samzenpus (5) writes
"A while ago you had the chance to ask GNU and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman about GNU, copyright laws, digital restrictions management, and software patents. Below you'll find his answers to those questions."
RMS tends to only talk about the FSF party line.
By aussersterne
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2014-May-6 13:42
• Score: 4, Interesting
• Thread
He's got decades of this under his belt. Ask him about whether red sauce or green sauce is better for drive-through tacos, he'll talk about freedom and oppression the same confounding ways.
As for myself, I'm much more in the Torvalds camp. Substantive freedom is a practical freedom as well as a prophylactic one; it's the freedom not just *from* things but *to do and participate in* things.
Sure, I want the freedom to protect my data or change my software. But I also want the freedom to buy and use a device that I think is great, or to participate in the mobile ecosystem (sorry, RMS) because I find it to be useful.
RMS can't distinguish between the two, or between the different kinds of restrictiveness at issue—the commercial software restrictiveness that is certainly annoying and terrible for our world, but also the FSF-styled restrictiveness that shoots itself in the foot and ends up being exactly the same.
In both cases, the end result is that I can't do what I want with my software/hardware. The commercial interests are at least open about it: we don't want you to do that because it would hurt our profits. The FSF is less open about it: we're not responsible for this, it's their fault—you're free to do your own thing.
Yes, maybe in theory I could rewrite the entire GNU codebase from scratch or get a world of developers together myself to do my own thing, but substantively speaking, in terms of actual opportunity structures available to me right now, today, or next week, or indeed for most people *as themselves, during their regular lives*, there is about the same amount of substantive freedom and restriction involved.
If I want to do X with my tech, and company X won't allow it with their toolchain, and the open computing world won't support it for ideological reasons, the net result is still that *I* am *practically* unable to do X with my tech.
Part of the FSF problem is that they often delegitimize X. RMS's answers about, say, "cloud" computing or the mobile ecosystem are instructive here, and mirror common answers in free software developments from techs. "That is not a real thing, it's just marketingspeak, you are a victim of ideology, and no, we won't help you."
Operating under the Thomas theorem and using the well-respected argument made by Rawls, I'd say that RMS fails to distinguish between summary rules and rules of practice. For RMS, there are only summary rules—things that we decide or don't decide to do, and espouse for utilitarian reasons. All of his arguments are utilitarian in nature (though often convolutedly so). Even when they involve other people or "society," his arguments boil down to rational self-interest calculated according to a very narrow range of values and goods, discounting the rest.
He ignores the dimension of rules and practices that are oriented toward social life—toward behaving in ways that others understand and that enable one to substantively participate in public and group life by virtue of conceding them as ordering principles for "how the world works right now."
The FSF vision of computing is, ironically, radically individualist and lonely in this regard—it is all about "what I can accomplish on my own." The only "we" that it acknowledges is one that is made up entirely of people that have precisely the same ideological outlook, goals, desires, and summary rules as the self. All other forms of "we" are reimagined as secretly selfish people that *claim* to be a public, but are in fact actually seeking to dominate one another. For RMS, "we" hasn't happened yet and he is trying to bring it about through summary means—as a rational self-interest calculation.
But a world of identical "free-people" in which the "we" finally comes about by virtue of the universal embrace of FSF values simply doesn't and won't exist—people are different, desires are different, and that which is in one person's self-interest is never necessarily in everyone's self-interest.
To believe in
Re:Boring and repetitive?
By CronoCloud
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2014-May-6 13:46
• Score: 4, Interesting
• Thread
The thing is, I think he's the way he is because he never grew out of the 70's MIT AI Lab paradigms of computing. He's never used a computer the way I or you have. He's basically been sitting in front of a console in Emacs for almost 40 years. And Emacs itself is based on the even earlier paradigm of TECO. So basically RMS computes like it was 1962. You've read how he uses a computer, right?
http://stallman.org/stallman-c...
So he's totally out of touch. He'd never be able to explain the average tablet/phone user why they shouldn't use it.
tablet user: I use it to watch netflix and play games
RMS: You shouldn't use ti for that because it requires non-free software.
tablet user: but if I don't, how can I watch movies and play games.
RMS: you should use a free tablet
tablet: where can I get one and can I use netflix and play angry birds.on it
RMS: You shouldn't play non-free games or use netflix.
You get the gist.
Re:Um...
By BitZtream
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2014-May-6 14:13
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
Linus doesn't start off telling people their idiots. He starts off very nice and cordial in every instance I've ever seen of him blowing up.
He blows up when you repeatedly do something he has ASKED you not to do and then try to act like you are doing nothing wrong.
I think you need to stop reading headlines about Linus and read the actual conversations the headlines are written about and the back story leading up to them.
Re:Um...
By UnknownSoldier
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2014-May-6 15:07
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
> Not only that, but he acts like "free" software wasn't just hit with some of the most massive security holes
You seem to be under the delusion that the philosophy used to write the software under magically makes it immune to bugs; no one is claiming that.
How many bugs in Windows, worms, viruses, trojans are closed / non-free source??
The WHOLE point of open / free source is that you and everyone else CAN contribute to make it better; in contradistinction you don't have that freedom with non-free closed source. Over time, in the long run, free/open source software is better for society instead of worrying about hidden back doors in closed non-free propriety source code and/or binaries.
You are making a mountain out of a mole hill.
And most people discount the man for being ugly
By davydagger
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2014-May-6 16:23
• Score: 3
• Thread
Despite being socially obtuse and offputting, Stallman is not only litterate in his correspondence, uncompromising in moral character, and keen at percieving threats to our freedoms.
Most Americans are not. Instead most Americans look to the TV, we look to celebrities. We look to proffesional PR men, and "Event organizers" more concerned about their own social capital and position on the ladder. We've become a nation of 12 year old girls, more concerned about appearance than substances. This is why America is rotting.
If more people had principles, we wouldn't have to worry about SOPA/PIPA, the DMCA, and people might vote for canidates that made a diffrence.
Between him and Schiener, I say is this generations two defining intellectuals.