom would be in the world.
Not everyone is ready to restrict herself to make world more free. But someone do it. RMS is the ideological leader for such a people. Like Dalay Lama or some priests of other religions. At least we can look at them and compare they life with ours. Compare and choose consiously.
Ah, and there is more then two possible choices. You are free to choose some tradeoff between sides which is acceptable to you personally.
https://duckduckhack.com/
0: https://github.com/wlib/duckgo
That's true but it's not evil to offer nonfree programs. It's my choice to run it or not.
So I have been saving and indexing every page of my browsing history and bookmarks for the past 3-4 years. I have a local copy of wikipedia/stackoverflow and offline docs via Zeal. The only time I need google these days is for casual map location/distance queries. I am too lazy to type out the details of my setup but it works quite well.
I point people at this link and the associated search project for similar ideas - http://aurelieherbelot.net/how-small-is-the-world-wide-web-r...
Initially the only thing that I missed out on and struggled with was news (cause at the time google news had been my default homepage for a while). After trying all kinds of url/keyword blocking at various levels (browser/host file/router) I am finally down to 2 hours of internet a day.
Why am I doing all this - cause the web today (including hacker news) is just wasting my time. Tim Wu makes the case much better than I could here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Xm-1CoAuw8
But, practicality aside, and sometimes childish tone aside (e.g. derogatory names for companies) here's what really bothers me: the framing of this as a moral issue.
I can get behind the idea that non-free code might be a problem, sometimes. I can get behind the idea that we should, in some situations, strive to have non-free code. But why is this a moral issue at all? Why can't reasonable people get together and decide that proprietary code makes sense for some situations, and that doesn't make them or the people using the code morally wrong?
I have a hard time with people whose shtick is mostly "appeal to emotions".
If you agree that these two are automatically derived from basic moral principles – control over yourself, and the right to ownership – then you also have to agree that closed source products, and SaaS, are morally problematic.
That's not the argument Stallman actually makes here though. Note that he doesn't list 'propriety software running on Google's servers' as a reason not to use Google, even though that has far more of an an impact on your ability to control information about you (or to modify the software that you are using) then the comparatively small amount of client side javascript that runs when you use Google.
The general FSF/Stallman position is that non-free software is fine as long as you access it over a network. So clearly control over your own data isn't why RMS is morally opposed to non-free software.
No?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
And maybe it isn't morally acceptable in some circumstances. Like when transparency is required in order to facilitate accountability and peace of mind.
It's immoral to have closed-source voting machines. But is it immoral to rely on closed-source search algorithms? The answer to that is less obvious. Either way, moral issues affect code all the time.
For a voting machine, I'd say it is immoral to have voting systems that are unreliable or unverifiable. The problem of making a reliable and verifiable voting system is mostly orthogonal to the open/closed nature of the software in voting machines.
For open-source voting machines, how does the voter know that the binary code running on the machine they are using is actually compiled, unmodified, from the right source? Even if they can somehow determine that, there is still the possibility of bugs.
To get reliable and verifiable voting system, what you need to do is design the system so that if the voting machine software does not count votes correctly that will be detected elsewhere in the system and can be corrected.
An example of how to do this is David Chaum's "Punchscan" system, or it's successor, Chaum and Ron Rivest's "Scantegrity II" system.
Bullshit. The problem is voting machines in general. They are too complex and you cannot observe how they work. This opens up elections to get manipulated regardless if open source is used or not. This is also not a moral problem, but a technological problem. The moral problem is in setting the requirements, the technological problem is in solving them.
What I do not understand in regards to voting computers, is why you need the computer part anyway. If you want fast counting, punch cards suffice.
That said, RMS's stuff is showing up in a few posts today, and framing as a moral issue is certainly a large part of his standard toolkit. Considering any situation from an ethical viewpoint tends to make my eyes roll and skin crawl (ooh, the moral dimensions of public hygiene? yes please!), but appealing to hearts and minds is pretty basic old-school rhetorical technique.
If nothing else, coming from a technical background, it's occasionally useful to come at the problems from a different, squishier, direction.
This is almost always patently false ... A user chooses to submit themselves to the power of the program's developer in exchange for the utility provided by the program. We do similar things all the time in society:
- If I want to drive a car, I submit myself to the "programmer" who decided that the "Enter" key (gas pedal) would be operated by my foot and be on the floor.
- If I want to drive a car, I also submit myself to a myriad of driving conventions and laws that I can't change: I should probably drive on the correct side of the road for the country I'm in and if I don't stop at red-lights I'll quickly be t-boned.
These are in no way moral decisions and since many of his warnings have to do with privacy and security issues, I applaud him for raising the warning. I don't however think that he helps himself by being so black and white on issues. It's far too easy to point out hypocrisies, especially in non-software areas.
According to the link he gave to Google's statement on TPP, here are the three provisions as described by Google:
#1> The Internet has revolutionized how people can share and access information, and the TPP promotes the free flow of information in ways that are unprecedented for a binding international agreement. The TPP requires the 12 participating countries to allow cross-border transfers of information and prohibits them from requiring local storage of data. These provisions will support the Internet’s open architecture and make it more difficult for TPP countries to block Internet sites -- so that users have access to a web that is global, not just local.
#2> The TPP provides strong copyright protections, while also requiring fair and reasonable copyright exceptions and limitations that protect the Internet. It balances the interests of copyright holders with the public’s interest in the wider distribution and use of creative works -- enabling innovations like search engines, social networks, video recording, the iPod, cloud computing, and machine learning. The endorsement of balanced copyright is unprecedented for a trade agreement. The TPP similarly requires the kinds of copyright safe harbors that have been critical to the Internet’s success, with allowances for some variation to account for different legal systems.
#3> The TPP advances other important Internet policy goals. It prohibits discrimination against foreign Internet services, limits governments’ ability to demand access to encryption keys or other cryptographic methods, requires pro-innovation telecom access policies, prohibits customs duties on digital products, requires proportionality in intellectual property remedies, and advances other key digital goals.
#1 and #3 sound like things that Stallman would like. Anyone happen to know what he dislikes about them?
I believed in Google because I believe in "don't be evil", but we're passed that now, regrettably.
We should consider that maybe the Internet really has become a mass surveillance tool, a privacy issue, a billboard and maybe even a distraction from the real issues humans face today.
We might have to except the fact that Google is now, just another major corporation trying to grow infinitely and is less concerned about what it takes to stay at the top, they're walking an ethical tight rope of their own making, especially with regards to supporting the TPP.
I use alternatives frequently now and I feel better for it. DuckDuckGo, TOR, Diconnect.me etc.
We as tech focused people could be doing more to protect users online privacy and I applaud Stallman for having the courage to speak out about these issues, they are important.