It looks like Lunduke just cut-and-pasted all the quotes that Slashdot published (presumably their transcription from the FSF's audio file) on Saturday.
The grandparent comment says that Lunduke ripped off Slashdot. I don't see that. There is one quote that's the same and several that I see that are different. You claim you changed it to the original source... the original source would be the Libreplanet link here:
https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/the-state-of-t...
So both Lunduke and Slashdot are posting news about LibrePlanet and it's not clear one ripped off the other, other than having one quote that's the same.
It seems like you went with the above commenters without investigating.
I have no affiliation with Lunduke. I'm not a paid subscriber to his journal, I just get it by email sometimes.
The quotes overlap just about completely, they aren't offered with any additional analysis so the 'original source' of both the curation and transcription is really those slashdot comments. There's no 'ripping off' mentioned.
I am looking forward to that book, but I don't expect too much from it. After all, he basically says, I don't like abstraction. Let's see if the result is worth specialising his book to GCC.
I was checking in every once in a while when it was live once the video crapped out. I popped in and he was trashing Zoom, which I found a tad ironic...
Not anymore than any other technology he disparages: it's proprietary and steals your information, which is all likely true. But if he is using open source free software as a replacement, shouldn't he have tested and fixed said software? Isn't that his entire shtick? High minded ideals are great and all but at the end of the day the software needs to work and on that day it did not...
> 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, Emacs to do his presentation, and there was a bug preventing him.
Why do so many people feel the need to make excuses for him? No, I don't think the onus is on him to personally fix all software he uses, but I do think making sure that his big "The state of the Free Software movement" talk should be a tiny bit more slick and tested than a rushed college freshmen tech demo from the early 90's which is about where I would put the whole thing I watched then mostly listened to...
> But typically these games are not solitaire; you're playing with other people. And using a non-free program together with other people? That's particularly bad. Because it means that those people are pressuring each other to keep running that non-free program.
I wonder what Stallman would say about anticheat software. Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable.
But without it, there's a client-side arms race against the server code which is a different kind of metagame than most players would want.
>Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable.
[[Citation Needed]]. Trying to play a multiplayer game that doesn't implement effective anticheat is miserable. The arms race is unfortunate but 100% understandable, and I wouldn't play any game that doesn't implement some form of it.
Bit of a false dichotomy. Detesting anticheat doesn't mean you support none (and therefore enjoy rampant cheating).
More probably, the point here is most anticheats are very invasive and harmful to privacy, while also degrading game performance and often being ineffective at preventing cheaters.
> More probably, the point here is most anticheats are very invasive and harmful to privacy, while also degrading game performance and often being ineffective at preventing cheaters.
[Citation needed] at the last part. Of course they're not gonna prevent 100% of cheaters, but I have doubts that they don't do anything.
i think you may have misread it. no one claimed any absolute (in)effectiveness. my point was the % of cheating they do prevent is sometimes not enough to sufficiently improve the user experience, despite the large privacy tradeoffs. for example, queue for ranked in R6 Siege... saying "citation needed" on repeat is kind of lazy.
OP's point here was that anticheat - while necessary in practice - is particularly egregious at invading privacy and/or degrading the user's experience, which i think is fair to say goes against the free software ideal. the experience would certainly be worse without any anticheat, but that doesn't mean anticheat couldn't be better or isn't still very non-free.
This is due to how multiplayer in modern games is orchestrated.
In the old days, you would play multiplayer with your friends and their friends on a private server or some kind of community server where cheaters could quickly be recognized and banned by the admins. Now this communal way of playing online games is largely gone and replaced by match making which makes multiplayer basically the same as playing against cleverer bots.
Match making is more convenient, especially for lone players, and I don't think the change was done out of malice. Still, it feels like something was lost with the disappearance of private or semi-private community servers, easy policing of cheaters being one of those things.
Anticheat was still a thing in the old days, even when it was something the admins had to manually install (PunkBuster for some games, I think?) or at least not opt out of (VAC). So, at least at the time, many admins saw it as desirable despite their own existence.
Solving the community game problem doesn’t require Anticheat, just groups of people who organize and nominate admins. But that niche doesn’t pay for the development of the games.
For a game to attract the amount of people required to finance AAA gamedev it needs console matchmaking (so people can enjoy it from the first minute), it might need to allow trustworthy competitive games bevause competitions are part of marketing.
Being able to switch off the anticheats on private/community server that are policed by admins would work. But again it’s a pretty small niche.
More and more it feels like one of the central problems of the modern technical is how to effectively scale trust.
Anti-piracy: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling the sale of products because technology has radically reduced "manufacture" and distribution costs.
Anti-cheat: trying to address the lack of abuse of trust while scaling game coordination because tech. has made massive interconnectivity possible
Anti-cryptography: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling communication tools.
I lived through those days, and you're looking back with rose colored glasses. Most servers didn't have an admin online most of the time, so hacking was still a major annoyance if you didn't have something like VAC.
I do miss the quirky nature of private servers, custom maps and game mods, and all of that, but cheating was a big problem back then too.
I think he would just say “I told you so”. To play a game I need to be running non-free hardware, to run a non-free OS (Windows 11) to run closed source software, that connects to a non-free server, that spies on me in proprietary ways to prevent cheating.
Other than the functionality of the phone itself, what practical difference is there between the iPhone and the Nintendo Switch?
What has Stallman said about walled gardens and app stores?
Maybe a GCW Zero or an OUYA or similar (and yes, I'm aware of the current status of the system). Fortunately, because these are linux or android based and thus open source, you still have the freedom to compile your own kernels for them.
I don't think this is really a given. I admit I'm not familiar with whether or not there exist some free and open source anti-cheat software out there but I can definitely imagine a world where if people put enough resources in developing such software it'd be totally possible to be as good as current proprietary anti-cheat techniques.
Claiming that knowing how the code works lets you break the code is basically advocating for security by obscurity which I'm fairly sure we're all aware it's not the holy grail of a secure system. If you will allow me a bit of a hyperbole, it'd be like saying that since I have access to the entire code of my SSH client, that gives me the capability of modifying it so it lets me connect to every server (even those that I do not own) without a password. That's simply not how it works.
It'd be simple to develop stealth code to hide your cheats.
>advocating for security by obscurity
There is nothing wrong with this as long as you understand what you are doing. The goal of anticheat is to prevent cheat makers from being able to make cheats for your game for as long as possible. Increasing the time and skill needed to reverse engineer your anticheat increases the time it takes for someone to develop a cheat.
>it'd be like saying that since I have access to the entire code of my SSH client, that gives me the capability of modifying it so it lets me connect to every server (even those that I do not own) without a password
With this kind of problem of authentication it is simple to design the code such that the time it will take for an attacker to break the security to be impractical. Anticheat on the other hand is not a problem that has a solution like that. If you want to check if a click came from a mouse or a cheat program and you trust the client to tell you where it came from it's impossible to prevent the client from lying. Since it's trivial to lie you need to find a way to slow down attackers to make it harder to lie.
Still, I'm not an expert and this might be entirely unfeasible but I can totally imagine some kind of trusted execution environment that cross checks specific instructions at the API level when the client communicates with the server using some kind of trusted operation (backed by cryptography).
There are already VMs that are used to run trusted instructions on a target (read: client) machine and regardless of you knowing how the VM works and what the code does, if you don't "play by the rules" (as is the world of cryptography), your data will not be accepted and you will get kicked/banned/disconnected.
Is it computationally expensive? Probably. Is it feasible? I don't know. Is it theoretically possible? I'd say so.
>Increasing the time and skill needed to reverse engineer your anticheat increases the time it takes for someone to develop a cheat.
This is the good ol' security by obscurity fallacy. Having it open increases the amount of people who have eyes on the code and contribute to the code and finds exploits to patch, etc. It's two sides of the same coin.
A cheat would just look at the detection code and be sure it doesn't violate what the anticheat is checking for.
>Having it open increases the amount of people who have eyes on the code and contribute to the code and finds exploits to patch, etc.
If your detection is to collect the names of the open windows on a computer to check for a cheat's name and then send the anticheat server the hash of the binary that opened that window how is making that information public making the anticheat stronger. The more eyes that look at that code the more cheaters who know to name their cheat windows as "Notepad." To avoid being found. If you find an exploit there is no patch.
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?
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).
No, not at all. You are making the same mistake as "security by obscurity". If fully understanding your anticheat breaks it, it was broken to begin with.
Anti cheat is an impossible task like DRM. Fundamentally it can’t be perfect for most games. But continuing the cat and mouse obscurity game has been working pretty well.
How can you possibly verify the mouse was moved by a human rather than a script when the script had the ability to lie about any check you put in place. In the end it comes to making the check so hard to understand that you can’t work it out fast enough to keep ahead.
> Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable.
I don’t want to play a game with a bunch of cheaters, and I don’t want to have to filter down to “friends I know won’t cheat “ to play a game with others.
You could play with friends of friends of friends. We can make software for making these checks automatically and transitively, and automatically distribute responsibility when someone is found cheating.
> Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable.
Generally the people who are actually into multiplayer games accept anticheat software as a necessary evil. Yes, they're not exactly enthused about what amounts to game-supporting spyware, but playing a game that's rife with hackers is a miserable experience.
Grifters, trolls, asshats always find their way into communities that are centrally moderated. That includes most online games and social media today. This problem isn't solved with anti cheat and government ID checks. In fact this problem was solved years ago, simply by letting each community create their own spaces with their own rules. This means some spaces are private. Others may be semi-open. And some will be fully open, and yes that will always be chaotic.
The only multi-player games I play are with friends or their friends, ie people I already trust. The only social media i use is group chats with friends. Of course, you can have more open and anonymous spaces like we have here on HN, but you need more moderation and the moderators need to feel some sense of pride/ownership to keep on working for free.
This I agree. Furthermore, you should be able to do such a community by a local network (LAN) instead of using the internet, if you wish. (Free software has this advantage, too; if it does not already do that, you could change it to work.) (Also, some tournaments might be set up in a room in a building; there, they can have dedicated computers.)
Private walled gardens would pretty much kill the competitive scene of most games.
I used to play competitive dota (the original wc3 map) back in the day and the inhouse leagues were a massive pain in the ass. Same with all the various leagues for counter strike (1.6 at the time). UX was terrible, the moderation sucked and you still had to have anti-cheat as people would cheat even in private spaces. Usually the easiest way to get up the ladder was do something dubious and be good friends with the mods so they would rule in your favor.
People use cheats even at LAN events too. So yeah for competitive multiplayer anti-cheat is pretty much required.
Smash Bros has so bad netcode that serious competitive online play does not really exist. This is why most big fighting game tournaments dropped smash during covid due to being forced to be ran online (and Nintendo is just a real pain to work with). Instead we get some previously "small" game being ran at big tournamets like Skullgirls at EVO because they have rock solid netcode so they can actually be played online at high level.
Also smash is played on consoles that prevent one from installing cheats basically the fact that the whole platform is fully locked down is the anti-cheat. Still controllers are sometimes checked at tournaments for any additions that can run macros (most adapters that allow one to use a different consoles controller can do this)
And it has barely limped along over the years in comparison to other developer supported FGC games.
This is more of an "exception that proves the rule" since Smash is pretty much the only competitive game with zero centralized support that has broken out of a tiny niche to compete with big names.
It's wild to me that game developers have determined it's easier to write malwate to prevent cheating than just make server side code robust enough to not validate code that could be a cheat...
I am not sure what you mean there. Wallhacks is the ability to see through walls. The server could simply not give out the information about what behind a wall and the wallhack exploit would stop working. It would also very likely introduce pop-in and latency issue as soon the client peeks behind the wall and now need updated information from the server.
Fake lag is in a similar situation. The server could simply hold the true state of all positioning and ignore what the clients think is their position. This might work fine in a very low latency situation, but as latency increase it would make playing the game feel sluggish. It would also make aiming difficult, since the key press for fire would have to travel to the server in order for it to occur, and by then the location of players could have shifted.
Trigger bots however is mostly impossible to stop server side. Any action that is identical to human actions can only really be detected through statistics and heuristics.
>It would also very likely introduce pop-in and latency issue as soon the client peeks behind the wall and now need updated information from the server.
Which is why games that do that will still send you data about player who you are almost able to see. This will be their exact position and look direction along with what they are holding. Even limited wallhacks can give a competitive advantage.
I think you misunderstand fake lag. With fake lag you get fake packet loss / latency which causes your character to stutter making it harder to aim at you. The server isn't getting a regular stream of updates of your position.
If the movement, location and actions occurs at the server, the effect of fake lag would just harm the player doing it. It would not make the character stutter for everyone else, as from the server perspective the player would just be standing still.
Yes, the player will look like they are teleporting around, but they will still be able to kill you. No, it doesn't harm the player doing it because client side they are still moving around.
There is a misunderstanding here over how server side vs client side movement work. I will illustrate this with an example:
With Client side movement, Player A sends in even intervals their location to the server. Let say they move right for 3 unit of time, the location get updated from 0:0, 0:1, 0:2. The server then relay the information to Player B.
With Server side movement, Player A tells the server they want to move to the right. The server create a path over time, 0:0, 0:1, 0:2, ... and continuously sends this to player B.
Let now add a fake lag with client side movement. In the first case the we see Player A send locations like 0:0, 0:1, -, -, -, 0:5. The server sends this to player B. If Player B fired a gun at 0:2 at the third interval they might miss because player A is not there. The server might extrapolate an virtual path between 0:1 and 0:5, but that depend on game logic.
Lets now add a fake lag with server side movement. Player A tells the server that they want to move right. After 2 units they add a 3 unit lag, and finally sends tells the server a stop command. The server would construct the following path: 0:0 (start moving player A), 0:1, 0:2, 0:3, 0:4, 0:5 (halt moving Player A). If Player B fired a gun at 0:2 at the third interval, the server see that player A is at that location and will mark a hit.
This is why server side movement isn't vulnerable to fake lag. The server has the full game state and thus know at any point where all player are and what they are doing, and if the client lag then it simply mean that their input gets delayed. Server side movement is however vulnerable to real lag, as between any action there might be a delay and thus events might not occur at the server when players want it to occur. Server side movement is also slightly more vulnerable to ddos attacks if players can identify the IP address of other players.
With server side movement, player A do not send coordinates. The server does the movement of players.
Imagine you are talking over the phone to someone who is driving, given them directions. That is server side movements. If you suddenly stop talking, the car doesn't just stop, nor does the traffic. All you have accomplished is that the driver is no longer getting any further instructions from you.
I wasn't talking about coordinates. Just commands attached to timestamps. If Player B shoots player B at t=5 and then Player A says they stopped moving at t=2, then Player B's shot will miss since they didn't know Player A had already stopped 3 seconds ago.
Depends on how it is implemented. If the server-side version is the truth, only the player doing it suffers. For example, player lags for a second. In that second, the server extrapolates their new position based on last velocity, heading, input, etc. Someone kills them at that extrapolated position. When the client resyncs they suddenly die.
I wonder What Stallman would think of ROM hacking, and other mod communities that reverse engineer proprietary games, and fundamentally transform (either through direct hacks or rebuilding from decompiled source) them into something more akin to open culture. Legally? No, which is why I doubt he'll ever comment on it, but I imagine he might say that this is a distopian notion where people have to break laws to take ownership of culture because everything is fundamentally non-free.
He made a comment about reverse engineering in response to a question. Someone asked about reverse engineering something (I think it was about some teleconferencing application), and his response was basically "it's hard work, go for it, but make sure you are not breaking the law in your country".
> “Well, first of all, I don't think there's anything bad about playing a game. Unless the game is non-free — then it's bad for you, if you play it.
I get that Stallman's shtick is being as hardline as possible about free software, but it really feels like sometimes this hurts the free software movement.
Imagine trying to bring in a normal, non-technical person who plays video games as one of their hobbies (describes a lot of my friends at least), and they see this quote. Immediately, it feels bullshit and dumb to them - non-free games (which make up 99.999% of the market) are "harmful for them"? It's hard enough for me (a trusted friend) to explain the free software movement to them after seeing stuff like this, imagine a random person just stumbling upon it.
And yes, every community has their super-idealistic members that make extreme hyperbolic statements, but the problem is that Richard Stallman is one of the most influential and respected members of the movement (and the founder of it!). Sometimes I feel like we could get a lot more done for free software with a tiny bit of pragmatism - for example, in the video game space, pushing for Valve to open source the Steam client, which feels like the most likely high-impact goal to push for rather than the lost battle of trying to change the entire industry at once.
Stallman has a vision that you and I should be typing our comments and playing our games from machines that are under our control, i.e., whereby we can inspect and modify all of the code that is running on them.
That is not the case, and all Stallman is saying, is that this is bad for us.
The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground.
I don't think Stallman would agree that "lack of pragmatism" is really what's stopping things from changing for better.
> That is not the case, and all Stallman is saying, is that this is bad for us.
Right, but to most people, that's still an extreme position. Because again, like 99.99% of games are non-free, and especially the way he phrased it is gonna come across as a crank.
Stallman strikes me very much as the kind of person who communicates poorly, in an inflammatory way, and gives zero shits how much this bothers anyone else.
Which for a random individual is probably fine, or at least tolerable, but is less good when you're the face of a movement.
It's 2022 and it's close to impossible for you and me to own a computer that we control. Even the thought of owning a computer we control is now seen as "extreme".
If we did go through hops to have a machine that we control, it'd be practically impossible to use it to communicate with our friends and family, because all of our communications go through third party servers that we do not control.
In exactly which way is Stallman being inflammatory here?
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.
I think this can actually be a good tactic. If someone thinks of something like games as entirely good or bad, they will never understand the argument. Many people love alcohol but know it’s bad for them. Many people love games but know that digital restrictions work against them. It’s probably the easiest example to onboard people to the FSF’s ideas because the restrictions on games are so apparent.
I use plenty of proprietary software, but I also know it’s bad for me. Like someone who enjoys alcohol, I think the benefits are worth the negative effects, but whenever I can get the same benefits from free software, I prefer them. I keep one computer around that runs only free software, and it’s great. It’s a decade old, but gains on desktop software performance in the last decade have been slow.
Even Stallman gives one reason to use proprietary software: to make a free version of it. I’ll offer a liberal interpretation of that rule: most people work in technology need to use a wide variety of proprietary software to understand trends and developments in software paradigms, even if they are not directly copying it while using it.
And my prediction: one day, all software will become free. All proprietary software is only temporarily restricted. Future computers will be able to reverse-engineer any existing program and create code that is functionally identical. That still makes it harmful, but that harm will eventually end. We just have the responsibility to make better laws in the future. Most important is preserving political freedom, and software freedom will eventually follow.
This is because 99.99% of the population wouldn’t know what to do with such a device. Computers are consumer devices, they can’t be expected to meet demands for total user control without those users shooting themselves in the foot nonstop. This is the only logical way they can develop.
Put a bunch of smart, pragmatic people in a room and you’ll only end up with the current state of the software industry. The stricter the rules, the more durable the movement.
He could definitely benefit from coming across as more pleasant and affable, though.
I'm interested in what you would consider success in the free software movement? GPL'd software is everywhere, Linux is a household name, proprietary competitors have been consistently overshadowed and made irrelevant. We are nowhere near a 100% free software world, but it's far better than 10 or 20 years ago, let alone 30+.
The FSF has been chronically incapable of doing anything about SaaS. What good is GPL software if I'm forced to use an opaque version of it in a device out of my control to do my business? The FSF made the AGPL as a stopgap but it's been an unpopular license.
So no, the world just moved proprietary software to the cloud with parts spun-off and GPLed on paper.
Aren't most activist movements led – to a great extent – by people who take rather maximalist positions? This is true in areas which have nothing to do with free software.
In a way, it is a form of society-wide bargaining. Ask for everything, get something. Ask for something, get nothing. Start big, end up small; start small, end up nowhere.
To most people in France in 1789 it was an extreme position to take power and shortly after put Louis XVI to the guillotine but two-something centuries after most are thankful this happened
>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.
> The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground. I don't think Stallman would agree that "lack of pragmatism" is really what's stopping things from changing for better.
Or maybe the FSF has absolutely miserably failed at actually getting their message out there?
The Right to Repair movement has been more successful; there's quite a bit of overlap between the concept of Free Software and Right To Repair: both are fundamentally about "I can do to the machine I bought whatever I want!" And it seems both the public and lawmakers are receptive to this argument. Right to Repair hasn't been as successful as I'd like (yet), but a lot more successful than Free Software. It seems to me that part of the blame squarely lies with FSF's inability to actually communicate their message effectively. Open Source has been more successful either.
I never like this kind of externalizing of issues and blame other people/corporations/governments because it's just not helpful. Even if you're 100% correct about all of that, you can't change what other people/organisations do where you have no influence, but you can influence what you do, so it's almost always better to think about "what can I/we do better?" rather than "what can they do better?"
I think right to repair is easier for the average person to understand. You can just go to a repair shop and they can fix your device. Easy to understand. When you have a computer it can just work regardless if you are using free software or not. For the average person they won't see any visible / tangible benefit to free software.
I don't think FSF communication really has that much of an impact on the success. Even if the average person understands the benefit to free software it just doesn't impact them in the same way that right to repair does and that will result in them not really caring about it.
The average person also buys into the standard copyright argument of "you should own your creativity"; accepting software freedom requires, at a minimum, rejecting software copyright categorically[0]. This is a left-of-Marx view: even the extreme left does not touch copyright beyond anticapitalist generalities.
In contrast, right to repair does not require abandoning the entire framework of copyright. In fact, it barely touches it. Furthermore, Louis Rossman is way better at explaining the problems with anti-repair bullshit than RMS is at explaining the harms of proprietary software.
[0] Yes I know GPL relies upon copyright to work. That was the backup plan - if we can't force all software to be Free we can at least keep our own software from being locked down.
Software as individual expression, or as IP to be defended do not need to be in your face opposite extremes. They aren't in most cases. Open source is one middle ground, open hardware or documented hardware can be another.
I do think copyright reform has favored individual expression recently, and I don't see this changing.
I don't think Free Software has to be difficult to explain: "if you encounter a bug in your program/game then anyone can fix it, and you don't have to wait for the manufacturer (which may never release a fix)", or "if you want a feature then anyone can add it, and maybe someone already did", or "if you don't like the new version of the software people can continue maintaining the old version".
Some practical scenarios:
- The game Guacamelee crashes at 30 minutes in to the game for me and quite a lot of other people, but I can't fix it or download an "unofficial patch" (how many games have reverse-engineered unofficial patches btw?).
- I happened to have bought Hyperlight Drifer on GOG.com today; it seems okay, but the controls are horrible to the point of being almost unplayable. Pretty sure someone would have fixed it if they could.
- Back in the day KPN (Dutch AT&T) gave everyone a wireless dongle with their internet, but the driver was bugged and after a certain Windows update it would cause BSODs, and I had to sell a lot of new wireless dongles because of that.
- How many people and organisations would have preferred running Windows XP/7 instead of more or less forcibly updating to 8/10 because Microsoft no longer maintained it?
- How many people wished they could get a version of Windows 10 that doesn't forcibly reboot on updates?
And many more. These are all things a regular person could take advantage of, and very concrete advantages for a regular person, and not all that different from "right to repair".
A big point of Free Software really is about "right to repair"; a lot of people really do want their software to do something different or is broken beyond repair, but there is no way anyone can actually make it work any different. Chances are that if you're struggling with $problemX someone else is too, and already released a fix for it. Or, especially in a corporate environment, you can hire someone.
The FSF takes a very high-level philosophical/academic views of things, as well as a very programmer-centric view, but it doesn't need to be like this.
I just don't think would care about these issues anywhere near the level they would care about right to repair.
None of the issues you brought up are necessaries in the same way right to repair can be. Right to repair can save people thousands of dollars while the examples you provided are more of nice to have sorts of things.
Don't get me wrong. I am very much in favor of free software and I think if people understood it they would like it as well. I just don't think they would really care about it anywhere near the same level as right to repair.
>The game Guacamelee crashes at 30 minutes in to the game for me and quite a lot of other people, but I can't fix it or download an "unofficial patch" (how many games have reverse-engineered unofficial patches btw?).
A lot of games have mods. These games are proprietary and the mods often are as well. Look at a game like Skyrim. There is literally a mod called the Unofficial Patch. It fixes a lot of the issues with the game. I think most people care about mod capabilities not an actual open source game. If all games had mods people would be content.
>I happened to have bought Hyperlight Drifer on GOG.com today; it seems okay, but the controls are horrible to the point of being almost unplayable. Pretty sure someone would have fixed it if they could.
How many people play games that don't have remappable controls? That seems like such a niche issue that it wouldn't impact the average person I was referring to.
>Back in the day KPN (Dutch AT&T) gave everyone a wireless dongle with their internet, but the driver was bugged and after a certain Windows update it would cause BSODs, and I had to sell a lot of new wireless dongles because of that.
I don't think this is really a big issue anymore. More and more people don't even have computers and when they do, they have wifi card built in. Again not appealing to the average person (in the present day).
>How many people and organisations would have preferred running Windows XP/7 instead of more or less forcibly updating to 8/10 because Microsoft no longer maintained it?
While this is probably the best one you brought up, I don't think you would have enough people maintain older versions of something as complex as an OS and this would create a massively insecure situation for users of it. I think this would do a lot to harm the free software movement.
>How many people wished they could get a version of Windows 10 that doesn't forcibly reboot on updates?
I think Microsoft already fixed this? There are also third party software that can fix this without modification to the OS.
Regardless, let's say that was not the case. If it was something desirable I have no doubt that it would have been trivial for Microsoft to implement. This means Microsoft would be choosing not to implement it. Windows being free software would do nothing to get this change implemented as Microsoft would not accept the pull request.
People would have to fork Windows to add this in. Given Window's habit of reverting settings the fork couldn't just change a setting and provide the ISO. This means they would have to continually provide updates. I have no reason to think Microsoft would collaborate with Windows fork maintainers so we would have slower updates assuming the forks actually update regularly.
When the forks inventively take too long to patch there would be security issues resulting in the negative press from security issues.
Linux and associated software are made by open source people for open source people. If Microsoft turned Windows into free software I just don't think they would make it convenient for people forking it since they would still want people to pay for Windows.
I understand these were just random ideas you thought of, but only one seemed like something the average person would actually care about and it could very likely turn into negative press for free software.
all Stallman is saying, is that this is bad for us.
That is just plain not true. If it were, that would be fantastic. Unfortunately that's only part of Stallman's message, and a good portion of the rest of it is either simply unworkable or batshit insane.
To quote David Schlesinger after RMS got up on stage and talked about how "women who have not been introduced to emacs are emacs virgins and 'relieving them of their virginity is a sacred duty of all members of the church of emacs'", Stallman continues to embarrass us all
I have paid a lot of attention to RMS over the years.
I took him out to dinner once, my wife and I, and had a lovely evening talking mostly about his childhood experiences.
He was extremely respectful to the staff at the restaurant I recall. Going out of his way to compliment them on the food.
That at some point he said: "women who have not been introduced to emacs...sacred duty of all members of the church of emacs" is entirely possible. We all have said stupid things. Out of context especially, had these things been recorded, we would be ashamed.
To use that quote to define RMS is a gross insult, intellectually fraudulent, it is a political attack.
I do think it is important to play nice in politics. So if you have criticisms of RMS' stand on software, make them.
This sort of thing is insulting to all of us who do our best to imperfectly maintain standards of debate
People are defined by what they say though. And a quick google search reveals that RMS’s “emacs virgins” comment wasn’t just an out of character remark he made once in passing
First hit for me searching `emacs virgin stallman` on duckduckgo and bing separately. That's three major search engines. (Are you in a bubble?)
>I have never heard those sorts of words pass his lips.
>So I accuse you of telling a lie here. It is not uncommon to make up stories and exaggerate faults of those you politically oppose. Still lies
You must not be listening very hard. Making comments like these is even part of his wikipedia page as he had to set down from the FSF and MIT for a while for similar comments
I do think it is important to play nice in politics. So if you have criticisms of RMS' stand on software, make them.
That's the issue. Stallman's technical contributions and early political contributions were both foundational and heroic. That does not negate the fact that for the better part of two decades he's been a constant embarrassment that continuously degrades the movement in the eyes of anyone who hasn't developed a tolerance for him. Evangelizing free software was comparatively easy in the days when peoples' reaction to his name was "Haha, that guy who ate stuff off his foot on stage? Wild." It's gotten considerably harder now that the reaction is "wait, the guy who wrote those pedophile emails and harasses women at conferences?"
I'm tired of trying to advocate for free software when just the name "Free Software Foundation" is a conversational liability.
> From there since Free Software has only lost ground
I mean, we live in a world powered by Free Software, so, I don't know, really. If anything, corporation were kinda successful making money out of free software, but that's another can of worms.
> The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground
I used computers in 1985. To suggest that the free software movement has only lost ground since then is completely absurd. Has it gone anywhere nearly as far as Stallman and others hoped it would? No. Has it gone much further than anyone who was around in 1985 to watch this being born thought it would go? Absolutely.
>The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground.
Are you joking? This was before my time, but there once was a time when you would not only have to pay for development tools, but pay for them seperately. Want a compiler? $500, please. Want something like Bison? Fork a few hundred. Want an assembler? Another few hundred. etc.
There have been setbacks, and it does look like the tide is turning towards everything becoming closed again but it's untrue to say that Free Software has "only lost ground" since 1985 -hell, GCC didn't even come out until what, 1987, 1988 or so?
Yes, and no limited-time demo version to try things out - you bought a copy-protected disk in a box in shrink-wrapped plastic from a shop. I remember when Turbo Pascal came out - at below $100 and not copy-protected it seemed revolutionary, virtually free, like they were giving it away, it was so much cheaper than the usual $500 price tag.
On this topic: Tales of Maj'eyal is an open source game, but the game content is not. I was surprised to learn this, and it seems open source games isn't a complete non-starter like you might expect.
Richard Stallman has a policy of putting his non-engineering works under a non-libre license (CC-BY-ND 3.0) [0] [1], so maybe he wouldn't have a problem with this non-libre game as the underlying code is libre, just not the assets.
In my opinion, this is one of the problems with Stallman's "moral authority" approach to the FSF. I would very much like to hear about these cases where a game's source is libre licensed but not it's content and see what Stallman actually has to say about it.
Not for nothing, but there are many network/online games that have both source and content libre licensed. Here are a few:
A few years ago I saw an indie game developer recount his experience with Stallman[1]; he doesn't see how he can release his games as Free Software while making a living, pay his rent, pay for his children's education, etc. So he asked Stallman what to do about that.
Stallman's reply? "You should not be making those games, it is unethical."
To say that is non-constructive would be an understatement; it's just shutting down any conversation and exploration and how we can improve things. There are a whole bunch of things one can think of: release the code but keep the assets (graphics, sound, music, etc.) proprietary, release under some sort of "source available" license, keep the core rendering parts proprietary SO/DLLs and release the rest as free software, and maybe a few other things. All of that would be a huge improvement over "100% closed".
But Stallman isn't open to any of that, and because the FSF is still very much Stallman's organisation, neither is the FSF. For at least 20 years the FSF has done nothing except preaching to the choir, and certainly hasn't actually made many significant meaningful every-day improvements. In the above situation the game dev essentially asked was "what is the best way to make my software more free?" and all he got was a rather insulting and condensing shutdown of that conversation before it could even take off.
[1]: I don't have the source for that right now; I think it was somewhere on YouTube. It may have been an interview with Lunduke, but I'm not sure.
Stallman seems like the kinda of guy who would tell you that you need to starve in the streets as long as you fit his version of ethics. All while he lives comfortably off the income of his own celebrity.
The hyperbole doesn't help. Stallman would not tell you that you need to starve in the streets. He is well away that most programmers get paid at least median income, and often much more, and they are normally people who can make choices in their lives, few of which will involve starving in the streets. You don't have to agree that the choices are attractive to acknowledge that they do not need to include starving in the streets.
> He is well away that most programmers get paid at least median income, and often much more
Yes, by working on unfree software, an occupation which he uncompromisingly condemns. Programmers working exclusively on free software would be earning much, much less on average.
You can make a lot of money writing free software at whatever FAANG is called now. I mean sure the source is never distributed because the binaries aren’t either, but it does meet the definition.
When Stallman says "free as in free speech, not free beer", he means freedom to use software in any way you want including changing it. Not zero price.
Except this model is practically "zero price". Yes, you can sell GPL software, but on the customer side, buying such software cannot be justified economically, if all you got to do is to find somebody/some place that will provide this software to you free of charge and legally so. The only customers that would pay are ones that do it for moral purposes, at which point your business selling GPL software isn't a business anymore, but something that receives charitable donations.
All of the open source companies/people that come to mind are not selling libre software, they are all selling some kind of service - support contracts, managed hosting, etc - or they embraced some kind of freemium/"open core" model (so they are really selling non-free software), or they are funded by charitable donations and sometimes public grants, often by having some large non-free companies being sponsors (Linus Torvalds is paid this way for example, through sponsorship money from the who-is-who of the non-free corporate world distributed through the Linux Foundation).
Ardour has 10's of thousands of users, many of which get the software from their Linux distributions. Nevertheless, more than 6000 of these individuals choose to help fund the project to the tune of between $150k and $210k a year.
So yes, although your observations are not wrong, they do not apply universally.
> The only customers that would pay are ones that do it for moral purposes, at which point your business selling GPL software isn't a business anymore, but something that receives charitable donations.
> Nevertheless, more than 6000 of these individuals choose to help fund the project to the tune of between $150k and $210k a year.
How is this not covered by the posters comment about it not being a business but a charity if you rely on people paying more than they need to?
Game engine is not what is paying the developpers rent, and Stallman has always explained that he didn't believed artforms should be made open source.
It doesn't sound complicated to me to understand that you can sell games whose code is open source but the 3d models, graphics, levels building and artwork aren't. Customer would still retain all free software liberties, be able to port the game to other platforms and the dev studios would still get paid.
No I mean literally working on GPLed code which means writing Free Software. But, since those companies never distribute binaries, they never have to share the code under the terms of the GPL.
There are a lot of options to work for a company that builds free software now, and not necessarily fangs / gafam. Many of those companies are struggling to find people. And now, you can often even join remotely. It might be paid less but still very comfortable.
You mentioned exclusively, that's true that you might have to write custom, closed code for customers at many of those companies. But that's still better than exclusively working on non free software.
He has told people almost that exact thing. I recall an interview from about a decade ago where some asked RMS a question similar to the one the GP mentions, but their phrasing was more like, "I need to make money from software to feed my family." RMS' answer was that the interviewer's ability to feed their family was less important than free software.
RMS' heart is mostly in the right place, but he's a fanatic who is 100% out of touch with the real world.
He just reply according to where the cursor is placed regarding ethics.
The same way anyone who think selling metamphetamines to vulnerable people and kids is unethical and wrong, then you should not do it and find another income to feed your family.
Nobody is put a gun to the temple and forced to write proprietary software to make a living. There are myriads of other jobs.
> All while he lives comfortably off the income of his own celebrity.
For most part of his life he was living in his office at the university, technically homeless. After that period he lived in a home designated by MIT, possible because they got tired of the building code violation of having a professor living in his office.
I would classify being able to live at his office without being tossed out into the streets, and being given a home after that got to be too much for the school, as living off his celebrity. The "technically" in "technically homeless" is a major difference between what Stallman has to deal with vs what non famous computer scientists/software engineers have to deal with.
I understand he's forgone the amount of wealth he could have accumulated by just working in the software industry in the name of his cause, and that is laudable. However he thinks everyone should do this despite the greater burden they'd have to shoulder. All the people he tells shouldn't be making non free software so they can support themselves and their families are not going to be given free lodging by MIT.
Being a celebrity does provide much more benefits than a person actually being homeless.
However your comment above said he lived comfortably off the income of his own celebrity. We would have to twist the word income here for a bit to cover this kind of situation. The comfortably part is also a bit questionable, but I guess living at the office can be comfortable to some people. The description just didn't fit the situation that well, which is why I wrote the above comment.
Alright, if you want to be that pedantic then find+replace “income” with benefits. The point still stands. He has the basics of his life taken care of and tells others they should go without in the name of his ethics system
Stallman and the FSF see closed source software as unethical.
Imagine if someone asked you for help and said "I don't see how to free my slaves while making a living, paying my rent, paying for my children's education". Would you tell them "You shouldn't have slaves, it's unethical" or would you try to help them find a way to run their business with fewer slaves, but still some?
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.
No. I made an analogy to another behavior that I hope everyone will agree is unethical. The point is that if you accept Stallman's position that closed source software is unethical his response is not unexpected.
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 weren’t so bad.
It’s a good rule of thumb that rather than making a logical argument, you are in fact bringing a rational discussion to an end by invoking slavery, Hitler, or other incontrovertible evil. They are not in any meaningful sense useful analogies for most discussions.
The guy wasn’t bringing up anything like slavery. Therefore Stallman’s response is quite likely unexpected to most people.
No, this isn't an example of Godwin's law being used as a tactic to end discussion; rather he was using hyperbole - a rhetorical device - to make a point. The slavery reference is not used to suggest that 'non-free software is morally equivalent to slavery/nazism' etc but rather is used as an example of a clear, strongly held moral position in order to emphasise the (possibly more subtle) original point. The point of hyperbole is to further elucidate, not close down.
This misunderstanding tends to be caused by (1) treating the rhetorical device literally rather than as an (intentionally exaggerated) analogy, and (2) - as in this case - by assuming that the argument being made is trying to draw some moral equivalence between the analogy and the original example. It isn't.
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 attacking the wrong part of his argument. If you disagree with him you should attack his base belief that proprietary software is unethical.
> 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?
When have you ever seen Stallman be pragmatic instead of idealist about anything regarding proprietary software?
> 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 unethical behaviours like theft with true evils like slavery or murder is beyond unhelpful.
I don't see how proprietary has even been established as unethical let alone a evil equivalent to slavery.
Please stop making this argument on Stallman's behalf.
> To conflate and compare and equivalate unethical behaviours like theft with true evils like slavery or murder is beyond unhelpful.
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.
“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 don't know what to say. Someone went to a person who is well known to have the position that nonfree software is unethical and to be an idealist to ask how to make nonfree software and somehow is surprised that the answer is that they shouldn't make nonfree software.
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.
As a one time political activist, I’ve met plenty of folks with strong convictions that are very pleasant people. The pacifist, vegan, transgender campaigner I am thinking of would never take the approach you’re describing.
I’ve been to events supporting a cause. They are full of people who, in support of their passionate convictions, try to help and persuade people to join them without reducing personal dilemmas to simplistic answers.
It makes me wonder: if strong convictions don’t cause or correlate to how you treat people, is there another explanation for why it’s so easy to find such anecdotes?
Except there is a difference between software and slavery.
Society has moved on in the decades since Stallman started (for better or for worse), and we need to figure out a way to stay true to their vision around software and bringing new people on board with the free software movement. Having such extremist comments when someone is trying to figure out how to make their game opensource without breaking agreements for other parts they rely on isn't going to get anyone anywhere.
What am I supposed to say to that? Proprietary software is not slavery, or even anywhere close to it, even if we accept the argument that it is unethical. I find this entire analogy unhelpful.
Slavery is not the argument, it's an example of something you find reproachable.
Try to imagine something that you find unethical but some others do not: burqas, abortion, war, public schools, private schools, eating meat, rolling coal or whatever it may be.
If you start from the position that such a thing is unethical, you can't enter an argument with someone who asks you "how should I do X to make you happy?", because you simply won't be happy if this gets done at all.
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 proprietary software and argue about that.
Expecting Stallman to help someone make money with proprietary software is like expecting a vegan advocate to help someone kill cows more humanely.
Note that I'm not expressing an agreement or disagreement with Stallman's worldview, only that his answer is exactly what follows from his worldview, and you should argue about that and not about the answer.
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
> Expecting Stallman to help someone make money with proprietary software is like expecting a vegan advocate to help someone kill cows more humanely.
Many vegans are actually doing exactly that: enacting laws to improve the living conditions of animals. In the Netherlands we have the "party for the animals" in parliament for that. While their long-term goal is the elimination of meat, they also realize this is not realistic/practical in the short-term for various reasons. In the meanwhile they've been fairly successful in putting the topic of animal suffering on the agenda, making meaningful proposals to improve things, and hopefully coming closer to the long-term goals
I happen to be vegan (well, mostly anyway). Yes, you have the "extreme" vegans you might encounter on occasion, which me and my vegan friends tend to dislike as well, but most are significantly more pragmatic than you might think. It's just that you hear less from them as they're not as "loud".
If a farmer was to walk up to me and ask me "how can I improve the welfare of my animals in my factory farm?" then I'd do my best to make meaningful improvements, even though I think factory farming in general is unethical.
Now, back to Free Software: in broad lines I agree with Stallman, but just find his approach unhelpful, and I don't think that can just be hand-waved away with "but [he thinks] it's unethical".
As someone who, younger, avoided games because they were non-free and who is not into games at all anymore anyway, and as someone who explicitly when out of their way to join a company that develops free software. I hear you.
However, in my opinion, this game developer interested in doing the right thing is the kind of person the FSF and Stallman should focus on and work on finding solutions for, because they could make a difference and even move part of the industry to free software. Telling such people they are not doing the right thing without giving any trail is not going to achieve much and could even repel them.
That's counter productive.
One could say that the concerned developer should instead think themself of a solution. That's partly true. I think they should if they are really concerned. However, the whole goal of the FSF is to move the world to free software. They should work to provide trails to such people, because they have all the incentive to do so, even more than the concerned developer. They should provide a welcoming climate so such developer want to join (even more).
I think Stallman should be prepared to give a kind, low effort answer to such a "basic" question. It can be low effort because sometimes the question is low effort too, or even a bit ill-intended and yes, the developer should do their homework. But a nice, positive answer could make things change and engage people.
(I say "basic", but that does not mean the problem is easy. I think it's hard.)
You are comparing slavery to writing proprietary code. It takes a cult-like devotion to perform that mental leap. Maybe it's obvious in your mind, but good luck spreading this word to wider world.
We already have business models that work with intellectual material. Think Locals, Patreon, substack, youtube, etc.
There's no reason you cannot make a living by simply creating a payment method where you get the game + code. Yes, people will copy it. FAR from all people will. In the game add a pay/subscribe/support button. Frankly, I suspect you'll get more money; the game will be spread further and people will be willing to pay. You can even create a "bug bounty" program, where people can pay for bug fixes. Alternatively, have people "pre-pay" for new releases and send the code. There's plenty of alternatives.
That said, I do understand the view, but take a step back..
Stallman's point is that it's unethical to have closed source code running on your hardware. Effectively, you cannot understand, manipulate, update the underlying code. If I purchase a book, I can modify it. If I buy a car I can modify it. If I buy a song, I can modify it. Why can I not modify the software I purchased?
In terms of meaningful improvements, everyone considers licensing. Every company I've ever worked at, every code base, every project is evaluated, etc. It's taken seriously, something that was not done prior to the FSF. I'm currently writing this comment on hardware I can modify, with software I can modify. I don't even have closed sourced video drivers.. So I really don't see your point.
When you buy a game from Jason Rohrer, you get the source code too. (It's also on GitHub.) What you're actually buying is an account on the official multiplayer server (which is also open source).
I thought this was a really interesting model.
Maybe it wouldn't work so well with singleplayer games. However, there's a similar example with the sprite editor / animation software Aseprite, which is open source but you have to compile it yourself, so it's cheaper for most people (in terms of time and effort) to just buy it for $15.
Yeah, exactly. I think the real risk seems to be unofficial precompiled versions, or clones/derivatives, but the same risk exists for redistributing/cracking (and to a lesser degree, modding) closed source software.
Jason Rohrer's game One Hour One Life has a few community spin-offs, which is also really interesting. There are also blatant clones, of course, but it seems to be a worthwhile tradeoff on the whole.
Thanks for the correction. In FSF terms, it has the first two freedoms (run the program, inspect/modify), but not the second two (redistribute program freely, redistribute modified versions).
Still, the latest version is on GitHub? But it's only for "personal use" according to the EULA (and not making your own fork for example).
The problem is in the question: the game dev wants to know how to reconcile ethics and his desire to make money from making games. Stallman is saying “it’s not my job to help solve your dilemma.” And he’s right. If I ask a doctor ‘how can I eat french fries and still lose weight”, the doctor will say “you can’t, and I can’t help you resolve your dilemma. What you’re doing is unhealthy”.
It is a bit like a rancher asking the founder of the vegan movement how to raising livestock while making a living, pay his rent, pay for his children's education, etc. The conversation can very easily become non-constructive, even when the more optimal answer could be focused on improving things, like using a more humane method of killing and better treatment when the livestock is alive.
I would have just answered that the best way to develop free software games is to not be forced to rely on copyright in order to get paid. Get paid to work on it, rather than get paid after work has already been done. If one has to rely on copyright to get paid, a CC BY-NC license might be the best choice, as then the author still have exclusivity to put the game on stores. An other choice is a contractual trigger where once the author is not interested in exclusivity they they will release the code.
He is fighting an unwinnable war, to be sure. Most people will never be technically savvy enough to care about these issues. Apple will probably start soldering their cases shut. Sadly I don't think it makes much difference what Stallman thinks, even though I think he is mostly right.
> Richard Stallman is one of the most influential and respected members of the movement
If you really think so, I’d argue that his hardline position is then justified.
To me Stallman doesn’t have any specific unfair advantage over anyone who would get on their soapboax and preach for a different approach. You or me could make blogposts and go talk to conferences, and rally people around a different approach. If we were to gain traction, there is no hidden lever for Stallman to pull that throws us in dark cave and nobody hears from us ever.
What gives Stallman his influence is that pragmatic approaches have at most kept the status quo, at worse allowed way more encroachment on our software and devices ownership. Even if we don’t reach the 100% free ideal, setting the goal at “a bit freer than now” won’t help in my opinion.
More and more the “realistic” approach feels close to accepting cops have some amount of violent abuse, because non abusing cops make 90% of the workforce and we better be in friendly terms with them to make things progress, right ?
As others have pointed out, the Right to Repair movement has achieved far more practical progress than Stallman has.
Stallman can't/won't even defend the GPL in court; others have had to organize outside the FSF to do so because the FSF is only interested in stroking its beards.
Right to Repair and the other foundations fighting to defend GPL don't seem to be in conflict with Stallman's position, nor what the FSF does, so your point would be that the FSF is not as efficient as you want it to be ?
In my opinion, if Stallman is an hermit that only serves as an anchoring for other people to move toward the right direction, I'd argue it's plenty enough.
Now I don't know much about the FSF finances and what we should really be expecting from it.
Many gamers deeply resent the gaming industry and they are at least a "warm" audience. Microtransactions, DRM that imposes a significant performance penalty, single player games that refuse to work if not online (or worse, have multiplayer aspects required to progress in the game, but servers get shut down), massive pre-order hype-trains for games that turn out to be hot messes, games purposefully turned into grind-fests (right now, people are hating on Forza for heading this way.) Then there's the bullshit like (initially) variable refresh rate monitors that only worked with a particular brand of video card despite industry standards for VRR. Basic peripherals that require bloated, proprietary, borderline-spyware drivers to work. Benchmark manipulation. Etc etc.
Talking to gamers about the evils of paid proprietary software and hardware should be relatively easy. But because Stallman is so fundamentally incapable of reading the room, and so exceptionally talented at alienating people, he manages to put out something that gamers look at, laugh, maybe make a meme or two out of, and then forget about.
> but the problem is that Richard Stallman is one of the most influential and respected members of the movement
Stallman hasn't been influential in at least two decades. He's so extremist that anyone actually interested in getting shit done has ignored him. He is completely lacking in perspective-taking, empathy, viewing anyone as anything approaching a peer, or even managing just to not talk at/down to them. He openly pities everyone, thinks us all stupid fools.
I think there was limited respect for Stallman's original concepts and his vision. But in the decades since, he's generated little to no work product, and mostly come off as jealous and bitter.
Any mainstream-open-source-community respect he had, he lost much of when all the stories about him being a serial sexual harasser (if not borderline predator) came out, and then his comments about underage sex...which to make the matter even worse, he's been nothing but petulant and defensive about.
Stallman is not a statesman, a diplomat, ambassador, or a leader. He's just an ideological zealot who has held back the open software movement by refusing to acknowledge his skill set, demeanor, and behavior are not suitable for representing and advancing the open source movement, and that if he truly cared about said movement, he would have long since changed his methods or let someone else take a whirl.
Some folks see him as a genius, but all I see is man who has spent over four decades yelling (largely) the same thing from the top of a mountain, thinking that one day everyone will suddenly see the genius and wisdom of his grand plan. Who lacks the self-awareness to recognize his lack of effectiveness, and the selflessness to step aside and let someone else try carrying the mantle.
I agree, Stallman is an incredibly poor leader and holds back the free software movement, FSF, and FSF projects at this point. It's not just that I disagree with his absolutist view on free software, he holds back the movement from achieving the goals that he espouses.
As a product manager he has done a poor job. For years he prevented GCC from moving to a simpler more modular architecture because he said that would make it easier to build non-free software on top of it. In the meantime Clang implemented this modular architecture and started taking market share from GCC. Years later GCC moved to a modular architecture anyway because Stallman finally blessed it. At the same time he prevented emacs from officially embracing better integration with Clang and Clang style compilers that provide a richer debugging and syntax checking experience. He did this because GCC didn't support the same experience. Eventually (after years) emacs did integrate with Clang and GCC style syntax facilities.
He made similar stalling moves preventing the adoption of git for emacs (and other FSF projects). First he pushed Arch, the he forced repositories to migrate to BZR after git had clearly won the version control battle (I'm fuzzy, but emacs moved to BZR around 2009-2011). Finally he conceded and emacs moved to git in 2014. After emacs migrated to git he used the emacs mailing list asking for simple git support that he would have understood if he hadn't remained purposefully ignorant about the VCS.
The FSF still revolves around Stallman and he hasn't done much work to find and promote a successor to himself to lead the organization. He is a poor steward of his own movement.
There were also his comments about Minsky and Epstein. He is entitled to his opinions, but as a leader of an important org with such stringent beliefs, delving into other topics was a distraction for the org. Being a leader requires focus and direction, inviting controversy with comments on unrelated current events is the opposite of focus.
In total I think that a lot of Stallman's actions have more to do with his ego and self importance than advancing the free software movement.
> There were also his comments about Minsky and Epstein. He is entitled to his opinions, but as a leader of an important org with such stringent beliefs, delving into other topics was a distraction for the org. Being a leader requires focus and direction, inviting controversy with comments on unrelated current events is the opposite of focus.
You're likely aware, but I wanted to take this opportunity to surface that a lot of the coverage of his comments on Minsky and Epstein was misleading if not malicious.
Notably, articles from Vice and The Daily Beast accused him of defending Epstein and asserting that victims were willing, and both of those accusations are false, as can be reasonably discerned from careful reading of the quotes that appear in the articles themselves. Rather, Stallman defended Minsky and said that victims probably appeared to Minsky to be willing even if they were being coerced out of his sight.
In addition to any judgement we're applying over his choice of whether to talk about it in the first place, we should be sure we're judging him for what he said (which I do believe deserves criticism) and not for what some people want to pretend he said.
>and they see this quote. Immediately, it feels bullshit and dumb to them
it literally sounds like a religious cult at this point. When I was growing up I had a friend from an actual cult and the family literally had their own invented board games (which were terrible) purged of all kinds of "immoral" references because they weren't allowed to touch anything out of mainstream culture.
Whenver I see this depluralizing behavior as if non-free software causes some sort of metaphysical corruption I have to think back to this.
Honestly, the public interest in the free software movement was always about developers not wanting to jump through N legal/business hoops to use software or figure out how something worked. The most aggressive licenses helped this for a time by forcing corporations to participate. The software industry without open-source is like Automotive Engineers not seeing how cars work.
That all sounds nice, but the fact of the matter is that Richard Stallman is one of the few anchors left, keeping the Overton window of the politics of software from falling all of the way into the ocean.
Personally, I used to think that Stalmman was a crank. And as time passed, and as I watched some of his prophecies come true and as I noted ways in my own life in which my own devices became harder to use, and my own data became harder to store and retrieve in the ways that I wanted to - I began to change my mind.
Without that irascible, loud-mouthed, doom-sandwich-board-wearing maniac... who else would exist at the intersection of "knows enough to know what he's talking about to speak with authority" and "has nothing left to lose"?
My advice to anyone reading this is to not be so quick to "solution" on his behalf, or to reason against his ideas, in advocacy of a more "moderate" approach.
Not sure how it's now, but some oldish proprietary games were moddable. You didn't have all source, but you had relevant source - the game script, and it could be changed and run, I did it.
It completely depends on how you approach the term idealism, and what your consider ethical. You're framing the argument as-if goals should be above ones ideals. If you can't convince people about the importance of free-software then the project should die off. I don't see the value in diluting the mission.
Someone who thinks eating sick animals (most meat products) is unethical, isn't going to compromise their personal values just because you're treating them to a meal at the local steakhouse.
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 the major GCC contributor.
He is worried that companies will use their proprietary software that is sold in exchange for money to maximize revenue by squeezing users. Companies and up using open source software to create proprietary services that are sold in exchange for attention, and to maximize revenue optimize for “engagement” which is now tearing society apart.
Most computer users are using proprietary systems, but now they are cheaper to build thanks to open source software.
Who had/has more control over their data, a Windows 95 user running Microsoft Office on a PC, or a modern Chromebook user running Google Docs? The later incorporates a lot more open source software.
Related, the reason why Clang was created is because GCC was specifically made to prevent it from being used with non-free software. You can find that quote around 3:17 of this talk:
https://youtu.be/NURiiQatBXA?t=185
It turned out to be easier in the long run to write a compiler from scratch, than to work with GCC.
And related to that I find that free-software focus often misses one of the biggest issues of our day; privacy. I care much more about software privacy then I do about software freedom (though I still want both). But when the FSF was founded the internet didn’t exist (so privacy was not as much a concern) and they have never brought that under their umbrella. Even though they are very related concepts.
On the other hand it's 2022 and my GNU/Linux/KDE system is very close from 100% free software, and allows to do pretty much anything I want - audio and video creation and editing with Kdenlive, LMMS, Ardour, writing and typesetting (I mostly use LaTeX but LibreOffice works well enough to be used in most of the administration of my country - I'm nearly 30 and have had the luck of almost never having been exposed to MS Office either in school or professionaly), making presentations (I use QML but there's LO, Beamer or whatever Markdown or JS presentation framework of the day), browsing the web with firefox, managing and processing RAW pictures with Darktable, and then there are entire toolchains and development tools which are more than competitive with proprietary alternatives... and I forget a ton of things.
I am thankful every day of being able to live in the world where this is possible and having been able to do so from a quite young age - at first because when I was a kid my parents did not have the money to buy any software at all so learning how to use free software & systems has quickly been a necessity, and now because I know that whenever there's a bug somewhere in the stack I have good chances of being able to peek at the exact issue and if not fixing it myself, at least reporting it to the person who most likely wrote the code almost directly .
I think this is what a lot of people mean when they say that FOSS (and Open Source in general) 'lost' in the grand scheme of things. Sure, FOSS is running the entire show from sites to servers to databases to build systems to programming languages, but, whether or not you can actually see the code seems to hold little sway when the war is really over personal data and privacy. Who cares if I can see the tensorflow source code when the real danger is in the models these companies are building, which themselves are aggregated of petabytes of 'anonymous' user data. You'd have to open-source the data, too, to see how these businesses are truly run.
If the war has shifted to open/closed data, does it mean the battle for free software was won? Saying we lost is a bit early. I do see lots of projects aiming for open data. That battle has not been decided yet, it's a long game.
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.
I really think far too many people are missing why Stallman and the FSF are so valuable. It's not that everyone should behave exactly like them; it's that they provide a useful extreme endpoint such that there can exist a reasonable "Overton Window" of Free/Open Source/ Whatever Software.
I 100% support what they do and preach knowing FULL well I will likely never 100% do as they recommend. That's not actually a big problem.
Open source would still exist without Stallman and the FSF. There is a practical benefit to open source software and calling people / companies evil / unethical for not open sourcing everything is not as helpful as the FSF may think.
Free software is not no cost, it is free as in freedom. Didn't the FSF sell SunOS and Solaris free software when they first started out? It could be sold for the cost of maintenance or supporting the free software, which the user doesn't always get.
With Microsoft and Apple the software is commercial and not free, but they do a good job of handholding the customer and working through bugs and technical issues over the phone.
Free software also predates "free software." People circulated programs within the science and hobbyists communities, as early as those communities existed. And before there was software, the ham radio community thrived on shared and published designs.
With that said, I appreciate what Stallman has done, if nothing else, to shine light on what freedoms we're giving up, and on the contrasts between the different free and non-free models that are in use today.
It's not like permissive licenses are a crazy hard concept to figure out. It's not like Fermat's last theorem where there is a large challenge in discovering a proof. Sure it may not be labelled as "Open Source", but there would be something similar. Also I believe there is a good chance that software would be more free due to copyleft licenses potentially not gaining momentum.
They're not hard, and I think Stallman et al figured them out way long ago, and they are why they created free software. Roughly, "permissive" ends up meaning "bad faith actors are permitted to take advantage of others' spirit of sharing."
Open Source in the OSI sense of the term was created as a reaction to the Free Software movement so I'm guessing probably not.
It's more likely that we'd have the situation we had with UNIX; incompatible forks tied to incrutable hardware drivers that no one can fix with a zillion different combinations so that when you sat down at a terminal you had no idea what to do -thanks to people being able to take the BSD/MIT software and create their own contrarian forks.
GNU wasn't innovative because it was free, or even because it's source was free. It was innovative because it forced people to play nice.
The UNIX Wars demonstrated how well people play with others when left to their own desires (not at all).
Correct, this is why I relatedly believe the Linux Desktop is actually a ridiculously huge success. I don't compare it by percentage of market share, I compare it do "how garbage would desktops be if Linux wasn't around to provide useful pressure?"
> 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 zero Linux.
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.
The comment I replied to was specifically about Linux on the desktop, not Linux in general. I didn't claim Android etc wouldn't exist without Linux. Linux on the desktop is just irrelevant to commercial desktop OSes. Microsoft, Apple, and Google don't care one iota about the latest updates to GNOME or KDE.
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.
It's actually important to have difficult or impossible goals. They are guidelines or north stars used for navigation. It helps make short term decisions that trend in the right long term direction.
I don't really see how this is valuable, and I see a lot of ways in which this is harmful to the cause. It's not explaining the message very well, it's actively turning people off, and it's preventing some free software from being as useful as it could be.
You can keep long-term goals in mind while also working towards smaller short-term goals. Almost every political party and lobby organisation in the world is doing exactly that.
Here Stallman again rails against Ubuntu. Okay, maybe Ubuntu isn't perfect, but s/Microsoft windows/Ubuntu/ would be quite an improvement, and especially since the 100% free/libre stuff he recommends are caveated to hell it's the only pragmatic/realistic option there is right now – not necessarily Ubuntu itself, but some distro which includes the same firmware, nVidia drivers, and such. And if a lot of people are actually running Ubuntu/Linux you end up having a lot more leverage.
By focusing only on the endpoint you're actually doing more short-term thinking rather than playing the long game.
The cause would likely not exist or at least be much weaker if not for Stallman and the FSF and GNU. Ubuntu isn't going to stop what they are doing because of Stallman's ideas.
> The cause would likely not exist or at least be much weaker if not for Stallman and the FSF and GNU.
Sure, but that was back in the 80s and this is now.
That someone had a lot of good ideas and did good work 35 years ago doesn't mean they're not hampering it today. I once worked for a business where the owner worked very hard to build things up (or so I heard), but when I worked there all he really used his business for was to show his boyfriends around to impress them or something; I rarely saw him. That's all fine, except that the business was directionless and basic stuff wasn't getting done (like, say, my employment contract). Eventually there was a bit of an intervention and he was ousted (his dad also owned part of the company), which was badly needed because he was really running things in to the ground, in spite of having built it up in the first place.
> Ubuntu isn't going to stop what they are doing because of Stallman's ideas.
No, but the FSF could be promoting Ubuntu instead of railing against it. If I'm interested in Free Software and find the FSF website then all I get are unpractical solutions.
But what the FSF really should be doing is lobby this kind of thing with governments, schools, corporations and such.
> I see a lot of ways in which this is harmful to the cause.
I'm trying to understand your meaning. You went on to say:
> You can keep long-term goals in mind while also working towards smaller short-term goals. Almost every political party and lobby organisation in the world is doing exactly that.
But every example of such political parties/organizations I can think of (in my experience) has 'puritanical' wings that serve to establish the key direction.
> It's not explaining the message very well, it's actively turning people off, and it's preventing some free software from being as useful as it could be.
I was unable to follow your logic. Perhaps actual example of this happening would be useful.
> By focusing only on the endpoint you're actually doing more short-term thinking rather than playing the long game.
Forgive me, but it appears like you're focusing on practically achievable goals rather than having a long term plan. If Ubuntu continued along its current path of just partnering with vendors, only "they" being able to build the signed boot images that machines boot, then it is not unreasonable to suspect that at some point users will lose all ability to build their own kernel for their machine.
But if Stallman is actually pursuing the OP's idea of extending the Overton window, then he's specifically not trying to accomplish short-term goals. Other people can and should be working on those short-term goals. Stallman, meanwhile, is trying to stretch the playing field out far enough that the smaller goals seem very reasonable by comparison to the extreme that he creates.
I'm not sure that Stallman is intentionally positioning himself this way (he seems to sincerely believe his all-or-nothing stance), but I could see it actually working. The big problem with Stallman is that he has to be at least moderately credible in order to extend the Overton window, but he seems to perpetually be right on the edge of being completely dismissed. If that happens then the window snaps back shut.
"[Stallman] seems to sincerely believe his all-or-nothing stance"
Richard Stallman has largely been not averse to pragmatism, he is the sort that is willing to clearly articulate his stance as to what he thinks is right, but has also been willing to endorse all sorts of incrementalism. For example:
"In response to the change of license, Richard Stallman of the Free Software
Foundation says, "I agree. It is wise to make some of the Ogg Vorbis code
available for use in proprietary software, so that commercial companies doing
proprietary software will use it, and help Vorbis succeed in competition with
other formats that would be restricted against our use.""
(I am desperately trying to avoid inserting a Bernie Sanders analogy here..)
I do not always like FSF and Stallman and their policies. Still I am in complete agreement that they do provide enormous value to the software world in and to the betterment of our lives in general.
> "tying people down, strapping them into their chairs so that they can't do anything that hurts themselves -- makes things worse, not better."
Stallman could have been talking about censorship and deplatforming here and it still would have made sense. His (and my) generation seem to care a lot more about idealistic freedoms than we do now as a society.
Censorship and deplatforming are ways of making the competition shut up. If someone has a different opinion than you do, they should have free speech to say it. Within reason of course, nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene.
This is why Musk is trying to buy out Twitter, and he is trolling them with his wealth.
Don't forget removal from the APP Store or blocked by proxies.
Information still wants to be free, not stifled by tyrants just for being different opinions than the shareholders have.
Remember there is a reason why people want to root their phone, they want the freedom to install any app they wish to install. The more it gets locked down, the more people are going to find ways to unlock it.
Instead of deplatforming and censorship, ratings should be used instead for people to decide what they are going to read.
> nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene.
I want both sets of people to expose their views to the public. Disgusting though these views may be, it is safer for society if individuals are able to check and decide that someone else's views are reprehensible. If the people are merely told such by authorities, with the "offending" content immediately removed, then the authorities have enormous power to expand the definition of "offending" when it pleases them to do so.
People aren’t ironclad in their current views of right and wrong for all topics, its possible to convince people of really anything with enough exposure
>its possible to convince people of really anything with enough exposure
Not really. You can spend days, weeks, and months; millions of dollars; thousands of paid shill accounts; all geared towards selling a single lie. And that lie can be exposed to millions of people in 10 seconds for free. But only if there is free speech.
Agreed, the neo-nazis were fringe and people laughed at their marches. Now that they are taken entirely too seriously, the attention and victimization has empowered them to recruit and grow. The deplatforming has had the opposite of the intended effect, instead putting them in a spotlight.
Except that's not quite the sequence that occurred to my recollection. With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, what was previously "unsayable" was being said by the highest voices, directly legitimising fringe voices and empowering many that previously self-regulated to an extend for fear of judgement. That fear proved unfounded as it turned out and media (both MSM and social) amplified all sorts of previously fringe content. It's only once the push-back began that companies, fearing for their bottom line in some form or other (customers moving, regulation, legal fights) began turfing people off their platforms. At least, that's how it seems to me.
There’s an argument around growing / shrinking a market here. Have you ever experienced morbid fascination? Some people get addicted to the experience of horror (I don’t mean the genre). This arguably creates a new demand for something that even those demanding it would not otherwise have had any interest in.
I think you’re right about the dangers of giving authority over what does and doesn’t get censored, but there are also very real dangers on the other side of this. You don’t make consuming heroin normative, because you don’t want to make it easy to fall into an addiction by accident for those who are more prone to do so. The more harm the addiction causes to society as a whole, the more prerogative you have to protect people from accidentally becoming addicted.
This doesn’t produce a good outcome because violent, indefensible bad actors shout down others and each one drives away 100 reasonable people. Yours is naive idea, though I recognize you are advocating for the good of all.
>Within reason of course, nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene.
Who decides what's reasonable? Who decides what constitutes a "Nazi" or a "Pedophile"? If someone tries to suggest that convicting a 14 year old girl as a sex offender for having nude photos of herself on her phone is preposterous that person can be effectively silenced by labeling them as a pedophile.
"But that's ridiculous. Nobody would do that." -Somebody who has never been on the internet.
Every idiotic position you can think of exists on the internet, and can be amplified to make it seem like it's a more popular opinion than it really is.
The only logical course of action is to allow all speech and let the reader discern for themselves.
> The only logical course of action is to allow all speech and let the reader discern for themselves.
The assumption being that most readers are discerning. Kind of reminds of the adage about markets working based on rational actors. In both situations, reality would like a word.
No, there's no such assumption. In fact, by virtue of ignoring the main point of his, your post is an example "of the adage about markets working based on rational actors", which doesn't go well with reality.
And the point is: "Who decides what's reasonable?" You? Well, yeah, I hope you do for yourself. But I don't want you to dare to even try to decide that for me. Nothing personal, of course: there's no single person on the planet I would trust to do that for me.
In other words, it's not about assuming anything about the most readers (it is rather about NOT assuming anything about them). And, in fact, I don't even expect any good outcome "for the most of readers". I am pretty positive most people will find a way to fuck themselves no matter what you do. The only assertion here is that it will be worse for everyone if you TRY to do something about it. I mean, it should be pretty obvious thing to say, as much as people like to tell stories about "how terrible it was when Stalin was in charge" — it is best for everyone if there's no individual or group of people who can enforce their ideas of what is right on the others.
(BTW, I don't believe that this is really avoidable too. It happes one way or the other. The only thing that makes me say anything about this, is that this is just scary that half of the society today doesn't even understand that they SHOULD TRY to prevent anyone from being able to control what they say or think. They WANT to be controlled. They WANT to fuck themselves and everyone around them.)
Perhaps I wasn’t being clear. Following the principle that your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, the thing about free speech and an undiscerning audience is that there are often consequences that cross that line even when the speech itself doesn’t. Anyway, I’m pretty confident that I’m not going to cut the Gordian knot here.
For myself I’m happy for you to have all the freedom of speech you like. What I’d like enshrined is the right to freedom from speech. In my country we are in the midst of an election campaign and it is impossible for me (both legally and technically) to stop political parties from spamming my phone. I would rather they didn’t spam my phone. I don’t have an opinion about your phone.
Elon Musk is buying Twitter to increase his wealth, mindshare, and influence. He does not actually care about free speech, and its naïve to think that he is buying the platform for "altruistic" reasons.
He is also the lead of a company that has seemingly fired an employee for posting about their publicly available features, and is also facing one of the biggest labor lawsuits ever in the state of California.
He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.
He built huge amounts of wealth by building rocket ships and electric cars because he's worried about the earth becoming uninhabitable and thinks we need to be an interplanetary civilization. This is a dude who's dedicated his entire life to (in his mind) save all of humanity from certain doom.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that it's all just exploitation.
I buy a broken down camaro. The windshield is gone. The sheetmetal is rusted. The frame is bent. The motor needs rebuilt. I patch/replace the sheetmetal, and paint it. I straighten the frame. I rebuild the motor, and put a supercharger on it to boot. It’s a pretty nice little hot rod, and it was busted before. But you tell me, did I buy it or build it?
You buy an already functioning camaro factory that restores camaros, you do basically nothing in terms of hiring or management, you shitpost on twitter all day and hire an army of twitter bots to promote the amazing work you're doing on building that camaro.
But you tell me, did you buy that camaro, or did you build it?
Those goals are cool and all, but that doesnt change his poor worker treatment or his massive wealth hoarding, while still trying to change rules so he can have more.
Great goals, but in my opinion, a terrible ambassador for tech/engineering, and a completely ingenuine person. I do not believe he is buying Twitter to "restore free speech" at all, and I dont even think that itself is a particularly good goal without having laid out plans of what it means.
Him being in charge of companies that produce cool products does not make him a good person at all.
I haven’t worked for Musk, but I’ve heard he only hires fanatics who want to save the world. I expect that he expects things different from most employers.
>wealth hoarding
Most of his wealth isn’t in money or stocks, it’s in his companies. The money that is in stocks, well most of that’s in stock for companies that have actual assets and do actual things in the real world.
People always have power motives for doing things. But that doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them people who have objectives that require power, or perhaps power seekers who need to meet objectives (or claim they do). I trust the former far more than the latter.
I believe he built huge amounts of wealth because he's something like "genetically predisposed to"; he's not different from other billionaires, who I think have something like a mental defect that encourages them to rack up their score as high as possible.
It's just that he has more interesting hobbies (Space, EV, whatever) than the rest of them; but for any move he makes, first ask -- does this look like part of a play to just gain more money? And 9 times out of 10 the answer is yes.
He could make his own platform, but the users matter. With users, there is influence. In old times, you used to buy the news paper company to get influence.
> He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.
I wonder if we find a billionaire from the top 20 wealthiest who hasn’t at some level
> I wonder if we find a billionaire from the top 20 wealthiest who hasn’t at some level
No absolutely not. Id even say that you wont find more than a handful of billionaires who havent built their wealth on exploitation.
Its such a massive amount of wealth to have, it is virtually always precluded by harming others. The only exceptions I can think of are company founders who got exceedingly lucky, and even then you could definitely stretch the definition of exploitation to include them too.
Eh, I'm equally suspicious of everyone who speculates about "what Musk is doing". I think your post is spot-on about what he's NOT doing, but as to what he IS doing… how can you possibly know, what his true intentions are? I, for one, strongly suspect he's not even buying Twitter at all: he's just playing with the share prices to dump his 9% with a nice profit (as he always does). But I also guess he has a solid plan whichever way it goes. What actually IS his plan, if he's going to make Twitter private? I have like 10 versions of what it might be, and I don't expect that even one is close. But then, again, I don't really expect he is going to buy it anyway, so…
There’s nothing wrong with idealistic freedoms or rights in a vacuum. Of course we don’t live in a vacuum, and most non-trivial and realistic situations are about finding the balance between different freedoms or rights, not about their boolean existence.
Yeah, I can't cosign this at all. "Censorship" is no worse now than it has been at least my entire life (I'm in my 40s) -- what's happening is that when the left was silenced by the right, they called it "market forces" or "culture" and now that it's somewhat reversed they're getting all butthurt and believing that everything is going against them.
But in neither case do I believe that "the government is colluding to eliminate first amendment rights" which I believe is a reasonably specific definition of censorship. This is just culture culturing.
I honestly can't conceive of what this "Serious FSF" that you imagine would look like? Meaning, I can't think of any similar "movement" that succeeds by having a camera-friendly diplomatic leader -- unless you're thinking about going "full politics?"
There's no "vegan leader person" or "financial literacy leader person" or "animal cruelty leader person," etc. Not even "environment person," though you do get your occasional Greta Thunberg or Al Gore, but that's different from what you're saying here.
>I honestly can't conceive of what this "Serious FSF" that you imagine would look like?
Well mostly it would look like an FSF that doesn't eat toejam on camera, and instead of giving the same tired lecture about the 4 freedoms, they actually go out and do productive things like put on workshops for college students to install trisquel or whatever.
Instead of wasting countless hours sponsoring dumb stuff like the GNU Name System they could be writing open wifi/bluetooth stacks that support more than 802.11g, since connectivity is usually the #1 reason people won't run fully-free stacks on their laptops (or at least it's a big reason I won't), or if not that then how about getting governments to run Linux and helping them do so? They could operate a consultancy to bring in some operating income.
>Meaning, I can't think of any similar "movement" that succeeds by having a camera-friendly diplomatic leader -- unless you're thinking about going "full politics?"
Are you unaware that the Free Software Movement is a political movement first and foremost? People think it's a technical thing but technical excellence has always been secondary to political/ethical purity for GNU/FSF as evidenced by things like HURD and gnutls.
>There's no "vegan leader person" or "financial literacy leader person" or "animal cruelty leader person," etc. Not even "environment person,"
Look, if you're not going to argue in good faith then don't bother replying further. Those movements all have have multiple organizations working towards somewhat-common goals. Those individual orgs do indeed have leaders and by and large they're not toejam eaters.
>Are you unaware that the Free Software Movement is a political movement first and foremost?
Bingo. It is a political movement. One rooted in idiotic ideologies that no thinking person takes seriously. Communism was defeated by taking the few valid points of Marx and addressing them. The 98% stupidity was easy to refute and discard when the 2% valid points were accepted and addressed.
Well... I think it also took a cold war between two economic systems, multiple hot wars in Asia, and the maturation of social democracy to do so but yeah your point stands.
I have done politics long enough to understand that centrism never pays, in the long run. People are thirsty of ideals and coherence, and the FSF has plenty of those. They are in for the long run. And I would even say: despite having 0 budget, they were immensely successful over time. Modern computing wouldn't be the same without Stallman & co.
>And I would even say: despite having 0 budget, they were immensely successful over time.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree because from where I sit, Free Software had a bright spark at the beginning and slowly faded away into a miserable failure.
Apple sells a lot of laptops because they're really easy to use. The wifi "just works" and the battery life is excellent.
To a first approximation, zero people run fully-free stacks on their daily-driver laptops because they're not easy to use unless you're the kind of person who uses their 2005-vintage Thinkpad on Ethernet and AC power only.
Free Software will never be palatable to the mainstream, because the mainstream rejects socialist ideas. I think the popularity of Linux has somehow obscured the ideological origins of the movement, which seemed much more overt in the late 90s/early 00's when I first got into it.
>Free Software will never be palatable to the mainstream, because the mainstream rejects socialist ideas.
Then don't frame it as a socialist idea. There's absolutely nothing about Free Software that has a hard requirement on socialist ideology.
Frame it as pragmatism: Governments/schools/etc should run free software because it's more cost-effective and thus a more fiscally-responsible use of taxpayer monies.
Frame it as democratic: Why should a bunch of unelected CEOs have the right to dictate what you, a citizen of $this_great_nation, do with your devices?
Frame it as nationalism: How can American kids grow up to be world-leading innovators if they can't hack their devices? We're losing to Russia and China in the hacking gap!
Frame it as free speech or something: Why does the government get to decide what I do with my devices? My ipad my choice.
I think you're letting your personal beliefs/circles affect your view on the FOSS ideology. Free software has nothing to say for or against commercial software. Commercial software doesn't need to be proprietary. I was there in the late 90s and early 2000s too and it was a minority (of proponents, many opponents would slander FOSS as a form of socialism) that somehow equated open software with socialism.
We're talking free as in libre here, not free as in beer.
Okay, honest question, other than this impossible-to-quantify symbolic value, did FSF make any meaningful contribution/impact over the past two decades? They kept preaching their maximalist philosophy which seems increasingly convincing almost no one; their old flagships kept chugging along, some (or the majority) of them gradually losing relevance, thanks in part to GPLv3; no new hotness is joining the GNU umbrella AFAIK; Savannah is completely irrelevant outside some GNU projects and is less usable than phpBB. Ironically, I guess the hostility of GPLv3 spurred the development and adoption of many permissive replacements, which is arguably an unintended contribution. And on the opposite end of people and companies wanting to be less permissive, they find even the least permissive GNU license inadequate, since they usually give zero shit about “freedom”, it’s financial contributions that they seek; so they’re moving to source available instead of copyleft.
Not really a counter to anything you've said, but just wanted to note that after two decades of fighting open source licensing for their widely popular VST audio plugin API, Steinberg finally did release under the GPLv3.
> they provide a useful extreme endpoint such that there can exist a reasonable "Overton Window" of Free/Open Source/ Whatever Software
Or, ya know, they could just stake out reasonable, nuanced positions that organizations could adopt or at least be a starting point for further developments
It's pretty hilarious seeing people suggesting that someone fundamentally unable to engage in empathy, perspective-taking, or second-order strategizing...is actually making some big-brain play to hold down the extremist end so that more moderate voices and exist.
Stallman is infamous for his inability to recognize viewpoints other than his own as having worth or validity. He is literally incapable of such a big-brain plan because there's no way he could see a moderate position as valid.
No. I also don't think Buddhist monks are strategizing a big-brain play to convert people to Buddhism. It's more hilarious to see people not getting the idea that this is just his thing and I admire it, even if I ain't doing it.
I think this may have already been attempted, and you're perhaps underestimating the incentive and relative cheapness of large well funded companies (right now, literally the largest and most well funded) to insert their own agendas into visible movements like this (for better or worse, this is not much different from how "Open Source" came out of "Free Software.")
In other words, the fact that you don't see these positions I think is a result of a mild "embrace, extend extinguish" and not "no one thought of this before."
"Cancelled" and "toxic" are vague terms that we really need to stop using, please use the more precise words you mean. Has he broken the law or been unforgivably abusive, etc? If so, say that. If not, stop throwing accusations.
I reluctantly agree. While its great to have a reference point, there is a whole platoon of people who take this as a gospel. Speaking of gospel idiom, that's exactly what happened in the medieval churches – those who did not follow were ostrasized.
So, let's keep pragmatism, reality and wisdom above idealism.
It won’t be major exaggeration to say that FSF and Stallman are irrelevant in 2022 and not much different from any other radical left group, struggling even to make sense for majority of people. The idea of completely free software where user could control the source code is an obsolete ideal. Not because it’s unviable economically, but because the size and complexity of modern software is far beyond the ability of individual users to reason about it based just on the source code and without any augmentation. Software is no longer result of work of a small village of intelligent individuals, it’s a product of a large and diverse society and other norms and customs should support our freedoms. Free software as an idea did exist only to check the corporations and the governments and to ensure they do not violate other rights. In our society an ordinary person does not do that themselves, this task is usually delegated to various institutions. In information society we need to establish such institutions for the software products and services and not limit it to the code only. FSF got the problem statement right, but their solution was naïve and is now de facto not working.
I believe the GPL is Stallman's most lasting accomplishment and IMHO it's doing just fine. It allows all kinds of projects, big and small, to flourish like hardy organisms even in 2022.
Stallman and the FSF help encourage and motivate its use.
Question: what is the share of software products released and used under GPL?
What good do they do exactly to non-technical users, compared e.g. to Apache license or commercial no-cost licenses?
There are obviously some successes, but in general GPL license is not popular - overwhelming majority of the software is not released under GPL and sometimes never released to the public.
> Question: what is the share of software products released and used under GPL? What good do they do exactly to non-technical users, compared e.g. to Apache license or commercial no-cost licenses?
Apache and commercial no-cost is not the same. If the vendor decides to cut support for a piece of software and introduce something new, bloated and costs more. I have the choice to hire a programmer to maintain the current thing with GPL and Apache if it is worth it. That is a very important benefit, I have the choice, many business owners do not understand that, but the IT people they hire do and can use that to protect their employer (and their jobs) from exploitative practices. The GPL ensures it stays that way years down the road while Apache suffers from the MIT issue Stallman had when he maintained a Lisp system on his own. His competitor took his MIT licensed code and did not give back.
Those 'no-cost' licenses often become cost and very-costly in the future if they become popular enough with future versions.
As for the software products: they are still very common. Look at Flatpak or Snap stores. Krita made quite a bit of money on the Microsoft store believe it or not. Paid for and free Linux distro products dominate the server market that run Linux and GPL userland tools. Some Apache licensed web components (Grafana) is moved over to the AGPL.
They are the same in the sense that they are both not GPL. They just illustrate the spectrum of licenses that are not ideologically aligned with FSF, but may still do the job.
> As for the software products: they are still very common.
I will just repeat myself: there are some successes, but this is not the majority of the software. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s enormous pile of proprietary software, that is absolutely not free or open source. Think of Google, Facebook or Salesforce codebase. Think of all the banking or military software. Even some Linux distro can be dwarfed by those applications.
Do you think that the growing size and complexity of software might be part of the strategy of those profiting from the suppression of free software, rather than a necessity for increased software quality?
Not the poster in question, but I think some of it might just be the "big ball of mud" of long maintained software, and some of it may indeed be the managerial structures around software, which incentivizes managers to grow their teams and find problems for them to solve, regardless of the need of either the growth of team size, or the so-called problems.
And we all know bored developers will make up work for themselves and bikeshed themselves to death.
> a strategy
I don't think it's conspiratorial, so much as emergent. All structures which persist have means of ensuring their persistence. Institutions (including open ones) will push for things that further their existence, status, funding, and ultimately their power. They will make themselves indispensable, regardless of their actual value-added.
Linux kernel today is more complicated than 25 years ago. Is it conspiracy or necessity?
In a modern product engineering process we in fact fight the increasing complexity by selecting for the implementation only features that have the biggest business impact. That code is created because someone is going to use it to address some user need, not to confuse a potential reader. Nobody thinks at the moment of the roadmap planning about harming free software, this idea is just absurd.
I don't think you understand. Most people consciously using free software do not read the source code, or modify it. The value of libre software is no less to them - it only takes one canary or developer to alert the community of issues in the source code, so making an argument based on the fact that most people don't read source code or even can is bunk - that's always been true and the community has reaped the benefits of libre software anyways.
Now if you want to talk about real bloat, like JavaScript libraries, then you are citing a malignant practice anyways. There is no world in which we should compromise libre software principles so we can mindlessly continue using Javascript bloat, which should be taken out back and shot even if you aren't concerned about libre philosophy.
> Most people consciously using free software do not read the source code, or modify it. The value of libre software is no less to them - it only takes one canary or developer to alert the community of issues in the source code, so making an argument based on the fact that most people don't read source code or even can is bunk - that's always been true and the community has reaped the benefits of libre software anyways.
I understand this too well. You say: “one canary developer”. If our software was built in hope that someone will bring the canary to ensure quality, we would have terrible software. It is surely nice to have this opportunity, but you don’t have to release your software under GPL for that. Hiring QA or white hat team could work even better. I’m not saying that open source software does not work: there are of course some successful projects. It is just minority of the entire codebase, and not all open source software is released under licenses endorsed by FSF. If we care about our rights, we should think what could be the appropriate way to build trust in the software made by Google, Okta or Salesforce, because open source battle is lost there.
> Now if you want to talk about real bloat, like JavaScript libraries…
No, I do not want to talk about that mess. That particular example won’t prove anything. Sorry. :)
>because the size and complexity of modern software is far beyond the ability of individual users to reason about it based just on the source code and without any augmentation
I feel this. You should be able to understand your computer.
Cool. I think we should understand the physics of our homes' use of energy. The world is full of complexity and no single person can understand everything. I don't think software is what everyone needs to understand.
Belaboring the point: you should have SOME working understanding of the physics of your homes use of energy. You should be able to fix your home when something’s wrong with it, so long as it’s not something catastrophically wrong that requires professional help (such as the fire brigade).
The point: computers are different from everything else. Pre-writing man is a fundamentally different character to literate, historical man. (I do believe there’s an Egyptian dialogue on the matter.) And in the same manner, computing man is a fundamentally different character from pre-computing man. However, most people, despite their USE of computers, cannot really compute, because they can only get their computers to do what other people have told them to do, and not what they themselves have told their computers to do. In other words, to them the computer is an appliance. Now, not everyone can read Ulysses, or Durants history, and I don’t think it would be fair to expect that of people. But most people can read, and they can read the whole book if they choose. The qualitative shift of computational man finds that what he has read can be made into action, simply by it having been written, yet this does not hold true for a person who is handed Durants history of the world, or Livy’s history of Rome (before having been taught Latin, even!) and being told, you have knowledge, even though you can’t get through it all.
You start people with shorter books. Even picture books. You start them with simpler computers, with simpler software, and then more complex computers which do more complex things. And even in the professional world, of fully literate adults, you only break out the really complicated stuff for the really complicated things.
Software should be comprehensible, because it is meant to be comprehensible, it is not just execution but elocution, and is the explanation of its own intent.
> The qualitative shift of computational man finds that what he has read can be made into action, simply by it having been written, yet this does not hold true for a person who is handed Durants history of the world, or Livy’s history of Rome (before having been taught Latin, even!) and being told, you have knowledge, even though you can’t get through it all.
I think you have much too high a regard for your own interests and craft. I can guarantee you a cabinetmaker, machinist, pilot, doctor, or lawyer can make any and more of the same style of arguments. A little bit of computational knowledge? Yes it's very useful, and that's what low-code tools like Excel/spreadsheets are for. Akin to learning the basics of reading. More than that? No I think you overestimate the usefulness of computing, and most people only have a working knowledge of reading and writing. The world is full of complexity everywhere. Computing isn't the only thing with this force multiplier effect for humanity.
It is surely different in the sense that it has the complexity of higher order.
Every software in addition to the complexity of the implementation also reflects the complexity of the domain: if one person cannot grasp the full picture of the domain, the same person cannot be expected to understand the software for it. We are beyond the point when for many domains a single human being could understand them in their entirety. 20 years ago I could say I understand and can replicate the technology behind a personal computer from silicon to OS internals to GUI application on a CRT screen (I studied electronics and computer science). Today even a specialist in one of the layers will need a lot of time to understand an unfamiliar product. If we cannot do it, we should focus not on how we can get access to the code but on how we can entrust the audit and repair responsibility to someone else who is a specialist. And that’s a different story.
Ubuntu, debian, armbian etc all have pipelines, build processes to create an image file where the users can install. The processes where one can compile/build/package are already there (signing the image might require more steps with access to keys). Documentation and the tooling for such processes can be improved and made more user friendly.
With the evolving supply chain attacks, US Government advised companies to better understand their software supply chains. With transparent and repeatable builds this goal would be much more simple using the approach documented above.
We can innovate on more ideas for making more transparent software. We can have signed dependencies, pre-built trusted (signed, hashes) dependency chains.
You cannot really expect that every user will have sufficient expertise to understand how an operating system works. Today not even technical users can do it without investing considerable effort.
Security only explains why _some_ people should be able to understand how software works, and this is a different story. You do not need to make software open source or free for that, there can exist entire spectrum of various licenses and accesses. This is what I mean by delegating the work to institutions: you let someone you trust to audit the code for you. This can be a dedicated team in your company, a 3rd party expert or a government agency, the important part is only those people really need access to the code, because only they can understand it.
You do not need to understand the entire operating system to benefit from open source. Open source can enable an end user to fix or at least report a narrow issue.
>Open source can enable an end user to fix or at least report a narrow issue.
This is a very small subset of end users that can do that and will want to do that. Even software engineers may not dare to touch the code and seek for workarounds or ways to report the bug with less effort instead. The programming language and APIs can be unfamiliar, there can be lack of context etc. The distance between general computer science literacy and ability to read the code of a large product is very big - experts often tend to underestimate it.
For the majority of other people value of this possibility is literally zero: they would prefer to have a warranty from vendor. There's very little consolation for them in having weak guarantees from community of volunteers that discovered bugs will be some day fixed.
,, Macintoshes are moving towards being jails, like the iMonsters. It's getting harder for users to install even their own programs to run them.''
I feel this all the time, especially on my iPad Pro: I'm buying much more idevices than before, because I don't like the direction Windows has taken, and Apple gets always the newest TSMC slots (I buy the newest products from TSMC, they just happen to be made together with Apple).
It amazes me that the very first personal computer I had was effectively useless without being able to write your own software. It wasn"t an Apple ][ but they encouraged software development, it was a huge part of 8 bit culture.
40 years later, trying to get something running on a modern Mac is painful, and they gatekeep it with Xcode and a variety of user hostile features. They have become what they despised in that 1984 commercial.
It makes me just a little angry. No wonder people are so nostalgic for 8 bit stuff.
Have you tried getting a command-line program to build and run on an M1 Mac lately?
Yeah, it works most of the time. But when it doesn’t, e.g. due to some post-build script that massages the binary after signing it, it brings you a world of pain.
And to do that, as a package maintainer, you sometimes have to trace upstream’s build system because you need to intercept the file after the build system has patched it, but before they’re actually using it to run the tests. And then you try to inject the codesign command line into the upstream build system, and hope it’s going to work this time.
And often enough, it just doesn’t work at all ([1] ballpark number of issues, [2] one example case where I can confirm that I was affected myself).
You can put it on the Mac app store and pay Apple’s tax (and live at the mercy of Apple, who are a terrible business partner)
Or you can sell it through your website and not pay Apple’s tax. Except if you do this, Apple will tell your customers that you’re potentially a virus, and you have to invest more on customer support and education materials just to teach people how to launch your app (through no fault of your own). In some cases, it’s just not feasible to do this, and you just have to accept reduced sales and/or increased returns/chargebacks from angry customers that blame you for Apple’s decision.
Apple’s Mac app store has a huge competitive advantage thanks to this unfair practice. Your competitors will beat you if they put their app on the Mac app store, no matter how much money you invest into advertising and improving your product.
That’s anti-competitive behavior from a monopolist. It’s the same situation on Android (it’s actually worse on Android, as Google is the pioneer in this field)
It goes a little deeper than that. I'm not talking about running stuff somebody else built, I'm talking about using my own machine for my own purposes (i.e. writing a program for myself) which Apple have decided to make increasingly difficult. Examples:
Being forced to use XCode to sign .NET assemblies before they will run. You can build and run a self contained .NET program on literally anything from a Pi to a multi-processor rack server running Windows or Linux and it just works. Not on a Mac though, gotta jump through Apple hoops before that happens.
Apple deciding that your new iPhone isn't allowed to talk to your old Mac.
Being forced to use a Mac to do iPhone development, despite XCode being the runt of the litter of development environments.
Weird, old, crippled BSD for an operating system? Why not! Having to install a package manager as a seperate thing just to install boring stuff that comes with most Linux distributions. Why don't apple install Homebrew by default? Why do they pour so many resources into making the UI shiny instead of producing a modern OS?
Is your company using Docker for deployment? Why not give you a Mac which has the worst Docker development experience of any of the major OSs. What a wonderful idea.
The machines were often sold with your ability to create software with ease being a feature / benefit selling point.
The Apple ][ is the iconic machine, as was the BBC Micro (which has a kick ass BASIC / in-line assembly environment in ROM many Apple ][ users would envy), and heck my machine came with schematics!!
I always appreciate people that live by their principles but some of this stuff is downright comical! Making other people buy things online for you to avoid using non-free javascript?! Lol
I started at being all-currency, the typical job-apartment-cat type scenario, and I gradually found replacements for each things I needed to function, sometimes with an uncomfortable transition in between.
If you want details, there are some in my comment history.
Just wanted to follow up on your comment and link to a few older comments where I expand on how I do this.
The basic premise is that I try to live off of society's excesses without pulling new things out of the supply chain. So I tend to sleep in public spaces, eat food that's left over from others, wear hand-me-down clothes or "shop" in free stores, and so on. When I need to travel, I ask around for someone driving the same way.
For a few areas of my life, I still need new things, such as web hosting, occasional bus ticket, etc. For this, I allow others to interface with the currency system for me, and contribute to them in other ways, such as helping them with whatever they need help with.
As far as the bigger picture, I contribute by constantly looking for and doing things which need help doing, such as: cleaning up trash where it's not cleaned up, lending an ear to someone who needs to talk, teaching what I know to others, and so on.
I really resonate with the Steve Jobs quote that everything (man-made) around us was created by someone who had less knowledge and understanding of the world than we do today (because they did it in the past) and there's every reason to believe that each of us can do better if we put our mind to it.
Initially, I set out to have more time for my passion projects, which meant spending less time working for money, which, in turn, meant lowering my upkeep costs. I started unsubscribing from one thing, and then another, until, one day, I noticed that it has been days or weeks since I'd used money.
I wondered if anyone else was doing this thing, and I found freganism, "The Man Who Gave Up Money", etc.
And digging deeper into this, I realized several things after pondering them for a while:
a) I'm now operating in large part on my karma, and using money is almost always a karma negative. When I exchange one dollar for something, I'm setting in motion a whole chain of events to which I am karmically connected, most of which are negative.
b) When I work for money, all I get is the money. If I work for an employer for five years, all I have at the end of those five years is the money, which I am, honestly, not capable of managing well, something I have accepted about myself after so many years. On the other hand, if I abandon money, I have time to work on my relationships, something which pays infinitely better.
That example feels extremely dishonest and hypocritical. The correct answer in that sort of case is not to buy it in first place. Having someone else do it for you doesn't change anything, just makes you dishonest hypocrite. If you disagree with thing like that you shouldn't be giving them money in any case.
Locked down PCs and Macs. AMD and Intel and Apple are making security in their CPUs to lock down the computer. This locks out libre Operating systems like Linux from installing on them. It limits what the user can install and locks down the OS so it can only be installed from an official source not compiled from a tarball or downloaded off the Internet. I found that part of his speech to be interesting.
In my experience, the American society places a high value on 'balance' - from "checks and balances" to balanced individuals, to balanced meals, to balancing criticism with some praise first, etc. When this balance is off, most people's innate reaction is to reject the imbalanced person, and by extension, their ideas, regardless of any objective measure of the value of those ideas.
Being direct creates an imbalance, for example when one describes an issue or person purely from a negative point of view, regardless of whether all of it is actually true. Most people will innately attempt to say something positive about that same person to restore some sort of balance to the discussion.
Generalizations are also an example of imbalance, with people typically having a strong reaction to it, even though I think most people would agree that if 97 times out of 100 something is true, it's safe to say that thing is true.
Lastly, as a special case of generalizations, taking an absolute stance is also seen as imbalanced, and therefore bad, because, I assume, most things in life aren't black and white - there's lots of gray areas, so it's pragmatic to start out assuming that in actuality there's a gray area with any issue.
This is all to say that Stallman doesn't speak in a balanced way, which is why I think his speeches and ideas do not appeal to the American audience, or any other audience that places a higher value on balance than on the actual ideas.
If he were able to convey those same ideas in a less absolutist, more nuanced and more pragmatic manner, I think he, as a person, would be more appreciated in the US and perhaps people would listen more closely to what Stallman has to say.
I've lived in several other countries, particularly in Europe, and generalizations, absolute positions and speaking in a direct manner are all generally appreciated by the society there, or at the very least it's tolerated much better and won't get you dismissed right away (since that's how most people speak).
At the end of the day, I personally think Stallman is right. When I look at what he says, I see a non-compromising idealist who places more value on truth, and how things "ought to be", than on pleasantries and gray areas, and that's a difficult sell to the American audience. When I focus on his content with the understanding that he's converting gray into either black or white, I see a dreamer and a believer in a utopian society. I too would like to live in a world where all software is FOSS and we all write FOSS code that runs on FOSS hardware, but I recognize that's a dream. It shouldn't stop us from trying to make that dream a reality though.
I'll go ahead and shoot. The fact that this topic would be off-topic is just not true as the person speaking is in fact rms. Does this mean he is recuperated now? Everyone was calling him a pedophile and the FSF lost a lot of contacts over him being re-appointed. What does this mean then?
Tbh, I was curious what happened since last year and I didn't realize at the time he was somewhat apologetic, and honestly, it is hard for me to determine a lot of the veracity of the claims around him at the time and more so now. That said, as a leader of FSF and the free software movement, is he now recuperated, because his reputation since this episode, due to the truth or not, is pretty bad now and his being seen as a continuing leader of the movement could be seen as a liability. Should he be recuperated or should he not be?
Interesting question, and the discussion does still need to be had. Let me try to give some insights:
The FSF today has the highest membership it has ever had. Most new members joined in support of RMS last year in defence of the attacks on his reputation. The Foundation is doing very well now.
One interesting (and little discussed) theory about the attack on RMS that I heard was that it was also an attack on the Free Software and the FSF as a kind of coup and championed by people working from and benefiting from the chip makers, corporations and manufacturers.
Now there's is some evidence for that the majority of attackers were from that group, however I suspect it's more likely a correlation between the new kind of professional cultural standard of Silicon Valley highly paid technologists and their income sources, than any coordinated attack on Free Software in principle.
There was some a relation between the more lax Open Source developers and the anti-RMS stance seen in previous times, but I think, again, it's not some conspiracy to take down Free Software but rather a relationship between the more pragmatic Open Source developers being able to work for the Silicon Valley industry and becoming part of that culture.
I see it the other way around. The "movement" does not exist without RMS.
FSF itself is pretty woke nowadays so they have diluted and taken their mission in another direction.
As for the RMS attacks, he did the heresy of thinking out loud on a private mailing list which do-gooders promptly leaked and framed.
Your whole question is silly. He's not 'recuperated' since there's no authority to decide this. It's kinda hard when you replace institutions for woke mobs.
Half an hour through the ~90min presentation, I was wondering about speech-to-text solutions out there to really skim through it. For anyone else who would similarly like to be able to skim through a transcription:
Ran it through the Goog's speech to text. It's a quick paste of the raw pass, with no clean-up, although I added a couple of timestamps. Some irony in the choice of transcription engine, I know.
I was mostly attracted to the OP's coverage of the upcoming "GNU C manual" publishing, and if anyone knows anything more about it, I'd love to hear it.
With the light digging I've done so far, I'm not sure if it's supposed to be the same GNU C manual as listed at https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/ for which the latest revision was published in '16.
I was the main author on the manual you linked to. In 2012, Stallman contacted me about his new book, and with that forthcoming, I thought it made no sense for me to spend much more time on mine. So I never got quite finished it, and did only a few minor bug fix releases since then.
I did not know it was going to be ten years until his came out!
In any case, I did help him a bit on the new one, but not very recently. The main text, last I saw it, certainly spoke to the GCC dialect of C, and included some GCC historical footnotes, but the description he gave of the book sounds like he must have added even more GCC-specific content since I last saw a draft.
Did he say anything about cloud providers/the SaaS loophole? I mean they do anything with GPL licensed software, as distribution does not happen. The AGPL addresses this issue, but it does not seem to be used much.
Around the 8 and 9 min mark RMS talks about old hardware losing software support, like 32 bit systems. I am a kernel developer and the kernel removes code for a lot of older systems all the time (often lesser known 32bit ARM systems).
The reason they do this is because a lot of these systems can break as the internal kAPIs change all the time and the users will not know since the embedded custom distro of software + kernel is not upgraded. Support can be broken for these arches for years until someone gets these systems second hand and posts about them, but may not care to fix it or it is cheaper to replace it.
RMS calls this a major issue, specifically 32-bit support in Ubuntu. I do not agree. My last 32 bit computer died a long time ago after the battery died years ago. It was a Gateway so getting replacement parts would be difficult. I also was never able to get it to run Linux. Aside from my brother-in-law finding his old laptop no one I know uses 32 bit computers (well except for myself with my Pi Zero: ARM v6, which I used once).
It just feels like the wrong battle to pick when Linux's biggest competitor is forcing practically all PCs to use a bootloader signed with their key. Major vendors can choose to refuse to allow users to install their own key. They are already locking CPUs (Ryzens) to their brand of motherboards with a builtin fuse provided by AMD. He of course talks about it-it just feels like the 32 bit part distracts from it.
Pragmatism will always gravitate towards the “middle”. But the middle can never be truly found by pragmatism unless it can see either extreme.
Without Stallman, the closed software extreme has a ton of supporters (Microsoft, Apple, etc) but the free software extreme has almost none.
What Stallman does is define the free software extreme which allows the pragmatists to find a much better middle than if he wasn’t pushing that boundary.
I think the point is not that kernel devs (or whoever) will support obsolete platforms, but that users of those platforms can keep using the kernel if they want and are willing to put in the effort to maintain it.
There were a large number of Intel Atom tablets and laptops manufactured less than a decade ago that were hobbled with I think a 32-bit UEFI which could only boot a 32-bit OS. I own two of these devices myself so they are not uncommon.
A friend of mine had one of those laptops and I wanted to install Linux on it. It took me a few weeks for other reasons (those M.2 drives were the worst), but thanks to the work of Ian Morrison, it was possible.
Developers naturally has the freedom to choose where and on what they want to focus development time on, through I would not discount 32-bit machines as computers that should by now have died and be discared, especially in the server space which is what RMS is talking about during that 8-9m mark. A old 1U rack server is perfectly fine to operate as a router, a firewall, a logging server, a message bus, secondary backup (ie the server that simply get copies from the primary backup server) or some other low intensity work that is preferable done on a separate physical machine. If you work at a company that owned many of those you also have plenty of spares in case some essential old parts breaks down. You don't need a 256 core epic server with a 1TB of ram.
I suspect most kernel developers mostly operate with virtual machines in mind, but as a sysadmin I would argue that physical machines also has their use cases. I also suspect that if the linux kernel stop supporting 32-bit machines, others will continue. Are the BSD people thinking about dropping 32-bit support?
"Due to the increased usage of OpenBSD/amd64, as well as the age and practicality of most i386 hardware, only easy and critical security fixes are backported to i386. The project has more important things to focus on." [1]
OpenBSD includes their Xorg port in a base install, and you can run a reasonable graphical desktop on a 32bit machine. Firefox is not packaged for i386 I think. I just use Seamonkey when I test the 32 bit image now and again. There may be other package limitations relevant to server only use. Seems a rational approach to me.
I have a ton of devices that are 32 bit x86. I'd love if i was able to continue to use them... i can't stand having to throw away all tech every $x years. I only need like, 1 GB of RAM to work productively! I unironically work on machines that i found in the garbage.
Remove 32-bit x86 support, and it will pin me down to the few 64-bit machines that i have.
Every line of code has a maintenance overhead and it is quite likely you are in a minority at this point. Eventually, as with all things legacy, the effort outweighs the gain.
621 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadhttps://news.slashdot.org/story/22/04/16/238221/richard-stal...
https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/04/16/238221/richard-stal...
https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/04/16/2154203/richard-sta...
That is, are two different slashdot posts about the different aspects of the talk, and the above link is to the earlier of the posts.
We want original sources here. From the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):
"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
(For the purposes of that guideline, copying and pasting someone else's work counts as 'reporting on'.)
The original posted URL was: https://lunduke.substack.com/p/richard-stallman-the-state-of...
The grandparent comment says that Lunduke ripped off Slashdot. I don't see that. There is one quote that's the same and several that I see that are different. You claim you changed it to the original source... the original source would be the Libreplanet link here: https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/the-state-of-t...
So both Lunduke and Slashdot are posting news about LibrePlanet and it's not clear one ripped off the other, other than having one quote that's the same.
It seems like you went with the above commenters without investigating.
I have no affiliation with Lunduke. I'm not a paid subscriber to his journal, I just get it by email sometimes.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/04/16/2154203/richard-sta...
Hmm that's insightful.
> “Due to unforeseen technical difficulties, RMS gave his talk over audio only.”
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, Emacs to do his presentation, and there was a bug preventing him.
Emacs doesn't have video conferencing yet?
I wonder what Stallman would say about anticheat software. Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable.
But without it, there's a client-side arms race against the server code which is a different kind of metagame than most players would want.
[[Citation Needed]]. Trying to play a multiplayer game that doesn't implement effective anticheat is miserable. The arms race is unfortunate but 100% understandable, and I wouldn't play any game that doesn't implement some form of it.
More probably, the point here is most anticheats are very invasive and harmful to privacy, while also degrading game performance and often being ineffective at preventing cheaters.
[Citation needed] at the last part. Of course they're not gonna prevent 100% of cheaters, but I have doubts that they don't do anything.
OP's point here was that anticheat - while necessary in practice - is particularly egregious at invading privacy and/or degrading the user's experience, which i think is fair to say goes against the free software ideal. the experience would certainly be worse without any anticheat, but that doesn't mean anticheat couldn't be better or isn't still very non-free.
In the old days, you would play multiplayer with your friends and their friends on a private server or some kind of community server where cheaters could quickly be recognized and banned by the admins. Now this communal way of playing online games is largely gone and replaced by match making which makes multiplayer basically the same as playing against cleverer bots.
Match making is more convenient, especially for lone players, and I don't think the change was done out of malice. Still, it feels like something was lost with the disappearance of private or semi-private community servers, easy policing of cheaters being one of those things.
For a game to attract the amount of people required to finance AAA gamedev it needs console matchmaking (so people can enjoy it from the first minute), it might need to allow trustworthy competitive games bevause competitions are part of marketing.
Being able to switch off the anticheats on private/community server that are policed by admins would work. But again it’s a pretty small niche.
Anti-piracy: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling the sale of products because technology has radically reduced "manufacture" and distribution costs.
Anti-cheat: trying to address the lack of abuse of trust while scaling game coordination because tech. has made massive interconnectivity possible
Anti-cryptography: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling communication tools.
I do miss the quirky nature of private servers, custom maps and game mods, and all of that, but cheating was a big problem back then too.
The problem is mixing purposes to the point where most people don't even have access to a free computing system.
What has Stallman said about walled gardens and app stores?
Maybe a GCW Zero or an OUYA or similar (and yes, I'm aware of the current status of the system). Fortunately, because these are linux or android based and thus open source, you still have the freedom to compile your own kernels for them.
I do not hate anticheat as a gamer, but I do hate DRMs.
Claiming that knowing how the code works lets you break the code is basically advocating for security by obscurity which I'm fairly sure we're all aware it's not the holy grail of a secure system. If you will allow me a bit of a hyperbole, it'd be like saying that since I have access to the entire code of my SSH client, that gives me the capability of modifying it so it lets me connect to every server (even those that I do not own) without a password. That's simply not how it works.
>advocating for security by obscurity
There is nothing wrong with this as long as you understand what you are doing. The goal of anticheat is to prevent cheat makers from being able to make cheats for your game for as long as possible. Increasing the time and skill needed to reverse engineer your anticheat increases the time it takes for someone to develop a cheat.
>it'd be like saying that since I have access to the entire code of my SSH client, that gives me the capability of modifying it so it lets me connect to every server (even those that I do not own) without a password
With this kind of problem of authentication it is simple to design the code such that the time it will take for an attacker to break the security to be impractical. Anticheat on the other hand is not a problem that has a solution like that. If you want to check if a click came from a mouse or a cheat program and you trust the client to tell you where it came from it's impossible to prevent the client from lying. Since it's trivial to lie you need to find a way to slow down attackers to make it harder to lie.
There are already VMs that are used to run trusted instructions on a target (read: client) machine and regardless of you knowing how the VM works and what the code does, if you don't "play by the rules" (as is the world of cryptography), your data will not be accepted and you will get kicked/banned/disconnected.
Is it computationally expensive? Probably. Is it feasible? I don't know. Is it theoretically possible? I'd say so.
>Increasing the time and skill needed to reverse engineer your anticheat increases the time it takes for someone to develop a cheat.
This is the good ol' security by obscurity fallacy. Having it open increases the amount of people who have eyes on the code and contribute to the code and finds exploits to patch, etc. It's two sides of the same coin.
>Having it open increases the amount of people who have eyes on the code and contribute to the code and finds exploits to patch, etc.
If your detection is to collect the names of the open windows on a computer to check for a cheat's name and then send the anticheat server the hash of the binary that opened that window how is making that information public making the anticheat stronger. The more eyes that look at that code the more cheaters who know to name their cheat windows as "Notepad." To avoid being found. If you find an exploit there is no patch.
Detecting cheating by window names? 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.
How can you possibly verify the mouse was moved by a human rather than a script when the script had the ability to lie about any check you put in place. In the end it comes to making the check so hard to understand that you can’t work it out fast enough to keep ahead.
I don’t want to play a game with a bunch of cheaters, and I don’t want to have to filter down to “friends I know won’t cheat “ to play a game with others.
Also what if I don't have friends who play the same game and I'm not interested in making any?
Generally the people who are actually into multiplayer games accept anticheat software as a necessary evil. Yes, they're not exactly enthused about what amounts to game-supporting spyware, but playing a game that's rife with hackers is a miserable experience.
The only multi-player games I play are with friends or their friends, ie people I already trust. The only social media i use is group chats with friends. Of course, you can have more open and anonymous spaces like we have here on HN, but you need more moderation and the moderators need to feel some sense of pride/ownership to keep on working for free.
I used to play competitive dota (the original wc3 map) back in the day and the inhouse leagues were a massive pain in the ass. Same with all the various leagues for counter strike (1.6 at the time). UX was terrible, the moderation sucked and you still had to have anti-cheat as people would cheat even in private spaces. Usually the easiest way to get up the ladder was do something dubious and be good friends with the mods so they would rule in your favor.
People use cheats even at LAN events too. So yeah for competitive multiplayer anti-cheat is pretty much required.
For average players yes, central developer driven model is much easier and simpler.
Also smash is played on consoles that prevent one from installing cheats basically the fact that the whole platform is fully locked down is the anti-cheat. Still controllers are sometimes checked at tournaments for any additions that can run macros (most adapters that allow one to use a different consoles controller can do this)
https://www.polygon.com/2020/11/19/21578200/super-smash-bros...
This is more of an "exception that proves the rule" since Smash is pretty much the only competitive game with zero centralized support that has broken out of a tiny niche to compete with big names.
Fake lag is in a similar situation. The server could simply hold the true state of all positioning and ignore what the clients think is their position. This might work fine in a very low latency situation, but as latency increase it would make playing the game feel sluggish. It would also make aiming difficult, since the key press for fire would have to travel to the server in order for it to occur, and by then the location of players could have shifted.
Trigger bots however is mostly impossible to stop server side. Any action that is identical to human actions can only really be detected through statistics and heuristics.
Which is why games that do that will still send you data about player who you are almost able to see. This will be their exact position and look direction along with what they are holding. Even limited wallhacks can give a competitive advantage.
I think you misunderstand fake lag. With fake lag you get fake packet loss / latency which causes your character to stutter making it harder to aim at you. The server isn't getting a regular stream of updates of your position.
With Client side movement, Player A sends in even intervals their location to the server. Let say they move right for 3 unit of time, the location get updated from 0:0, 0:1, 0:2. The server then relay the information to Player B.
With Server side movement, Player A tells the server they want to move to the right. The server create a path over time, 0:0, 0:1, 0:2, ... and continuously sends this to player B.
Let now add a fake lag with client side movement. In the first case the we see Player A send locations like 0:0, 0:1, -, -, -, 0:5. The server sends this to player B. If Player B fired a gun at 0:2 at the third interval they might miss because player A is not there. The server might extrapolate an virtual path between 0:1 and 0:5, but that depend on game logic.
Lets now add a fake lag with server side movement. Player A tells the server that they want to move right. After 2 units they add a 3 unit lag, and finally sends tells the server a stop command. The server would construct the following path: 0:0 (start moving player A), 0:1, 0:2, 0:3, 0:4, 0:5 (halt moving Player A). If Player B fired a gun at 0:2 at the third interval, the server see that player A is at that location and will mark a hit.
This is why server side movement isn't vulnerable to fake lag. The server has the full game state and thus know at any point where all player are and what they are doing, and if the client lag then it simply mean that their input gets delayed. Server side movement is however vulnerable to real lag, as between any action there might be a delay and thus events might not occur at the server when players want it to occur. Server side movement is also slightly more vulnerable to ddos attacks if players can identify the IP address of other players.
Player A may send 0:0, 0:1, -, -, -, 0:2 0:3 0:4 0:5
The location for 0:2 that B would have been wrong via your approach. If player A's actual location at 0:2 isn't about the same B will miss his shot.
Imagine you are talking over the phone to someone who is driving, given them directions. That is server side movements. If you suddenly stop talking, the car doesn't just stop, nor does the traffic. All you have accomplished is that the driver is no longer getting any further instructions from you.
This exists with anticheat, too.
I get that Stallman's shtick is being as hardline as possible about free software, but it really feels like sometimes this hurts the free software movement.
Imagine trying to bring in a normal, non-technical person who plays video games as one of their hobbies (describes a lot of my friends at least), and they see this quote. Immediately, it feels bullshit and dumb to them - non-free games (which make up 99.999% of the market) are "harmful for them"? It's hard enough for me (a trusted friend) to explain the free software movement to them after seeing stuff like this, imagine a random person just stumbling upon it.
And yes, every community has their super-idealistic members that make extreme hyperbolic statements, but the problem is that Richard Stallman is one of the most influential and respected members of the movement (and the founder of it!). Sometimes I feel like we could get a lot more done for free software with a tiny bit of pragmatism - for example, in the video game space, pushing for Valve to open source the Steam client, which feels like the most likely high-impact goal to push for rather than the lost battle of trying to change the entire industry at once.
The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground. I don't think Stallman would agree that "lack of pragmatism" is really what's stopping things from changing for better.
Right, but to most people, that's still an extreme position. Because again, like 99.99% of games are non-free, and especially the way he phrased it is gonna come across as a crank.
Stallman strikes me very much as the kind of person who communicates poorly, in an inflammatory way, and gives zero shits how much this bothers anyone else.
Which for a random individual is probably fine, or at least tolerable, but is less good when you're the face of a movement.
In exactly which way is Stallman being inflammatory here?
If it has to be interpreted, it is poorly communicated.
I use plenty of proprietary software, but I also know it’s bad for me. Like someone who enjoys alcohol, I think the benefits are worth the negative effects, but whenever I can get the same benefits from free software, I prefer them. I keep one computer around that runs only free software, and it’s great. It’s a decade old, but gains on desktop software performance in the last decade have been slow.
Even Stallman gives one reason to use proprietary software: to make a free version of it. I’ll offer a liberal interpretation of that rule: most people work in technology need to use a wide variety of proprietary software to understand trends and developments in software paradigms, even if they are not directly copying it while using it.
And my prediction: one day, all software will become free. All proprietary software is only temporarily restricted. Future computers will be able to reverse-engineer any existing program and create code that is functionally identical. That still makes it harmful, but that harm will eventually end. We just have the responsibility to make better laws in the future. Most important is preserving political freedom, and software freedom will eventually follow.
Nothing you say addresses that.
He could definitely benefit from coming across as more pleasant and affable, though.
So no, the world just moved proprietary software to the cloud with parts spun-off and GPLed on paper.
In a way, it is a form of society-wide bargaining. Ask for everything, get something. Ask for something, get nothing. Start big, end up small; start small, end up nowhere.
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.
Or maybe the FSF has absolutely miserably failed at actually getting their message out there?
The Right to Repair movement has been more successful; there's quite a bit of overlap between the concept of Free Software and Right To Repair: both are fundamentally about "I can do to the machine I bought whatever I want!" And it seems both the public and lawmakers are receptive to this argument. Right to Repair hasn't been as successful as I'd like (yet), but a lot more successful than Free Software. It seems to me that part of the blame squarely lies with FSF's inability to actually communicate their message effectively. Open Source has been more successful either.
I never like this kind of externalizing of issues and blame other people/corporations/governments because it's just not helpful. Even if you're 100% correct about all of that, you can't change what other people/organisations do where you have no influence, but you can influence what you do, so it's almost always better to think about "what can I/we do better?" rather than "what can they do better?"
I don't think FSF communication really has that much of an impact on the success. Even if the average person understands the benefit to free software it just doesn't impact them in the same way that right to repair does and that will result in them not really caring about it.
In contrast, right to repair does not require abandoning the entire framework of copyright. In fact, it barely touches it. Furthermore, Louis Rossman is way better at explaining the problems with anti-repair bullshit than RMS is at explaining the harms of proprietary software.
[0] Yes I know GPL relies upon copyright to work. That was the backup plan - if we can't force all software to be Free we can at least keep our own software from being locked down.
I do think copyright reform has favored individual expression recently, and I don't see this changing.
Some practical scenarios:
- The game Guacamelee crashes at 30 minutes in to the game for me and quite a lot of other people, but I can't fix it or download an "unofficial patch" (how many games have reverse-engineered unofficial patches btw?).
- I happened to have bought Hyperlight Drifer on GOG.com today; it seems okay, but the controls are horrible to the point of being almost unplayable. Pretty sure someone would have fixed it if they could.
- Back in the day KPN (Dutch AT&T) gave everyone a wireless dongle with their internet, but the driver was bugged and after a certain Windows update it would cause BSODs, and I had to sell a lot of new wireless dongles because of that.
- How many people and organisations would have preferred running Windows XP/7 instead of more or less forcibly updating to 8/10 because Microsoft no longer maintained it?
- How many people wished they could get a version of Windows 10 that doesn't forcibly reboot on updates?
And many more. These are all things a regular person could take advantage of, and very concrete advantages for a regular person, and not all that different from "right to repair".
A big point of Free Software really is about "right to repair"; a lot of people really do want their software to do something different or is broken beyond repair, but there is no way anyone can actually make it work any different. Chances are that if you're struggling with $problemX someone else is too, and already released a fix for it. Or, especially in a corporate environment, you can hire someone.
The FSF takes a very high-level philosophical/academic views of things, as well as a very programmer-centric view, but it doesn't need to be like this.
None of the issues you brought up are necessaries in the same way right to repair can be. Right to repair can save people thousands of dollars while the examples you provided are more of nice to have sorts of things.
Don't get me wrong. I am very much in favor of free software and I think if people understood it they would like it as well. I just don't think they would really care about it anywhere near the same level as right to repair.
>The game Guacamelee crashes at 30 minutes in to the game for me and quite a lot of other people, but I can't fix it or download an "unofficial patch" (how many games have reverse-engineered unofficial patches btw?).
A lot of games have mods. These games are proprietary and the mods often are as well. Look at a game like Skyrim. There is literally a mod called the Unofficial Patch. It fixes a lot of the issues with the game. I think most people care about mod capabilities not an actual open source game. If all games had mods people would be content.
>I happened to have bought Hyperlight Drifer on GOG.com today; it seems okay, but the controls are horrible to the point of being almost unplayable. Pretty sure someone would have fixed it if they could.
How many people play games that don't have remappable controls? That seems like such a niche issue that it wouldn't impact the average person I was referring to.
>Back in the day KPN (Dutch AT&T) gave everyone a wireless dongle with their internet, but the driver was bugged and after a certain Windows update it would cause BSODs, and I had to sell a lot of new wireless dongles because of that.
I don't think this is really a big issue anymore. More and more people don't even have computers and when they do, they have wifi card built in. Again not appealing to the average person (in the present day).
>How many people and organisations would have preferred running Windows XP/7 instead of more or less forcibly updating to 8/10 because Microsoft no longer maintained it?
While this is probably the best one you brought up, I don't think you would have enough people maintain older versions of something as complex as an OS and this would create a massively insecure situation for users of it. I think this would do a lot to harm the free software movement.
>How many people wished they could get a version of Windows 10 that doesn't forcibly reboot on updates?
I think Microsoft already fixed this? There are also third party software that can fix this without modification to the OS.
Regardless, let's say that was not the case. If it was something desirable I have no doubt that it would have been trivial for Microsoft to implement. This means Microsoft would be choosing not to implement it. Windows being free software would do nothing to get this change implemented as Microsoft would not accept the pull request.
People would have to fork Windows to add this in. Given Window's habit of reverting settings the fork couldn't just change a setting and provide the ISO. This means they would have to continually provide updates. I have no reason to think Microsoft would collaborate with Windows fork maintainers so we would have slower updates assuming the forks actually update regularly.
When the forks inventively take too long to patch there would be security issues resulting in the negative press from security issues.
Linux and associated software are made by open source people for open source people. If Microsoft turned Windows into free software I just don't think they would make it convenient for people forking it since they would still want people to pay for Windows.
I understand these were just random ideas you thought of, but only one seemed like something the average person would actually care about and it could very likely turn into negative press for free software.
I think the fact you had to throug...
That is just plain not true. If it were, that would be fantastic. Unfortunately that's only part of Stallman's message, and a good portion of the rest of it is either simply unworkable or batshit insane.
To quote David Schlesinger after RMS got up on stage and talked about how "women who have not been introduced to emacs are emacs virgins and 'relieving them of their virginity is a sacred duty of all members of the church of emacs'", Stallman continues to embarrass us all
I took him out to dinner once, my wife and I, and had a lovely evening talking mostly about his childhood experiences.
He was extremely respectful to the staff at the restaurant I recall. Going out of his way to compliment them on the food.
That at some point he said: "women who have not been introduced to emacs...sacred duty of all members of the church of emacs" is entirely possible. We all have said stupid things. Out of context especially, had these things been recorded, we would be ashamed.
To use that quote to define RMS is a gross insult, intellectually fraudulent, it is a political attack.
I do think it is important to play nice in politics. So if you have criticisms of RMS' stand on software, make them.
This sort of thing is insulting to all of us who do our best to imperfectly maintain standards of debate
Before I commented I tried to find the source, interesting digressions ensued, but nothing that suggests this is typical.
Also I mentioned I have been following him for a long time (nearly three decades, golly). I have never heard those sorts of words pass his lips.
So I accuse you of telling a lie here. It is not uncommon to make up stories and exaggerate faults of those you politically oppose. Still lies
>I have never heard those sorts of words pass his lips. >So I accuse you of telling a lie here. It is not uncommon to make up stories and exaggerate faults of those you politically oppose. Still lies
You must not be listening very hard. Making comments like these is even part of his wikipedia page as he had to set down from the FSF and MIT for a while for similar comments
That's the issue. Stallman's technical contributions and early political contributions were both foundational and heroic. That does not negate the fact that for the better part of two decades he's been a constant embarrassment that continuously degrades the movement in the eyes of anyone who hasn't developed a tolerance for him. Evangelizing free software was comparatively easy in the days when peoples' reaction to his name was "Haha, that guy who ate stuff off his foot on stage? Wild." It's gotten considerably harder now that the reaction is "wait, the guy who wrote those pedophile emails and harasses women at conferences?"
I'm tired of trying to advocate for free software when just the name "Free Software Foundation" is a conversational liability.
https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/EMACS_virgins_joke
There are references too.
No it has not.
I exclusively use Free Software outside my working life (for my sins, developing iOS software with Swift. A bit like Linux in 1997 - it mostly works)
I mean, we live in a world powered by Free Software, so, I don't know, really. If anything, corporation were kinda successful making money out of free software, but that's another can of worms.
I used computers in 1985. To suggest that the free software movement has only lost ground since then is completely absurd. Has it gone anywhere nearly as far as Stallman and others hoped it would? No. Has it gone much further than anyone who was around in 1985 to watch this being born thought it would go? Absolutely.
Are you joking? This was before my time, but there once was a time when you would not only have to pay for development tools, but pay for them seperately. Want a compiler? $500, please. Want something like Bison? Fork a few hundred. Want an assembler? Another few hundred. etc.
There have been setbacks, and it does look like the tide is turning towards everything becoming closed again but it's untrue to say that Free Software has "only lost ground" since 1985 -hell, GCC didn't even come out until what, 1987, 1988 or so?
In my opinion, this is one of the problems with Stallman's "moral authority" approach to the FSF. I would very much like to hear about these cases where a game's source is libre licensed but not it's content and see what Stallman actually has to say about it.
Not for nothing, but there are many network/online games that have both source and content libre licensed. Here are a few:
* Teeworlds - https://www.teeworlds.com/
* Minetest - https://www.minetest.net/
* Battle for Wesnoth - https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth
I'm sure there are many others of note but those are just the few that I have at least some passing familiarity with.
[0] https://stallman.org/#thanks
[1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/
Stallman's reply? "You should not be making those games, it is unethical."
To say that is non-constructive would be an understatement; it's just shutting down any conversation and exploration and how we can improve things. There are a whole bunch of things one can think of: release the code but keep the assets (graphics, sound, music, etc.) proprietary, release under some sort of "source available" license, keep the core rendering parts proprietary SO/DLLs and release the rest as free software, and maybe a few other things. All of that would be a huge improvement over "100% closed".
But Stallman isn't open to any of that, and because the FSF is still very much Stallman's organisation, neither is the FSF. For at least 20 years the FSF has done nothing except preaching to the choir, and certainly hasn't actually made many significant meaningful every-day improvements. In the above situation the game dev essentially asked was "what is the best way to make my software more free?" and all he got was a rather insulting and condensing shutdown of that conversation before it could even take off.
[1]: I don't have the source for that right now; I think it was somewhere on YouTube. It may have been an interview with Lunduke, but I'm not sure.
Yet GNU and FSF aren't everything RMS is, so he has his own personal website. I would assume you've learned about his views on having children there.
Here you are. Discussing and arguing.
Good on you.
Yes, by working on unfree software, an occupation which he uncompromisingly condemns. Programmers working exclusively on free software would be earning much, much less on average.
All of the open source companies/people that come to mind are not selling libre software, they are all selling some kind of service - support contracts, managed hosting, etc - or they embraced some kind of freemium/"open core" model (so they are really selling non-free software), or they are funded by charitable donations and sometimes public grants, often by having some large non-free companies being sponsors (Linus Torvalds is paid this way for example, through sponsorship money from the who-is-who of the non-free corporate world distributed through the Linux Foundation).
So yes, although your observations are not wrong, they do not apply universally.
> Nevertheless, more than 6000 of these individuals choose to help fund the project to the tune of between $150k and $210k a year.
How is this not covered by the posters comment about it not being a business but a charity if you rely on people paying more than they need to?
If that's your definition, then sure.
That's not my definition.
It doesn't sound complicated to me to understand that you can sell games whose code is open source but the 3d models, graphics, levels building and artwork aren't. Customer would still retain all free software liberties, be able to port the game to other platforms and the dev studios would still get paid.
You mentioned exclusively, that's true that you might have to write custom, closed code for customers at many of those companies. But that's still better than exclusively working on non free software.
RMS' heart is mostly in the right place, but he's a fanatic who is 100% out of touch with the real world.
The same way anyone who think selling metamphetamines to vulnerable people and kids is unethical and wrong, then you should not do it and find another income to feed your family.
Nobody is put a gun to the temple and forced to write proprietary software to make a living. There are myriads of other jobs.
For most part of his life he was living in his office at the university, technically homeless. After that period he lived in a home designated by MIT, possible because they got tired of the building code violation of having a professor living in his office.
I understand he's forgone the amount of wealth he could have accumulated by just working in the software industry in the name of his cause, and that is laudable. However he thinks everyone should do this despite the greater burden they'd have to shoulder. All the people he tells shouldn't be making non free software so they can support themselves and their families are not going to be given free lodging by MIT.
However your comment above said he lived comfortably off the income of his own celebrity. We would have to twist the word income here for a bit to cover this kind of situation. The comfortably part is also a bit questionable, but I guess living at the office can be comfortable to some people. The description just didn't fit the situation that well, which is why I wrote the above comment.
Imagine if someone asked you for help and said "I don't see how to free my slaves while making a living, paying my rent, paying for my children's education". Would you tell them "You shouldn't have slaves, it's unethical" or would you try to help them find a way to run their business with fewer slaves, but still some?
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 weren’t so bad.
It’s a good rule of thumb that rather than making a logical argument, you are in fact bringing a rational discussion to an end by invoking slavery, Hitler, or other incontrovertible evil. They are not in any meaningful sense useful analogies for most discussions.
The guy wasn’t bringing up anything like slavery. Therefore Stallman’s response is quite likely unexpected to most people.
This misunderstanding tends to be caused by (1) treating the rhetorical device literally rather than as an (intentionally exaggerated) analogy, and (2) - as in this case - by assuming that the argument being made is trying to draw some moral equivalence between the analogy and the original example. It isn't.
I wasn't making any point about whether Stallman is right or wrong on that, I was just pointing out that people are attacking the wrong part of his argument. If you disagree with him you should attack his base belief that proprietary software is unethical.
> 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?
When have you ever seen Stallman be pragmatic instead of idealist about anything regarding proprietary software?
Wow. There is a continuum from good behaviour to unethical behaviour to evil.
To conflate and compare and equivalate unethical behaviours like theft with true evils like slavery or murder is beyond unhelpful.
I don't see how proprietary has even been established as unethical let alone a evil equivalent to slavery.
Please stop making this argument on Stallman's behalf.
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.
> 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.
I’ve been to events supporting a cause. They are full of people who, in support of their passionate convictions, try to help and persuade people to join them without reducing personal dilemmas to simplistic answers.
It makes me wonder: if strong convictions don’t cause or correlate to how you treat people, is there another explanation for why it’s so easy to find such anecdotes?
Two things don't have to be exactly as bad as each other to be analogous circumstances.
You are supposed to apply to same chain of logical reasoning to the two situations.
Just expressing faux outrage with a "How dare you compare these two things" isn't actually defeating the argument in any way.
Society has moved on in the decades since Stallman started (for better or for worse), and we need to figure out a way to stay true to their vision around software and bringing new people on board with the free software movement. Having such extremist comments when someone is trying to figure out how to make their game opensource without breaking agreements for other parts they rely on isn't going to get anyone anywhere.
Try to imagine something that you find unethical but some others do not: burqas, abortion, war, public schools, private schools, eating meat, rolling coal or whatever it may be.
If you start from the position that such a thing is unethical, you can't enter an argument with someone who asks you "how should I do X to make you happy?", because you simply won't be happy if this gets done at all.
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 proprietary software and argue about that.
Expecting Stallman to help someone make money with proprietary software is like expecting a vegan advocate to help someone kill cows more humanely.
Note that I'm not expressing an agreement or disagreement with Stallman's worldview, only that his answer is exactly what follows from his worldview, and you should argue about that and not about the answer.
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
Many vegans are actually doing exactly that: enacting laws to improve the living conditions of animals. In the Netherlands we have the "party for the animals" in parliament for that. While their long-term goal is the elimination of meat, they also realize this is not realistic/practical in the short-term for various reasons. In the meanwhile they've been fairly successful in putting the topic of animal suffering on the agenda, making meaningful proposals to improve things, and hopefully coming closer to the long-term goals
I happen to be vegan (well, mostly anyway). Yes, you have the "extreme" vegans you might encounter on occasion, which me and my vegan friends tend to dislike as well, but most are significantly more pragmatic than you might think. It's just that you hear less from them as they're not as "loud".
If a farmer was to walk up to me and ask me "how can I improve the welfare of my animals in my factory farm?" then I'd do my best to make meaningful improvements, even though I think factory farming in general is unethical.
Now, back to Free Software: in broad lines I agree with Stallman, but just find his approach unhelpful, and I don't think that can just be hand-waved away with "but [he thinks] it's unethical".
However, in my opinion, this game developer interested in doing the right thing is the kind of person the FSF and Stallman should focus on and work on finding solutions for, because they could make a difference and even move part of the industry to free software. Telling such people they are not doing the right thing without giving any trail is not going to achieve much and could even repel them. That's counter productive.
One could say that the concerned developer should instead think themself of a solution. That's partly true. I think they should if they are really concerned. However, the whole goal of the FSF is to move the world to free software. They should work to provide trails to such people, because they have all the incentive to do so, even more than the concerned developer. They should provide a welcoming climate so such developer want to join (even more).
I think Stallman should be prepared to give a kind, low effort answer to such a "basic" question. It can be low effort because sometimes the question is low effort too, or even a bit ill-intended and yes, the developer should do their homework. But a nice, positive answer could make things change and engage people.
(I say "basic", but that does not mean the problem is easy. I think it's hard.)
There's no reason you cannot make a living by simply creating a payment method where you get the game + code. Yes, people will copy it. FAR from all people will. In the game add a pay/subscribe/support button. Frankly, I suspect you'll get more money; the game will be spread further and people will be willing to pay. You can even create a "bug bounty" program, where people can pay for bug fixes. Alternatively, have people "pre-pay" for new releases and send the code. There's plenty of alternatives.
That said, I do understand the view, but take a step back..
Stallman's point is that it's unethical to have closed source code running on your hardware. Effectively, you cannot understand, manipulate, update the underlying code. If I purchase a book, I can modify it. If I buy a car I can modify it. If I buy a song, I can modify it. Why can I not modify the software I purchased?
In terms of meaningful improvements, everyone considers licensing. Every company I've ever worked at, every code base, every project is evaluated, etc. It's taken seriously, something that was not done prior to the FSF. I'm currently writing this comment on hardware I can modify, with software I can modify. I don't even have closed sourced video drivers.. So I really don't see your point.
I thought this was a really interesting model.
Maybe it wouldn't work so well with singleplayer games. However, there's a similar example with the sprite editor / animation software Aseprite, which is open source but you have to compile it yourself, so it's cheaper for most people (in terms of time and effort) to just buy it for $15.
Jason Rohrer's game One Hour One Life has a few community spin-offs, which is also really interesting. There are also blatant clones, of course, but it seems to be a worthwhile tradeoff on the whole.
Now sadly no longer on the Apple App Store
I guess that is what happens over time at the walled garden: You don't pay, you don't play
[1] http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/
update: gotta go scrounge for my box of old iPod touches with dead batteries if they have the games as local iTunes sync no longer works.
https://dev.aseprite.org/2016/09/01/new-source-code-license/
Still, the latest version is on GitHub? But it's only for "personal use" according to the EULA (and not making your own fork for example).
https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite
This is probably one of the best critiques of his approach (and by extention the FSF) I've read. Very true, and it is a tremendous waste.
An idea that's inapplicable to reality even in principle is worthless.
Made me imagine one of those xkcd:
Me: here is the code.
RMS: what? this is the compiled software.
Me: but the code is there in assembly.
RMS: that's unethical, give me the source code.
Me: ok, here, the source right before compilation.
RMS: this is obfuscated code, still unethical.
Me: granted, here it goes without obfuscation.
RMS: no, wait, the code is so micro-optimized it's no easy to understand, that's not open enough, and, unethical.
Me: ugh but I didn't save the unoptimized version, I just kept optimizing until it got this way.
RMS: look if we can't understand it we won't be able to inspect it, so this is still unethical.
Me: fine, I refactored the code.
RMS: it's undocumented, how are most people going to understand it, imagine a whole operating system undocumented, just, unethical!
I would have just answered that the best way to develop free software games is to not be forced to rely on copyright in order to get paid. Get paid to work on it, rather than get paid after work has already been done. If one has to rely on copyright to get paid, a CC BY-NC license might be the best choice, as then the author still have exclusivity to put the game on stores. An other choice is a contractual trigger where once the author is not interested in exclusivity they they will release the code.
If you really think so, I’d argue that his hardline position is then justified.
To me Stallman doesn’t have any specific unfair advantage over anyone who would get on their soapboax and preach for a different approach. You or me could make blogposts and go talk to conferences, and rally people around a different approach. If we were to gain traction, there is no hidden lever for Stallman to pull that throws us in dark cave and nobody hears from us ever.
What gives Stallman his influence is that pragmatic approaches have at most kept the status quo, at worse allowed way more encroachment on our software and devices ownership. Even if we don’t reach the 100% free ideal, setting the goal at “a bit freer than now” won’t help in my opinion.
More and more the “realistic” approach feels close to accepting cops have some amount of violent abuse, because non abusing cops make 90% of the workforce and we better be in friendly terms with them to make things progress, right ?
Stallman can't/won't even defend the GPL in court; others have had to organize outside the FSF to do so because the FSF is only interested in stroking its beards.
In my opinion, if Stallman is an hermit that only serves as an anchoring for other people to move toward the right direction, I'd argue it's plenty enough.
Now I don't know much about the FSF finances and what we should really be expecting from it.
Talking to gamers about the evils of paid proprietary software and hardware should be relatively easy. But because Stallman is so fundamentally incapable of reading the room, and so exceptionally talented at alienating people, he manages to put out something that gamers look at, laugh, maybe make a meme or two out of, and then forget about.
> but the problem is that Richard Stallman is one of the most influential and respected members of the movement
Stallman hasn't been influential in at least two decades. He's so extremist that anyone actually interested in getting shit done has ignored him. He is completely lacking in perspective-taking, empathy, viewing anyone as anything approaching a peer, or even managing just to not talk at/down to them. He openly pities everyone, thinks us all stupid fools.
I think there was limited respect for Stallman's original concepts and his vision. But in the decades since, he's generated little to no work product, and mostly come off as jealous and bitter.
Any mainstream-open-source-community respect he had, he lost much of when all the stories about him being a serial sexual harasser (if not borderline predator) came out, and then his comments about underage sex...which to make the matter even worse, he's been nothing but petulant and defensive about.
Stallman is not a statesman, a diplomat, ambassador, or a leader. He's just an ideological zealot who has held back the open software movement by refusing to acknowledge his skill set, demeanor, and behavior are not suitable for representing and advancing the open source movement, and that if he truly cared about said movement, he would have long since changed his methods or let someone else take a whirl.
Some folks see him as a genius, but all I see is man who has spent over four decades yelling (largely) the same thing from the top of a mountain, thinking that one day everyone will suddenly see the genius and wisdom of his grand plan. Who lacks the self-awareness to recognize his lack of effectiveness, and the selflessness to step aside and let someone else try carrying the mantle.
RMS isn't preventing you (or anybody else) from doing so.
And it's being done. There's even groups such as the OSI.
As a product manager he has done a poor job. For years he prevented GCC from moving to a simpler more modular architecture because he said that would make it easier to build non-free software on top of it. In the meantime Clang implemented this modular architecture and started taking market share from GCC. Years later GCC moved to a modular architecture anyway because Stallman finally blessed it. At the same time he prevented emacs from officially embracing better integration with Clang and Clang style compilers that provide a richer debugging and syntax checking experience. He did this because GCC didn't support the same experience. Eventually (after years) emacs did integrate with Clang and GCC style syntax facilities.
He made similar stalling moves preventing the adoption of git for emacs (and other FSF projects). First he pushed Arch, the he forced repositories to migrate to BZR after git had clearly won the version control battle (I'm fuzzy, but emacs moved to BZR around 2009-2011). Finally he conceded and emacs moved to git in 2014. After emacs migrated to git he used the emacs mailing list asking for simple git support that he would have understood if he hadn't remained purposefully ignorant about the VCS.
The FSF still revolves around Stallman and he hasn't done much work to find and promote a successor to himself to lead the organization. He is a poor steward of his own movement.
There were also his comments about Minsky and Epstein. He is entitled to his opinions, but as a leader of an important org with such stringent beliefs, delving into other topics was a distraction for the org. Being a leader requires focus and direction, inviting controversy with comments on unrelated current events is the opposite of focus.
In total I think that a lot of Stallman's actions have more to do with his ego and self importance than advancing the free software movement.
You're likely aware, but I wanted to take this opportunity to surface that a lot of the coverage of his comments on Minsky and Epstein was misleading if not malicious.
Notably, articles from Vice and The Daily Beast accused him of defending Epstein and asserting that victims were willing, and both of those accusations are false, as can be reasonably discerned from careful reading of the quotes that appear in the articles themselves. Rather, Stallman defended Minsky and said that victims probably appeared to Minsky to be willing even if they were being coerced out of his sight.
In addition to any judgement we're applying over his choice of whether to talk about it in the first place, we should be sure we're judging him for what he said (which I do believe deserves criticism) and not for what some people want to pretend he said.
it literally sounds like a religious cult at this point. When I was growing up I had a friend from an actual cult and the family literally had their own invented board games (which were terrible) purged of all kinds of "immoral" references because they weren't allowed to touch anything out of mainstream culture.
Whenver I see this depluralizing behavior as if non-free software causes some sort of metaphysical corruption I have to think back to this.
The other stuff seems kinda BS.
This is wrong and disastrous. We need mostly pragmatism, may be a tiny bit of free-spirit and idealism.
Personally, I used to think that Stalmman was a crank. And as time passed, and as I watched some of his prophecies come true and as I noted ways in my own life in which my own devices became harder to use, and my own data became harder to store and retrieve in the ways that I wanted to - I began to change my mind.
Without that irascible, loud-mouthed, doom-sandwich-board-wearing maniac... who else would exist at the intersection of "knows enough to know what he's talking about to speak with authority" and "has nothing left to lose"?
My advice to anyone reading this is to not be so quick to "solution" on his behalf, or to reason against his ideas, in advocacy of a more "moderate" approach.
It may be useful to listen to a person who sounds unrealistic, but also proved to be right on some pretty important issues, like DRM and the cloud.
It does not mean we should immediately switch away from anything proprietary. But it does mean it's worth being aware.
We're almost there with our phones. At least on Android one can install 3rd party apps.
So I think RMS is spot on.
I like to own my device. Write, compile, and install software of my choosing on it, without some company getting into the way of that.
Companies want to control and monetize every possible use of our devices. We can't let that happen unchecked.
The again, in reality I take a less idealistic stance:
- I accept that the BIOS, drivers for the graphics card and the wifi chip are - for the time being - proprietary.
- For everything else I see absolutely no reason why I should use any closed source software.
- My OS is open source, all applications are open source, all games I (occasionally) play are open source.
Someone who thinks eating sick animals (most meat products) is unethical, isn't going to compromise their personal values just because you're treating them to a meal at the local steakhouse.
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 the major GCC contributor.
He is worried that companies will use their proprietary software that is sold in exchange for money to maximize revenue by squeezing users. Companies and up using open source software to create proprietary services that are sold in exchange for attention, and to maximize revenue optimize for “engagement” which is now tearing society apart.
Most computer users are using proprietary systems, but now they are cheaper to build thanks to open source software.
Who had/has more control over their data, a Windows 95 user running Microsoft Office on a PC, or a modern Chromebook user running Google Docs? The later incorporates a lot more open source software.
It turned out to be easier in the long run to write a compiler from scratch, than to work with GCC.
I am thankful every day of being able to live in the world where this is possible and having been able to do so from a quite young age - at first because when I was a kid my parents did not have the money to buy any software at all so learning how to use free software & systems has quickly been a necessity, and now because I know that whenever there's a bug somewhere in the stack I have good chances of being able to peek at the exact issue and if not fixing it myself, at least reporting it to the person who most likely wrote the code almost directly .
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.
I 100% support what they do and preach knowing FULL well I will likely never 100% do as they recommend. That's not actually a big problem.
And again, helpful to whom? Yes. Stallman's no diplomat or ambassador, but that's not the job he's trying to do.
With Microsoft and Apple the software is commercial and not free, but they do a good job of handholding the customer and working through bugs and technical issues over the phone.
With that said, I appreciate what Stallman has done, if nothing else, to shine light on what freedoms we're giving up, and on the contrasts between the different free and non-free models that are in use today.
It's more likely that we'd have the situation we had with UNIX; incompatible forks tied to incrutable hardware drivers that no one can fix with a zillion different combinations so that when you sat down at a terminal you had no idea what to do -thanks to people being able to take the BSD/MIT software and create their own contrarian forks.
GNU wasn't innovative because it was free, or even because it's source was free. It was innovative because it forced people to play nice.
The UNIX Wars demonstrated how well people play with others when left to their own desires (not at all).
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 zero Linux.
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.
For end users, WSL and Crossover do allow for more freedom than if these things didn't exist.
You can keep long-term goals in mind while also working towards smaller short-term goals. Almost every political party and lobby organisation in the world is doing exactly that.
Here Stallman again rails against Ubuntu. Okay, maybe Ubuntu isn't perfect, but s/Microsoft windows/Ubuntu/ would be quite an improvement, and especially since the 100% free/libre stuff he recommends are caveated to hell it's the only pragmatic/realistic option there is right now – not necessarily Ubuntu itself, but some distro which includes the same firmware, nVidia drivers, and such. And if a lot of people are actually running Ubuntu/Linux you end up having a lot more leverage.
By focusing only on the endpoint you're actually doing more short-term thinking rather than playing the long game.
Love your username btw.
Sure, but that was back in the 80s and this is now.
That someone had a lot of good ideas and did good work 35 years ago doesn't mean they're not hampering it today. I once worked for a business where the owner worked very hard to build things up (or so I heard), but when I worked there all he really used his business for was to show his boyfriends around to impress them or something; I rarely saw him. That's all fine, except that the business was directionless and basic stuff wasn't getting done (like, say, my employment contract). Eventually there was a bit of an intervention and he was ousted (his dad also owned part of the company), which was badly needed because he was really running things in to the ground, in spite of having built it up in the first place.
> Ubuntu isn't going to stop what they are doing because of Stallman's ideas.
No, but the FSF could be promoting Ubuntu instead of railing against it. If I'm interested in Free Software and find the FSF website then all I get are unpractical solutions.
But what the FSF really should be doing is lobby this kind of thing with governments, schools, corporations and such.
I'm trying to understand your meaning. You went on to say:
> You can keep long-term goals in mind while also working towards smaller short-term goals. Almost every political party and lobby organisation in the world is doing exactly that.
But every example of such political parties/organizations I can think of (in my experience) has 'puritanical' wings that serve to establish the key direction.
> It's not explaining the message very well, it's actively turning people off, and it's preventing some free software from being as useful as it could be.
I was unable to follow your logic. Perhaps actual example of this happening would be useful.
> By focusing only on the endpoint you're actually doing more short-term thinking rather than playing the long game.
Forgive me, but it appears like you're focusing on practically achievable goals rather than having a long term plan. If Ubuntu continued along its current path of just partnering with vendors, only "they" being able to build the signed boot images that machines boot, then it is not unreasonable to suspect that at some point users will lose all ability to build their own kernel for their machine.
I'm not sure that Stallman is intentionally positioning himself this way (he seems to sincerely believe his all-or-nothing stance), but I could see it actually working. The big problem with Stallman is that he has to be at least moderately credible in order to extend the Overton window, but he seems to perpetually be right on the edge of being completely dismissed. If that happens then the window snaps back shut.
Richard Stallman has largely been not averse to pragmatism, he is the sort that is willing to clearly articulate his stance as to what he thinks is right, but has also been willing to endorse all sorts of incrementalism. For example:
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/icecast-dev/2001-February/00...
"In response to the change of license, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation says, "I agree. It is wise to make some of the Ogg Vorbis code available for use in proprietary software, so that commercial companies doing proprietary software will use it, and help Vorbis succeed in competition with other formats that would be restricted against our use.""
(I am desperately trying to avoid inserting a Bernie Sanders analogy here..)
Stallman could have been talking about censorship and deplatforming here and it still would have made sense. His (and my) generation seem to care a lot more about idealistic freedoms than we do now as a society.
This is why Musk is trying to buy out Twitter, and he is trolling them with his wealth.
Don't forget removal from the APP Store or blocked by proxies.
Information still wants to be free, not stifled by tyrants just for being different opinions than the shareholders have.
Remember there is a reason why people want to root their phone, they want the freedom to install any app they wish to install. The more it gets locked down, the more people are going to find ways to unlock it.
Instead of deplatforming and censorship, ratings should be used instead for people to decide what they are going to read.
I want both sets of people to expose their views to the public. Disgusting though these views may be, it is safer for society if individuals are able to check and decide that someone else's views are reprehensible. If the people are merely told such by authorities, with the "offending" content immediately removed, then the authorities have enormous power to expand the definition of "offending" when it pleases them to do so.
Not really. You can spend days, weeks, and months; millions of dollars; thousands of paid shill accounts; all geared towards selling a single lie. And that lie can be exposed to millions of people in 10 seconds for free. But only if there is free speech.
I think you’re right about the dangers of giving authority over what does and doesn’t get censored, but there are also very real dangers on the other side of this. You don’t make consuming heroin normative, because you don’t want to make it easy to fall into an addiction by accident for those who are more prone to do so. The more harm the addiction causes to society as a whole, the more prerogative you have to protect people from accidentally becoming addicted.
Who decides what's reasonable? Who decides what constitutes a "Nazi" or a "Pedophile"? If someone tries to suggest that convicting a 14 year old girl as a sex offender for having nude photos of herself on her phone is preposterous that person can be effectively silenced by labeling them as a pedophile.
"But that's ridiculous. Nobody would do that." -Somebody who has never been on the internet.
Every idiotic position you can think of exists on the internet, and can be amplified to make it seem like it's a more popular opinion than it really is.
The only logical course of action is to allow all speech and let the reader discern for themselves.
The assumption being that most readers are discerning. Kind of reminds of the adage about markets working based on rational actors. In both situations, reality would like a word.
And the point is: "Who decides what's reasonable?" You? Well, yeah, I hope you do for yourself. But I don't want you to dare to even try to decide that for me. Nothing personal, of course: there's no single person on the planet I would trust to do that for me.
In other words, it's not about assuming anything about the most readers (it is rather about NOT assuming anything about them). And, in fact, I don't even expect any good outcome "for the most of readers". I am pretty positive most people will find a way to fuck themselves no matter what you do. The only assertion here is that it will be worse for everyone if you TRY to do something about it. I mean, it should be pretty obvious thing to say, as much as people like to tell stories about "how terrible it was when Stalin was in charge" — it is best for everyone if there's no individual or group of people who can enforce their ideas of what is right on the others.
(BTW, I don't believe that this is really avoidable too. It happes one way or the other. The only thing that makes me say anything about this, is that this is just scary that half of the society today doesn't even understand that they SHOULD TRY to prevent anyone from being able to control what they say or think. They WANT to be controlled. They WANT to fuck themselves and everyone around them.)
For myself I’m happy for you to have all the freedom of speech you like. What I’d like enshrined is the right to freedom from speech. In my country we are in the midst of an election campaign and it is impossible for me (both legally and technically) to stop political parties from spamming my phone. I would rather they didn’t spam my phone. I don’t have an opinion about your phone.
He is also the lead of a company that has seemingly fired an employee for posting about their publicly available features, and is also facing one of the biggest labor lawsuits ever in the state of California.
He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that it's all just exploitation.
But you tell me, did you buy that camaro, or did you build it?
Great goals, but in my opinion, a terrible ambassador for tech/engineering, and a completely ingenuine person. I do not believe he is buying Twitter to "restore free speech" at all, and I dont even think that itself is a particularly good goal without having laid out plans of what it means.
Him being in charge of companies that produce cool products does not make him a good person at all.
I haven’t worked for Musk, but I’ve heard he only hires fanatics who want to save the world. I expect that he expects things different from most employers.
>wealth hoarding
Most of his wealth isn’t in money or stocks, it’s in his companies. The money that is in stocks, well most of that’s in stock for companies that have actual assets and do actual things in the real world.
People always have power motives for doing things. But that doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them people who have objectives that require power, or perhaps power seekers who need to meet objectives (or claim they do). I trust the former far more than the latter.
I believe he built huge amounts of wealth because he's something like "genetically predisposed to"; he's not different from other billionaires, who I think have something like a mental defect that encourages them to rack up their score as high as possible.
It's just that he has more interesting hobbies (Space, EV, whatever) than the rest of them; but for any move he makes, first ask -- does this look like part of a play to just gain more money? And 9 times out of 10 the answer is yes.
> He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.
I wonder if we find a billionaire from the top 20 wealthiest who hasn’t at some level
No absolutely not. Id even say that you wont find more than a handful of billionaires who havent built their wealth on exploitation.
Its such a massive amount of wealth to have, it is virtually always precluded by harming others. The only exceptions I can think of are company founders who got exceedingly lucky, and even then you could definitely stretch the definition of exploitation to include them too.
The solution is to make such labor practices NOT legal and force everyone into a good field of play and rules for the game(s).
But in neither case do I believe that "the government is colluding to eliminate first amendment rights" which I believe is a reasonably specific definition of censorship. This is just culture culturing.
There's no "vegan leader person" or "financial literacy leader person" or "animal cruelty leader person," etc. Not even "environment person," though you do get your occasional Greta Thunberg or Al Gore, but that's different from what you're saying here.
Well mostly it would look like an FSF that doesn't eat toejam on camera, and instead of giving the same tired lecture about the 4 freedoms, they actually go out and do productive things like put on workshops for college students to install trisquel or whatever.
Instead of wasting countless hours sponsoring dumb stuff like the GNU Name System they could be writing open wifi/bluetooth stacks that support more than 802.11g, since connectivity is usually the #1 reason people won't run fully-free stacks on their laptops (or at least it's a big reason I won't), or if not that then how about getting governments to run Linux and helping them do so? They could operate a consultancy to bring in some operating income.
>Meaning, I can't think of any similar "movement" that succeeds by having a camera-friendly diplomatic leader -- unless you're thinking about going "full politics?"
Are you unaware that the Free Software Movement is a political movement first and foremost? People think it's a technical thing but technical excellence has always been secondary to political/ethical purity for GNU/FSF as evidenced by things like HURD and gnutls.
>There's no "vegan leader person" or "financial literacy leader person" or "animal cruelty leader person," etc. Not even "environment person,"
Look, if you're not going to argue in good faith then don't bother replying further. Those movements all have have multiple organizations working towards somewhat-common goals. Those individual orgs do indeed have leaders and by and large they're not toejam eaters.
Bingo. It is a political movement. One rooted in idiotic ideologies that no thinking person takes seriously. Communism was defeated by taking the few valid points of Marx and addressing them. The 98% stupidity was easy to refute and discard when the 2% valid points were accepted and addressed.
(Love your username btw)
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree because from where I sit, Free Software had a bright spark at the beginning and slowly faded away into a miserable failure.
Apple sells a lot of laptops because they're really easy to use. The wifi "just works" and the battery life is excellent.
To a first approximation, zero people run fully-free stacks on their daily-driver laptops because they're not easy to use unless you're the kind of person who uses their 2005-vintage Thinkpad on Ethernet and AC power only.
Then don't frame it as a socialist idea. There's absolutely nothing about Free Software that has a hard requirement on socialist ideology.
Frame it as pragmatism: Governments/schools/etc should run free software because it's more cost-effective and thus a more fiscally-responsible use of taxpayer monies.
Frame it as democratic: Why should a bunch of unelected CEOs have the right to dictate what you, a citizen of $this_great_nation, do with your devices?
Frame it as nationalism: How can American kids grow up to be world-leading innovators if they can't hack their devices? We're losing to Russia and China in the hacking gap!
Frame it as free speech or something: Why does the government get to decide what I do with my devices? My ipad my choice.
We're talking free as in libre here, not free as in beer.
Or, ya know, they could just stake out reasonable, nuanced positions that organizations could adopt or at least be a starting point for further developments
Stallman is infamous for his inability to recognize viewpoints other than his own as having worth or validity. He is literally incapable of such a big-brain plan because there's no way he could see a moderate position as valid.
In other words, the fact that you don't see these positions I think is a result of a mild "embrace, extend extinguish" and not "no one thought of this before."
Also I agree 100%.
Toxic people shouldn't have a voice because then all sorts of people will decide to not get involved in a community where such people can be leaders.
Trust me in this, I should know :(
"Cancelled" and "toxic" are vague terms that we really need to stop using, please use the more precise words you mean. Has he broken the law or been unforgivably abusive, etc? If so, say that. If not, stop throwing accusations.
So, let's keep pragmatism, reality and wisdom above idealism.
Stallman and the FSF help encourage and motivate its use.
There are obviously some successes, but in general GPL license is not popular - overwhelming majority of the software is not released under GPL and sometimes never released to the public.
Apache and commercial no-cost is not the same. If the vendor decides to cut support for a piece of software and introduce something new, bloated and costs more. I have the choice to hire a programmer to maintain the current thing with GPL and Apache if it is worth it. That is a very important benefit, I have the choice, many business owners do not understand that, but the IT people they hire do and can use that to protect their employer (and their jobs) from exploitative practices. The GPL ensures it stays that way years down the road while Apache suffers from the MIT issue Stallman had when he maintained a Lisp system on his own. His competitor took his MIT licensed code and did not give back.
Those 'no-cost' licenses often become cost and very-costly in the future if they become popular enough with future versions.
As for the software products: they are still very common. Look at Flatpak or Snap stores. Krita made quite a bit of money on the Microsoft store believe it or not. Paid for and free Linux distro products dominate the server market that run Linux and GPL userland tools. Some Apache licensed web components (Grafana) is moved over to the AGPL.
They are the same in the sense that they are both not GPL. They just illustrate the spectrum of licenses that are not ideologically aligned with FSF, but may still do the job.
> As for the software products: they are still very common.
I will just repeat myself: there are some successes, but this is not the majority of the software. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s enormous pile of proprietary software, that is absolutely not free or open source. Think of Google, Facebook or Salesforce codebase. Think of all the banking or military software. Even some Linux distro can be dwarfed by those applications.
And we all know bored developers will make up work for themselves and bikeshed themselves to death.
> a strategy
I don't think it's conspiratorial, so much as emergent. All structures which persist have means of ensuring their persistence. Institutions (including open ones) will push for things that further their existence, status, funding, and ultimately their power. They will make themselves indispensable, regardless of their actual value-added.
In a modern product engineering process we in fact fight the increasing complexity by selecting for the implementation only features that have the biggest business impact. That code is created because someone is going to use it to address some user need, not to confuse a potential reader. Nobody thinks at the moment of the roadmap planning about harming free software, this idea is just absurd.
Now if you want to talk about real bloat, like JavaScript libraries, then you are citing a malignant practice anyways. There is no world in which we should compromise libre software principles so we can mindlessly continue using Javascript bloat, which should be taken out back and shot even if you aren't concerned about libre philosophy.
I understand this too well. You say: “one canary developer”. If our software was built in hope that someone will bring the canary to ensure quality, we would have terrible software. It is surely nice to have this opportunity, but you don’t have to release your software under GPL for that. Hiring QA or white hat team could work even better. I’m not saying that open source software does not work: there are of course some successful projects. It is just minority of the entire codebase, and not all open source software is released under licenses endorsed by FSF. If we care about our rights, we should think what could be the appropriate way to build trust in the software made by Google, Okta or Salesforce, because open source battle is lost there.
> Now if you want to talk about real bloat, like JavaScript libraries…
No, I do not want to talk about that mess. That particular example won’t prove anything. Sorry. :)
I feel this. You should be able to understand your computer.
The point: computers are different from everything else. Pre-writing man is a fundamentally different character to literate, historical man. (I do believe there’s an Egyptian dialogue on the matter.) And in the same manner, computing man is a fundamentally different character from pre-computing man. However, most people, despite their USE of computers, cannot really compute, because they can only get their computers to do what other people have told them to do, and not what they themselves have told their computers to do. In other words, to them the computer is an appliance. Now, not everyone can read Ulysses, or Durants history, and I don’t think it would be fair to expect that of people. But most people can read, and they can read the whole book if they choose. The qualitative shift of computational man finds that what he has read can be made into action, simply by it having been written, yet this does not hold true for a person who is handed Durants history of the world, or Livy’s history of Rome (before having been taught Latin, even!) and being told, you have knowledge, even though you can’t get through it all.
You start people with shorter books. Even picture books. You start them with simpler computers, with simpler software, and then more complex computers which do more complex things. And even in the professional world, of fully literate adults, you only break out the really complicated stuff for the really complicated things.
Software should be comprehensible, because it is meant to be comprehensible, it is not just execution but elocution, and is the explanation of its own intent.
I think you have much too high a regard for your own interests and craft. I can guarantee you a cabinetmaker, machinist, pilot, doctor, or lawyer can make any and more of the same style of arguments. A little bit of computational knowledge? Yes it's very useful, and that's what low-code tools like Excel/spreadsheets are for. Akin to learning the basics of reading. More than that? No I think you overestimate the usefulness of computing, and most people only have a working knowledge of reading and writing. The world is full of complexity everywhere. Computing isn't the only thing with this force multiplier effect for humanity.
I’m allowed to be idealistic about some things. Aren’t we all?
With the evolving supply chain attacks, US Government advised companies to better understand their software supply chains. With transparent and repeatable builds this goal would be much more simple using the approach documented above.
We can innovate on more ideas for making more transparent software. We can have signed dependencies, pre-built trusted (signed, hashes) dependency chains.
Security only explains why _some_ people should be able to understand how software works, and this is a different story. You do not need to make software open source or free for that, there can exist entire spectrum of various licenses and accesses. This is what I mean by delegating the work to institutions: you let someone you trust to audit the code for you. This can be a dedicated team in your company, a 3rd party expert or a government agency, the important part is only those people really need access to the code, because only they can understand it.
This is a very small subset of end users that can do that and will want to do that. Even software engineers may not dare to touch the code and seek for workarounds or ways to report the bug with less effort instead. The programming language and APIs can be unfamiliar, there can be lack of context etc. The distance between general computer science literacy and ability to read the code of a large product is very big - experts often tend to underestimate it. For the majority of other people value of this possibility is literally zero: they would prefer to have a warranty from vendor. There's very little consolation for them in having weak guarantees from community of volunteers that discovered bugs will be some day fixed.
I feel this all the time, especially on my iPad Pro: I'm buying much more idevices than before, because I don't like the direction Windows has taken, and Apple gets always the newest TSMC slots (I buy the newest products from TSMC, they just happen to be made together with Apple).
Had they been looking into definitively getting rid of un happiness, they would have killed everyone ASAP.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile_(Doctor_Who)
40 years later, trying to get something running on a modern Mac is painful, and they gatekeep it with Xcode and a variety of user hostile features. They have become what they despised in that 1984 commercial.
It makes me just a little angry. No wonder people are so nostalgic for 8 bit stuff.
Right click on app, select ‘open’. If you get a prompt warning about an unknown developer, pick the option to run the app anyway.
Getting angry about a prompt that you only ever see once (it won’t prompt you again) seems extreme.
Yeah, it works most of the time. But when it doesn’t, e.g. due to some post-build script that massages the binary after signing it, it brings you a world of pain.
Use codesign -s - path to binary to recompute the checksum.
And often enough, it just doesn’t work at all ([1] ballpark number of issues, [2] one example case where I can confirm that I was affected myself).
Apple’s codesigning is hell.
[1]: https://github.com/search?q=org%3AHomebrew+codesign&type=iss...
[2]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857#issuecomment-71...
Scenario: you want to sell an app for Mac.
You can put it on the Mac app store and pay Apple’s tax (and live at the mercy of Apple, who are a terrible business partner)
Or you can sell it through your website and not pay Apple’s tax. Except if you do this, Apple will tell your customers that you’re potentially a virus, and you have to invest more on customer support and education materials just to teach people how to launch your app (through no fault of your own). In some cases, it’s just not feasible to do this, and you just have to accept reduced sales and/or increased returns/chargebacks from angry customers that blame you for Apple’s decision.
Apple’s Mac app store has a huge competitive advantage thanks to this unfair practice. Your competitors will beat you if they put their app on the Mac app store, no matter how much money you invest into advertising and improving your product.
That’s anti-competitive behavior from a monopolist. It’s the same situation on Android (it’s actually worse on Android, as Google is the pioneer in this field)
Being forced to use XCode to sign .NET assemblies before they will run. You can build and run a self contained .NET program on literally anything from a Pi to a multi-processor rack server running Windows or Linux and it just works. Not on a Mac though, gotta jump through Apple hoops before that happens.
Apple deciding that your new iPhone isn't allowed to talk to your old Mac.
Being forced to use a Mac to do iPhone development, despite XCode being the runt of the litter of development environments.
Weird, old, crippled BSD for an operating system? Why not! Having to install a package manager as a seperate thing just to install boring stuff that comes with most Linux distributions. Why don't apple install Homebrew by default? Why do they pour so many resources into making the UI shiny instead of producing a modern OS?
Is your company using Docker for deployment? Why not give you a Mac which has the worst Docker development experience of any of the major OSs. What a wonderful idea.
They hate developers.
The Apple ][ is the iconic machine, as was the BBC Micro (which has a kick ass BASIC / in-line assembly environment in ROM many Apple ][ users would envy), and heck my machine came with schematics!!
The modern Mac is a bit painful. Agreed.
I build and run from source, both my own and from others all the time on my Mac.
I’m all for free software but that’s hilarious and symptomatic.
If you want details, there are some in my comment history.
The basic premise is that I try to live off of society's excesses without pulling new things out of the supply chain. So I tend to sleep in public spaces, eat food that's left over from others, wear hand-me-down clothes or "shop" in free stores, and so on. When I need to travel, I ask around for someone driving the same way.
For a few areas of my life, I still need new things, such as web hosting, occasional bus ticket, etc. For this, I allow others to interface with the currency system for me, and contribute to them in other ways, such as helping them with whatever they need help with.
As far as the bigger picture, I contribute by constantly looking for and doing things which need help doing, such as: cleaning up trash where it's not cleaned up, lending an ear to someone who needs to talk, teaching what I know to others, and so on.
I really resonate with the Steve Jobs quote that everything (man-made) around us was created by someone who had less knowledge and understanding of the world than we do today (because they did it in the past) and there's every reason to believe that each of us can do better if we put our mind to it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30321009
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043346
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30042841
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043104
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30042864
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043130
Do you have a moral objection to centralised currency?
I wondered if anyone else was doing this thing, and I found freganism, "The Man Who Gave Up Money", etc.
And digging deeper into this, I realized several things after pondering them for a while:
a) I'm now operating in large part on my karma, and using money is almost always a karma negative. When I exchange one dollar for something, I'm setting in motion a whole chain of events to which I am karmically connected, most of which are negative.
b) When I work for money, all I get is the money. If I work for an employer for five years, all I have at the end of those five years is the money, which I am, honestly, not capable of managing well, something I have accepted about myself after so many years. On the other hand, if I abandon money, I have time to work on my relationships, something which pays infinitely better.
Being direct creates an imbalance, for example when one describes an issue or person purely from a negative point of view, regardless of whether all of it is actually true. Most people will innately attempt to say something positive about that same person to restore some sort of balance to the discussion.
Generalizations are also an example of imbalance, with people typically having a strong reaction to it, even though I think most people would agree that if 97 times out of 100 something is true, it's safe to say that thing is true.
Lastly, as a special case of generalizations, taking an absolute stance is also seen as imbalanced, and therefore bad, because, I assume, most things in life aren't black and white - there's lots of gray areas, so it's pragmatic to start out assuming that in actuality there's a gray area with any issue.
This is all to say that Stallman doesn't speak in a balanced way, which is why I think his speeches and ideas do not appeal to the American audience, or any other audience that places a higher value on balance than on the actual ideas.
If he were able to convey those same ideas in a less absolutist, more nuanced and more pragmatic manner, I think he, as a person, would be more appreciated in the US and perhaps people would listen more closely to what Stallman has to say.
I've lived in several other countries, particularly in Europe, and generalizations, absolute positions and speaking in a direct manner are all generally appreciated by the society there, or at the very least it's tolerated much better and won't get you dismissed right away (since that's how most people speak).
At the end of the day, I personally think Stallman is right. When I look at what he says, I see a non-compromising idealist who places more value on truth, and how things "ought to be", than on pleasantries and gray areas, and that's a difficult sell to the American audience. When I focus on his content with the understanding that he's converting gray into either black or white, I see a dreamer and a believer in a utopian society. I too would like to live in a world where all software is FOSS and we all write FOSS code that runs on FOSS hardware, but I recognize that's a dream. It shouldn't stop us from trying to make that dream a reality though.
Tbh, I was curious what happened since last year and I didn't realize at the time he was somewhat apologetic, and honestly, it is hard for me to determine a lot of the veracity of the claims around him at the time and more so now. That said, as a leader of FSF and the free software movement, is he now recuperated, because his reputation since this episode, due to the truth or not, is pretty bad now and his being seen as a continuing leader of the movement could be seen as a liability. Should he be recuperated or should he not be?
The FSF today has the highest membership it has ever had. Most new members joined in support of RMS last year in defence of the attacks on his reputation. The Foundation is doing very well now.
One interesting (and little discussed) theory about the attack on RMS that I heard was that it was also an attack on the Free Software and the FSF as a kind of coup and championed by people working from and benefiting from the chip makers, corporations and manufacturers.
Now there's is some evidence for that the majority of attackers were from that group, however I suspect it's more likely a correlation between the new kind of professional cultural standard of Silicon Valley highly paid technologists and their income sources, than any coordinated attack on Free Software in principle.
There was some a relation between the more lax Open Source developers and the anti-RMS stance seen in previous times, but I think, again, it's not some conspiracy to take down Free Software but rather a relationship between the more pragmatic Open Source developers being able to work for the Silicon Valley industry and becoming part of that culture.
FSF itself is pretty woke nowadays so they have diluted and taken their mission in another direction.
As for the RMS attacks, he did the heresy of thinking out loud on a private mailing list which do-gooders promptly leaked and framed.
Your whole question is silly. He's not 'recuperated' since there's no authority to decide this. It's kinda hard when you replace institutions for woke mobs.
https://pastebin.com/Fgrh68WY
Ran it through the Goog's speech to text. It's a quick paste of the raw pass, with no clean-up, although I added a couple of timestamps. Some irony in the choice of transcription engine, I know.
I was mostly attracted to the OP's coverage of the upcoming "GNU C manual" publishing, and if anyone knows anything more about it, I'd love to hear it.
With the light digging I've done so far, I'm not sure if it's supposed to be the same GNU C manual as listed at https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-c-manual/ for which the latest revision was published in '16.
I did not know it was going to be ten years until his came out!
In any case, I did help him a bit on the new one, but not very recently. The main text, last I saw it, certainly spoke to the GCC dialect of C, and included some GCC historical footnotes, but the description he gave of the book sounds like he must have added even more GCC-specific content since I last saw a draft.
https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/the-saas-...
Phoronix reported that 5.18 removed the Andes NDS32 CPU arch code. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-51...
The reason they do this is because a lot of these systems can break as the internal kAPIs change all the time and the users will not know since the embedded custom distro of software + kernel is not upgraded. Support can be broken for these arches for years until someone gets these systems second hand and posts about them, but may not care to fix it or it is cheaper to replace it.
RMS calls this a major issue, specifically 32-bit support in Ubuntu. I do not agree. My last 32 bit computer died a long time ago after the battery died years ago. It was a Gateway so getting replacement parts would be difficult. I also was never able to get it to run Linux. Aside from my brother-in-law finding his old laptop no one I know uses 32 bit computers (well except for myself with my Pi Zero: ARM v6, which I used once).
It just feels like the wrong battle to pick when Linux's biggest competitor is forcing practically all PCs to use a bootloader signed with their key. Major vendors can choose to refuse to allow users to install their own key. They are already locking CPUs (Ryzens) to their brand of motherboards with a builtin fuse provided by AMD. He of course talks about it-it just feels like the 32 bit part distracts from it.
Pragmatism will always gravitate towards the “middle”. But the middle can never be truly found by pragmatism unless it can see either extreme.
Without Stallman, the closed software extreme has a ton of supporters (Microsoft, Apple, etc) but the free software extreme has almost none.
What Stallman does is define the free software extreme which allows the pragmatists to find a much better middle than if he wasn’t pushing that boundary.
Turns out a bios flash can in some cases enable the 64bit functionality.
Its not a particularly fast system though...
Source: https://liliputing.com/2015/07/install-ubuntu-14-04-lts-on-t...
A friend of mine had one of those laptops and I wanted to install Linux on it. It took me a few weeks for other reasons (those M.2 drives were the worst), but thanks to the work of Ian Morrison, it was possible.
It’s enough for an embedded system, but vastly underpowered for desktop computing or web browsing.
I suspect most kernel developers mostly operate with virtual machines in mind, but as a sysadmin I would argue that physical machines also has their use cases. I also suspect that if the linux kernel stop supporting 32-bit machines, others will continue. Are the BSD people thinking about dropping 32-bit support?
"Due to the increased usage of OpenBSD/amd64, as well as the age and practicality of most i386 hardware, only easy and critical security fixes are backported to i386. The project has more important things to focus on." [1]
OpenBSD includes their Xorg port in a base install, and you can run a reasonable graphical desktop on a 32bit machine. Firefox is not packaged for i386 I think. I just use Seamonkey when I test the 32 bit image now and again. There may be other package limitations relevant to server only use. Seems a rational approach to me.
[1] https://www.openbsd.org/i386.html
Remove 32-bit x86 support, and it will pin me down to the few 64-bit machines that i have.